Dust, kicked up from their brief turmoil, settled like snow over the ruined bones of the Basilica.

  The Wire-Witch stepped forward from the ranks of the living, her breath catching in a wet rasp. Something in her bearing had changed. Gone was the defiant arcanist who had raised walls against the Immortal’s wrath. What stood now was something closer to a biologist on the edge of extinction, describing not battle but collapse.

  Her voice trembled, not with fear, but with exhausted certainty.

  “His helm,” she said, “or his chestplate where it is damaged. They must be breached for us to get a signal in.”

  She didn’t look at Bee. Didn’t need to. She spoke into the stunned silence like a death sentence handed down.

  “You can’t wound him. You can’t wear him down. You can’t make him bleed. You either open him… or you die screaming.” The Wire-Witch’s words hissed from between her chrome teeth.

  “This is not a fight we win,” she said. “Not unless we breach his armour.”

  No one answered her. The Pilgrim had not yet moved. But they all felt the weight of what had just been said settle over them like a grave shroud.

  The sound of the Witch’s warning hadn’t finished echoing when Vashante moved.

  Her pistons shrieked as she surged forward, damaged limb trailing sparks. Her blade caught the laser light mid-stride, spilling its reflected rays across the cracked tiles. Fury and shame pulsed through every stride—this was not a tactical charge. This was vengeance with its teeth bared.

  “Vash—!” Bee shouted, reaching out—

  Too late.

  The Eidolon launched herself from the shattered ground. Her blade swept high, a perfect arc.

  The Pilgrim met her in motion.

  He stepped forward and caught her.

  One massive hand closed over her skull.

  The impact was thunder. Vashante slammed into the floor hard enough to crater it. Stone tiles split outward like shattered glass. Her limbs convulsed, twitched, and locked. Her voice shrieked once before rupturing entirely. Silence.

  “Vashante!” Bee screamed.

  Smoke hissed from ruptured tubing. Arteries spilt oil and blood. Her camera eyes were dark.

  The Pilgrim let go. Turned. Continued.

  The spear was already in motion before Vashante’s body finished crashing to the floor.

  Jhedothar roared—a varicose outcry of war, barely tempered by untold years of disciplined rage. His hind legs kicked off the cracked stone, driving all the mass of his centaurian frame into a low charge. The ruby-tipped spear gleamed forward, aimed dead centre for the Pilgrim’s heart.

  The Pilgrim turned to meet him.

  No surprise. No adjustment.

  He swung his glaive with a smooth, pendulum-like arc.

  The two weapons met mid-charge.

  The Basilica flashed white as hardlight clashed against crystal salvaged from starfall. The air warped. Sparks exploded in all directions. Plasma arced between the weapons in filaments of shrieking energy. The screech drowned all other sounds.

  They locked.

  For one impossible heartbeat, they held.

  Neither moved.

  Then the Pilgrim leaned in—unhurried, implacable.

  “I know who you are,” he said, his voice low, tectonic. “Ambitious child, you think yourself a Lord? Wielding a weapon that is little more than a mockery of a tale best left forgotten.”

  The moment held like the breath before a detonation.

  The Pilgrim and Jhedothar stood locked, blade to spear, at the heart of the Basilica’s ruin. Sparks cascaded from their clash. For an instant, it seemed as if Jhedothar might hold—his spear groaning, ruby tip blazing with ancestral fire, legs braced, and hooves skidding against cracked marble. For that singular instant, there was hope.

  But such a time could never last.

  “Monstrous brute,” the Pilgrim said, voice quaking the realm, a seismic rupture throughout the City entire. “Lacking all true semblance of humanity. I am the true remembrance. I shall devour your petty princess and open the path to the stars myself.”

  Then the Pilgrim moved.

  He stepped forward—just one stride. Not wide. Not fast.

  It shattered the lock.

  The glaive carved down. Jhedothar’s spear was wrought in two with a dry, contemptuous break. The ruby tip went spinning as the shaft clattered from his hands.

  The Pilgrim surged inside the now-futile reach. His gauntlets closed around Jhedothar’s arms—one at the shoulder, the other at the wrist—and lifted.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Jhedothar’s centaurian frame writhed, hooves thrashing for traction.

  “No—! Not like this...”

  His final words.

  And then the Pilgrim pulled him apart.

  Vertically. From antlered brow to hind hooves. A crushing, tearing motion.

  The sound was obscene. Wet. Snapping sinew and splitting bone. A howl that became a gurgle. Jhedothar opened like fruit left too long in the sun. His torso burst in a steaming flood of viscera, the contents of his noble rebellion painted in broad strokes across the Basilica floor.

  One-half of him struck a bone-carved pillar and slumped. The other half folded at the Witch’s feet like a dropped offering.

  The Pilgrim stood over what remained, exoskeletal armoured joints humming.

  “A Lord does not bleed so easily.”

  All around, the Basilica reeled in silence. The ruby spear tip rolled to a stop in a trail of blood. Dim. Shameful. Unclaimed.

  Bee was already in motion, her wings flaring wide as she kicked off the shattered balustrade. Light glowed within her as she pushed her biology to its limits, scattered in fragmented rays through the haze of smoke and blood.

  The Pilgrim did not so much as glance up.

  Bee shot across the open space, banking hard, trailing signal noise as she tried to attack his neural lace. She angled down, strafing, barely managing to draw the Pilgrim’s attention as his helmet dampened the cyber attack.

