ProlixalParagon squared his stance, the breath in his lungs burning, his lattice aching from overuse. His dagger felt almost laughably small against the beast — a shard of will against a leviathan born from wreckage and rage.
But small was enough.
It had to be.
The hound shifted, lowering itself, thick coils of shattered chain tightening along its shoulders, its malformed legs tensing to pounce.
The bell rang once, a deep, resonant note that vibrated in the marrow of Prolix’s bones.
And then it charged.
Prolix moved.
Not away — not retreating — but into the assault, a sidestep born of training and desperation.
The creature roared past, its chains flailing like whips, gouging deep rents into the ground where he had stood a heartbeat before.
Sparks showered the plaza. The stench of heated iron filled the air.
Prolix spun, eyes narrowing, and hurled a Fragmented Ley Prism at the creature’s hindquarters.
The prism exploded mid-air, warping gravity around the hound’s rear legs, making its movements stagger for a fraction of a second.
Not enough to stop it.
But enough to buy time.
The hound skidded across the broken stones, chains snarling, tearing up plumes of broken flagstone as it whipped around with terrifying momentum.
Its bell tolled again — louder this time, the pulse of it fracturing the air itself, sending shards of unstable mana skittering across the plaza like burning leaves.
Prolix stumbled, his shield flickering under the onslaught, his Focus battered by the auditory assault.
He couldn’t win like this.
Not with tricks.
Not with gadgets.
He needed something more primal.
Something buried deeper than cunning or craft.
Something older.
Something darker.
He closed his eyes for half a breath.
Reached inward — past the burn of spent mana, past the familiar hum of his mechanical genius — down into the raw wellspring that the Umbral Synthete class had unlocked.
And there, coiled like a slumbering storm, was the abyssal affinity.
Silent.
Vast.
Endless.
A yawning space not of destruction, but of possibility — the space between falling apart and being remade.
ProlixalParagon did not pray.
He pulled.
Mana ripped through his body like a tidal wave, tearing through the channels of his lattice, fusing soul to void, metal to instinct.
The world snapped into brutal, breathtaking clarity.
When he opened his eyes again, the world was edged in shadow and silver.
Thin black lines of abyssal energy coiled from his fingertips, drawn into his body like a second skin.
The hound lunged again, bell tolling so violently it cracked itself mid-swing.
Prolix stepped into the charge.
This time, he didn’t dodge.
He met the beast head-on.
At the last instant, he diverted.
Using the abyssal energy coiling along his arm, he redirected the momentum of the hound’s strike — not stopping it, not resisting it — but folding it away, dispersing its force into the roiling instability of the plaza.
The creature reeled, its chains snarling wildly as its balance shattered.
Prolix moved with a surgeon’s precision.
His dagger, now sheathed in an edge of soul-threaded abyssal mana, flashed forward —
—cutting through the creature’s chest bell with a single, impossible strike.
The bell’s cracked metal split down the middle with a sound like a thousand broken oaths.
The hound screamed, a keening, hollow noise that tore through the ruins.
Its body began to unravel — chains unwinding, splinters of broken wood and rusted nails spinning outward into a collapsing spiral.
Still it fought.
Still it thrashed.
But Prolix was done giving ground.
He wove the abyssal energy into a glyphless array — no neat sigils, no careful diagrams — just raw, furious intent shaped into form.
The Soul-Void Bind.
A crude technique.
A dangerous one.
But deadly.
He drove the binding into the heart of the hound’s unraveling core.
There was no explosion.
No brilliant burst of light.
Only a terrible, aching silence as the creature folded into itself — crushed into a single shard of darkened mana, no larger than a coin — and vanished.
The plaza was quiet again.
Truly quiet.
The broken air trembled.
The anchored light flickered uncertainly, but held — burning through the rising mist like a lighthouse in a storm.
ProlixalParagon stood alone amid the wreckage, his knees shaking, the last threads of abyssal energy whispering away into the stones at his feet.
He sheathed his dagger with trembling fingers.
He had won.
But the fight had cost him dearly — in mana, in strength, in something deeper he could not yet name.
He turned his gaze eastward.
The fourth anchor pulsed faintly on the system map, waiting.
Calling.
And somewhere beyond it — growing closer with every heartbeat — the presence of Dedisco loomed like a gathering storm.
The battle against the hound had left its mark.
Even stabilized, the plaza around the third anchor felt brittle, hollow — like a building repaired after a fire, the scars visible just beneath the surface. ProlixalParagon stood a moment longer, feeling the slow, careful pulse of his mana lattice trying to knit itself together.
