The cold floor of the Resonance Chamber was covered in thick grey dust and silver blood. Silas Kapito was lying completely still. His eyes were closed. His breathing was so slow it looked like he was dead. "Silas! Silas, please wake up!" The voice was small and scared. It was Ren. The boy was on his knees, shaking Silas’s good shoulder. Tears were falling from Ren’s eyes, cutting clean lines through the dirty mud on his face. Silas slowly opened his eyes. The world was blurry. The "Nerve-Stripping" technique was completely gone. Now, the pain was awake. It felt like a thousand hot knives were stabbing into his chest. His ribs were shattered. His left arm was completely dead. The broken bone in his right arm poked out of his marble-white skin. Every time he took a breath, he tasted copper and blood. "Ren," Silas whispered. His voice was very weak. "You need to... run away.""I am not leaving you!" Ren cried. He grabbed Silas’s hand. "We won! You killed it, Silas! The monster is de

The tiny sound of Silas’s knuckles tapping the metal was completely quiet. Tink. It looked like a mistake. It looked like the weakest punch in the history of the world. For one long, terrible second, the giant Resonance Chamber was perfectly silent. And then, the vibration woke up. It did not start on the outside of the beast. It started on the inside. The thick, unbreakable titanium chest-plate of the Chimera caught the kinetic energy from Silas's "Zero-Inch Strike." The metal did not bend. It did not break. Instead, the titanium armor acted exactly like a giant metal bell. RIIIIIIIIIING. The sound was not something you could just hear with your ears. It was something you felt in your teeth. You felt it in your bones. Subject 13, the unstoppable 800-pound monster, suddenly froze. It stopped pushing its claws into Silas’s shoulder. Its massive, backward-bending legs locked perfectly straight. Its giant hands stuck out in the air, completely stiff. The beast looked like a statu

The giant Resonance Chamber was finally quiet. The ringing in the walls stopped. The dust slowly floated down from the ceiling like grey snow. Silas Kapito stood in the center of the room. He was surrounded by the melted, ruined pieces of the Chimera. The 800-pound beast, Subject 13, lay at his feet. It was a pile of dead titanium and thick, dark soup. Silas was a broken mess. His left arm was completely shattered. The bones were cracked, and the muscles were torn. The arm hung by his side, totally useless. Inside his chest, three of his thick tungsten ribs were crushed. Every time he took a breath, the broken pieces of metal ground against each other. A normal boy would be screaming. A normal boy would be dead. But Silas did not fall. He did not even stagger. He stood perfectly still, his heavy boots planted on the bloody floor. Inside his mind, the core struggle continued. His body was screaming in pain, but his "Neuro-Sync Alpha" mind was cold and calm. Silas closed his solid

The giant floating city of the Citadel was falling from the sky. It blocked out the morning sun, casting a massive, terrifying shadow over the ruined Ash-Lands. The gravity-engines roared with a sound so loud it made the teeth of every person in the mud vibrate. But Silas Kapito did not look up at the falling city. He looked straight ahead. Hovering just twenty feet above the broken courtyard was a machine. It was a "Relay Drone." It was completely different from the small, grey Retrieval Drones. This drone was large, plated in pure, shiny gold, and covered in bright blue lights. This was the Chrome Council’s primary broadcast camera. It was not just recording a video for a few rich parents in a dark room. It was broadcasting a live feed to every single crystal screen on the entire planet. It was sending the video to the shining towers of the Spires, and it was sending it to the dirty, stolen televisions hidden deep in the Sump. The Chrome Council had sent the Relay Drone to show

The giant floating city had landed.For the first time in a thousand years, the Citadel was not in the sky. It sat directly in the dirty mud of the Ash-Lands. Its massive steel landing legs crushed the ruined buildings into flat dust. The gravity-engines hissed, blowing thick clouds of hot steam into the yellow fog.The Chrome Council had brought their city down to crush the Dregs. But they had made a terrible mistake. By bringing the city to the ground, they had also opened their front door.Silas Kapito stood in the mud. He told Ren and the Iron-Grey Reapers to stay hidden in the ruins. "Wait for my signal," Silas had said. "I am going home."Now, Silas was walking toward the main gates of the Academy. He did not use a dropship. He did not use a fast transport vehicle. He walked on his own two feet.The Academy gates were massive doors made of solid white steel. Four Gilded guards stood in front of the doors. They wore bright gold armor. They held heavy plasma rifles.Normally, thes