The air in Scotland was never warm anymore. Not really. Even under a clear sky, even when the sun tried to break through the smoke-thin clouds, the cold still seeped in – through coats, gloves, even bones. Chloe felt it in her fingertips as she gripped the rusted railing outside the western gate, boots crunching frostbitten moss, the highlands stretching out like a graveyard beneath her.

The Fortress loomed behind her – not a castle, not a sanctuary. Just slabs of concrete stacked over what used to be the Grimm Institute, ringed in soulsteel fences and hex-glyph towers humming with tired magic. A dozen watchlights blinked in rotation. One of them sparked out halfway through its arc.

She stared at it, exhausted. Let it blink. Let the damn thing burn out.

Her shoulder throbbed. Her sword arm was still wrapped in makeshift bandages, soaked dark near the elbow. She hadn't slept. Not properly. Neither had Ying.

The gates hissed open behind her – pressure seals groaning like dying lungs – and a pair of kids ran past her into the yard. Maybe eight, maybe ten, bundled in jackets too big for their frames. One of them had a toy duct-taped together from old drone parts. The other was barefoot.

Chloe watched them sprint toward the central bunker, where food lines had already started to form. A soldier stood nearby, half-armour strapped over civilian gear, lighting a cigarette with a shaking hand. He didn't stop the kids. Just watched them with the hollow eyes of someone who'd stopped caring who lived and who didn't.

She turned back to the road they'd come from. No sign of pursuit. No sign of the others. Just ash trails and broken ground, stretching east past the old forest, where the last demon nest had burned.

Another name for the wall.

She moved toward it slowly, limping a little now – adrenaline long gone. The names had been carved with whatever they'd had on hand: chalk, knives, bloody fingernails. Some were burned in with plasma torches. Others just scratched crude and crooked into oxidised metal.

She found one. Near the bottom. Her fingers hovered over the letters.

LENA GRAY

Gone two years. Pulled under during a supply run to Manchester. They'd only found half her body. Chloe had helped carry it back.

She didn't say anything. Just stood there, heart loud in her chest, jaw clenched so tight it ached. A gust of wind caught her coat, lifting the torn hem. Somewhere above, the rune towers sparked again – low, groaning static. Failing. Everything was failing.

Footsteps approached behind her. Light. Measured.

Ying.

Chloe didn't turn. Just whispered, "We're back."

Ying's voice was cool and flat. "Then let's make it count."

Chloe nodded once. Then turned and followed her inside, past the threshold of the last human stronghold. The Fortress didn't welcome them. It simply swallowed them back whole.

***

The war room was colder than the corridors. Not in temperature – in atmosphere. The walls were lined with black-glass monitors and soulfield projectors, each displaying fragments of a dying world. Broken leyline charts. Failing ward matrices. Red-zone migration patterns. Beneath it all, the low hum of arcane servers gnawed at the silence like insects trapped in metal.

Ying stepped through the security veil first. Her limp was slight, but it sharpened with every step. The mission had taken more out of her than she'd admit. A burn traced her thigh under the combat harness, slow to heal. She ignored it. Pain was irrelevant.

In her right hand, she carried a scorched black briefcase sealed with five-point wards. Its outer shell hissed faintly as it reacted to the wards layered into the room.

Chloe followed her in, saying nothing. Her face unreadable. Dust still clung to her braid, streaks of dried blood crusted along her collar. She hadn't changed. Neither had Ying. There hadn't been time.

Dr. Grimm stood at the far end of the room. Alone.

He looked… hollowed out. His once-vibrant shock of grey hair had thinned, yellowed near the temples. His posture, once military-stiff, now leaned ever so slightly to the right – as if something inside had cracked and never quite realigned. Golden runes pulsed faintly across his exposed forearm, crawling from wrist to elbow like a living script. They flickered when he moved.

He didn't offer a greeting. No words of thanks, no inquiry about the mission's casualties.

Just: "Well?"

Ying unlatched the case and placed it on the central table. The seal broke with a hiss.

A tri-layered map bloomed upward from the projector – spectral light forming topography, soul energy resonance, and heat signatures in stacked colour-coded strata. Prague. Or what Prague had become.

She pointed without pause.

"Target located. Prague. Underground zone. Codename: the Heart."

Another keystroke. The outer perimeter lit up in red sigils.

"Confirmed Class A warding glyphs. Triple-layer construct. Demon patrols on twenty-minute rotations – Corrupter-tier. Estimated eight to ten elite enforcers."

She tapped a separate node. A flickering shadow, barely visible in the data haze, hovered inside the deepest chamber.

"We saw him."

Dr. Grimm's eyes narrowed, the glow of the projection reflecting off his cornea implants. "Alive?"

Ying's voice didn't change.

"Technically."

No one spoke for a beat. The hum of the servers deepened, as if the room itself had registered the weight of her words.

Then Grimm exhaled slowly, voice dry as bone. "…Show me everything."

Ying nodded once, already queuing the next file. The mission was over. The real work was just beginning.

***

The projection chamber still smelled of ozone and burnt copper.