The weight of his recent victory clung to him like a second skin: heavy, scratchy, half-welcome.
He exhaled, gathering himself.
The fourth anchor pulsed faintly in the distance, marked by a pale beacon on the twitching system map.
Time to move.
The streets narrowed as he made his way inland, twisting into alleyways and merchant avenues that had once been vibrant with the hum of trade.
Now they felt... different.
Not shattered like before.
Not wild.
But watched.
The feeling crept under his fur, a slow prickling sensation, as if the stones themselves bore witness to every step he took.
There was no immediate threat—no anomaly creatures slithering from the mist, no unstable mana flares bursting from the cobbles.
Instead, the world had stilled.
Buildings leaned inward ever so slightly, their broken frames like hunched figures bowing low in reverence — or warning.
Fragments of banners fluttered from shattered balconies, bearing symbols he didn’t recognize — spirals within spirals, simple, almost crude — like a child's memory of a lost truth.
And beneath it all, something deeper stirred.
Not a voice.
Not a sound.
A presence.
Ancient.
Endless.
Patient.
Prolix tightened his grip on the battered leather strap of his satchel, feeling the distant hum of unfinished constructs shifting against each other.
He kept moving.
Every few steps, the world seemed to breathe — inhaling with a faint pull of the wind, exhaling with the sigh of settling dust.
The rhythm of it was wrong — too slow, too deep — as though the city itself now pulsed in time with a heart buried far beneath the earth.
At a crooked crossroads where three streets once met, he paused.
There, scrawled across the stones in a strange silvery ash, was a symbol.
A perfect circle.
Broken and mended.
Then broken again.
The lines still smoldered faintly, as if they had been etched by an invisible hand only moments before his arrival.
>>You are noticed.<<
The system prompt flickered across his vision — simple, almost casual — but it chilled him more than any monster’s roar.
He spun slowly, scanning the ruins.
Nothing moved.
Nothing attacked.
But he felt the weight of the gaze pressing down on him, measuring, weighing.
Not hostile.
Not yet.
Testing.
Watching.
Waiting.
Prolix's chest tightened with the knowledge that whatever watched him from behind the thin veil of reality was not one of the city's broken spirits — not an anomaly beast or rogue mana construct.
This was older.
Bigger.
And for reasons he could not fathom, it had chosen not to strike.
Yet.
He pushed forward, the weight of unseen eyes settling deeper into his bones.
The path to the fourth anchor led through a sunken courtyard that had once been a place of leisure — merchant pavilions, a circular garden, ornamental fountains.
Now the fountains leaked black mist instead of water.
The stone benches were cracked and empty, the gardens overgrown with vines that moved subtly, twisting in slow, rhythmic patterns that seemed to mimic breathing.
Prolix kept to the edges, wary of touching anything unnecessarily.
The anchor beacon pulsed faintly from the far side of the courtyard, perched atop a shattered dias where a monument had once stood — now just a broken plinth wrapped in looping tendrils of mana-scarred ivy.
And woven around the base of the plinth, scorched into the stones, were more symbols.
Not runes.
Not magic circles.
Simple, brutal shapes — spirals, cycles, broken chains.
All variations of the same idea:
Destruction. Renewal. Becoming.
Prolix’s hand twitched toward his dagger unconsciously.
He didn’t understand why, but the sight of the symbols made his heart race, his instincts screaming that he was balancing on the edge of something vast.
Something that could not be fought with steel or constructs.
Only endured.
Only understood.
As he moved cautiously toward the fourth anchor, the world around him seemed to hold its breath.
There were no monsters waiting this time.
No abominations stitched from wreckage and wrath.
Only the whisper of crumbling leaves.
The soft scrape of his own boots against ancient stone.
The impossible, suffocating sense of being seen.
The fourth anchor flickered uncertainly — its fractures different than the others, more delicate, as if the instability here was not wild but sculpted.
ProlixalParagon exhaled slowly, centering himself.
No panic.
No fear.
Only precision.
He reached into his satchel, fingers brushing over his stabilization tools.
Behind him, unseen but felt, the presence — Dedisco’s Eye — continued to watch.
Not to destroy.
Not to stop him.
To witness.
And somewhere deep inside, a part of Prolix whispered back:
I see you too.
The fourth anchor sat atop the broken plinth, trembling faintly with a sickly, wavering light.
Up close, it was less a solid object and more an intersection — a place where threads of mana and memory tangled, snapped, and tried desperately to reweave themselves. Fractures spiderwebbed the air around it, too thin to see fully unless he focused, too dangerous to ignore.
