Silence reigned in the still-rough cavity where the slaves had gathered, but it wasn't a peaceful silence. It was the silence of tension, thick and oppressive, weighing on shoulders like a lead shroud. Some slept directly on the cold rock, huddled in uncomfortable positions, their battered bodies seeking rest that would never truly come. Others, too nervous to close their eyes, stared at the rough walls with eyes reddened by fatigue and worry, their trembling hands clutching makeshift blankets.

The air smelled of sweat, fear, and that particular odor of damp earth mixed with residual magic. A few children wept softly in their mothers' arms, who tried to reassure them with muffled whispers. The eldest, those who had survived other purges, maintained stoic masks, but their gazes betrayed deep anxiety.

Mordred stood apart, sitting against a wall, his back straight despite the fatigue. His half-closed orange pupils gleamed with an unsettling light in the gloom, reflecting the dance of magical flames that dimly illuminated the shelter. He was deep in thought, his senses extended toward the surface, analyzing every vibration, every change in the air.

He had felt the wave. Something up there had changed. The dragons were moving. Too fast. Too heavily. Their steps echoed differently on the Parisian pavement, more coordinated, more methodical. They were going to search. This was no longer a hypothesis born of paranoia. It was a certainty carved into the stone of his instincts.

He rose silently, his muscles protesting after hours of immobility. With predatory grace, he crossed the small camp without waking anyone, stepping over sleeping bodies with precision born of habit. His steps made no sound on the uneven rock, as if he floated above the ground.

He joined Livia, crouched near a meager magical fire suspended above a flat stone. She was preparing a decoction of bitter herbs, one of the few things they had left. Her brown hair, usually carefully braided, now fell in disheveled strands around her face, and dark circles hollowed her cheeks.

She looked up as she saw him approach, and the seriousness on her face intensified upon meeting his gaze. She knew him well enough to read his most subtle expressions, and what she saw there made her shiver.

- "Tell me," she murmured, her voice barely audible so as not to wake the others. "You have that look... the one you get when everything's about to collapse."

Mordred didn't smile. He stood for a moment, his eyes sweeping over the sleeping assembly, then knelt beside her with a sigh heavy with responsibility.

- "We're going to have to bring it all down," he said simply, but his words carried the weight of a death sentence.

Livia raised her eyebrows, surprised despite herself. She had hoped he would find another solution, a less drastic way out.

- "The tunnel? You mean... the entire network?"

He slowly nodded his head, his orange eyes fixed on the dancing flames.

- "They're coming. They're going to search. And sooner or later, if they find one of the galleries, they'll trace it back. And if they trace it back... here..."

He didn't finish his sentence. He didn't need to. They both knew what being discovered meant. The dragons would show no mercy. Not for men, not for women, not for children.

Livia breathed deeply, her gaze fixed on the flickering wall of light. She thought of the months of work, the nights spent digging grain by grain, the hopes they had founded on this underground network. Everything was going to disappear.

- "Are you sure we have time to do it properly? Not to trap ourselves?"

- "I planned controlled rupture points from the beginning," he explained, his voice taking on a more technical tone. "We just need to trigger the right pillars in the right order. But once it's done, there'll be no going back. It'll be as if nothing had ever existed. They'll believe it was a natural collapse, something mundane in a city this ancient."

She thought for a few seconds, weighing the pros and cons, then nodded with a determination that commanded respect.

- "Then let's do it. Better a lost tunnel than a hundred massacred lives."

Mordred straightened and placed a hand on her shoulder, feeling the warmth of her skin through the worn fabric of her tunic.

- "Thank you."

- "For what?"

- "For understanding without me having to explain everything. For trusting me, even when my decisions seem crazy."

She didn't respond immediately. Instead, she stood and approached him, their faces finding themselves just centimeters apart. In the flickering light of the magical fire, her eyes shone with a complex emotion, a mixture of tenderness and melancholy.

She placed a quick kiss on Mordred's cheek, her lips brushing his skin with a gentleness that contrasted with the harshness of their situation. Without a word, she smiled at him softly, that smile she reserved for the darkest moments, then walked away with long strides, disappearing into the shadow of the corridor to prepare the others.

Mordred remained frozen for a second, surprised by this unexpected gesture. He raised a hand to his cheek, touched it slowly, as if to make sure this moment had really happened, then shook his head with a small smile tinged with tenderness.

- "That girl..." he whispered, half-amused, half-resigned. "She always manages to surprise me."

After an hour, all the rupture points were prepared. The mana charges were in place. Mordred remained alone at the entrance to the main gallery, he closed his eyes and waited a moment before detonating his mana.

He closed his eyes for an instant, remembering each tunnel, each chamber, each corner they had dug with such hope. Then he reopened his eyes, and his determination was absolute.

He then detonated them. A muffled vibration ran through the ground, rising up his legs. A silent, calculated wave spread through the rock like deadly poison.

Then... the first pillar gave way.

The first pillar gave way with a muffled crack, barely perceptible to human ears. But for him who had dug these galleries, who knew their structure like an extension of his own flesh, the sound was terrifying. It was the death cry of their work, the swan song of his hopes.

The stone first cracked in silence, a thin line crossing the base like a marble tear. Then, suddenly, it broke with a dull, deep sound, like the snap of a broken spine. The pressure of the vault then crashed down on the void left by the rupture, causing a massive rockslide. A silent cascade of rubble, dust, and dead rock engulfed the gallery, erasing months of labor in seconds.

Very quickly, the echoes reverberated through the ground, running from point to point like inverted heartbeats, resonating in the deep strata of the earth. The network was collapsing methodically, section by section, in a perfectly orchestrated ballet of destruction.

