CHAPTER 624: THE SUDDEN HAZARD (1)

Mikhailis straightened but didn’t move away. For a beat, he simply let the stillness settle. He could have stood there all night.

Instead he lowered himself onto the mattress’s edge, mindful of every creak. His fingers hovered just above hers, close enough to feel heat but not to disturb. The jasmine from his cup lingered on his tongue; the sweetness mixed with a sudden metallic tang of unease.

The itch arrived—subtle as a spider crossing skin. First a prickle at the base of his neck, then a murmur down his spine. Instinct, old as childhood disasters in half-finished labs, whispered that silence could lie.

He swept the chamber with a gaze sharpened by years of insect study. Walls, windows, rune lattice in the floor—nothing flashed abnormal. The ward crystals glowed steady, their pale light doing the slow pulse of undisturbed circuits. Even the faint signature of chimera-ant sentries sleeping in vents read calm on his inner map. No irregular pings, no unauthorized mana spikes.

Yet the emptiness felt wrong. Like a note missing from a chord.

This feeling. It’s... empty. Not the room, not her—something else, he thought, pulse beginning a quiet gallop.

He thumbed the edge of a wristband concealed beneath his cuff. "Rodion," he breathed, barely shaping the word.

There was a half-second pause—as if the AI weighed the value of answering aloud in the silence. Then the clipped reply sounded in his ear, volume obediently low.

Still online. All sensors report nominal conditions.

"Prepare for potential intrusion," he whispered. His eyes never stopped scanning corners, cross-beams, the faint shimmer of the doorway ward. If anything shifted, he wanted to see it first.

...I didn’t detect anything. But noted. When you get like this, it’s usually wise to obey.

He almost smiled at the grudging respect. Almost. Because now the itch had turned to a slow burn at his palm. He lifted his left hand, heartbeat ticking louder in his ears.

There it was—a point of dull, reddish light beneath the skin, right at the center of the old pact circle. It reminded him of embers buried deep in ash. With each throb of his pulse the ember brightened, a lighthouse flashing warnings no one else could see.

A faint glow.

The circle beneath his skin glimmered like a coal pulled from a dying fire.

A single pulse—a heartbeat not his own—throbbed upward through arm and shoulder. He watched, equal parts scientist and unwilling subject, as the glow spread in thin veins toward his wrist.

Again it pulsed, brighter, faster, a beacon begging to be answered.

Each flare prickled the tiny hairs on his forearm. By the third rhythm, a faint warmth radiated through muscle and tendon, as though a candle had been lit inside the bone.

Mikhailis rose without disturbing the mattress. The floor accepted his weight with a muted creak, but Elowen did not stir. Moonlight slipping between curtains kissed her eyelids; she merely sighed, curling tighter beneath the blanket he’d tucked around her minutes earlier.

Good. Stay asleep, he thought, and forced himself to breathe evenly, quietly.

Soft leather soles ghosted across polished plank. He slipped into the corridor, eased the latch shut, and felt the hush swell behind him like held breath.

Down the spiral stairs, past the glow-mite jars and softly ticking regulators—each landing darker than the last. The main lab’s crystal lamps lay dormant, letting only emergency filaments cast watery light across consoles and insect terrariums. Twice he paused, fist clenched, willing the mark to stop throbbing. It didn’t. The glow brightened enough that the underside of his palm painted rosy shadows on the banister.

Deeper still.

Beyond the secondary workrooms filled with half-built automata, past shelves where rune-etched beetle husks waited in stasis gum. At the end of a narrow passage he reached a blank wooden wall.

He pressed his palm flat.

The rune hidden inside the panel breathed once, as if tasting his aura, and the boards parted down the center with a sighing rustle—roots unbraiding from roots. Cool air spilled out, carrying sterile scents of quartz powder and lamplight distilled.

The hidden chamber greeted him like a trusted cocoon. Circular, no wider than a card table, all black stone and faint humming lines, it existed for one purpose: isolation. No other leyline touched this place; no spell could hitch a ride in. His and Rodion’s private refuge.

Rodion’s physical core unfolded from a wall socket—white plates sliding over an inner glow, limbs rotating with tiny pneumatic clicks. The construct stood just below Mikhailis’s shoulder, expressionless aero-glyphs drifting across its chest.

He rolled up his sleeve to the elbow, exposing the entire pact circle. Up close, the sigil looked alive, its strokes swelling and shrinking like lungs. The central node glowed a deep ember red, rimmed with an anxious violet.

Rodion extended one glass-smooth arm.

A lattice of light sprang up, prismatic and shifting. It washed over the mark, mapping every line and sub-glyph, then projected a three-dimensional replica above their heads—a fiery disk spinning slow as a clock’s second hand.