Once, it had been an observatory – a dome of glass and steel perched atop the Institute's highest tower, used to study celestial events, trace the stars, maybe even inspire wonder. Now it was sealed in iron and soul-thread wiring, stripped of beauty and purpose. The walls were scorched with failed incantations. The air buzzed faintly, like a swarm of flies just out of reach.

Chloe stepped through the heavy blast door and into the dark.

The room was already half-full – techs, junior tacticians, a few veteran operatives standing in a crescent. No one spoke. The feed had already started.

She moved closer, heart spiking despite herself.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The image flickered, warped by interference. Static danced like veins across the projection surface – psychic remnants overlaid with corrupted thermal scans and what looked like raw divination threads. Nothing about it was clean. The angles shifted erratically, focus phasing in and out as if the recorder had been shaking. Or afraid.

Then the image stabilised just long enough to reveal him.

Max.

Chained to an obsidian rig the size of a generator core. His wrists were shackled above his head, elbows locked at cruel angles. His frame was skeletal, skin clinging to ribs like wet paper. Hair matted and long, tangled across his face and shoulders. His eyes were open – barely – but sunken deep in bruised sockets. They didn't track. They just stared.

A thick spike, black and ridged like carved bone, was driven through his right thigh, anchoring him to the ground. Blood – old, sticky, half-dried – had crusted around the wound, but no healing showed.

And from his spine, just below the shoulder blades, a slow, rhythmic pulse of black light exhaled into the air like steam. It wasn't smoke. It wasn't energy. It was something worse – alive, hungry, drawn out in a repeating pattern.

Feed. Reset. Feed again.

Each pulse felt like a heartbeat that didn't belong to him anymore. A rhythm not his own – but Moloch's.

All around him, the space flickered. Shapes moved in the dark – not quite demons, not quite human. Observers? Consumers?

The room fell into silence.

Then the whispers began.

Not loud. Not from the speakers. Not even from the feed.

They came from inside the chamber.

"…more…"

"…awaken them…"

"…again… again…"

The lights overhead dimmed.

Dr. Grimm flinched – a rare crack in his icy composure. His lip curled slightly, the runes on his arm reacting with a spasm of gold. He turned away from the image.

"They're using him," he said. His voice was quiet. Disgusted. "Not just as bait. As a forge."

Ying didn't blink. She stepped forward, her own shadow stretching into the light of the projection.

"Confirmed data trail indicates Max is the core of their awakening network. Psychic bleed shows at least 200 enhanced souls per week are being pushed through his siphon. That's assuming a 70% survival rate. Power is being routed through Prague's eastern node and channelled to Moloch's global reserve."

She paused. Let it land.

"He's not dying," she added. "They're keeping him barely alive. Optimum pain. Minimum decay. Engine efficiency."

Chloe's breath caught.

Not because she was surprised. But because some part of her – the stubborn, reckless part – had still clung to the idea that Max was out there, fighting. Somewhere in the dark, holding on. Saving people.

Not… this.

She felt it all hit at once – the relief that he was breathing, and the horror at what those breaths were costing.

Her fingers curled around the rusted railing in front of the display, knuckles white. Her stomach turned. A dry nausea rose up behind her teeth.

The feed twitched again. For one half-second, Max's face lifted. Eyes still unfocused. Lips barely moved.

But Chloe saw it. Or thought she did.

A whisper. A memory.

"Don't let it be for nothing."

Her vision blurred.

She forced herself to look away.

Alive. Yes.

But not Max. Not yet.

And whatever pieces were left of him… they'd have to fight like hell to bring back.

***

Ying stood near the edge of the dome, just outside the halo of the dying projector.

The curved glass panels above her – once clear – were now coated in layers of soot and alchemical dust, filtering the sky into a dull, lifeless grey. She could make out faint outlines beyond the glass: the skeletal remains of the upper towers, the jagged ward pylons buzzing weakly in the wind, and just past them, the mist-stained highlands rolling away like a forgotten battlefield.

This had once been a place for wonder. She didn't care.

She wasn't here for the stars.

Her eyes scanned the room again. The feed had stopped, but no one had left. The operators stayed frozen behind their consoles. The junior tacticians stood motionless in their crescent. Some had gone pale during the footage. One was quietly crying.

Ying ignored them.

Her gaze moved toward the back.

No Dan. No Victor. No Alyssa. No Hana. And no Liz.

The girl who cracked the Devourer's cage. Who broke the veil with her mind alone. The most haunted. The one person who might still reach Max. But not yet.

The room felt incomplete without them – like something core to the Fortress's spine was missing.

But they had their own burdens. They didn't need this intel yet. Not until the plan was viable. Not until the risks were worth bringing to the table.

Ying turned from the glass and stepped back into the circle of light. Her boots echoed faintly on the metal floor.

She tapped her tablet once, and the world flickered back to life behind her.

"Status update," she said. Her voice carried cleanly through the chamber. "Planetary. Priority targets and threat zones. Eyes forward."

A new map unfolded from the projector – flat, colour-drained, crisscrossed with scars. Not lines of latitude, but fractures in reality. A global projection. Cracked and weathered. Not because the data was old, but because the world was.

