Mana crashed through the lower levels, boots hammering the ribbed alloy of the archive's foundation. The tunnel forked and doubled back on itself, each segment a repetition of battered meshwalk and blue-lit mineral, the whole architecture suffocating in its sameness. Above, somewhere far above, the war for the archive raged: phased artillery, the shudder of collapsed stone, the static chorus of Jäger communication filling every resonance band. But here in the underguts, the soundscape was pure and surgical—each exhale a knife of white in the chill, every step an echo off the wet, mirrored floor.

She moved with purpose, not grace. The wounds from the surface engagement pulsed raw and hot, blood stiffening where it soaked the thermal undersuit. Her left arm trailed slightly, the elbow locking and releasing at random as the Core tried to stem the swelling. Every fourth stride, a shock of pain lanced her side, where the armor had split and skin showed gray and blue in the light.

Water pooled in the tunnel, ankle-deep and freezing, streaked with the prismatic oil of spent fuel. Each footfall set off a spray that caught the crystal seams along the walls, sending ripples of blue-violet radiance outward in perfect, concentric halos. The beauty of it was almost sacrilegious—a palace built for nothing but memory and death.

"Left at the next cross," Fox said, his voice a staccato in the neural link, skipping syllables as the signal cut and rejoined. "They're not pursuing in squad formation—looks like a fanning pattern. Someone's feeding them your path."

Mana pressed on, swallowing the taste of blood and nanofoam in her mouth. Her breath came in hard, wet gasps; the recycled air reeked of her own exertion, and the wet metallic cold of the archive’s depths.

The blue light in the tunnel was alive, pulsing with a rhythm that wanted to map itself onto her own. Her heart, thumping at double pace, syncopated with the walls' throb until it became unclear which beat was hers, and which belonged to the place. For a moment, she almost stumbled, the microtremor in her right leg threatening to send her down in the muck, but she caught herself with a fist to the wall, splintering a patch of ancient frost.

Behind, the Jäger squad drew closer. She could hear them, now—boots on steel, the distinctive click of their plasma carbine cycling a charge. The old stories said that a Jäger only ever let you hear them once; the second time, it meant you were already dead. She counted three shadows stretching toward her on the wet metal: two regular, one heavy. The heavy was the Kommandant.

"Mana," Fox said. His tone was all business, but under it she heard the edge, the vibrato of real fear. "There's a maintenance hatch up ahead, fifty meters. If you can get through, it's a hard drop into the substation. Their sensors won't track well in the geothermal."

"Copy," she rasped, and set her jaw.

The hatch appeared, precisely where he said: round, rimed with ice, the handle crusted with generations of dust. She reached it, braced herself, and twisted. The metal screamed, the sound peeling through her teeth like sand. She slammed her shoulder into the hatch, once, then again, and the thing finally broke free, spinning open on an invisible axis.

The drop was worse than expected. Not the four meters Fox had predicted, but closer to ten; she landed badly, the impact jarring her whole body, shoving the broken rib up into a fresh agony. For a second, Mana could not move. She lay in the dark, blinking away the retinal stars, trying to will sensation back into her feet.

A moment later, the Jäger hit the hatch above. Their voices, even filtered through the helmet and the echoing shaft, had the dry, deliberate certainty of a predator that had cornered its prey. One barked a phrase in the guttural code they favored: the word for “finish.”

She struggled up, legs threatening to fold, and staggered forward into the darkness. Here, the floor was less refined, more cave than corridor. The blue veins in the walls glowed with real bioluminescence, not just reflected light, and they cast every shadow into strange, living forms. Water ran here, too, deeper than before. The first step plunged her to mid-calf in a freezing slush, but Mana pressed on, each stride a full-bodied effort.

Her helmet HUD painted a crude map: up ahead, a choke point, then a long, straight tunnel ending in—she checked, squinting through the blur—a dead end. She keyed the link: "Fox, you seeing this?"

A pause. Then: "It's wrong. The archive blueprints don't show a terminal here. There should be a way through. Unless—"

She cut him off with a hoarse laugh. "Unless the Erben wanted to trap rats, too."

Above her, the sound of pursuit grew louder. She heard the thunk of a Jäger body dropping down the shaft. Then another. The Kommandant’s impact was last, and the force of it sent vibrations through the slush at her feet.

Mana broke into a run. The pain receded, or else she burned through it, the world narrowing to a tunnel vision defined by three points: the blue light, the breath in her chest, and the sound of her own name echoing in her skull. She made the choke point—barely a meter wide, with a razor tooth of black stone hanging at the entrance.

She ducked through, scraping her helmet on the rock. Instantly, the air changed: colder, yes, but also alive, charged with some deep, old electricity. The blue light ahead was almost blinding, a field of runes etched in the walls, so dense they blurred into solid color.

She made it to the end, where the tunnel terminated in a sheer face of ancient stone. Mana turned, back pressed against the cold surface, and drew her sidearm. Her free hand found the seam at her hip—three traces right, three traces left—the motion automatic as the Jäger appeared at the choke. The NEXUS pistol's weight felt insignificant against the cathedral-like vastness of the archive's oldest section.

The first Jäger appeared at the choke, tall and thin and moving with a liquid precision. It raised its weapon, and Mana fired, once, twice. The first round hit the helmet, cracking it with a starburst, but not shattering. The second caught it in the throat, and the Jäger jerked sideways, more annoyed than killed.

The Kommandant came next, filling the choke. His face was a lattice of scar and metal, the eyes blank blue disks. He smiled with a mouth full of glass.

