The lobby was a slaughterhouse of noise—alarms blaring, wolves snarling, the wet thud of bodies hitting stone.
The numbers were dropping. Four down.
“Useless,” Varessia hissed.
She descended the stairs, abandoning her perch. The air around her darkened, draining the colour and heat from the air. She summoned a void so cold it made the marble floor crack with thermal shock.
She swept her hands out. A tide of total darkness rolled across the floor.
Goran roared, throwing up a golden barrier to protect Dane, butthe impact slid him backward, his claws gouging deep furrows in the marble as frost raced up his fur.
I planted myself in front of the wave. I slashed my hand downward, cleaving the onslaught in two.
Varessia stopped ten feet away. Her pristine white suit was untouched, but her eyes were wild, violet light bleeding from the pupils.
“This effort is statistically insignificant,” she stated, her voice distorted by the supercooled air. “You are a write-off, Riven. A liability I should have liquidated years ago.”
“I’m the one still standing,” I said, walking towards her to force her focus.
She laughed—a sharp, mirthless sound. “And yet, your formation is incomplete. Where is the girl? Did you leave the most valuable piece on the board unguarded?”
I stiffened.
A sudden spike of genuine alarm pierced the battle haze. We hadn’t been clever enough. The plan relied on Varessia’s arrogance blinding her, on the assumption that she would focus solely on the violence in front of her. She was auditing the scene. She had anticipated the flank.
She smiled, cruel, relishing the jolt of panic she must have seen in my eyes.
“Is she fast enough? My containment team is already sweeping the upper levels. When they secure the asset… I instructed them to prolong the process. I want her screams to reach you down here.”
Red rage flooded my vision, obliterating all tactical thought. It was purely primal.
The shadows obeyed my fury. Overhead lights shattered, plunging the lobby into gloom. The darkness swelled, thickening into a rising tide.
“You won’t touch her,” I snarled.
I lashed out with a whip of solidified shadow, aiming forher throat.
She stood there, unmoved. She didn’t laugh this time. She watched the lethal arc of darkness come for her, and with a lazy flick of her wrist, she unravelled it into harmless mist.
“There it is,” she said softly, her eyes gleaming with grim satisfaction. “The pulse I haven’t felt in twenty years.”
She took a slow, deliberate step down the stairs.
“After the lab explosion, you came back to us… muted. Empty. All I could feel were sparks of anger, burying the real power deep where we couldn’t touch it.”
I gathered the darkness again, but she held up a hand, her voice laced with vindication.
“I told Korenth,” she said. “I told him you were lying to us. He called it trauma. I called it strategy.”
She gestured to the ruins of the lobby, her expression twisting into a sneer.
“That is why you were barred from the new facility, Riven. Why we buried the Calysteri experiments. I couldn’t risk you sabotaging the work again. I was right to prevent a second collapse.”
She shook her head, looking at me with genuine disappointment.
“You played the loyal dog so well. What a waste. If you had just embraced what you are, you could have sat on the throne beside us. You could have been a god, Riven. Instead, you chose to hide in the kennel.”
“I chose not to be a monster,” I spat, bracing my feet.
