A pair of Reapers grab her arms. She kicks one viciously, bites the other—but they’re warriors twice her mass. They drag her back as she thrashes.
My vision goes red.
I tear free of the Reaper in front of me—splitting his skull with a clawed punch—and lunge toward her.
I almost reach her.
Almost.
A hulking silhouette drops from the shattered upper balcony with impossible grace—metal boots denting the floor, servo-motors whining softly.
Trebuchet.
His eyes glow faintly beneath the strips of grafted skin stretched over his skull. His voice is a hiss of static and something colder.
“You’re predictable, Warlord.”
I roar and charge.
He moves faster than flesh should. Faster than bone. Faster than me, even in blood-fever.
I swing?—
—he sidesteps.
Yorta stumbles, bleeding heavily. Arnab laughs somewhere behind the smoke.
Freya screams my name again.
I shove past debris, tearing through one of the warriors holding her—but it’s too late.
Trebuchet turns—not toward me.
Toward her.
“Don’t—!” I snarl.
He strikes.
A flash of metal.
A sickeningcrack.
Freya’s head snaps to the side—her body going eerily still for half a heartbeat before she collapses like someone cut her strings.
The sound she makes—small, choked—rips something open inside me.
“NO!”
My roar shakes the hall.
The roar of rage inside me bangs against my skull like war drums in a metal tomb — but the prison they gave me isn’t metal. It’s light. Hollow. Liquid death in suspense.
One moment I’m crouched over Freya’s limp body, senses raging — copper blood, splintered wood, the sharp tang of betrayal — and the next, a shimmer in the air warps reality itself. The walls of the hall blur, light bends, and then the world folds in and around me. A bubble — invisible but real — materializes in seconds, cracking the stone floor beneath with unnatural pressure.
I thrash — claws rending the air — but the barrier holds. It hums. Buzzes. A low-pitch thrumming vibration that skews bone, rattles armor plates. I try to punch it. I try to tear it. I try to bite. But all I catch is empty air and the hollow taste of fury.
From beyond the ghost-glass walls, treacherous voices echo. Arnab laughs — low, wet with triumph. “Look at him, dying king. No claws, no spurs — no power.”
