The moment the last corporate warden fell, the chamber's obsidian walls trembled. Where crystalline veins once pulsed in steady rhythm, jagged fractures appeared—sigils of containment splintering like broken runes. The Astral Prism's glow warped, sending shockwaves through the Spire's arcane lattice.
Aris stumbled back as a surge of raw energy tore free, hissing through the air like a wounded spirit. "The sigils—they held everything in balance," he gasped, pressing a hand against a shattered rune that flared with unstable light. "Without them, this entire level could collapse."
Eira's eyes went white with determination. She planted her staff at the center of the chamber floor and began tracing new glyphs in lunar mana. Each symbol shimmered and then snapped apart under the Prism's wild pulses. "They're fighting back," she muttered, sweat beading on her brow. "I can't reforge these wards with the Prism's resonance fluctuating."
Nyx dove for her deck, fingers dancing across holo-keys. Lines of code scrolled faster than thought. "I can engineer dampeners—digital shackles to stabilize the magical flux—but I need time." She glanced at the widening fractures in nearby walls. "Give me ninety seconds before the resonance tears the Spire apart."
At her signal, Rho and Kael formed a defensive circle, their kinetic shields deflecting shards of eldritch energy. Tuckling set explosive charges at key stress points, ready to blow escape tunnels if the sanctum collapsed. Mara hovered at Aris's side, her blade humming with newly awakened sigil-light, ready to defend both team and mage.
Seconds later, a deep roar echoed from above as security lockdown measures triggered—reinforced doors slammed shut throughout the lower levels. Activating a feedback loop, Aris channeled the Prism's core energy into a single resonant strike. A pulse of prismatic light rippled outward, momentarily crystallizing the fractures into stable shards.
That was Nyx's cue. "Now!" She unleashed her digital dampeners. Invisible fields sprang across the shattered sigils, anchoring them to the Prism's radiation spikes. Eira's desperate glyphs cohered into a lattice of glowing runes. The tremors ceased, and the chamber exhaled an echoing silence.
Together, they watched as the fractured walls coalesced, binding broken runes into a new pattern—one born of both machine and moonlit magic. The path upward lay open again, but each of them knew the Spire had changed. The sigils were broken and reforged; from here on, nothing inside the tower—or in NeoLuna—would ever be the same.