The void didn't feel like space; it felt like being digested.Saddam’s consciousness slammed back into reality with the grace of a brick dropped from a skyscraper. He wasn't falling anymore. He was face-down on a floor made of cold, slick obsidian, breathing in air that tasted like ozone and rusted copper.He didn't move immediately. He lay there, his heart drumming against the floor, checking his own limbs. The last thing he remembered was the sensation of Felisa’s whisper against his ear and that soul-searing explosion."Felisa?" he wheezed. His voice sounded like gravel grinding in a jar.He forced his eyes open. He was in a long, vaulted corridor that seemed to bleed darkness. The obsidian walls pulsed with an unnatural, sickly purple light—veins of residual mana running through the stone like cancer. This wasn't the headquarters. This was deeper. This was something beneath the base, something Kepler had been keeping in the cellar.He scrambled to his feet, every joint in his body

The fall didn't end in fire or death, but in the suffocating silence of an air vent.Saddam landed with a heavy thud, his knees slamming into the metal grating of an ventilation shaft. The impact rattled his teeth. Beside him, Felisa landed with a tactical tuck-and-roll that looked fluid and silent, though her pale complexion told the story of how much the previous sequence had drained her.They were deep within the under-city—the mechanical bowels of Munich’s infrastructure. Somewhere, above the layers of concrete and fiber-optic cabling, the city slept in ignorance of the rift tearing its foundation apart."Status," Saddam hissed, pushing the metal grate just enough to peer through."Zero-mana. No visual on hostiles. Minimal muscle endurance," Felisa muttered, wiping a streak of black grime from her cheek. She didn't look like a Captain right now; she looked like a stray dog on the hunt. "This vent connects to the logistics terminal

The dripping from the sewer pipes overhead sounded like a persistent stopwatch in Saddam’s ears. It wasn't the slow, calm rhythm of standard dripping, but an uneven cadence that screamed one thing: high structural stress. Just behind them, the metro tunnel they had barely escaped gave a shuddering heave, sending a thick cloud of dust billoping around them.Saddam adjusted his weight, feeling the dead pull of his courier jacket’s utility pockets. He checked the holographic pane shimmering near his temple.[Sync Rate: 16%. Emotional Overlap initiated: Active memory cache found.]"Shut it off," Saddam muttered, leaning his shoulder into Felisa’s to steer her toward a concrete alcove behind an abandoned generator unit.She wasn't resisting him anymore. That was the first bad sign. Felisa, the ice-veined leader of the Fourth, usually acted like Saddam’s presence was a smudge on her polished glass existence. But right no

The glass shards of the transit hub floor crunched like sugar under Saddam’s boots. The Cerberus unit hadn't even had the chance to fire its kinetic emitter before Felisa’s palm, glowing with an raw, frigid mana, fused its cooling intake directly into a jagged block of obsidian ice. It was a one-hit execution—fast, brutal, and terrifyingly efficient."Two more left in the perimeter," Saddam barked, tapping his wrist. His HUD was glitching, the frame rates struggling to keep up with the sheer speed of their synchronized movements. "We need to hit the gate bypass while they're disoriented."Felisa pulled the ice-sword from the now-silent mechanical torso of the construct. The light reflecting off her silver armor was erratic, flickering like a dying strobe. "I can’t hold the sword forever, Saddam. This isn't just lack of mana—the Dead Zone is actively leaching the energy right out of my skin."She wasn't lying. As they crossed the per

The rebel transport groaned, its aged fuselage shuddering as it hugged the low altitude of the foothills, desperate to evade the searchlights of Kepler’s remaining automated gunships. Inside, Maria was curled against the cargo netting, her gaze drifting toward the small, oval viewport. For the first time, her movements weren't jagged, military, or precise—she looked almost sluggish, her limbs heavy with the sheer weight of regaining a life she had barely known.Saddam sat opposite her, cradling a sub-machine gun he had scavenged from a dead insurgent. He didn't want to break the silence. He was staring at his own empty HUD—the blue flicker of the 'Romantic Synchronization System' was gone. In its place was a dull, persistent throbbing behind his temples, the phantom pain of a week-long overclock."We aren't making it to the rebel main camp in this," Maria said, her voice soft but piercing through the engine’s drone. "The fuel line’s leakin