Mana felt the Core at the base of her neck ignite—a warning, or an urge, she couldn’t tell. The wounds all along her body pulsed, but in the background now, secondary to the heat that spread up her spine.

It was then that she heard the sound—a counting, low and insistent. At first she thought it was Fox, some new signal in the link, but it was too slow, too old. The numbers were German, but not any dialect she recognized: "Eins. Zwei. Drei." Over and over, the tempo absolutely regular, as if metering out time in fractions of death.

The Kommandant leveled his weapon, took a step into the tunnel, and then stopped. His head cocked, the mouth twitched, and for a moment, he looked as if he were listening to something just outside the audible range.

Mana's Core burned. The air vibrated, not with violence, but with anticipation.

She risked a glance at the wall behind her. The blue veins along its face were bright now, almost white-hot. The runes crawled, shifting, not in place but in logic, rearranging their syntax with every blink. Mana reached out, almost unconsciously, and the wall rippled under her hand, flexing as if it were skin stretched over bone.

"Fox," she gasped. "Something's happening—"

But the link had gone dead. Or rather, silent—no static, no pulse, just absence.

The counting increased in volume: "Vier. Fünf. Sechs." The Kommandant turned, as if tracking the sound, and then Mana understood—it wasn’t coming from outside. It was coming from behind the wall.

The blue light at her hand grew so intense she had to shut her eyes. The Core flared, every port along her skull activating in sequence, and the helmet’s HUD crashed, rebooting to nothing but a single line:

Mana pressed her palm to the wall.

It vanished.

She fell forward, bracing herself for impact, but found none. The passage was smooth, as if she had been poured through it, body and soul both. The counting continued, soft as a lullaby now, all the way to:

"Dreizehn."

She landed in a chamber that did not exist on any blueprint, not even the blacksite maps Fox had once shown her. The blue was everywhere, but now it was gentle, a field of light instead of a cage. She stumbled to her feet, checked for wounds—everything hurt, but nothing bled anew. Her helmet rebooted, the HUD flickering back to life with a fresh overlay: "UNKNOWN ZONE."

Mana looked back. The wall had reassembled, smooth as glass. The Kommandant’s voice was just audible, shouting something, then cut off as if the air had been sucked out of the world.

She turned, scanned the chamber. There was no furniture, no machinery, only the blue runes that swirled around a single point at the far end. At first she thought it was another crystal engine, but the shape was wrong: a tangle of geometry, a floating polyhedron, turning slowly in place, every facet etched with the same shifting script.

The counting resumed, now in a whisper: "Vierzehn, fünfzehn…"

Mana stared at the shape, and it stared back. The single point of gold in its core blinked, once, and then again, and she recognized, with a start, the rhythm.

It was a heartbeat, not her own, but something older, deeper.

She took a step forward, unsure if she was in control of her own legs. The chamber vibrated, not with sound but with the certainty of presence.

She holstered her weapon, then reconsidered, drew it again, and advanced.

The counting had stopped.

In the center of the polyhedron, the golden point blossomed, casting a faint line of light that traced her outline on the floor.

It spoke.

"Brücken-Entität," it said, the voice familiar, ancient, and filled with a patience that chilled her more than any Jäger ever had. "Endlich."

Mana shivered, the Core at her spine cool now, the heat replaced by a need to know.

"Was bist du?" she asked.

The shape unfurled a fractal arm, extending toward her but not quite touching.

"Archiv," it said. "Und jetzt… Gastgeber."

Mana blinked, the blue light smearing in her eyes.

The first thought she had was that she had left the Jäger far behind. The second was that she had run directly into the arms of something much, much worse.

She exhaled, and the air fogged before her, then vanished into the golden light.

She nodded, once, and stepped into the heart of the unknown.

For a moment, Mana forgot what pursuit felt like.

The chamber beyond the wall was a circle nested inside a circle, each layer defined by a band of moving blue runes that pulsed in impossible time. The walls bowed outward, every centimeter etched with geometry: some glyphs simple, angular, others so complex they seemed to writhe and re-form as she watched. The floor was neither stone nor metal but something that denied both, frictionless and yet warm beneath her boots. At its center, hovering a meter from the ground, the polyhedron rotated: an architecture of faces folding into faces, surface tessellating into infinity, each line sharper than any blade Mana had ever held.

At the heart of the shape, a point of amber-gold traced gentle ellipses, spinning and blinking in a pattern that, after a few rotations, Mana realized was not random. It watched her, as if through a thousand eyes, each one perfectly calibrated to her movements and her silence.

She stood, weapon half-raised, unable to decide if this was an execution chamber or a shrine.

The polyhedron spoke again, the language a perfect overlay of her own, then slightly ahead, then behind, as if to comfort her with its mastery of translation. "You are afraid, Mana. That is good. It means you are still new."

The grandfatherly cadence set her teeth on edge. Her own grandfather had spoken like that, once, back in the childhood that lived in her only as a muscle memory of warmth and loss.

The shape shimmered, and the runes along its closest facet realigned, now tracing the contour of her skull, then the lines of her broken left arm, then, bizarrely, the scar beneath her jaw she’d never shown to a single living person. "I know all the names you have been," it said. "But this one fits you best. Mana. The simplest unit of power. Beautiful, isn't it?"

She did not answer. Her Core sputtered like a dying engine, and Fox's voice cut through the static, each syllable measured with the precision of someone fighting to maintain control: "Mana—vitals—can't—" Then nothing. The link died again, leaving only the hollow ache at the base of her skull where his voice should be. Her fingers found the edge of her chestplate—three taps right, three taps left—the rhythm filling the silence Fox had left behind, like a child counting in the dark.