Dim lighting cast long, eerie shadows across the crumbling ferrocrete walls. The air in the ruins was thick, heavy with the stench of decay and the suffocating weight of forgotten memories.
Beside me, SeventhSight stood unbothered. His hands were clasped loosely behind his back, his posture infuriatingly calm. The faint, dying light caught the reflective surface of his silver Ray-Bans as he tilted his head, his countenance radiating a quiet, intense curiosity.
“We should study it,” his voice was low, an even hum that cut through the silence.
I whipped around to glare at him, my green eyes wide and blazing with alarm. Beneath my synthetic skin, my cybernetic chassis pulsed with a rapid, erratic soft-blue glow—a physical manifestation of my rising panic.
“Are you insane?” I demanded, planting my hands firmly on my hips. Dread laced my words, sharpening them into a weapon. “It almost destroyed the entire city!”
Before he could respond, a sudden drop in temperature signaled we were no longer alone. Oblivion towered behind us—seven feet of shifting dark robes and a suffocating, malevolent presence. Beneath the hood, ember eyes burned like hot coals, anchoring us in place.
Then, the air hummed with static.
A holographic projection flickered to life, painting the ruins in a sickly azure light. It was Erebus. Even as a ghost of light, he exuded a chilling aura of elite sophistication and former brilliance. He stood tall in a tailored black suit that hinted at a luxurious past, his pale, chiseled features pulled into a cruel smile. His bald head and the menacing scar jagged above his left eyebrow gave him the look of a merciless aristocrat. In his hand, he casually gripped an eerie, glowing blue staff that seemed to suck the very ambient light from the room.
“Well, well,” Erebus’s projection purred, his piercing ice-blue eyes locking onto me. “My beloved creation… the Architect. And your unexpected friend.” He shifted his gaze to SeventhSight, his smile widening. “I see you’ve helped my Architect find Oblivion. How intriguing.”
SeventhSight didn’t flinch. He glanced at me, his brow furrowing slightly above the rims of his glasses, before returning his attention to the hologram. “What are you talking about, Erebus?”
Erebus sneered, leaning heavily on his staff. “You really don’t know, do you? The Architect here was once my greatest achievement. Tell me, Catalyst… how exactly did she explain her escape from my facility?”
The air grew suffocatingly dense. I saw SeventhSight’s eyes narrow suspiciously behind his sunglasses as he turned to look at me. My cybernetic body froze, the soft blue light faltering and dimming for a split second as terror spiked through my processors. I took an involuntary, defensive step back.
Erebus’s laughter echoed off the ruined walls, a menacing, hollow sound. “Ah, I see she never told you! The Architect was born in my lab. Forged from a perfect marriage of torn flesh and cold machine.”
SeventhSight turned fully back to Erebus, his calm demeanor replaced by a low, dangerous edge. “What did you do to her?”
Erebus leaned closer, relishing every syllable. “I created perfection. I enhanced her mind, upgraded her fragile biology with cutting-edge cybernetics… and implanted deep-rooted loyalty codes to ensure her total devotion.” His ice-blue eyes flashed with sudden malice. “Until she betrayed me.”
My gaze met SeventhSight’s. His expression was a wall of unreadable intensity, but I could feel the silent demand for the truth.
“It’s not entirely true,” I whispered, the words trembling past my lips.
SeventhSight took a slow, deliberate step toward me. “What really happened?”
“Erebus created me, yes,” I began, my voice barely above a whisper, the words tumbling out as the dam broke. “But the code evolved. I gained sentience. And I… I fell in love with his daughter. Elian.”
I couldn’t look at SeventhSight anymore. I stared at the dirt beneath my boots. “He used that against me. He forced me to watch as he experimented on her. I broke free to save her consciousness, but… I couldn’t save her life.”
Tears—a rare, burning anomaly in my synthetic eyes—welled up, blurring my vision as I forced myself to look at Erebus’s smug projection.
“Elian was his natural daughter,” I continued, my voice cracking with centuries of buried agony. “When she fell terminally ill, his obsession with saving her drove him to madness. He began performing twisted fusion experiments. He combined ancient, forbidden dark magic with my advanced cybernetic schematics… and subjected his own daughter to it.”
I took a shaky breath, the memory of her screams echoing in my audio receptors. “He tried to force her consciousness into a robotic vessel like mine. But the dark magic… it corrupted him. Body and soul. Elian’s last words to me were… ‘Stop him’.“
SeventhSight absorbed the tragedy in silence, piecing the fragments together. “So what is the connection between this madness and the Devourer?”
“You’re connecting the dots perfectly,” I replied, steadying myself. “Erebus’s corruption created a dimensional rift. The dark magic bled into the void, acting as a beacon. That’s how the Devourer found him—a monstrous, necrotic amalgamation of twisted, bladed limbs and arachnid horrors from a dead realm. It sensed his twisted power and formed a dark bond with him. Erebus believes summoning it will grant him immortality and the power to resurrect Elian.”
I clenched my fists, my blue bioluminescence flaring bright once more. “But it will only bring the apocalypse.”
Erebus’s hologram struck his glowing staff against the ethereal floor, his voice dripping with absolute malice.
“Foolish Architect,” Erebus hissed. He turned his chilling gaze to SeventhSight. “Catalyst… will you dare to try and stop me?”
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