Bee’s neural lace screamed. A tone of frozen fire drilled through her cortex and drove spikes behind her eyes. The Immortal had fired a kill-string—code shaped for wholesale extinction of any mind connected to her network. Every micro-relay in Bee’s body raced to execute the command, cell membranes translating the data into chemical collapse.

  She staggered, but Vashante broke first: the Eidolon’s restored voice jammed into a single strangled keen while her lace burnt. She crashed to one knee, metal fingers clutching her helm, pupils narrowed to pinpoints, steam venting from damaged arm pistons.

  Jhedothar bellowed, slammed into a bone pillar, and dropped his spear. Each of his four legs folded in rag-doll sequence; saliva flecked crimson as his jaw spasmed.

  Lady Isbet’s scream started thin, then severed as her jaw snapped shut on her tongue. Silks pooled around her twitching frame. The Hand of Zolgamere toppled in a roar of plate, clawed gauntlet scraping trenches in his cuirass while the signal scorched his motor cortex. Hash’s twin guards mirrored each other in collapse; their spears clattered away. In the amphitheatre tiers, the chained courtiers convulsed in their manacles, eyes rolling white, foam streaking their chins.

  It was less a battle than a shutdown command—clean, immediate, and designed for systems that couldn’t say no.

  Bee fought for focus through a veil of red. Blood vessels burst in her sinuses and slicked her lips with iron. One palm slapped stone to steady her trembling knees.

  To her right, the Wire-Witch growled, a raw mechanical rasp. Even her superior augments buckled.

  One figure alone stood unaffected by the Immortal’s latent command: the Pilgrim. The giant remained motionless except for a slight tilt of his head, as if in curiosity. At the same time, he observed the carnage unfolding at his feet, emerald laser flicking out to scan their reactions. The Immortal’s projection tilted her head, lips curving in cold pleasure as they squirmed and died beneath her power.

  Bee’s thoughts began to fracture.

  A ragged cry cut the darkness. The Wire-Witch forced herself upright, silver-lined fingers spread to channel power the Basilica’s ghosts could taste as ozone. Her many implants and subdermal wires crackled with sudden energy, fluorescing beneath her skin. She spoke a shard-tongue command.

  And with a guttural sound—half ritual chant, half digital command—she let loose a counter-signal of her own. Invisible pressure rolled outward, a harmonic tuned against the kill-string. The lethal static faltered where it met the Witch’s weave.

  Screams ebbed to groans. Jhedothar’s head lifted. Lady Isbet curled, coughing blood rather than drowning in it. Zolgomere’s gauntlet unclenched. The code still clawed, but its teeth slipped on the Witch’s shield.

  The Witch’s jaw locked, chrome teeth grinding while she hauled more kernel-level fury from the depths of her craft. She held, but cracks showed in the tremor of her body.

  The Immortal snarled, snowy noise crackling through the projection. The kill string doubled. The spider-crawl of daemons descended on the network, a dozen legs touching each of their minds at once. Bee tasted knives behind her eyes.

  The Witch would break.

  Bee reached within memory—the quiet nights with her secret guide in Slashex, his instruction guiding her learnings, voice drilling fundamentals of deep-lace warfare. Hard-focus breathing, vector math hammered into muscle memory, the etiquette of stealth keys that ride parasite channels beneath hostile scans. Not arcane, as those who knew not the origins of this world so assumed, but ruthless engineering taught in stolen hours.

  Bee exhaled, pressed both palms to the floor, and opened the sandbox the Witch had hidden in her lace system months earlier. Threadbare yet lethal—-an executor designed to graft onto any friendly broadcast and amplify. Bee fed it the Witch’s current hash; the sandbox bloomed into a braid of counter-phase tones.

  Pain roared as she exposed her lace’s write-head, but discipline held. She injected the braid straight through her spinal bus and let the Witch’s waveform ride the new carrier on wings of coherent resonance.

  A second pulse spread. Softer than the Witch’s blunt shield, it infiltrated the kill string’s packet structure, pruning malicious calls and toggling dead bits to absorb repeat attacks. Data sleet blew apart into harmless dust.

  Air filled with ragged breathing. Vashante’s optics reset, plates whirring as she rose. Jhedothar spat clots and levered himself upright, four legs quaking then steady. Lady Isbet wiped her mouth with a trembling glove and sat back on her heels, alive and furious. The Hand of Zolgamere produced a grating chuckle and rammed his helm against the floor for balance.

  Bee stood. Blood streaked her chin, and her ears rang, yet clarity returned. Across the rubble, the Witch lowered her arm, shoulders heaving, a single nod acknowledging Bee’s hand in the rescue. In that shared look, a brief camaraderie passed—two generations of the Immortal’s lineage united in defying her dominion over life itself.

  The Immortal’s image distorted under the strain of her rage, pixels tearing and then healing around edges of royal composure.

  “How dare you,” she said, voice edged in broken glass. A faint digital distortion betrayed the feedback storm inside her uplink. “You will die when I command it.”

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  The Wire-Witch wiped her cheek, empty gaze burning. “That’s the problem with data security. You can’t get away with the same tricks twice. Not when your adversary knows what you’re doing.”

  The Immortal’s nostrils flared. “I offered a merciful end. You choose torment. Very well.”

  The Wire-Witch drew herself up, readying some retort, but the Immortal’s image suddenly snapped her head towards the Pilgrim. The movement was jarringly swift, as though her patience had finally disintegrated entirely.