ProlixalParagon crouched low at the base, studying the wounded anchor with narrow, searching eyes.
This one was different.
The previous anchors had resisted collapse violently — bursting with wild instability that lashed out without thought.
This anchor seemed almost... hesitant.
As if waiting.
As if daring him to act.
He unpacked his tools slowly: filament coils, ley-chalk, battered soul-copper strips. The familiar rituals of preparation steadied his hands, even as the hair along the back of his neck refused to lie flat.
He knelt to carve the first containment glyph into the cracked stone.
The moment his chalk touched the surface—
—the world fractured.
Not outwardly.
Inwardly.
The courtyard blurred, the colors bleeding away into grays and smudged silvers. The ground shifted beneath him, no longer stone but a vast mirror of smoke.
Prolix stumbled upright, heart hammering.
He was no longer alone.
Standing across from him, mere paces away, was himself.
Or something wearing his shape.
But where Prolix’s armor was battered, scuffed from countless battles, this version gleamed, unmarred.
Where his eyes burned with fierce golden light, this version's eyes were hollow voids — pools of still, consuming darkness.
The mirrored Prolix tilted its head slowly, studying him with a detached curiosity.
Around them, the courtyard spun away into infinite distance — reflections upon reflections, a hall of endless broken possibilities.
A soft pulse thrummed beneath his feet, a heartbeat not his own.
The system flickered faintly.
>Challenge of the Fourth Anchor:<
>Face the Self That Breaks or Becomes.<
Prolix tightened his jaw, stepping into a cautious defensive stance.
He didn't attack immediately.
Didn't rush.
Because this wasn't just another enemy.
This was a test.
He could feel it in the way the mirrored Prolix moved — slow, precise, waiting for him to act first.
Not a trap.
A choice.
Prolix lowered his dagger slightly, staring into the abyssal mirror of himself.
The reflection moved too — mirroring the motion, the hesitation.
If I strike first, he thought, I affirm destruction.
If I wait, he thought, I may lose the chance to act at all.
Neither path was safe.
Neither path was obvious.
But Dedisco’s theme whispered through the fractured air — Destruction. Cycles. Renewal.
Not destruction for its own sake.
Not mindless ruin.
Purposeful unmaking.
To create space for what could be.
Prolix exhaled through his nose, slow and steady.
Acceptance.
That was the answer.
Not battle.
Not blind aggression.
Acceptance that destruction was not an enemy — it was a part of the cycle.
He sheathed his dagger in a smooth, deliberate motion.
The mirrored Prolix paused.
Then slowly — almost reverently — mirrored the gesture, sliding its own illusory dagger away.
The courtyard shimmered again, the cracked mirror-sky splitting down the center.
The system chimed, quiet and solemn:
The world folded inward — smoke peeling away like old skin — and Prolix staggered back into the broken courtyard of Sern Ka’Torr, blinking against the harsh golden light of the dying anomaly.
The fourth anchor blazed steady now, no longer flickering.
Whole.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Whole because he had chosen not to fight what was inevitable.
He had chosen to understand it.
Prolix knelt once more before the anchor, hands pressed to the warm stone.
He didn’t offer prayer.
He didn’t ask forgiveness.
He simply was.
And for a brief moment, something vast and ancient brushed against the edge of his mind — not words, not commands.
Only a simple acknowledgment.
Approval.
And the faint, stirring promise of trials yet to come.
The stabilization of the fourth anchor left the world trembling, as though a great hand had pressed flat against the fabric of the city — holding it steady, but only barely.
The fractured skies wept motes of faint silver and black light now, falling in slow, soundless streams that drifted through the ruined cityscape like dying stars.
ProlixalParagon rose from the base of the fourth anchor, adjusting the strap of his satchel, feeling the weight of the battle behind him — and the far greater one still ahead.
The fifth and final anchor pulsed on the ragged system map.
Farther still.
Near the old citadel that had once overlooked Sern Ka’Torr’s bustling harbor — now a blackened spire leaning at a crooked angle, wrapped in spirals of inverted mana that pulsed like the heartbeat of some vast, slumbering god.
The streets had changed as he moved.
More than the usual signs of mana collapse.
More deliberate.
The cobblestones underfoot were no longer cracked at random — they had split into spiraled patterns, each fracture an echo of a cycle: birth, growth, decay, rebirth.
Shattered archways had reformed into impossible curves, bending in on themselves, creating circular tunnels through which mist spilled like breath.