She spoke without ceremony. The room stilled.

"North America. Still structurally intact. Society operating. Order maintained through evangelic dominion. Belail's forces have turned the entire continent into a theocratic state. Obedience equals survival. Every city broadcasts sermons. Every citizen wears the mark. Resisters are crucified – metaphorically, at first. Now literally."

She let it hang. Then tapped again.

"Europe. Fragmented. Western front collapsed – demonic territories uncontrolled, infested. Eastern sectors under siege. Agrath's legions turned Poland and Ukraine into blood furnaces. Southern Italy burned. The Vatican? Gone. But…"

A soft pause.

"Prague holds."

She turned toward the hologram, highlighting it with a finger.

"Clean. Peaceful. Functioning electricity, transport, even food trade. But too perfect. No poverty. No sickness. No screaming."

A beat.

"That's where we found Max."

No one shifted. No one breathed.

She moved on.

"Asia. Japan is Zagan's corpse. Territory warped beyond navigation. Every attempt at infiltration ends in transmutation. Not even Chloe Blackthorn can get in now. Souls twisted into sculpture. No known survivors inside Kyoto.

Seoul is silent. Dream-locked. A no-go zone. You enter and you don't come back. Sleep takes you. Forever."

She moved the map westward.

"China: glassed. Nuclear fallout and infernal spillage from the Third War. Now reclaimed by the Church of Moloch. Verrine is active again. Sermons, sacrifices, territory consolidation. Resistance is suicidal."

Her hand drifted.

"Africa. Lost. No communications, no drones. Lilith's corruption runs unchecked. Terrain itself is… wrong. Breathing soil. Insect gods. Masses consumed. No known human enclaves. Monsters roam freely."

She zoomed in on the UK.

"Here." She tapped the glowing red mark. "Scotland. The Fortress. Ten thousand, three hundred and forty-two human souls. Highest concentration of uncontracted resistance on Earth."

Another tap. "We still have active cells in Norway, Chile, New Zealand, and Nepal. The Burrow remains functional under London's ruins. Multiple low-signal safe houses exist – most compromised, but half-buried, difficult to detect. We assume one in four remain viable."

She hesitated, just a flicker, before turning to the final point. She didn't need a map for it.

"Moloch."

The name sent a ripple through the room.

"Last confirmed activity was three months ago in Eastern Czechia. Two cities vanished. No energy spike. No seismic record. Just… gone."

She didn't blink.

"Probability suggests he's near Prague. Possibly dormant. Possibly watching."

Silence settled again.

Her voice was precise. Controlled. Memorised. Like the death tolls she no longer needed to read from a screen.

But the final words didn't come from a datapad. They came from somewhere deeper.

"If we don't act…"

Her gaze swept the room. No one met her eyes.

"…we'll be the last."

A long breath. Her voice dropped, softer now.

"And we'll die in the dark – forgotten."

The lights dimmed just a little more.

***

The wind bit deep this high up.

Chloe stood at the edge of the rooftop, her coat snapping behind her like a warning flag. The reinforced steel beneath her boots was rimed with frost, dusted in ash. She lit the flare with shaking fingers, shielding the flame from the wind as it caught. It burned low and red, casting her face in ghostlight.

Below her, the Fortress stirred.

Watchtowers rotated slowly. Wards blinked with fatigue. Drones buzzed low to the ground, their cores humming as they recharged. A patrol passed beneath her – five soldiers in ragged gear, one of them limping. No one looked up. No one ever looked up anymore.

The flare hissed softly in her palm.

Chloe stared at the horizon, past the mountain ridges and broken fields, toward the east where the world had rotted.

Max.

She didn't picture what they'd just seen in the feed. Not the spike through his leg, not the black light siphoning from his spine.

She pictured the man who'd carried her out of hell five years ago. Smoke-choked lungs. Blood on his arms. That stupid grin when they'd hit open air. The way he'd whispered, "We're not done yet."

She'd believed him. Still did. Even now – with that image burned behind her eyes.

Her throat tightened.

He's alive, she told herself. But not Max. Not yet — and she would not let that be the end of him.

Her hand clenched around the flare.

And we're going to get him back… or we're going to burn trying.

Behind her, the door creaked open with a soft hiss.

Ying didn't say anything at first. She stepped to Chloe's side, eyes sweeping the same landscape, unreadable as always. In her hands, she carried a black case – reinforced titanium, scorched at the edges. She set it down between them with a muted thunk.

Inside were weapons. Plans. The first steps of a suicide mission.

"We move at dusk," Ying said. "Quiet insertion. Three paths in. High risk on all of them."

She paused.

"We'll need Liz. And the others."

The wind kicked up again. Chloe didn't look at her.

Ying's voice dropped, softer than usual.

"…I want him back."

Her answer quiet, like an oath: "So do I."

Chloe didn't need to say anything more. They stood there, watching the sky shift – slow, bruised clouds stretching thin across the mountains. The first sliver of light cracked the eastern rim, bleeding red across the frostbitten peaks.

A dawn not of hope.

But of reckoning.

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