  “Enough!” the Immortal barked, and there was nothing of coaxing or seduction in her tone now, only command. “Do as you were bidden. Destroy them. Now. If you hesitate, I will wipe this place clean.”

  His wedged visor slowly turned towards her.

  “Tell me why you do not come here and do it yourself,” he boomed, the chamber trembling beneath his bassy tones. “You are more than capable.”

  A heavy silence fell, punctuated only by the laboured panting of those recovering from the neural attack. Bee’s heart skipped at his words.

  “Do not question me, Eberekt” she seethed. “Far better for you that I do not turn my attention there.”

  Bee’s eyes narrowed again. So it was just another daemon masquerading as the real thing. But what could be so important that she would not so much as look upon them herself?

  The Pilgrim growled.

  “Eberekt,” she returned the growl, her too-beautiful features contorting with fury. “Do not be test me. Maintain the high order or I shall do away with you and find someone who shall.”

  His stare did not last. He turned away, taking long strides towards his black, sepulchral throne. Looking satisfied, the Immortal vanished, the manifold projectors powering off and darkening the space around them. Broken marble and the upturned remnants of the statuary littered the space between the remaining God and the rebellion as scattered bones before the carrion crow. In the silence, Bee could hear the faint whir and click of ancient servomotors as the Pilgrim reached out.

  He had stood his long glaive against that monument; now, he reached out and took it. Drew it forth, hand over hand, with the unhurried grace of inevitability. Deactivated, it was a haft taller than a man, crafted of some dark alloy with traces of technology from a time before time. Prehistoric in provenance. Its blade remained deactivated, a bare emitter embedded in a wedge of star metal still scratched from micrometeor impacts during an unimaginable journey to this world from the beyond.

  The Pilgrim held the glaive’s shaft loosely in one gauntleted hand for a moment as if testing its weight.

  The silence was profound; Bee could hear her own heartbeat thundering in her ears. Around her, her allies mustered what strength remained. Took up their arms. Even those who had not pledged themselves to this course realised that no-one would leave this chamber alive…

  Not unless they slayed that ancient master first.

  They prepared themselves for the last fight of their lives.

  Bee’s attention never left the Pilgrim. She could not see his face behind that archaic helm, only the suggestion of an eye where that emerald laser beamed.

  Was there remorse behind that visor? Resignation? Or merely the cold focus of a warrior about to do what he had done so many times before? His next words, spoken in that resonant, metallic timbre that seemed to echo from the depths of a long-lost age, gave her a bitter hint.

  “So,” rumbled the Pilgrim, breaking his long silence at last, “It once again comes to this. As it did in ages past. Deceit turning us against one another until only those who will serve remain.”

  He spoke quietly, but in the deathly chamber, each syllable fell like a lead weight. Bee felt the fine hairs on her arms rise at the sound of that voice—a voice that had boomed across battlefields centuries past, that had cried victory and vengeance before her home City ever drew breath.

  Now, it was almost mournful.

  “Cycles upon cycles,” the Pilgrim intoned as if reciting an ancient lamentation. “History repeating, and we poor souls tread this same path once more.”

  His grip tightened on the glaive. With a heavy click, he pressed something on the weapon’s haft. The blade at its end blossomed to life.

  Moonlight.

  That was the first impression Bee had.

  Quiet, boiling fury, illuminating the Basilica in an eerie sanguine glow.

  The glaive’s blade was suddenly wreathed in a field of shimmering energy, a curved scythe of crystal fire. Its light fell upon the scene of devastation: the toppled monuments, the bruised and bloodied cohort gathering themselves for one more stand, the living corpses of courtiers that would bear witness. It reflected off the pools of spilt blood and water from the fountainry, as well as cracked marble, painting streaks of ghostly luminescence on the floor and walls.

  In that glow, the Pilgrim looked like a figure out of myth. The prodigal knight returned from death, wreathed in lunar glory, now poised to become the reaper of souls.

  Still, he considered that weapon in his hand, reforged from an age so long ago forgotten.

  He turned fully to face them at last.

  Bee saw the blade’s radiance dance across the Pilgrim’s armour, revealing more clearly the history marked there: the hairline cracks webbing his breastplate from his march to seize this realm, the melted gouges where Jhedothar’s weapon had seared him, the old scripture marked upon it that revealed the religious fervour of those who sacrificed themselves for his return

  For a heartbeat, nobody moved. Bee met Vashante’s gaze in the side-glow of the weapon—the Eidolon’s eyes were resolute as she grasped her star metal blade, though her chest still heaved from the lingering pain. Jhedothar retrieved his fallen spear, baring his fangs in a defiant snarl, the spear’s ruby tip shining as he levelled it once more. The Wire-Witch had stepped back towards her Lord-Husband, interposing herself protectively. All of them were battered and outmatched, yet none were willing to flee. They had prepared for this, in a way, ever since embarking on this doomed rebellion. If it was to end here, so be it, but not without a fight that would be remembered, no matter what became of this day.

  The Pilgrim inclined his head ever so slightly as if acknowledging their courage… or perhaps pitying it.

  The glowing glaive arced once through the air in a lazy flourish, and its charged blade sang a keening note as it sliced the very molecules of the atmosphere, leaving a flash of plasma and the stench of ozone in its wake. Then, his single emerald ocular light fixed on Bee for a moment. In that radiant green, Bee imagined she saw a flicker of recognition.

  “Come then,” he said. “You who would defy my rulership. You who would claim a path to the stars. Prove the might of your cause, or be devoured and further my own.”