Even the ruinous debris no longer tumbled loosely — it floated in slow, deliberate orbits around invisible centers, drawn into rhythmic dances of entropy and order.
And through it all, the presence pressed closer — not hostile, not yet — but vast, impossible to ignore.
Prolix moved carefully, instinctively ducking beneath low-hanging beams of fused bone and brass that arched across his path like ribcages, mindful not to disturb the delicate balance of this evolving space.
He was deep within Dedisco’s influence now.
He could feel it:
The promise of destruction, not as an end — but as a crucible.
A necessary hollowing out, to make room for something new.
The shattered city opened briefly before him — a collapsed square framed by leaning monoliths of black stone.
And there, cradled between the cracked stones like an offering, he found it:
A relic.
Simple.
Unadorned.
A sliver of dark metal, curved like a fragment of a greater wheel, etched with lines so fine they seemed to shimmer between existence and memory.
Prolix approached warily.
The relic pulsed faintly, its resonance tugging at the soul-thread of his lattice — not forcefully, but with patient inevitability, like the tide pulling at a drifting branch.
The system chimed — not the usual brisk mechanical note, but a low, reverent tone:
>Vestige of Dedisco: The Fractured Circle<
A fragment of the old cycle.
Those who endure the breaking may reshape what follows.
Prolix knelt before it.
Not out of worship.
Out of respect.
He extended his hand, fingers hovering over the sliver of metal.
For a moment, the mist thickened, spiraling around him.
And he saw —
—not through sight, but through understanding—
—visions not bound by time.
A great forge, hammering a broken world into new shape.
A tree grown from the ashes of a fallen civilization.
A fox-shaped figure, hands bleeding as he built impossible machines from ruin.
A city sinking, only to rise anew on the bones of its past.
And through it all, the same pulse:
Break.
Rebuild.
Become.
The vision blurred at the edges, fragmenting like brittle glass.
When Prolix blinked, the relic had embedded itself into the edge of his satchel, like a quiet companion.
No weight.
No burden.
Only the quiet certainty that he had been marked.
Not claimed.
Acknowledged.
Prolix rose to his feet.
Ahead, the fifth and final anchor pulsed faintly, its light dimmer than the rest — smothered beneath the growing influence of Dedisco's lingering will.
The final stretch of the city beckoned — its towers leaning into cyclopean spirals, its pathways folding into spirals of stone and mist.
Prolix tightened his grip on the hilt of his dagger, the Scrap-Drift Shade flickering close at his side.
One last anchor.
One last push.
And the fate of Sern Ka’Torr — and perhaps more than just the city — would be decided.
He set forward into the deepening mist, heart steady, lattice burning low and fierce.
One way or another, he would see this through.
The mist thickened around ProlixalParagon as he pressed forward, swirling in slow, deliberate coils that clung to his legs and clawed at the edges of his senses.
The city was no longer merely broken.
It was becoming something else.
The streets bent in impossible arcs, looping upward and back down in great spirals that defied the old rules of gravity and structure. Lamps twisted into knots of molten iron. Archways stretched and curled into helix shapes, their stones humming low and deep with barely-contained mana.
And all around him, the ground pulsed with a subtle heartbeat — the steady, rhythmic breath of Dedisco's influence.
The Scrap-Drift Shade at his side flickered uneasily, its camouflaging patterns warping uncontrollably in the thickened mana field.
Even Prolix’s own body felt heavier, his bones vibrating faintly with every pulse through the broken leylines.
The first hazard struck without warning.
A ripple through the stones underfoot.
A lurch in the world’s tilt.
Suddenly, the ground before him collapsed inward like a sucked drain, forming a spiraling pit of inverted mana that screamed a soft, keening wail.
>Environmental Hazard: Mana Sinkhole Detected!<
Prolix barely reacted in time.
He hurled himself backward, landing hard on one knee as the sinkhole chewed a ragged hole where he had stood.
The edges of the pit bubbled and twisted, trying to pull in anything nearby — stones, debris, even scraps of the mist itself.
The pull was stronger than normal gravity — an entropic hunger gnawing at the edges of reality.
Prolix triggered a burst from his adaptive shield, sending a shockwave downward into the ground to counter the sucking pull long enough for him to retreat beyond the hazard's reach.
The sinkhole collapsed in on itself a moment later, leaving only a smoking scar in the cobblestones.
He didn’t pause.
Keep moving.
Further up the spiraled path, the mist grew thicker — heavier — taking on weight and form.
Shapes moved within it.
At first they seemed merely tricks of the eye: faint silhouettes slithering sideways at impossible angles.
