"Draven, no!" Bayu shouted, his voice cracking against the low, heavy hum of the violet energy.Draven didn’t listen. He slammed his shoulder into the structural support beam a second time. The iron, already stressed by the localized reality-warps radiating from Galang’s convulsing form, gave a shrieking, metallic protest. A web of cracks splintered across the masonry above them, showering the group in grit and pulverized mortar."You idiot!" Kaelen snarled, his focus fracturing. The violet rod in his hand pulsed, the light turning a jagged, sickly shade of amethyst. "You’re bringing the ceiling down on all of us! Do you have any idea how much pressure is contained in this conduit?"Draven fell back, gasping, his hands stained with the black, oily sludge that coated the support beams. "Better to be buried than to be fuel!" he choked out, his chest heaving. "Look at him, Kaelen! Look at what your 'stabilization' does to the people you claim to save!"Bayu didn’t wait for an answer. He

"He’s in deep," Alaric’s voice cut through the air, sharp as a whetstone. He didn’t reach for Galang; instead, he backed toward the entrance of the tunnel, his hand hovering over the hilt of his blade. "Pull him away, Bayu, or we’re going to lose him to the feedback. Look at his veins."Bayu glanced down. Beneath Galang’s translucent, paper-thin skin, his veins weren't pulsing with blood. They were flickering with the same violet, bioluminescent sludge that powered the city's defenses—the very essence they had come here to destroy."I can't move him," Bayu grunted, the heat from Galang’s body forcing him to recoil. The air around the boy tasted like ozone and burnt hair. "He’s anchored to the conduit. Every time I touch him, the energy jumps to me."Kaelen crawled back up from the slick floor, his face a mask of furious, pragmatic desperation. He ignored the rod lying near the drain, focusing entirely on the spectacle of Galang’s agony. "He’s not anchored to the conduit, you fool," Ka

"And brings the entire district down on our heads!" Alaric snapped, his hand still tight on his sword hilt, his eyes darting between the ceiling’s pulsating, nauseating geometry and the trembling, violet-lit frame of Galang. "Draven, you’re talking about collapsing three tiers of the lower city. The Sultan’s guard will be on top of us before the dust settles, and we’ll be buried in the rubble with the very conduit we’re trying to kill."Draven didn’t flinch. He reached into his satchel, pulling out a heavy, lead-lined charge. His movements were clinical, stripped of the hesitation that had plagued him since they’d entered the drainage network. "The alternative is letting this boy turn into a conduit for the Sultan’s madness. Look at him, Alaric. He isn’t just Galang anymore. He’s becoming part of the architecture."Bayu looked down. Galang’s fingers had begun to meld with the stone floor, his nails elongating, turning into translucent, crystalline needles that burrowed into the masonr

"Stop," Bayu roared, his voice cracking as he slammed his palm against the pulsating wall, inches from Galang’s translucent, elongating hand. The vibration of the tether—the sickening, low-frequency hum of the city’s stolen vitality—seared through his skin like liquid ice. "Draven, put the charges away! If you blow those struts, there’s no coming back from the collapse. We aren’t just fighting the Sultan anymore; we’re erasing the map."Draven didn’t look up. His eyes, rimmed with the exhaustion of a man who had seen too many friends turned into battery cells, remained fixed on the structural intersection where the conduit met the ceiling. "The map is a cage, Bayu! We’ve spent weeks crawling through the guts of this city, watching our people get hollowed out to power a Sultan who hasn't even looked at his subjects in a decade. You think we're saving the city? We’re just managing the decay. Let it burn.""He's still in there!" Alaric interjected, stepping between Draven and the boy. Th

"He’s shifting!" Bayu screamed, his voice raw, nearly swallowed by the sickening, high-pitched harmonic resonance that began to bleed from the walls.The floor beneath them didn’t just vibrate; it groaned like a dying beast. Galang, whose body had been the center of this localized nightmare for the last hour, arched his spine. The violet light, once a mere atmospheric nuisance, now surged in thick, gelatinous ropes of energy, coiling around his limbs like glowing vipers. His skin, once tan and weathered by the wastes, had turned the translucent, brittle gray of polished marble.Draven didn't wait for permission. He lunged forward, not toward the boy, but toward the structural nexus of the ceiling, his thumb already hovering over the ignition trigger of the lead-lined charge. "Move, Alaric! I am not dying because you’re too sentimental to let go!""Don’t you dare!" Alaric lunged, his boot sliding on the slick, weeping stone of the drain. He tackled Draven, sending both men sprawling in