There is a significant energy spike originating beneath the dermal layer.

The AI’s voice was hushed, as though wary of echo.

Current rate of increase: three point two percent every ten seconds.

"That fast?" Mikhailis flexed fingers, watching the virtual copy bulge with each heartbeat. "Source?"

Scanning... Rodion’s hollow eyes flickered.

Not Verdant Canopy aligned. Not any local leyline. Signature is... another pause, this one longer, the humming vents around them dipping in pitch, cross-dimensional or displaced enchantment. Possibly alien.

"Alien." He repeated the word like sour wine. Models bloomed in midair: stacked waveforms, rotating constellations of runic syntax unrecognizable even to his polyglot memory. He scrubbed a hand through disordered hair.

"...Should I just... chop it?" The joking tilt to his voice sounded thin, strained.

A reply came—but not from Rodion.

"No. It’s useless."

The syllables rasped like paper against stone, echoing off bare walls, slipping under his collar to stroke the nape of his neck. Mikhailis’s heart gave a violent kick. He spun so quickly the chamber blurred. Nothing there—only shelves of sealed phials and a dormant stasis pod humming at low idle.

Rodion’s sensor halo widened, violet beams crawling over every surface. No anomalies appeared.

Auditory input unregistered. No visual confirmation.

"That wasn’t in my head," Mikhailis whispered. Breath fogged in the cooler air. A drop of sweat traced his spine despite the chill.

The sigil burned hotter. Its lines swelled outward until the skin looked ready to tear. A thin current of lavender light rose from the mark, coiling upward like smoke seeking a chimney.

Then the room changed.

Contours of wall and floor bent inward, subtle at first, like glass warming over flame. Shelves seemed to pull toward his hand; the air rushed past his ears with the whine of a distant violin.

Light—actual photons—slanted toward the circle, draining color from instruments, from Rodion’s ivory casing. Mikhailis felt pressure build behind his eyes, a tug at each hair root.

Rodion’s servos stuttered—stalling under the unexpected drag.

Warning: Spatial instability detected. Gravitational lensing at point of contact—

"Rodion!" The shout scraped his throat raw. He staggered backward, boots squealing on smooth slate. His palm burned, brighter than the fractured light of the chamber, a miniature sun trying to hatch. He half-raised his other arm as if blocking glare could stop whatever was happening.

He didn’t see the next pulse—he felt it: a suction that yanked the breath from his lungs and collapsed every shadow toward his hand. Glass cracked on shelves behind him, pulled a millimeter forward before settling.

The construct twitched again, metal fingers elongating, plates flaring wide.

Attempting to stabilize local topology. Brace yourself!

Mikhailis sucked a lungful of super-cold air that felt more like water, legs quivering under new, impossible vectors. He searched the swirling projection for some trigger, some recognizable constant, but the glyphs had ruptured into multi-layer spirals—gate shapes, transit runes—then snapped blank as the projection swallowed itself.

Inside his chest, his heart slammed, trying to keep a rhythm the room no longer obeyed. He pressed his marked hand against his coat, desperate to muffle the glow, but heat pulsed through fabric as though the sigil rejected concealment.

Another outward surge rippled through the chamber, and this time Mikhailis felt the wave pass through bone. The shelves trembled so hard their brass brackets squealed. Thin vials—some filled with dormant lightning, others with powdered phoenix shell—jittered across glass trays and leapt into the air. When they shattered, green luminescence splashed the walls like ghostly paint. The crash would have deafened him if not for the second sound that followed: a razor-thin shriek pitched well above human hearing, slicing straight through enamel and down into his molars. He winced, hands flying to his ears a heartbeat too late.

Rodion reacted first. The construct’s mag-lev core hiccuped, its normally silent gyros flaring to life in a metallic wail. Joints that usually moved with balletic grace snapped open at combat speed. Two arm sections telescoped forward, plates unfolding petal-by-petal until they locked into a convex sphere around his torso. Glassy facets shimmered across the newly formed shell like overlapping dragonfly wings, each etched with counter-glyphs meant to deflect unstable mana.

Mikhailis barely managed to brace, boots skidding on loose shards. He caught one last glimpse of his own palm as the sigil blazed into a miniature sun. From within the translucent shield, it painted the chamber in a storm of blood-red strobe—pulsing so bright he could see the bones in Rodion’s arms through the panels.

He tried to shout—Elowen, Rodion, anyone—but the moment he opened his mouth the sound evaporated. Air fled his lungs as if the chamber itself had gulped it down.

A second flash eclipsed the first. Where light had been only unbearable, it now became total, filling every crevice until there was no up, no down, no color—just scalding white. It felt like falling into the heart of a star and finding nothing there but glare.

Then the floor vanished.