But then they stepped free of the mist — jerking, malformed echoes of the creatures Prolix had already faced — minor anomaly constructs twisted anew by the deepening corruption of the city.
Spider-things built from broken sundials and shattered balcony railings, their limbs stuttering and twitching.
A trio of hound-like constructs woven from splintered merchant wagons and torn, salt-stiffened banners.
A half-formed thing dragging itself forward, its body a writhing mass of melted signboards and shattered lanterns, each movement shedding sparks of volatile mana.
These creatures were smaller than the true monstrosities he had fought — but faster.
Sharper.
More desperate.
They hunted with the mindless fury of things that knew the end was close.
Prolix grit his teeth, pulling free a set of improvised charge-spheres — tiny bombs no larger than marbles, tuned to detonate with unstable gravity wells.
He tossed the first two forward.
The spheres popped midair with sharp cracks, scattering localized pull-fields that dragged the lead spider-things into sudden collisions with each other.
The constructs shrieked as their forms tangled, their brittle bodies fracturing.
One of the hound-creatures lunged — fast, a blurred mass of splintered wood and whipping canvas.
Prolix pivoted sharply, letting it graze the edge of his adaptive shield, then countered with a brutal downward slash from his dagger, aiming for the crude mana core exposed near its neck.
The dagger, still faintly resonating with abyssal traces from the last battle, bit deep.
The hound convulsed and burst apart in a spray of splinters and burning cloth.
But there were too many.
The half-formed crawler closed in, dragging broken light behind it like a funeral shroud.
Prolix threw a pulse-detonator — one of the few mana-based weapons he dared to use here — and it exploded in a ripple of disruptive force, hurling the crawler back into a cracked stone column.
It didn’t get up.
Prolix wiped a trickle of blood from his lip, the impact of unstable mana bleeding through his defenses.
The environment itself fought him with every step.
The closer he drew to the fifth anchor, the more the air thickened, the more the world strained.
Finally, through a swirling wall of mist and floating debris, he saw it.
The final anchor.
A monolith of blackened stone, cracked wide down the center, cradled atop a staircase that had twisted into a M?bius strip of ascending steps — impossible, endless, the path folding back into itself.
The anchor pulsed weakly, its light barely flickering.
But what lay beyond it was worse.
Above the monolith, the very sky had opened into a great spiraling rift — not a hole, but a wound — bleeding silvery-black mist down into the city like veins feeding a dying heart.
The rift throbbed in time with the distorted heartbeat he had felt growing stronger at every step.
And from the heart of the rift, he felt it:
Dedisco’s attention.
No longer distant.
No longer passive.
Still not hostile — but focused, like the gaze of a craftsman watching a blade placed in the furnace, wondering if it would endure the flames… or shatter.
ProlixalParagon straightened slowly, feeling the old, familiar tension knotting his muscles — the fear of failure. The weight of responsibility.
But also the thrill of standing at the edge of the impossible.
He tightened the strap across his chest.
Checked the last of his tools.
Rolled his shoulders until they cracked.
One anchor.
One final stand.
He set his foot upon the first step of the impossible staircase, the Scrap-Drift Shade flitting behind him like a flicker of determination.
And above, the sky shuddered, awaiting his choice.
The first steps up the spiraling staircase rattled under ProlixalParagon’s boots — the stone singing with a high, brittle whine as it strained against the weight of reality itself.
Above, the final anchor loomed — flickering, failing — and the rift in the sky churned ever wider, spilling threads of inverted mana like weeping stars.
And ProlixalParagon knew with a gut-deep certainty:
He wasn’t ready.
Not yet.
He tapped quickly through his system inventory — a flurry of sharp motions and grim calculation.
What remained was pitiful.
Three filament charges.
One unstable prism shard.
A half-spent phase skitter node.
One soul-infused grapnel spike barely holding together with wire and stubbornness.
No grenades.
No disruptor bursts.
No backup mana packs.
Nothing that would survive another pitched battle — and certainly nothing that could stabilize a collapsing anchor while surviving Dedisco's trial.
Not enough.
Nowhere near enough.
Prolix's claws twitched in frustration, but he forced himself to breathe — slow and controlled.
The ruins around him pulsed gently, beckoning.
The city was breaking apart, yes — but that meant there was material everywhere.
Broken mana cores.
Torn ley-thread cloth.
Splintered fragments of enchanted wood and sundered metals.
Raw ingredients.
All he needed.
He moved fast, working on instinct sharpened by training and terror alike.
The first thing he salvaged was a chunk of half-melted mana conduit, ripped from the shattered arch of a nearby tower.
