The air in the sub-levels was no longer air. It was a thick, hot mist of sulfur, steam, and the smell of burnt iron. The "Operation Sun-Seal" was working. General Vane had turned the long, open tunnels into a series of small, locked boxes. Every hundred yards, a wall of white-hot Radiant Steel blocked the path.Inside these boxes, the people of the Pit were dying.Drogo Payne sat on his throne of compressed earth. He was ten feet of obsidian, but he looked like a ghost. His silver-marbled skin was dull. He felt the tethers in his mind flickering like candles in a storm. He felt the fear of the five hundred Nulls. He felt the pain of the woman whose arm had turned to ash.He had tried to be a strategist. He had tried to be quiet. He had tried to hide his people in the dark so the Sun-King would not see them. But the dark was no longer a shield. It was a trap."Source..." Vesper’s voice whispered in his mind. She was standing in a box three sectors away. "The air is almost gone. The wa

The Abyssal Granite, which Drogo had forged to be harder than diamond, was being turned into liquid by the sheer force of General Vane’s magic.The black stone bubbled and hissed, turning into a glowing red soup. Then, with a sound like a thunderclap, the wall exploded inward.A massive wave of heat and dust filled the main hall. The five hundred Nulls of the Pit fell back, shielding their silver eyes. The black water in the central pool splashed violently, hitting the hot stone and turning into thick, white steam. Through the steam, a figure walked.General Vane did not look like a man anymore. He looked like a god made of knives. He stood nearly nine feet tall. His body was covered in "Reactive Steel," a special kind of armor that moved like liquid mercury. The plates of the armor were constantly shifting, sliding over each other with a soft shink-shink-shink sound. One moment the steel was smooth; the next, it was covered in thousands of tiny, razor-sharp spikes.His left arm, t

The Pit was no longer a sanctuary. It was a shattered mirror.Inside Drogo Payne’s mind, the world was screaming. It was not one scream, but five hundred. Through the tethers of the Hive-Mind, Drogo felt every bit of the disaster. He felt the heat of the molten earth burning the skin of the Laborers. He felt the panic of the Defensive Battery as their violet shield grew thin and brittle. He felt the sharp, cold terror of the Shadow-Walkers as they watched their home fall apart. It was too much.Drogo sat on his throne, but his mind was being pulled in five hundred different directions. Every time a Null was crushed by a falling rock, a part of Drogo’s brain went dark. Every time a pipe exploded, he felt a sting in his own nerves.[CRITICAL OVERLOAD!][HIVE-MIND INTEGRITY: 60%... 55%... 50%...][WARNING: NEURAL FRACTURE IMMINENT. THE HOST CANNOT PROCESS THIS MUCH AGONY.]Drogo’s obsidian skin was leaking black smoke. His silver-marbled eyes were spinning. He was trying to be the Gene

The lance of liquid iron was still buried deep in Drogo Payne’s chest. It was a bridge of white-hot pain, connecting the heart of a General to the soul of a King. But the pain was no longer a weakness. To Drogo, the pain was a signal. It was the sound of a dinner bell ringing in the middle of a long, cold night.Drogo’s obsidian claws were locked onto General Vane’s shoulders. He did not pull away. He did not try to heal the wound. He leaned forward, his face inches from the General’s red mechanical eye."You wanted to see the end of the Nulls, Vane," Drogo whispered. His voice was a low, vibrating chime that made the liquid iron in his chest ripple. "But you are the one who is ending."Drogo opened the gates of his Abyssal Core. He stopped being a solid object and became a vacuum.The Consumption began. It started with the lance. The white-hot metal, which had been vibrating with Tier-8 power, suddenly went quiet. The glow faded from a brilliant white to a dull, sickly orange. The

The Inner Sanctum of the Pit was a room of broken things. The black-glass walls were shattered. The stone throne was a pile of rubble. The air was thick with the smell of burnt metal and the cold, oily scent of the Abyss.Drogo Payne stood in the center of the ruin. He was ten feet of polished obsidian and silver-black steel. His wings were spread wide, glowing with a terrifying violet light. He looked like a god of the end times.At his feet lay General Vane. The General was no longer a giant of steel. He was a small, broken man. His mechanical arm was a piece of dead iron. His red eye was a cracked lens. He was shivering, his human skin pale and wrinkled. Drogo had taken his magic. Drogo had taken his pride. Vane was now a Null, the very thing he had spent his life trying to erase.Drogo did not kill him immediately. He reached down and grabbed Vane by the collar of his ruined uniform. He lifted the man up until they were eye-to-eye."Look at me, General," Drogo said. His voice was