"HUUUUUUK!"
It wasn’t a gasp for air. It was the sound of a drowning victim violently breaking the surface of the water. Valerie threw herself sideways off the altar, hitting the stone floor on her hands and knees.
She violently coughed, vomiting a horrific mixture of dark blood, bile, and bright blue, pixelated static onto the tiles. Her entire body shook like a leaf in a hurricane.
"She’s alive!" Corbin wailed, dropping his head to the floor and crying in pure, unadulterated relief.
Wraith dropped down beside her, his hands hovering nervously, unsure if touching her would trigger another massive magical shockwave. "Boss? Valerie, look at me."
Valerie didn’t look at him. She stared at the puddle of blood on the floor, her chest heaving with desperate, ragged breaths. Every single muscle in her body felt like it had been run through an industrial meat grinder and then set on fire. Her head pounded with a migraine so severe it made her vision blur into double images.
"I feel like I drank a gallon of cheap tequila and got run over by a bus," Valerie wheezed, wiping a thick smear of blood off her chin with a shaking hand.
"I’d honestly take the bus right now," Galleon grunted, dropping the empty syringe. "You flatlined, Valerie. Your heart actually stopped. The Spire completely overloaded."
Valerie’s head snapped up. The joke completely died in her throat. The heavy, suffocating fog of the medical stim vanished, replaced by a cold, sharp spike of absolute terror.
"The tether," Valerie gasped, her wide, bloodshot blue eyes darting toward the smoking, ruined wreckage of the Astral Spire. The massive titanium structure was completely dark. The glowing blue mana cables were black and dead.
"It’s gone, Boss," Wraith said softly. He sat back on his heels, his raspy voice heavy with defeat. "The connection severed. The machine is completely slagged. We lost the signal."
"No," Valerie whispered, her voice cracking. She desperately tried to push herself up, her knees trembling so violently she almost collapsed again. "No, no, no. Tell me you can reboot it. Corbin, tell me you can fix it!"
Corbin shook his head rapidly, tears cutting tracks through the grease on his cheeks. "I can’t! Even if I had the spare parts, the primary runic array is melted into a puddle! It would take weeks to carve new conduits!"
Valerie leaned heavily against the marble altar. She closed her eyes, and a fresh wave of tears spilled down her face, mixing with the soot.
She knew exactly what it meant. She had promised Sebastian she would leave the light on. She had promised to be his compass in the dark. Without her astral signal anchoring his corrupted, glitching base code, the absolute perfection of the Core OS was going to tear his mind apart. He was going to dissolve into background radiation, utterly alone.
"Pull up the deep-space telemetry," Valerie commanded, her voice dropping into a harsh, hollow rasp. "Where is he?"
Corbin scrambled over to his desk. Most of the monitors were shattered glass, but one small, flickering green screen had survived the explosion. He frantically typed on the cracked keyboard.
"I... I can still read his localized mass," Corbin stammered, squinting at the scrolling data. "He’s still there. He’s standing right in front of the Genesis Protocol wave."
"Is he moving?" Wraith asked, stepping up behind the code-smith.
"No," Corbin swallowed hard, his face turning a sickly shade of gray. "He’s not dodging. He’s actively expanding. He’s increasing his rendering size to block the white light. But his Source Code reserves are plummeting. The formatting wave is eating him alive. He’s shrinking, Valerie. He doesn’t have enough fuel to hold the wall."
Valerie stared at the flickering green screen.
Her highly optimized, corporate-manager brain processed the logistics of the apocalypse with terrifying speed.
A Wi-Fi signal wasn’t enough anymore. Sending a glowing blue hologram to hold his hand in the void wasn’t going to stop a multiversal factory reset. The Genesis Protocol was a physical wall of pure software formatting. To stop it, Sebastian didn’t just need an anchor for his mind.
He needed physical mass. He needed a battery that wouldn’t run out.
"A digital signal isn’t going to cut it," Valerie muttered, pushing herself fully upright. She ignored the agonizing, sharp pain of her broken ribs. "He’s fighting an operating system. He needs hardware."
Valerie turned away from the ruined Astral Spire. She walked slowly, painfully, toward the very center of the grand hall.