  A flicker of movement. A challenge in flight. Still, he did not deign to so much as turn. But something shifted. A low mechanical hum whined up from beneath the Pilgrim’s armour. Sheathed within his left vambrace, one massive cannon unfolded and locked into firing position with a thump of pressurised steel.

  He fired.

  The first shot missed by metres. A concussive crack splitting the air as Bee dove. The second struck the northern wall of the Basilica.

  Stone vanished. Just gone.

  The impact ripped through the bones of the building like a comet. Marble and engraved statuary detonated outward in molten shards. Entire rows of amphitheatre seating were hurled skyward before crashing down in ruin. Screams cut through the debris cloud as courtiers were crushed beneath rainstorms of falling stone and gilded wreckage. The air turned red. Bee barely pulled up before the pressure wave caught her wings and sent her spinning.

  Ash and dust swallowed the dome.

  Somewhere below, beneath the crumbling iconography and cascading ruin, someone was still screaming. Briefly. Then nothing.

  From the veil of collapsing dust, twin shadows emerged.

  Lady Hash’s honour guard moved as one—gliding low, polearms drawn in mirrored arcs, their footfalls eerily synchronised. Blood spattered their lacquered armour; neither seemed to notice. Theirs was not the charge of hope. It was the choreography of their final duty.

  The Pilgrim turned, ponderous as a statue in motion.

  Their polearms crossed mid-run, forming a wedge aimed for the gap beneath his shoulder plates—some sliver of anatomy that might betray weakness if the Wire-Witch’s warning had been more than despair.

  One made it five steps. The other made it six.

  The Pilgrim’s arm moved once. A blur. The blunt edge of his gauntlet moved fast enough to shear through the first guard with surgical finality—diagonally from clavicle to hip. Bursting, wet with gore, the upper half of the guardian’s body skidded across the tiles in a twisting arc, crashing into the remnants of a pew.

  The other did not break stride.

  He screamed something—a name?—and reached the glaive.

  The Pilgrim impaled him clean through the torso.

  The blade erupted from his back in a halo of meat and steel. For a second, the guard dangled like a pinned insect, boots kicking weakly above the floor. Then the Pilgrim twisted the glaive and split him open from groin to sternum.

  Viscera sprayed. The remains dropped in a heap, flayed open like a crest of butchered heraldry.

  Neither guard had landed a blow.

  The Pilgrim did not even slow.

  The Wire-Witch staggered backwards.

  Not in defeat. Not yet. But in something far more rare for her: pure, instinctive dread.

  The charge of Lady Hash’s guards had ended in ruin. The echoes of their bifurcated remains still reverberated in the Basilica. Carnage. Finality.

  Ash clung to her. Blood—not her own—slicked the soles of her feet. She stepped, slipped, caught herself with a jerking motion that almost looked like a bow. Her empty eyesockets flicked—Bee, the throne, the Pilgrim.

  He turned towards her.

  That singular motion emptied the breath from her lungs.

  The Pilgrim’s helm rotated with glacial precision. One step followed. Then another.

  There was no hurry to him. Just inevitability.

  The Wire-Witch backed away, breath coming sharp and shallow. Her hand hovered behind her back—not yet. Just bracing. Just waiting.

  Each footstep from the Pilgrim landed like a tomb seal closing. There was nowhere to run. Not here. Not anymore.

  From the smoke behind the Pilgrim came a blur of star metal and raw hatred. The Hand of Zolgomere. He surged like a revenant unbound, gauntlet claws extended, augmented musculature thrumming with the strain. In a single bound, the last of the Knights Celebrant landed on the Pilgrim’s back, the impact sending a dull tremor through the Basilica’s bones.

  His gauntlet blades bit deep—sliding into gaps between the segmented helm and the towering collar of the Pilgrim’s frame. Sparks danced. Metal screamed. For one breathless moment, the impossible seemed possible.

  Then—

  The Pilgrim reached up, unfazed, and peeled him off like scrap cloth.

  The Hand of Zolgomere didn’t cry out. Didn’t beg. He kept driving those blades inward, even as the Pilgrim hauled him over a shoulder, turned him broadside…

  … And crushed him.

  The sound of wet sinews and bones popping echoed between the ribs of the Basilica.

  His armour collapsed inward with a metallic groan, vertebrae snapped under vice pressure, and organs liquified. Gouts of steaming blood sprayed from the seams in his plate and hound-skull helmet. It splattered the Wire-Witch, painting her like a casualty already marked for death.

  Zolgomere’s last breath was a hiss—steam, bile, and the last vestiges of defiance. His helm tumbled from the Pilgrim’s hand and landed beside the Witch’s feet, eyes dark.

  She flinched.

  The Pilgrim didn’t pause. Didn’t gloat.

  He stepped forward again. Steam rose from his vambraces, slick with cooling blood. Red light from the glaive caught the curves of the Witch’s skull.

  No words. None were needed.

  The Wire-Witch stumbled backwards.

  Her feet skidded in Zolgomere’s blood, palms striking stone as she caught herself just before collapsing. Her chest heaved, breath ragged, limbs shaking from horror and exhaustion alike. Behind her, the ranks of the hall left no room to escape.

  The Pilgrim stepped forward.

  Smoke coiled from his vambraces. Blood ran down the grooves in his greaves. The glaive in his hand hummed with residual energy, its hardlight blade casting a deep crimson glow across her skull—painting her like a shrine to failure.

  She looked up at him.

  The looming frame of an ancient war machine. The helmet, slicked with viscera. The burning emerald eye.

  He didn’t speak.

  He didn’t need to.

  And the Witch—cornered, breathless—knew that she would die.