The air inside the basement generator room was thick, humid, and tasted of metal shavings. The heavy blast door was sealed behind him, cutting Iron off from the remnants of his crew. Before him loomed the Heart, its roots anchoring deep into Dornheim's foundation. Its lead casing vibrated with a fine, low tremor. The temperature in the compartment had already surged past 40°C, and sweat instantly mingled with the grime on the engineer's face.
Iron approached the central console block. A web of cracks covered the screens, and the smell of burnt insulation wafted from the ventilation grates. Controlling the reactor through software code was impossible. Only direct physical contact remained.
He dropped to his knees before an open maintenance hatch at the base of the Heart. Inside pulsed thick main cables, through which ether was pumped into the city's distribution grid. Reaching out with his left hand, Iron brutally ripped the lead braiding from the main node, tearing his nails in the process. Sparks showered onto the concrete.
Upstairs, through dozens of meters of earth and stone, a long, guttural groan of buckling iron echoed. Walter's dome on the square was living out its final seconds. The Inquisitorial skiffs were locking their beams onto a single point.
Iron rammed the mangled, melted stump of his prosthesis straight into the exposed bundle of wires. Current tore through his network, forcing his spine to arch violently.
Lumon. Maximum activation.
Capillaries in his nasal cavity burst, and a thick stream of dark blood spilled down his chin, dripping onto his chest. A high, continuous ringing pierced his ears. His vision narrowed to a tiny pinpoint of light, while the rest of the world drowned in darkness.
His consciousness merged with the Heart. He felt the pressure of the ether inside the reactor's lead core; he felt the five colossal energy sources above, pressing down on the city.
He short-circuited the cooling loop and redirected all the energy generated by the Heart in reverse, using the steel skeleton of the ruined Town Hall as a gigantic conductor. It was a brief, short-circuiting pulse. A vertical resonance.
Out on the central square, Walter, blinded by sweat and blood, felt the knife switches of Laplace's Sphere suddenly turn ice-cold in his hands. The pressure from above vanished.
A fraction of a second before that, an invisible pillar of pure, unconverted kinetic energy erupted from beneath the ground, straight from the Town Hall's foundation. It carried neither color nor light. Space simply warped, surging upward in a cylindrical wave a hundred meters wide.
Raw anti-ether collided with the enchanted armor and engines of the ships. Heavy metal, human flesh, etheric cores—everything dissolved into basic elements within a millisecond, turning into a cloud of gray ionized dust that the wind immediately began to scatter over the ruins.
The wave ripped right through them and vanished into the stratosphere, tearing open the leaden clouds to reveal a patch of pale blue morning sky.
In the basement, Iron collapsed sideways with a dull thud. His body seized in a brief tremor and went limp. The connection severed. The overload shattered the circuits inside his melted prosthesis. Iron lay motionless. His eyes rolled back, leaving only the whites visible. His brain retreated into a deep coma, escaping total destruction.
In the adjoining compartment, Noah sat on a crate, leaning heavily against the wall. His acute hearing, though dulled by exhaustion and the agony in his arm, caught the sudden shift in the surrounding frequency.
A dead silence fell above. The pressure of the enemy engines was gone.
But the silence in the basement was broken by another sound. A thin hiss emanated from behind the sealed blast door of the generator room. It grew higher, more intense. The concrete floor beneath his feet began to vibrate with a fine, unrelenting tremor. Concrete dust rained down from the ceiling in a steady stream.
The Heart had entered a state of runaway core meltdown. The ether trapped inside the lead capsule, lacking any heat dissipation, began to expand.
Noah forced himself to stand. His knees shook; the torn muscles in his shoulder burned like fire.
"Darwin!" Noah shouted, turning toward him.
Darwin raised a glazed stare. He sat next to Elyria, looking blankly into space.
"We're about to die." Noah kicked the armored door open. "The core is melting. This whole place is about to explode. Grab her and run for the stairs. Move!"
Noah stepped into the generator room. The air warped with heat. The Heart roared, its leaden walls already warping and bulging from within. The concrete floor surrounding the reactor was webbed with glowing fractures.
Noah bent over Iron. The engineer was heavy, and Noah had only one functional arm left. Gripping the engineer by the collar with his left hand, Noah gritted his teeth and hoisted the body onto his left shoulder with a violent heave.
"Go!" he barked at Darwin, stepping heavily toward the exit.
Darwin, finally grasping the situation, scrambled to his feet. He scooped the unconscious Elyria into his arms and, with every ounce of strength he had left, bolted for the exit.
They tumbled into the corridor leading to the spiral staircase. The staircase swayed. The stone steps were covered in rubble and spent shell casings, making the soles of their boots slip. From deep within the basement, a pulsing white light began to rise. The scent of ozone grew so concentrated that it scorched the throat with every breath.