Sitting on a raised, polished obsidian pedestal, completely untouched by the explosion, was the Sanctuary Core. It was a massive, glowing sphere of pure golden energy. It was the True City Core that Sebastian had won in the tournament, the item that had established their base in reality. It was the beating, infinite heart of Earth’s localized mana-leyline.
"Valerie, what are you doing?" Wraith asked, taking a cautious step forward.
Valerie stopped in front of the pedestal. The warm, golden light washed over her charred, bloody overalls.
"I’m giving him a promotion," Valerie said flatly.
She raised both of her hands and placed them completely flat against the smooth, warm surface of the glowing golden sphere.
"System," Valerie commanded, her voice echoing loudly in the ruined chamber. "Access Guild Master override protocols."
*BING!*
A pristine, glowing blue window popped into her vision.
[Guild Master Recognized: Valerie.]
[Accessing Sanctuary Core.]
"Wait, Boss, don’t do that!" Corbin shrieked, suddenly realizing exactly what she was looking at. He scrambled over his desk, tripping and falling onto the floor. "That’s the planetary anchor! If you mess with that, the golden barrier outside drops! The whole world loses its firewall!"
"The firewall doesn’t matter if the hard drive gets deleted, Corbin!" Valerie yelled back without turning around.
She stared at the floating blue prompt. She didn’t want to just draw power from it to run a machine. She needed the actual, localized physics engine of the planet itself.
"Initiate forbidden command," Valerie whispered, her voice trembling but her resolve absolutely unbroken. "Target: Sanctuary Core. Action: Absolute Biological Absorption."
*BZZZZT!*
The system threw up a massive, glaring red error window, frantically trying to stop the insane request.
[CRITICAL WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED COMMAND.]
[The Sanctuary Core contains infinite, planetary-scale mana reserves.]
[A biological human vessel cannot contain this data density. Catastrophic physical fragmentation is 100% guaranteed. Proceed?]
Valerie thought about Sebastian standing in the dark, using his own giant, glitching body as a meat shield to protect a world that had never given him anything but grief. She thought about his sarcastic jokes, his stupid leather coat, and the fact that he was the only person who actually made her feel safe.
She didn’t hesitate.
"Accept," Valerie snarled.
The reaction was instantaneous, and it was the most agonizing thing she had ever felt in her entire life.
The massive, golden sphere of the Sanctuary Core didn’t just glow. It liquefied. The pure, unadulterated energy of the entire planet shot forward, plunging directly into the palms of her hands.
"GAAAAAAAH!" Valerie screamed, her head throwing back as the impossible power flooded her veins.
It wasn’t like the astral projection. This wasn’t sending energy away. This was pulling it all inside. Her blood literally began to boil. Beneath the charred, dirty fabric of her overalls, her veins began to glow with a blindingly bright, pure golden light. The light was so intense it shined straight through her pale skin, tracing the intricate, branching pathways of her nervous system in brilliant, burning gold.
Her broken ribs audibly cracked back into place, forcefully healed by the sheer volume of raw life-force, only to ache instantly from the incredible pressure. The air around her physically warped, the ambient gravity in the room spiking as her biological mass absorbed the weight of an entire world’s magic.
"Valerie!" Wraith yelled, trying to run toward her, but the sheer, oppressive heat radiating off her body forced the Assassin to throw his arms up and stagger backward.
The golden sphere on the pedestal shrank rapidly, pouring entirely into her fragile, human meat-suit. In less than ten seconds, the pedestal was completely empty.
Valerie dropped to her knees on the marble floor. She was panting heavily, her breath literally pluming into golden steam. Her blue eyes were gone, completely swallowed by glowing, radiant pools of solid gold light.
She felt incredibly, terrifyingly heavy. She felt like a walking nuclear reactor that was seconds away from a catastrophic meltdown.
"I’ve got the battery," Valerie whispered, her voice vibrating with the raw, acoustic power of a deity. She slowly pushed herself up to her feet, the stone cracking beneath her boots. "Now, I just have to deliver it."
——
The subterranean command center of Sanctuary looked like a bomb had gone off inside a cathedral. Shattered glass, twisted titanium from the ruined Astral Spire, and puddles of foul-smelling coolant littered the obsidian floor.
But none of the wreckage mattered compared to the woman standing in the center of the room.
Valerie wasn’t just glowing. She was practically incandescent. The pure, unadulterated planetary mana of the Sanctuary Core had entirely saturated her biological framework.