The second was a length of ley-fiber rope tangled among the bones of a collapsed crane.
Working against the oppressive pull of the growing rift, Prolix set to work.
He bent over a piece of broken wall, fingers moving quickly despite the raw ache burning through his lattice.
Twist the conduit into an improvised core coil.
Weave the ley-thread around it, tightening the unstable energy inside.
He created a makeshift Gravity Tether, barely stable — it would anchor a collapsing section of ground for a few seconds at most.
Enough to save his life if the floor buckled during the stabilization attempt.
He scavenged further — digging through splintered remains until he found shattered mana crystals still pulsing faintly.
Ground them between his gauntleted palms until the dust seeped into the fractures of a cracked prism shard — repairing it just enough to make a single-use Resonance Burst, a desperate crowd-control measure.
And from the twisted remnants of a broken automaton — half-fused into a wall by mana backlash — he ripped out a still-flickering mana recirculation core.
He jury-rigged it to a fragment of his shield casing, binding it with filament wire soaked in soul affinity.
A Pulse Barrier — a dome of reactive energy that could last five seconds, maybe seven if he didn’t breathe too hard.
By the time he finished, the stones beneath his feet were shaking in earnest — chunks of the spiraled path detaching from the world and drifting upward like bubbles escaping a drowned wreck.
The system map flickered wildly, the fifth anchor’s health dipping lower and lower with every passing breath.
>Environmental Stability: Critical.<
ProlixalParagon stuffed the newly-forged gadgets into his satchel, feeling the weight settle against him like a second heartbeat.
Not much.
Barely enough.
But it would have to be.
He squared his shoulders, feeling the fractured relic Dedisco had left for him pulse once — not in warning, but in silent acknowledgment.
This was not a battle he could win through force alone.
This was a battle of endurance.
Of cunning.
Of becoming.
He took the next step upward.
And another.
The world folded tighter around him as he climbed, the impossible M?bius staircase carrying him into a storm of soundless wind, shattered gravity, and boiling mist.
At the top, the fifth anchor awaited — perched like a dying flame atop the heart of a dying city.
And all around it, the broken fragments of Sern Ka’Torr howled against the inevitable.
Waiting for him.
Watching.
Testing.
The final steps strained under ProlixalParagon’s boots, bending impossibly, as if trying to throw him back into the chaos below.
But he pushed on.
One step.
Another.
Until finally, breath ragged and mana lattice singing with fatigue, he crested the top of the spiraled ascent and stood before the fifth anchor.
It was worse than he had imagined.
The anchor wasn't merely cracked — it was bleeding mana in slow, choking streams, leaking corruption into the earth and sky alike. The rift above gaped wider now, a churning spiral of inverted silver and black that clawed at the edges of reality itself.
At the heart of it all, the anchor floated, suspended in the air by broken fragments of a once-proud dais.
And surrounding it—
The Anomaly’s Final Guardians.
They slithered free of the mist in twos and threes, assembling with ghastly precision.
Spined constructs woven from sundered ship keels and shattered merchant banners.
Behemoth creatures stitched from the wreckage of collapsed towers, their bodies breathing with broken ley pulses.
A towering wraith-knight, draped in fragments of ruined noble regalia, its face hidden behind a mask of splintered stone carved into a cycle symbol.
Their movements were sharper than any Prolix had seen before.
No hesitation.
No mindless hunger.
Only purpose.
Stop him.
The system flared violently across his vision:
>>Dedisco's Eye Watches.<<
>Victory or Final Fall.<
The first wave broke before Prolix could even draw a full breath.
The smaller constructs — the keel-wolves and shard-wraiths — charged him en masse, a howling storm of teeth, splinters, and fractured magic.
Prolix moved.
His first instinct was survival.
He triggered the freshly-built Pulse Barrier, slamming the device into the ground at his feet.
A dome of rippling blue energy flared outward, just as the wave of minor creatures smashed into it.
The barrier shuddered under the assault — the hounds clawing and gnashing, the wraiths slamming into it with soundless shrieks — but it held.
Five seconds.
Four.
Three.
As the shield began to crack, Prolix primed the Resonance Burst he had built earlier, feeling the unstable device hum against his palm.
At the last heartbeat, as the shield shattered, he threw the burst high.
It detonated midair with a soundless implosion, sucking the smaller creatures upward in a cyclone of collapsing mana.
They screeched — disintegrating into motes of light as they were pulled apart by their own corrupted energy.
No time to breathe.
The behemoth construct — a grotesque amalgam of tower stones and twisted scaffolding — barreled toward him, earth shaking under its steps.
