The air in the medical bay was a sterile cocktail of antiseptic and ozone. It was a clean, sharp smell, one that tried and failed to mask the deeper, more organic scent of exhaustion and lingering trauma. Soft, amber light emanated from glow-orbs set into the ceiling, casting long, quiet shadows across the room. In the center, on a cot far more comfortable than her cell or the safe house floor, Selene lay unconscious.The Corruption: 95% was no longer just a number on an interface. It was a physical fact. A intricate, lace-like tapestry of blackest obsidian was etched into her skin, visible from her temples down her neck and across her hands where they rested on the blanket. It looked less like a disease and more like a tattoo, a permanent record of the ocean of sorrow she had swallowed and somehow contained. Her chest rose and fell in a slow, deep rhythm that was the only sign she wasn’t a statue carved from marble and shadow. She was alive, but she was profoundly, terrifyingly alter

The news, as it always did, filtered down to the medical bay. A young, wide-eyed apprentice healer brought word of the pledge, whispering it to Kai with a mixture of fear and excitement. The Sovereign's Guard. The words echoed in the sterile quiet. Kai listened, his hand still wrapped around Selene's, and felt the world shift once again. Their small, desperate trio was now the nucleus of an army. The weight of it was immense, a responsibility he hadn't asked for and didn't know how to carry. He looked at Selene's still face, at the dark lacework of corruption that was the price of this victory, and wondered what she would think when—if—she woke.In the deep, healing quiet of her coma, Selene was not asleep. The part of her that was "Selene" was a tiny, conscious ember floating in an immense, calm sea. The 95% Corruption was not a separate entity anymore; it was the ocean itself, vast and deep and now, finally, peaceful. The screaming anguish had been integrated, the million sorrows be

The chosen venue was the Aerie's Grand Gallery, a vast, natural cavern whose ceiling was lost in darkness. It was not a place of comfort, but of raw, imposing scale. A massive, corrupted System node—a relic from the mountain's pre-fall geothermal plant, a monstrous tangle of conduits and crystalline cores twice the size of a man—had been dragged to the center of the cavern floor. It pulsed with a sickly, aggressive gold-green light, its hum a low, irritating vibration in the teeth of the thousands gathered.The crowd was a sea of mixed emotions, a chaotic symphony that assaulted Selene’s newly heightened senses as she entered. The hopeful blue of Aris’s pragmatists. The sharp, coppery loyalty of Eclipse’s newly-christened Sovereign’s Guard. The jagged, fearful red of Vex’s dissenters, clustered together like a wound. And the soft, wavering yellow of the unaligned, the survivors who had come to see the Static Prophet with their own eyes.She walked through the crowd, and a path cleared

The silence in the comms relay station was a lie. To a normal person, the room would have been quiet, save for the hum of servers and the soft glow of runes. But for Rin, the silence was a thin sheet of ice over a roaring, polluted river. Ever since Selene’s city-wide broadcast—an act of breathtaking defiance that had shaken the very foundations of the System—the data streams had been… agitated. The usual golden-green static was now a seething, angry storm of corrupted packets and screeching feedback loops. It was a direct, systemic backlash, and she was sitting at the point of highest pressure.Her head throbbed, a constant, low-grade ache that had become her new normal. The whispers that had plagued her before were gone, but in their place was a profound, bone-deep sense of wrongness. Her code, the patched-together, glitching mess it was, felt like a raw nerve exposed to the open air. While the Aerie celebrated the birth of the Sanctuary Accord, Rin felt more isolated than ever. She

The silence that greeted them was worse than any sound. It was a void where sound should have been. As Selene, Kai, Linda, Aris, and Eclipse reached the vantage point overlooking the district that housed the Aerie's main surface access, the normal cacophony of a dying city was absent. No distant gunfire, no screech of corrupted fauna, not even the whisper of the wind. It had all been swallowed by the absolute stillness radiating from the epicenter ahead.They saw it then. A wound in the world.It was not a crater of destruction, not a scene of fire and rubble. This was something infinitely more wrong. A quarter-mile-wide sphere of Bombay had been… edited. The laws of physics within that dome were no longer their own. The ruined skyscrapers at its edge didn't look broken; they looked like poorly rendered concepts, their details blurring and dissolving into a greyish-white haze. Light within the zone did not shine or shadow correctly; it was a flat, sourceless illumination, leaching all