The Heart Core wasn’t a chamber—it was the exposed, dying furnace of a fallen god. Towering walls of necrotic coral tissue pulsed in ragged, arrhythmic spasms, their surfaces slick with weeping black ichor that reeked of rotting orchids and scorched copper. The air itself vibrated with the Coral Heart’s final, labored THUD-THUD-THUD, each beat sending visible shockwaves through the thick, brume-filled atmosphere, distorting vision like heat haze over a desert. Crimson light, thick and cloying as blood, emanated from the Heart itself—a colossal, fractured crystal suspended in a web of ruptured energy conduits at the chamber’s center. Vox’s essence saturated the space; his whispers weren’t just heard, they were felt as phantom pressures on the skin, as cold spots in the stifling heat: "...my fault... should have stopped him... forgive..." Selene staggered onto the central platform, every step an agony. The void-cracks mapping her body bled rivulets of captive starlight and abyssal whisp

The Architect’s taunt hung in the blood-lit air like poison gas, its synthesized timbre vibrating through the Coral Heart’s dying thuds. Crimson siphon tendrils pulsed overhead, drinking greedily from the wellspring of anguish below – Kai’s trembling blade still aimed at Selene, Golem-Linda’s perfect hand outstretched in false solace, Selene’s void-blood mingling with crimson on her torn shoulder. Linda’s revelation echoed in the suffocating chamber: "Our pain powers him!" The truth was a physical blow. Selene met Kai’s fractured gaze, seeing not the man she loved, but a conduit for Nyx and the Architect’s grief-twisted game. His eyes flickered – void-black pupils swallowing hazel irises, then receding – as Nyx battled Kai’s crumbling will. The Golem’s finger tapped its relentless rhythm against her hip. Tap-tap-tap-tap. "There’s only one way," Linda’s voice cut through Selene’s migraine haze, colder than the void leaking from her cracks. "The decay... the instability in our bond...

The void-tendril impaling Selene pulsed with the Grief Engine’s monstrous heartbeat, each THOOM sending waves of entropic cold that spread through her abdomen like liquid nitrogen, freezing blood vessels and muscle tissue black. Void-black ichor mingled with crimson lifeblood, pooling beneath her on the platform that vibrated with the Engine’s escalating power. Above, the congealed amber light dripped relentlessly, solidifying into new memorial horrors: a mother cradling a coral infant, a firefighter forever straining against petrified flames. Outside the buckling view-ports, Sydney’s skyline twisted further into a skeletal necropolis of weeping angels and fractured skyscrapers entombed in translucent coral. The air thrummed with the dissonant choir of bending metal and the Engine’s resonant dirge. Selene’s vision blurred, the Void Migraine layering static snow over the nightmare. Linda’s voice was a distant bell tolling under the Soulbind Curse’s triumphant shriek: "Anchor pierced! G

The Grief Engine’s groan deepened into a wounded leviathan’s bellow, its amber light strobing erratically across the chamber. Half-formed memorials stood frozen in macabre tableaus: a child’s coral hand forever outstretched towards a petrified parent just inches away, a street musician’s brass trumpet mid-melt into void-coral, notes trapped as ghostly vibrations in the air. Outside the shuddering view-ports, Sydney’s transformation had stalled. Skyscrapers remained grotesquely fused with weeping angel wings, their foundations encased in translucent coral that revealed skeletal frameworks and abandoned vehicles within, like insects trapped in amber. The dissonant choir of bending metal had subsided, replaced by the ominous creaking of a destabilized colossus and the panicked cries of civilians still partially conscious within their crystalline prisons. Mercy sprinted past Selene, sonic scalpel humming, sealing cracks in the coral encasing a group of firefighters. "Backdoor’s open, Star

Kai Zhen wasn’t fighting Nyx; he was drowning in her. His consciousness, reduced to a flickering ember at 5% sanity, existed within a nightmare landscape sculpted from his own fractured memories. This wasn’t Nyx’s domain; it was his mind, twisted and weaponized against him. Endless corridors stretched in every direction, their walls shifting like viscous oil. One moment, they were the polished chrome of the Mumbai monorail terminal, reflecting the image of Linda falling, endlessly looping. The next, they warped into the pulsating coral arches of the Tidal Labyrinth, dripping with corrosive ichor that smelled of Selene’s corrupted blood. The floor buckled, becoming the broken asphalt of the Bombay warzone, littered with glitching fragments of drone husks that whispered Nyx’s promises: "Let go... sink... the quiet is peace..." He ran, or tried to. His form was insubstantial, a ghost within his own skull. Nyx wasn’t a separate entity here; she was the labyrinth. Her presence saturated