Miko rolled through the window and landed in a crouch on warped floorboards, Soul Blade angled low so its glow wouldn't flood the room. The smell hit first: unwashed bodies, stale urine, canned food opened days ago, and beneath it the sharp chemical tang of bleach someone had used to mask worse. Then the sound resolved into individual voices, dozens of them, breathing and whimpering in the dark.Her eyes adjusted. The third floor had been gutted into a single open space, internal walls torn down to their studs and replaced with sleeping bags, blankets, and makeshift curtains hanging from washing lines strung between exposed beams. And everywhere she looked, children. Small faces turned toward her in overlapping rows, eyes catching the faint luminescence from the bioluminescent veins threading the exterior walls. Not dozens. Hundreds. Bodies pressed together on camp beds and inflatable mattresses and bare floor, filling the space from wall to wall until Miko couldn't see where one chil

Five hundred and six children pressed behind a barricade that was already crumbling. Riley felt the weight of every one of them through the reservoir humming in his chest, through the ape's fading silver pulse three floors above, and through the tide of creatures closing from every direction.The western barricade collapsed first. Darya screamed and threw both hands forward, but the concrete was dust and rebar now, nothing left to shape. Three elongated horrors scrambled through the gap and Craig met them with a full rotation that caved the first into the tarmac. Kiera's javelin took the second. The third reached a cluster of children before Jackson's shadows swallowed it and something wet hit the pavement inside the dark."We can't hold this," Faye called from the left flank. Her crystalline bolts punched through a fox but two more replaced it. "There's no end to them."Riley knew. He had known since the second wave, since the creatures stopped dying faster than they arrived. The res

Three days of dungeon grinding blurred into a rhythm that felt almost industrial. Wake, eat whatever Sylvia replicated and Olivia scorched, descend into whichever instance Illythia's scouts had flagged, kill everything inside, climb back into the light, sell the drops, repeat.Riley ran six clears on the first day alone. D-rank instances tucked beneath collapsed shops and fractured tube stations, each one yielding enough experience to feel the number climb but never enough to satisfy. By the second day they pushed into C-ranks—deeper structures with corridors that shifted mid-combat and guardians that required coordination instead of brute force. Illythia assigned two Galacion fighters per run, and Riley watched his team absorb their efficiency without complaint.His reservoir rebuilt itself between clears, the ring on his index finger bleeding stored essence back into his chest during rest cycles until the cold silver column behind his ribs stood full and pressurised again. By the th

Riley's first Nova Burst detonated forty metres beyond the outer wall and turned a wedge of geometric deer into light and shrapnel. The concussion rolled back across the barricade and rattled teeth in skulls up and down the line. Fighters flinched. The gap in the charge lasted two seconds before more bodies filled it.He wanted Stars of Night. Wanted it the way a drowning man wants air. But a thousand bodies stood between him and the dark, packed along the outer crescent in overlapping ranks, and the cascade would not discriminate. So he burned his reservoir on precision instead, throwing Lunar Lances into the thickest clusters, detonating Crescent Storms that scythed through legs and torsos, punching Moonfire Chains that leapt from target to target in crackling silver arcs until the links ran dry.It was not enough. It was never going to be enough.Beside him, Thistle pulsed once on Arianna's shoulder and the earth answered. Roots thick as a man's thigh erupted through fractured conc

The abominations broke.Not all at once, not cleanly, but in collapsing waves as the newcomers from London's ruins flooded through Thistle's root barrier and crashed into flanks the creatures had never expected to defend. Riley watched the western line stabilize, then hold, then push as Craig drove his sledgehammer through the last armoured beetle and the shockwave sent its corpse tumbling into three more. Jackson's shadows stitched the eastern gaps closed. Kiera's javelins pinned the final stragglers to the concrete like silver nails.Silence fell along the outer crescent. Not true silence—the river still roared, the Galacion craft still fired, the Siege Crab still screamed—but the silence of a wall that no longer shook.Riley turned to the river.The crab filled the Thames like a geological event, its carapace rising above the waterline in scarred, blackened ridges where Galacion beams had scored deep. One chelae hung at a wrong angle, cracked at the joint. The remaining assault cra