A micro-tremor vibrated beneath Paris's foundations. Inaudible. Undetectable to ordinary humans. But a few dragon soldiers stationed around the former prison quarter, where the detention camp was located, frowned almost in unison.

One of them, a young draconic with copper scales, slowly raised his head, his slit pupils vibrating for an instant with a worried gleam.

- "Did you feel that?" he asked his companion, a veteran with numerous scars.

- "Hmm... a tremor. It came from the ground, I think."

They exchanged a look, then shrugged almost simultaneously. The veteran spat on the pavement with disdain.

- "Paris is old. It moves under our feet. Always. These humans built haphazardly, their foundations are rotting."

- "Yeah... probably nothing."

And they returned to their post, unaware that several dozen meters below them, Mordred had just erased their only trail to the disappeared.

The slave barracks, now deserted, was methodically dismantled. No respect. No hesitation. The dragon technicians, accompanied by military engineering units, tore down the walls one by one under Alaryon's hard gaze. Each stone was numbered, catalogued, analyzed. The foundations were laid bare, scraped, probed, perforated with surgical precision.

The air filled with dust and the acrid smell of destructive magic. The draconic workers, protected by runic armor, worked tirelessly, their enchanted tools biting into stone with disconcerting ease.

Then came the more sophisticated devices: seismic mana detectors, large hexagonal structures set with elemental cores, capable of reading the magical resonance of the ground up to several dozen meters deep. Each device cost a fortune, but Maélor had spared no expense.

A network of runic filaments was deployed across the entire zone, pulsing at regular intervals like a steel heart. The symbols engraved on the conductors shone with a bluish glow, creating a complex detection web that left no square centimeter unexplored.

- "Scanning rhythm activated. Sectors 1 to 12 engaged," announced a draconic technician, his fingers dancing on a crystalline control panel.

The air vibrated with each pulse, creating an unpleasant sensation that made teeth grind. But the results came back relentlessly identical: negative.

No cavity. No residual flux. Even the etheric traces that a simple displacement spell or rudimentary excavation leaves in the mana framework were absent. It was... as if nothing had ever existed down there.

- "Check the calibrations," growled Alaryon, arms crossed, eye worried. His scales quivered with nervousness he struggled to hide.

- "Done. Double-checked. Even with psychic sensors and thermal reading, nothing. It's as if the ground had been... purified."

Alaryon clenched his fists. He knew what another failure meant. He knew what awaited him at the palace.

They brought in an ancient geomancer, affiliated with the desecrators. A sinister being, whose claws blackened by countless rituals could feel the fossilized vibrations of the ground back to Roman times. His mere presence made the technicians recoil, frightened by the deathly aura that emanated from him.

He placed his skeletal hands on the earth, his claws sinking into the ground like into flesh. Closed his eyes, revealing sockets hollowed by centuries of forbidden practices.

- "Mute," he breathed after a long moment, his raspy voice resonating like a death rattle. "As if the stone itself had been... rewritten. Purified by a force I don't recognize."

Three days passed. Three days of relentless investigation, frantic digging, increasingly desperate tests.

They turned over every square meter, descended through auxiliary shafts, had digging done by hand, by magic, by draconic fire. They brought necromancers to interrogate the dead, seers to scrutinize the past, earth elementals to probe the depths.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The final report, engraved on golden parchment with the ink of despair, was written with visible bitterness:

"No geological anomaly detected. No excavation remains identified. No hidden passage discovered. No magical flux residue measured. The site is considered virgin of any recent activity. Conclusion: disappearance unexplained by conventional means."

The parchment arrived at the royal palace on the evening of the fourth day, carried by a messenger whose wings trembled with exhaustion and apprehension.

Maélor read it in silence, his eyes scanning each line with devouring attention. Twice. Then a third time, as if he hoped the words would change under his gaze.

Then he folded it slowly, with disturbing precision, each measured gesture betraying anger rising like a black tide. He placed the parchment on the armrest of his throne with the delicacy of a man handling nitroglycerin.

A cold, methodical anger crept into his features. More terrible still than the flames that sometimes danced in his eyes. More dangerous than a cry of rage, for it spoke of calculated punishments, of long-matured vengeances.

- "I am being robbed. I am being defied. And beneath my own foundations, I am being played... like a blind man."

His voice was low, almost a whisper, but each word resonated in the throne room like a death knell. The dragons present in the room froze as if turned to ice, not daring even to breathe.

He rose slowly, his massive silhouette unfolding with deadly grace. Each movement was controlled, each gesture weighed, like that of a predator preparing for the kill.

He descended a few steps from his dais, his claws clicking on the marble with a sharp sound that echoed like whip cracks. He fixed Alaryon with a black eye, where orange flames danced promising a thousand torments.

- "You have failed," he said, and his voice was now charged with implacable authority. "You have humiliated your name, your blood, and your duty. You are relieved of your command. Indefinitely."

Alaryon bowed slowly, his shoulders sagging under the weight of shame. He knew that protesting would only make things worse. He knew there would be no redemption, no second chance. His career, his reputation, his very life were now at the king's mercy.

Maélor then turned toward the right of the throne, his steps echoing like a countdown.

Elystria.

She was there, as always. Straight as a blade, calm as the surface of a lake before the storm. Hands crossed on the pommel of her ceremonial sword, she observed the scene with that particular intensity that characterized her. Her gaze briefly met that of the king, and he saw in it a silent expectation, an immediate understanding. She knew he was coming to her. She knew what he was going to ask of her.

He approached her with slow steps, his voice becoming almost gentle again—but sharper still than the finest blade.

- "My sister..." he said, fixing her with an intensity that would have broken anyone else.

- "...we are going to need your services. Your... particular talents."