The utility conduit was a maze of dripping pipes, humming mana-lines, and echoing silence. Arlan moved with the quiet precision of a shadow, Umbral Sight painting the world in gradients of heat and residual energy. He followed the strongest source of the acrid, green smell—the signature of the Phasing Slime core explosion, a favored tool of the Silent Accord for its mana-disruptive properties. He immediately understood this was the work of the accord.
After twenty minutes of navigating, he found a sealed blast door, slightly ajar. A dead city guard lay slumped against the wall outside, not killed by monsters, but by a clean, precise energy burn to the chest. Professional work.
Arlan slipped through the door. He entered a vast, subterranean chamber that was clearly not part of the city's official infrastructure. It was a makeshift laboratory. Workbenches held strange, organic-looking devices that pulsed with sickly light. Cages lined one wall, containing terrified, mundane animals that whined and scratched. In the center of the room stood a large cylindrical tank, filled with a bubbling, emerald-green fluid. Suspended within it was a large, crystalline heart—a Greater Rift-Core, still alive, slowly beating with captured dimensional energy.
This was an Accord research station. And they were experimenting on a live rift-core, a act of catastrophic recklessness.
Two figures in sleek, grey environment suits moved around the tank, monitoring readings. Their auras were the now-familiar muted grey-green, pulsing softly. 3rd Order, likely. Technicians, not fighters.
But standing guard by the only other exit were two different figures. They wore form-fitting black combat armor, faces obscured by helmets with blank, reflective visors. Their auras were voids, just like the high-level operative he'd seen at the academy. Null-Suits. Designed to absorb and nullify mana signatures, making them nearly invisible to magical senses and incredibly resistant to spells. Close-quarters specialists.
Arlan's mind raced. He couldn't fight them head-on. A direct spatial slash might damage the unstable rift-core tank and kill them all. He needed to sabotage and escape.
He noticed the cabling on the floor—thick mana-conduits feeding power from the city's grid into the lab's equipment, and into the Null-Suits' armor packs. A central junction box was near his hiding spot behind a stack of crates.
Disable the power, disable the suits, cause chaos.
He focused, channeling spatial energy into his cracked blade. Not for a slash. For a precise, microscopic spatial shear. He pointed the tip at the main coupling in the junction box. With a faint ping, a tiny, invisible spatial cut severed the central mana-flow crystal inside the housing.
The effect was immediate. The lights flickered and died, plunging the lab into darkness save for the eerie green glow of the rift-core tank. The equipment beeped and whined as it powered down. The two Null-Suit guards staggered as their armor's power assist failed, the null-field sputtering out.
"Power failure! Intruder!" one of the grey-suited technicians yelled, fumbling for a sidearm.
Arlan was already moving. He triggered Shadow-Slip, becoming a blur in the darkness. He reached the first technician in two silent strides. A sharp, umbral-enhanced chop to the neck dropped him. The second technician turned, raising his pistol. Arlan didn't give him the chance. A small spatial fold in front of the man's foot made him trip headlong into a workbench, knocking him out.
The two Null-Suit guards, now just men in heavy, dead armor, were struggling to unseal their helmets and draw physical weapons.
Arlan didn't engage them. His goal wasn't to kill them; it was to destroy this place. He sprinted to the main control console for the rift-core tank. The screens were dark, but the manual override—a large, red lever behind a clear cover labeled EMERGENCY PURGE—was still a physical mechanism.
He smashed the cover with his blade's pommel and threw the lever.
Alarms blared—battery-powered backups. With a hiss of hydraulics, the bottom of the tank opened. The emerald-green fluid, now highly unstable without the containment fields, began to drain violently into a deep emergency sump. The living rift-core, deprived of its stabilizing bath, let out a psychic shriek of agony that made Arlan's vision swim. It began to pulse erratically, cracks forming on its surface.
"Core destabilization! Catastrophic! Evacuate!" one of the now-helmeted Null guards roared, his voice distorted.
They abandoned their post, rushing for the exit, knowing what came next.
Arlan ran for the blast door he came from. Behind him, the rift-core's pulsing turned frantic, the cracks spider-webbing. The air filled with the smell of ozone and burning metal.
He dove back into the conduit just as a soundless, green-white flash filled the lab behind him, followed by a wave of concussive force and heat that blew the blast door off its hinges and sent him tumbling down the tunnel. The explosion was contained by the lab's shielding, but the conduit shook, pipes rupturing, spraying steam and coolant.
He lay on the grating, ears ringing. The Accord lab was destroyed. But he was now deep underground, in a damaged tunnel, with who-knows-what between him and the surface.
He pushed himself up. As he did, his eyes caught something in the swirling steam and green-tinged aftermath of the explosion. Where the rift-core's energy had mingled with the explosive force and the escaping fluids, a small, unique fire had ignited on a piece of debris.
It wasn't orange or red. It was white. A pure, brilliant purple flame that burned without fuel, dancing above the metal, giving off no heat he could feel, but filling the area with a profound, soothing energy. It warped the light around it, making the steam look like liquid crystal.
His mind supplied the name from a dozen obscure texts in the Arcanum library. One of the Twenty-Three Heavenly Flames. Rare manifestations of primordial elemental power. This one, born from the death-throes of a spatial anomaly and volatile alchemical fluids... it could only be the Void-Heart Flame. A flame said to burn on paradoxical energy, capable of refining impurities and strengthening the vessel that contained it.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime treasure. And it was inches away, slowly guttering as the unstable energies that birthed it faded.
Without hesitation, driven by instinct, Arlan reached out. He didn't use his hand. He used his cracked Focus Blade, channeling the last dregs of his spatial mana through it. He folded the space around the tiny purple flame, creating a temporary, self-contained bubble of reality, and with a flick of his will, he pulled that bubble into the blade itself.
The purple flame vanished from the debris and reappeared, trapped inside the central crack of his Focus Blade. The dull metal of the blade began to glow with a soft, internal purple light, and a warming, purifying energy flowed up the hilt and into his arm.
A searing, yet painless, heat flooded his meridians. It wasn't burning him; it was scouring him. He felt impurities he didn't know he had—residual sickness from the ghost-cap, microscopic fractures from his unstable spatial power, the clinging cold of the umbral energy—being burned away in that pure purple fire.
His body glowed faintly from within. His bones hummed. His Physique rating, he could feel it, was undergoing a qualitative change. The flame was tempering him, forging his body into a stronger vessel.
The process lasted only a minute before the flame's energy, isolated and small, settled into the blade and his core, dormant but present. The glow faded from his skin, but the feeling remained. He felt... cleaner. Lighter. Stronger.
He checked his status mentally. His Physique had jumped from B+ to A-. His mana channels felt wider, clearer. And he now had a new, faint connection to the purple flame sleeping in his sword—a source of purifying, refining power he didn't yet understand.
He had survived the Accord's trap, destroyed their lab, and stolen a heavenly treasure from the ashes.
Now, he just had to find a way out of a collapsing city.
He picked a direction and started running, the purple light in his cracked blade casting a faint glow in the steam-filled dark, a new warmth steady in his chest. The path back would be long. But he was coming back changed.