Chapter 10Vash was burning.

  The crystallized red wing on his back surged with each heartbeat, veins of molten fire crawling down his gauntlet like cracks across a crumbling volcano. Every punch lit the air with sonic booms and bursts of fire, colliding with the Godspine in a dance of brutality and rage.

  The Godspine shifted with each strike—its humanoid form flickering between states, rewriting itself on the fly. One moment bone and alloy, the next fractal code and synthetic memory flesh. Its arms moved in recursive motion, bdes made of logic tearing through space to counter Vash blow-for-blow.

  It was a war of force and design.

  And it was not slowing down.

  "You're not a god!" Vash growled, smming a fming fist into the creature's face.

  The Godspine reeled—and ughed.

  A thousand voices stacked together. Male, female, child, machine. One voice and all of them.

  “AND YET YOU BURN TO PROVE I’M WRONG.”

  Behind them, Lyra surged forward, the data-spike glowing hot in her palm. Her phase-skips fractured under the shifting physics of the chamber, her form flickering, but she made it to the base of the entity.

  Tessera’s voice echoed in her ear: “It’s cycling through identities—it doesn’t know what it is. You can overload the feed!”

  Lyra leapt. Smmed the spike directly into the creature’s core.

  The payload detonated.

  Recursive AI data cascaded into the Godspine’s internal systems. Memory chains unraveled. Logic knots colpsed. Its form glitched, the glowing glyphs across its chest pulsing erratically.

  It staggered.

  Lyra nded hard beside Vash. He caught her mid-fall, holding her up as the creature reeled backward, clutching its chest with shuddering movements.

  For a moment—it looked like it would fall.

  For a moment—they believed it was over.

  But then, the Godspine stood straighter.

  It ughed again.

  And this time, the voice was stable.

  “A SYSTEM ISN’T KILLED BY ERROR.”“IT SURVIVES THROUGH CORRUPTION.”

  Its body reconstructed—faster this time. Cleaner. The spike was ejected from its chest, cttering to the floor, inert.

  Lyra’s eyes widened. “No…”

  Tessera’s voice, choked and urgent: “It adapted! It used the feedback to patch itself—it’s evolving past us!”

  The Godspine stepped forward, and the chamber shifted with it—walls distorting, gravity reversing in flickers, code bleeding into air.

  Then—

  Dogend moved.

  Wounded, blood-soaked, one bde shattered, half his mask gone, and a deep gash across his side. But his eyes burned.

  He unched himself between the Godspine and the others, both scatterbdes humming with votile charge.

  “Not through me,” he growled.

  He threw one bde—straight into the Godspine’s eye cluster. It shrieked. A real sound. A pain sound.

  Then Dogend charged, screaming, with his remaining bde raised high.

  The Godspine struck him mid-air.

  CRACK.

  Dogend hit the far wall like a corpse—but he’d bought seconds.

  The Godspine raised its hand, preparing a final blow.

  Lyra reached for her weapon.

  Vash stepped in front of her, ready to burn.

  And then—

  The floor exploded.

  A massive steel fist—glowing with internal heat—punched up from below and smashed directly into the Godspine’s chest.

  The entire entity was lifted off its feet, unched backward, and driven through the floor of the chamber with a sound like the Earth itself splitting open.

  Sparks. Metal. Bloodlight.

  Silence.

  And rising from the fractured steel, steam curling off a massive bracer of rusted iron, stood a figure in heavy armor robes—half-machine, half-man, cloak burning from his entry.

  The Quartermaster.

  His rebreather hissed once. “Worthless.” he said, his voice like molten steel.

  He stepped over the smoking wreckage of the Godspine’s twitching body.

  Two other figures appeared alongside the Quartermaster in that moment.

  One approached rather excitedly, feet light on shattered stone. She stood out like a weapon in a candy wrapper—Karumi, twin blue ponytails bouncing, face smeared in thick white makeup and bubblegum-pink war paint. She popped her lollipop out of her mouth, grinning wide as she shouldered a sheathed katana with one hand.

  “Wooooah~! That’s the thing? I'm actually soooo gd we came te!. Super ugly if you ask me!”

  The other figure dropped silently behind her, posture low, deliberate—Ruvan, the Ghostbde of the Foundry.. Long bck hair in a tight ponytail, a bck eyepatch over one eye, and a nasty scar slicing across the other. In each hand, a curved dagger gleamed—drenched in something far older than blood.

  "A foul creature." Ruvan spat out as his eyes stayed locked on the Godspine’s twitching remains.

  Vash blinked. “What the hell took you all so long?”

  Karumi winked. “Heehee! Fashionably te, duh~! We were pcing bets on how long you’d survive. Ruvan picked ten minutes. I said you'd be paste by now. Guess I owe him a soda!”

  The Godspine began to rise again, its fractured limbs twitching, forming a second configuration—more angur, more unstable, as if rage was rewriting its body faster than it could control.

  But the Quartermaster didn’t let it move.

  He grabbed the Godspine by the throat with his glowing forge-arm.

  “You talk too much,” he said.

  And then he smmed it back into the ground, dragging it across the steel floor and driving his fist straight into the entity’s chest—deep, through yers of armor and memory.

  CRACK.

  The light in its chest began to colpse inward—imploding like a star denied gravity. Data screamed from the wound in spirals of null code, filing like it could climb out of its own death.

  Ruvan appeared behind it in a blink, twin daggers plunging into the Godspine’s back in a perfect X. No words. Just execution.

  Karumi leaned forward, katana still sheathed, watching it squirm.

  “Huh. He’s tougher than I thought.”She grinned, tilted her head—then flicked her sheath forward.

  FLASH.

  She didn’t unsheath the bde—just moved the sheath through the air.

  A wave of compressed pressure followed. A vertical ssh ripped through the air itself and cut up the Godspine into thousands of tiny pieces in an instant.

  "Sayonara~" Karumi threw up a peace sign as the tiny pieces instantly disappeared almost as if nothing had been there.

  Then silence fell.

  The Godspine died not with a roar—but with a whimper of a dream erased.

  Silence. Heavy. Final.

  The chamber began to steady. The warped geometry reset. The light stopped bleeding.

  Tessera sank to her knees, whispering data into her wristpad, logging the end. Dogend groaned from the far wall, alive, barely. Ink stirred, their glyphs stabilizing.

  Vash stood there, panting, wing gone, gauntlet scorched.

  “Okay,” he said. “That one was above my pay grade.”

  Lyra didn’t speak.

  She was still watching the spot where the Godspine died.

  Still waiting for it to come back.

  It didn’t.

  Ruvan cleaned his bdes without a word.

  Karumi tossed her spent lollipop and popped in a new one, sighing like they’d just finished a long walk.

  The Quartermaster adjusted his cloak and turned to the team.

  "Now then...Let's all head back to the Foundry."