Prolix darted sideways, the edges of his vision blurring from the strain, and fired the improvised Gravity Tether.
The tether struck the behemoth’s leg, anchoring it to a sinking slab of stone.
It staggered, trying to pull free, but the weight of its own mass turned against it, dragging it down like a sinking ship.
Prolix sprinted past its flailing arms, making for the anchor’s base.
The wraith-knight moved then.
Not fast.
Not furious.
But inevitable.
It stepped forward, slow and deliberate, each motion cracking the ground beneath it. The mask it wore bled faint light, the lines of the cycle symbol burning brighter with every step.
It raised a rusted, mana-forged blade — long as Prolix was tall — and pointed it directly at him.
Not an invitation.
A judgment.
Face me, or fail.
Prolix grit his teeth, every instinct screaming to fight — to meet it blade to blade.
But there wasn’t time.
The anchor bled behind him, the rift pulled harder with every passing breath.
He couldn’t win by brute force.
He had to outlast.
Outcreate.
He dove for the broken dais around the anchor, skidding across loose stones, his hands already pulling stabilization tools free.
The wraith-knight lunged, crossing the space between them with terrifying speed.
Prolix planted his last prism shard into the cracked ground and triggered it blindly.
The world shattered into refracted echoes — splitting his image into a dozen false Prolixes dancing across the battlefield.
The knight struck one — a false image — then another.
Precious seconds bought.
Seconds he poured into carving crude stabilization glyphs across the anchor’s base, feeding them with the last shreds of mana he could scrape from his soul.
The anchor pulsed, trembling violently.
The glyphs seared themselves into the stone.
Prolix grabbed the relic fragment from his satchel — the piece of the Fractured Circle Dedisco had gifted him — and pressed it into the anchor’s core.
The system howled.
The mist deepened.
The rift howled.
Dedisco’s Eye burned brighter.
The world fell away, and there was only the broken boy, the dying city, and the endless cycle of breakage and rebirth coiling tight around him like a noose or a crown.
And ProlixalParagon, battered and burning, refused to yield.
He faced the wraith-knight head-on.
No illusions.
No shields.
Only will.
And the whispered knowledge that destruction was not an end — it was a beginning.
The plaza around the fifth anchor blurred at the edges of ProlixalParagon’s vision — a maelstrom of whirling mist, gravitational rips, and collapsing structures sucked upward into the hungry rift yawning in the sky.
The world buckled.
The anchor bled.
And the Wraith-Knight advanced, its shattered blade whispering through the air, its every step tearing fissures through the fractured stone.
The cycle sigil on its mask burned white-hot — a symbol of judgment, of endless unmaking.
Prolix breathed deep, tasting dust, ash, and the metallic tang of leaking mana.
His instincts screamed for retreat.
His soul demanded defiance.
He chose defiance.
The knight struck first — a downward blow meant to cleave him cleanly in two.
Prolix rolled sideways, feeling the blade bite the ground where he had just stood, the force of it sending splintered stone whipping past his face like razors.
He rose into a sprint, circling the knight, looking for an opening — any opening.
The Synthete’s bond burned hotter within him, a pressure against his ribs, a pulse behind his eyes.
Metal.
Soul.
Abyss.
Three cords twining tighter, whispering:
Create.
Destroy.
Become.
The knight turned with mechanical grace, its blade dragging behind it, cutting a slow spiral through the ground.
Prolix knew brute force wouldn’t win.
He had to fight like a Synthete.
Change the rules.
Mana surged through him — battered, sputtering, but still his.
He tore free one of his last jury-rigged devices — the unstable Grav-Tether he'd built at the last anchor — and hurled it underhand toward the knight’s feet.
The tether exploded midair, creating a localized pull that dragged the knight off-balance for a heartbeat — just enough.
Prolix darted in, slashing with his dagger not at the knight's armor — but at the ley-thread stitches binding its hollow form together.
The blade, still resonating faintly with abyssal affinity, tore into the stitches with a sound like tearing cloth across a chasm.
The knight staggered.
Its body warped, struggling to maintain coherence.
But it recovered too quickly.
It lashed out with a backhanded strike, catching Prolix across the ribs.
Pain flared white-hot, knocking him sprawling across the broken stones.
His shield crackled uselessly — drained, battered.
Vision blurred.
The city seemed to tilt and reel around him.
And high above, the rift deepened, as if drawn tighter by his faltering.
>Warning: Anchor Integrity at 6%.<
>Critical Threshold Approaching.<
No.
