The Last Mortal

CHAPTER 7: THE REVERSE CRUSH

 

Dominic reacted before my fingers could touch his throat. He dropped the silver pendulum, letting it fall toward the floor as he slammed both palms downward into the open air. The purple light around his skull flared with the density of an exploding star, sending a localized shockwave of inverted gravity straight into my shins.

The stone tiles beneath my boots shattered into fine gray sand. The sheer upward force didn't lift me; it tried to tear my legs from my waist, reversing the mass of my lower limbs while keeping my torso anchored in real-space. The artificial pressure twisted the air into a screaming vacuum that threatened to warp my physical frame into a broken mess. The intense focal distortion pulled at the edges of my duster, testing the resilience of the carbon-mesh lining.

I didn't try to pull back. I forced my left hand down into the sand, burying my bare fingers into the broken foundation of the palace floorboards. The Null key inside my consciousness opened a massive, quiet drain right beneath my palms. The inverted gravity field running through the tiles didn't snap my bones. The absolute emptiness of my baseline anatomy swallowed the current whole, draining the purple gravity essence directly from the stone before the vector could transfer to my joints.

The purple light beneath my feet sputtered, choked, and dissolved into my skin, leaving the surrounding air completely stagnant. The immense environmental force vanished as my core digested the raw data blocks. The sudden loss of structural pressure left the broken stones rattling weakly in the quiet chamber.

Dominic staggered back two paces, his pupilless eyes widening as his internal biometric tracking returned an unmapped exception error. "You aren't just resisting the script. You are formatting the field variables. What kind of degenerate lineage are you running?"

"I don't run lineages," I said.

I lunged out of the sand, his confusion giving me all the opening I needed. My boots launched me across the narrow archive aisle before he could recalibrate his gravitational coordinates or draw a secondary defensive relic from his robes. My right hand shot forward, my bare fingers locking tightly around his left wrist. The physical loop was established instantly, creating a hard-line connection between his high-density Gold-rank marrow and my empty storage directory.

The Null vortex slammed open with a heavy, internal roar.

Dominic let out a sharp, wet gasp as the deep purple light in his eyes flickered violently. He didn't drop like the lower-tier guards. His Gold-rank gravity sequence fought back, its dense, complex parameters attempting to crush my hand from the inside out by multiplying the mass of his own blood cells until his veins felt like solid lead. My visor’s HUD flashed a series of rapid warnings as my internal directory struggled to process the sheer volume of his ancestral code.

[Warning: Directory Capacity at 78%.]

[High-Density Input: Gravity-Weaver (Gold-Rank) detected.]

[Action: Executing forced extraction.]

"Get... off me... trash!" Dominic choked out, his right hand clawing at my face as he tried to trigger a localized collapse between our chests. The air between our faces began to warp, bending the light behind my black visor into a tight, black-hole distortion. He poured the remaining remnants of his lineage into a desperate, close-range kinetic repulsor.

"Hold still, Inquisitor," I said, my voice remaining entirely flat through the vocal filter. "I need your directory to clear the next floor."

I pulled with everything I had, ignoring the cold pressure expanding beneath my ribs. The resistance broke. The dense, purple warmth in his veins was forcefully dragged upward through his forearm, flowing across my open palm like a heavy, liquid current. His fingers went limp, the stones in his rings cracking and losing their luster as the ancestral code was completely uninstalled from his genetic core line by line.

[Status: Complete. Gold-Rank Gravity-Weaver archived in storage bank.]

I released his wrist. The High Inquisitor crumpled onto the shattered tiles like an empty sack of flour, his fine fur-lined robes pooling around his shivering, emaciated frame. His skin was dull, pale, and completely devoid of the vibrant luminescent sheen that marked the upper-ring nobility. He lay there gasping for ordinary air, a baseline mortal who could no longer feel the weight of the world he had spent his life controlling.

"Ren! The secondary vanguard division just broke through the lower lobby gates!" Mira’s voice cut through the com-link, her words practically melting into high-frequency static as the central archive systems entered an automated lockdown sequence. "The main elevator shafts are completely dead. If you don't get up here right now, they're going to seal the subterranean vaults with concrete!"

"I'm done here," I said, turning back to the black stone terminal.

I snatched Dominic’s fallen silver pendulum from the sand and jammed it into the auxiliary drive slot, forcing a thread of his newly stolen Gold-rank gravity essence into the copper interface. The terminal screen flashed a bright, authorized green, bypassing the palace's secondary firewalls and dumping the remaining data packets into Mira’s remote receiver.

[System Update: Central Harvest Spire Access Granted.]

[Target Location: Floor 99.]

I pulled the pendulum out, tucked it into the inner strap of my duster coat, and sprinted back down the frozen aisle toward the maintenance shafts. My chest felt immensely heavy, the dense gravity code swirling alongside the stone and water variables like a vortex of liquid mercury, but my stride remained perfectly balanced. The stolen data lines settled into the gray void of my mind, adjusting to the structural pattern.

I had the key to the empty throne now. I just needed to reach the top of the tower.