The alarm had been blaring for six minutes before anyone in Sub-Level Zero finally bothered to look up.

Red lights flashed across the cellblock, washing the old obsidian walls in a dull, bloody glow. Water dripped from the ceiling, one drop after another, filling the silence between the alarms.

Far above them, the ocean pressed down on the facility. Every now and then, the walls groaned under the weight.

The air smelled of metal, damp stone, and something rotten. There was still a faint sting of mana gas lingering in the ventilation shafts, burning at the back of the throat.

Eren Strong sat with his back against the rear wall of his cell, wrists bound in anti-magic fetters that had long since fused with the scar tissue of his forearms. 

The obsidian cuffs hummed with a low, predatory frequency, a constant reminder that his cultivation was dead, his core was gone, and the only thing keeping him alive was the prison's bureaucratic indifference to waste.

Six minutes, he thought, watching the red light strobe across the opposite wall. Must be a containment breach on Level Three. Happens every few weeks.

The klaxon died mid-wail. Silence rushed in like water through a cracked hull.

Then came the footsteps.

Two sets, heavy and unhurried, echoing down the corridor with the confidence of men who had never once feared anything in Sub-Level Zero. Eren didn't move. He'd learned three years ago that movement invited attention, and attention invited pain.

The footsteps stopped outside his cell.

"Look at this," a voice drawled. Deep, rough, with the particular smugness of a man who enjoyed his work too much. "Still breathing. Thought for sure the last purge would've done him in."

The energy barrier shimmered as someone pressed a palm against the control panel. Eren recognized the silhouette even before the barrier dissolved, Guard Captain Rourke, a slab of a man with a cybernetic left eye that clicked when it focused and a personality that had been surgically removed sometime around his tenth year of service.

Beside him stood a newer addition to the guard rotation. Younger,  leaner, the kind of face that still remembered what sunlight looked like.

"Three years," Rourke continued, stepping into the cell. His boots left prints in the grime. "Three years of breathing gas that would've liquefied a normal man's lungs in three days,  eating rations that are technically classified as biological weapons. And here you sit, Eren Strong, looking like you're waiting for room service."

Eren lifted his head.

The movement was slow, deliberate, the only kind of movement the fetters allowed. His hair had grown past his shoulders, matted and dark with prison filth. 

His body had been reduced to something lean and hard, all the softness stripped away by years of toxic air and deliberate starvation. But his eyes had not changed.

They were the same eyes that had once looked upon the Imperial Capital's golden spires with ambition. The same eyes that had trusted a woman named Lyra Tyrell with his future. The same eyes that had watched, helpless, as that future was ripped out of his chest.

Rourke's cybernetic eye clicked. "There it is. That look. You know what I tell the new guards about you, Strong?"

Eren said nothing.

"I tell them: That one there? He used to be somebody. Used to have a Spirit Marrow so pure the Imperial Academy sent recruiters to his village when he was twelve. Had a fiancée so beautiful half the noble houses in the Capital were jealous. Had a future so bright you could see it from orbit." Rourke crouched down, bringing his face level with Eren's. "And then he learned what happens when he gets so full of himself."

The younger guard shifted uncomfortably. "Captain, maybe we should—"

"Shut up, Vance." Rourke didn't look away from Eren. "I'm educating the boy. He needs to understand what happens to trash that forgets its place."

Eren's expression didn't change. Three years had taught him many things, first,  Patience, then, Endurance. The precise sound a man's neck made when it snapped. But most of all, it had taught him that words were weapons only when the speaker had something to lose.

He had nothing left to lose.

"You want to know what I heard?" Rourke stood, brushing grime from his knees. "Got a comms update from the surface this morning. The Tyrell Clan just secured a seat on the High Council. Big ceremony. Lots of nobles. And your ex-fiancée, Lyra, was it? she was the star of the show. Wore a dress worth more than this entire prison. Had her new core on full display."

He paused, waiting for a reaction.

Eren gave him nothing.

"The Kincaid heir was there too. Darius, oh that Handsome fellow. So Powerful. He always stood right beside Lyra like he owned her." Rourke's smile widened. "Word is, they're planning a wedding, a big one, and invitations are going out to every major house in the realm."

The younger guard, Vance, had gone very still. He was watching Eren now, not with cruelty, but with something closer to morbid fascination. The way one might watch a caged animal that had been prodded one too many times.

"They say Lyra's cultivation has tripled since she integrated the core," Rourke continued. "Tripled. Can you imagine? One little procedure, and she went from mid-tier nobility to one of the strongest young cultivators in the Capital. Bennett Tyrell has called it the greatest strategic acquisition in clan history."

He leaned against the cell wall, crossing his arms.

"And all it cost was one worthless ex-convict's future." Rourke tilted his head. "How does that feel, Strong? Knowing that everything you were, everything you could have become, it's all inside her now? Knowing that she's living the life you were supposed to have, and you're here, rotting two miles under the ocean, breathing poison and waiting to die?"

The silence stretched.

Eren blinked. Once. Slowly.

"I feel," he said, his voice a rasp from years of disuse, "nothing."

Rourke's smile faltered.

"Nothing?" He pushed off the wall, stepping closer. "You're telling me you feel nothing? Your fiancée betrayed you. Stole your core. Framed you for treason. Threw you into the deepest black site in the realm. And you feel nothing?"

Eren met his gaze.

"I feel nothing," he repeated, "because you're not telling me anything I don't already know."

Rourke's cybernetic eye whirred, focusing. For a moment, something flickered across his face, uncertainty, maybe or irritation. He wasn't used to prisoners who didn't break under the weight of their own despair.

"Yeah?" He grabbed Eren by the hair, yanking his head back. "Then let me tell you something you don't know. Warden Vane's got a purge scheduled for tomorrow. Full gas saturation. Every cell in Sub-Level Zero. Officially, it's to clear out the diseased inmates before the quarterly inspection. Unofficially..."

He leaned in close, breath hot and sour against Eren's face.

"Unofficially, the Tyrells paid good money to make sure you don't survive the month. Something about loose ends. Something about making sure the past stays buried."

Eren's eyes didn't waver.

"So tomorrow," Rourke continued, releasing his hair with a shove, "you die. Along with every other piece of trash in this block. And the best part? No one up there will even notice. No one will care. You'll just be another convict who couldn't handle the gas."

He straightened, gesturing to Vance.

"Come on. We're done here."

The younger guard hesitated. "Captain, should we—"

"I said we're done." Rourke stepped out of the cell, palming the control panel. The energy barrier shimmered back into place. "Let him enjoy his last night. Not like he's going to sleep through it anyway."

Their footsteps receded down the corridor.

The red light continued its rhythmic pulse.

Eren sat motionless, his back against the wall, his wrists bound in obsidian, his body a ruin of what it had once been. The mana gas in the air burned his lungs with every breath—a constant, low-grade agony that had become as familiar as his own heartbeat.

Tomorrow, he thought.

The word should have meant something. Fear. Desperation. The primal terror of a creature facing its own extinction.

But Eren felt nothing.

He had felt nothing for three years.

Not when the guards mocked him. Not when the toxic rations dissolved his stomach lining. Not when the isolation threatened to crack his mind into a thousand pieces. He had watched his own body decay, watched his cultivation wither, watched every trace of the man he had once been eroded away like sandstone in a hurricane.

And through it all, he had held onto one thing.

Not hope. Hope was for fools.

Rage.