"I don’t have him."

His words landed on the cold morning air without ceremony. Eloy kept his weight on the good ankle, one hand still positioned to grab Isolde if the stone beneath them decided to crumble. "Nobody knows where Caldwell is. His Inquisition purge cycle completed yesterday. Whatever records existed are sealed. That’s all I’ve got right now."

Three seconds of silence.

Hunter’s head tilted the other way. Same gesture, mirrored. Isolde’s weight shifted beside him, boots scraping rock.

Hunter spoke. Three new syllables. Pre-kingdom language, older than anything the dictionary had ever indexed. The HUD translation engine sputtered, flickered, and clawed its way back from its hard crash to deliver a single fractured line.

[ PURSUERS — NOT OURS — CONSTRUCTS ]

Chat fragmented into static as the engine stabilized, letters glitching across the blue window.

[speedGoblin_]: constructs??? actual pre-war constructs??? the ones from the network nodes???

[coldfront44]: not inquisition. never was inquisition.

[LMAO_cat]: OKAY SO THE TEN THINGS CHASING US ARE PRE-WAR AUTONOMOUS UNITS COOL COOL COOL

Hunter extended its arm, slow and non-ballistic. Its featureless hand stopped two centimeters from Eloy’s sternum.

A second red dot materialized on the HUD, pulsing directly beneath the first one. It synced with his heartbeat. No damage registered. HP sat at a clean 84%.

But the cold that shot through his chest had nothing to do with HP. It felt like a system-level override. A tag.

Isolde’s hand closed around his wrist.

She pulled him back half a step and planted herself between him and the Hunter. Lightning flickered along her knuckles in a tight, controlled arc. It didn’t ground, didn’t strike. The lightning just existed, humming through her fingers like a boundary being redrawn.

Hunter did not pursue. It retracted its arm and stepped back. Its head tilted a third time, the posture of an observer cataloging data.

Isolde’s grip on his wrist tightened once before releasing. Her breathing was steady, but her knuckles were white around the sparks she still held.

A child’s hand pressed against a sealed barrier. The hum of a ward.

Eloy didn’t say anything. He just watched her knuckles until the lightning dimmed.

"Vance." Maya’s voice cut through on a tight, focused current of wind from the far side. "Secondary ledge. Fifteen meters below the collapsed span. I can guide the descent with wind markers."

Her hands were already moving, wind shearing loose scree off the descent path to test its stability. The stone shivered, loose chips skittering down into the ravine.

Eloy looked down at the gap. Fifteen meters. Wind markers pulsing like waypoints. His ankle would hate him for it. It already hated him, a lot. What was one more descent anyway?

"Keep them steady," he said. "I’ll manage."

He didn’t debate it. The Hunter’s disengagement might be permanent, or it might not. The window was open. He wasn’t going to waste it discussing who carried what.

He swung his legs over the ledge. Cold stone scraped through his gloves. Wind markers held like invisible handholds.

Descent took four minutes. Maya’s wind markers stayed locked in position, little pockets of compressed air that let him shift his weight off the damaged ankle. Each time he planted the bad foot, the throb spiked through his calf and settled again. Predictable damage. Controllable.

Isolde spotted him from above, her lightning arcing once as a deterrent before she followed. Then she was beside him, descending with the same flat efficiency she applied to everything.

His boots hit solid rock.

Ledge was solid rock, and Eloy looked up.

Hunter stood on the ravine lip, featureless against the grey sky. It watched them for exactly two seconds.

Then the grey sky was empty.

Eloy pulled up the Deviant’s Sense overlay. Ten motionless red signatures pulsed in the valley behind them, positioned exactly where the party had been standing an hour ago. They weren’t advancing or retreating, just waiting, a static ring of red dots.

They had a head start.

It felt indistinguishable from a trap closing.

---

[ SURVIVAL MODE — 13 DAYS, 10 HOURS REMAINING ]

HUD timestamp advanced with a hard jump.

Thirty-six hours of shattered terrain, dead-end trails, and a dread silence that only showed up when the world was not colaborating. Eloy’s legs moved on autopilot. His ankle had graduated from a dull throb to a background process he’d learned to ignore. The air tasted thinner up here, cold and dry, scraping the back of his throat with every breath.

Survival Mode timer had ticked down another day and a half. The golden pulse on the minimap locked in at three kilometers south.

The Caldera.

He tabbed over to Valen’s status marker. A ping at 4.2 kilometers south-southwest returned dark, the same flatline it had held since the junction collapsed. No change in position, no fluctuation in the signal’s dead pulse. He closed the marker before his thumb could hover over it long enough for the others to notice.

Chat had gotten weird during the grind. Some usernames had dropped off entirely. New ones cycled in. Arguments had devolved into debates about optimal rest intervals and whether Isolde had blinked in the last hour.

[noob_slayer88]: bro just admit you’re lost 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

[crispyfry99]: he’s not lost the map is literally blank

[noob_slayer88]: THAT’S WHAT LOST MEANS

[QuietLurker01]: the constructs haven’t moved in twelve hours....

[HackerMan519]: the HUD blinked 22 times the last five minutes. maybe it’s a morse code??? maybe we need to solve an enigma!!!

[crispyfry99]: @HackerMan519 if it’s an enigma I swear to god I’m going to lose it

Eloy rubbed his eyes with the heel of his palm. He pulled up the Deviant’s Sense overlay.

Terrain rendered as a low-poly wireframe, contour lines rippling across his peripheral vision. Ten hostile signatures pulsed in a perfect ring at exactly two kilometers, spaced evenly, unmoving for the last twelve hours. Two red dots stacked on his own position marker, blinking in sync with his heartbeat. Like a second pulse. Like something counting down.

Maya stopped beside him, adjusting the satchel strap across her chest. The blue ledgers shifted against her ribs. Her eyes tracked the horizon line. "The air ahead of the Caldera is completely still. No wind currents. No thermal lift." She paused, processing the data in real time. "The siphoning has already begun. Atmospheric mana is being drawn into the mantle ahead of us."

Isolde stepped up to the ridge line. Her posture hadn’t changed since the way station: shoulders back, weight forward, head tilted. Listening to something none of them could hear.

"Then entering a live engine is strategically equivalent to walking into intake." Her voice was flat, a statement rather than a question. "Is that better than facing the ring of constructs behind us."

She wasn’t asking. She was naming the walls of the trap.

Eloy looked at the golden pulse on his minimap. Then at the ring of signatures behind them. He scratched his nape.

"One’s a known perimeter. The other’s what we came here for." He started walking south. "I don’t have a third option."

Maya fell in beside him. Her stride was shorter but efficient, each step placed with the same precision she applied to everything else. "Acceptable logic."

Isolde waited a beat, her weight still forward, then followed.

Caldera’s golden pulse throbbed on the HUD, three kilometers south. Ten signatures held their ring at exactly two kilometers.

As if they were waiting for permission to advance.

The wind was dead. The wilds were holding their breath.