Noah led the way. He couldn't feel his legs, moving them mechanically. Iron hung over his shoulder, his blood dripping onto Noah's back. Darwin panted behind him, his breathing ragged. The boy stumbled twice, skinning his knees raw, but he didn't let go of Elyria, forcing himself higher and higher.
"Faster..." Noah rasped, though he could barely move his own feet. "One more flight."
The light from below turned blinding. The hiss shifted into an infrasound that popped ears and triggered nausea. The metal handrails of the staircase grew hot to the touch.
They burst through a shattered doorway onto the first floor of the Town Hall's collapsed wing. Above them was a gray sky.
Noah took another ten steps away from the epicenter before the sound behind them vanished. An absolute, ringing silence fell. A vacuum.
"Get down!" Noah shouted, throwing himself forward and bringing Iron's body down with him.
Darwin instinctively slammed onto his stomach.
The earth beneath them bulged like a massive stone bubble. The reactor unleashed all its accumulated energy in a single, uncontrolled eruption that tore through the foundation, the basements, and the remains of the building.
A pillar of blinding flame and superheated plasma punctured the earth's crust. A deafening roar shattered the eardrums of anyone within a kilometer. The blast annihilated stone, turning it into a spray of incandescent slag.
The shockwave slammed into the backs of the fleeing group.
They were ripped off their feet. Noah felt himself thrown through the air along with Iron. They flew for dozens of meters.
A moment later, Noah crashed into a heap of construction debris, rolling as his ribs cracked, and struck his head hard against a cast-iron pipe. Iron slipped from his grip, hitting the stones brutally a few meters away. Darwin and Elyria were thrown in another direction, vanishing from sight in the thick cloud of dust kicked up by the explosion.
Then the debris rained down. Chunks of stone the size of a human head showered the square, smashing the cobblestones. Hot gray ash drifted down from the heavens.
And then, everything went quiet. Only the hissing of cooling slag and the crackle of smoldering beams remained.
Albert slowly opened his eyes. The world was blurry and devoid of sound. He lay on his back, blanketed by a layer of ash. His right arm throbbed—he had dislocated his shoulder in the fall. He tried to sit up, coughing up the gray grime that clogged his lungs.
A pile of rubble stirred nearby. Walter sat up, shaking his head dazedly. Blood leaked from his ears. He yelled something to Albert, but the doctor heard only an unreadable hum.
Albert pointed a finger toward the center of the square. The edges of the crater were melted, turned into smooth, smoking black glass. Within the vortex, a residual etheric glow churned, slowly fading away.
The few who had survived on the periphery of the square began to rise slowly from behind the barricades. They stared at the crater with hollow eyes.
Walter, leaning on a fragment of a building, heavily pulled himself to his feet. He looked at the crater, then shifted his gaze toward the wreckage of the destroyed residential quarter where the primary blast wave had traveled. Limping, he headed in that direction, kicking through the hot ash.
Albert, clutching his dislocated shoulder, followed him. They climbed over twisted beams and cast aside chunks of brickwork. The air was heavy; they had to breathe through the fabric of their clothes.
Twenty minutes later, Walter stopped near the carcass of a collapsed clock tower, half a kilometer from the epicenter. He threw aside a piece of sheet-metal roofing.
Underneath lay Darwin. The apprentice was covered in gashes from head to toe, his left leg twisted unnaturally. The boy lay on his back, tightly cradling Elyria, who remained unconscious beside him. Albert approached, knelt, and checked Darwin's pulse. He nodded to Walter.
The captain walked on. Rounding a pile of debris, he saw Noah. He was sitting with his back pressed against a surviving fragment of a brick wall. His right arm was severely mangled. With his left hand, he pressed a raggedly torn piece of cloth to his chest, trying to stem the bleeding from a wound on his neck. Noah's eyes were open, staring ahead with a dull, vacant look.
Two meters away, half-buried under dust and fine gravel, lay Iron.
Walter dropped heavily to his knees beside the engineer. Iron's body was cold. A crust of dried blood coated his face. The captain pressed two blistered fingers against the engineer's carotid artery.
The silence stretched on endlessly. Ash continued to fall from the sky, blanketing the ruins in a gray shroud.
A faint, uneven throb. Then another. Separated by a massive interval.
Walter exhaled sharply through his nose. He looked at Noah. Noah gave a slow, barely perceptible nod.
The captain forced himself to his feet and cast his eyes over what was left of Dornheim. There were no more streets, no more squares, no more houses. A heavy, leaden sky hung over them.
Walter pulled a crumpled cigarette from the pocket of his tattered jacket, popped it between his teeth, and flicked an old flint lighter. He drew in the acrid smoke, staring at the cooling crater.
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