Not like this.
ProlixalParagon pushed himself upright, gasping.
He planted one hand flat against the broken ground.
And this time, he didn't draw just on his devices.
He drew on himself.
He felt the abyss open inside him — a wellspring of endings and beginnings, black and infinite and alive.
He called it forth.
And from that endless dark, he forged.
The air around him shimmered.
Scraps of metal, broken stones, fragments of shattered mana crystals lifted from the ground, orbiting him like shards drawn to a lodestone.
>Create: Defensive Manifold.<
>Create: Binding Vortex.<
>Create: Abyssal Pulse Spike.<
Prolix shaped them instinctively, raw improvisation flowing through him like molten glass poured into a mold.
A defensive lattice of jagged, whirling shards surrounded him, cutting through the mist and the knight’s next sweeping blow.
A binding vortex surged up from the stones at the knight’s feet, locking its legs in twisting tendrils of compressed abyssal mana.
And in his other hand, a single spike of pulsing black light formed — the Abyssal Pulse Spike, vibrating with barely-contained destruction.
The Wraith-Knight strained against the bindings, cracks webbing across its form.
Prolix ran.
Straight into the teeth of death.
Dagger forgotten.
Every step pounded against the stones like a drumbeat:
I will not break.
I will not break.
I will not break.
He closed the distance as the knight raised its sword overhead in a desperate final arc.
Prolix moved faster.
At the last moment, he threw the Abyssal Pulse Spike into the knight’s exposed core.
The spike punched through the knight's chest in a burst of devouring light.
The knight froze —
—faltered —
—and then collapsed inward, its body unraveling into a thousand threads of mist and scattered light.
The silence after was deafening.
The fifth anchor pulsed one last time.
A thin, steady beat — fragile, but unbroken.
The system roared across his vision:
ProlixalParagon sagged to one knee, trembling.
Above him, the great rift in the sky shuddered — and slowly, slowly began to contract.
Not erased.
Not forgotten.
Mended.
The mist thinned.
The ground steadied.
The air tasted of rain and burnt iron and possibility.
And high above, at the peak of the dying rift, Dedisco's Eye gleamed once — a final flicker of acknowledgment — before fading away.
No words.
No grand reward.
Only the simple, sacred truth of the cycle:
You endured.
You rebuilt.
You became.
Prolix closed his eyes.
For the first time since the nightmare had begun, the city of Sern Ka’Torr breathed again.
Alive.
Scarred.
But alive.
And so was he.
The great rift overhead shivered one final time, spiraling closed with the soft sound of a thousand whispers retreating into silence.
The light bleeding from the fifth anchor steadied, casting long, rippling shadows across the battered remains of Sern Ka’Torr.
The city exhaled — a slow, shuddering breath — and the mist began to lift.
The dungeon’s hold faltered.
The broken geometry of the streets snapped back into near-recognition: crumbling towers straightening, shattered plazas reweaving themselves like threads pulled taut on an ancient loom.
The howling instability that had stalked every corner ebbed away, replaced by a fragile stillness.
And through it all, ProlixalParagon knelt on cracked stone, swaying slightly, his arms limp at his sides, vision swimming with the afterimage of Dedisco’s fading Eye.
A soft chime flickered at the edge of his hearing — a voice not of gods, but of the system itself.
System Notification:
>>You have cleared the Dungeon: Fractured Harbor of the Synthete.<<
- Core Anomaly Stabilized.
- Reality Thread Partially Restored.
- Cataclysm Averted.>
A cascade of golden light burst across his vision, too bright, too heavy to fully process.
One after another, the system flooded him with accumulated triumph:
>(Fragmented Heart of the Anomaly) (Rare)<
>(Ley-Sewn Tinker’s Mantle) (Epic)<
>(Scrip of Dedisco’s Acknowledgment) (Unique, Quest-Linked)<
>Level Up!<
>You have reached Level 25.<
>Class Evolution Milestone Achieved. (Pending.)<
>Subclass-Specialization Synergy Deepened. (Pending.)<
The golden light poured over him, filling every crack, every aching wound.
But ProlixalParagon was past exhaustion.
Past even triumph.
As the system’s rewards washed through his battered soul, he felt his body finally give way, the adrenaline that had carried him through impossible battles bleeding out like a punctured vessel.
His knees buckled.
The world tilted sideways.
And with a soft, breathless grunt, he collapsed onto the warm, cracked stone.
The last thing he saw before unconsciousness took him was the slow, steady pulse of the fifth anchor’s light —
—no longer trembling.
—no longer broken.
Alive.