The second Inquisitor didn't attack. He stumbled back, his thermal sensors struggling to track a target that had no heat signature—because Kaelen's blood wasn't moving.
"You... you're a Revenant," the soldier stammered, raising a short-barreled plasma pistol. "A glitch in the soul!"
Kaelen didn't give him the chance to fire. He lunged, his body a streak of golden-grey shadow. He slammed his palm against the Inquisitor's chest, right over the power-cell of his armor.
DRAIN, Kaelen thought.
The Logic-Core obeyed. Instead of discharging, it pulled. The energy from the Inquisitor's suit was sucked into Kaelen's arm, feeding the hungry capacitor. The soldier collapsed as his life-support systems failed, leaving him a prisoner in his own heavy suit.
Kaelen stood over them, his chest heaving—but there was no air. He was still flatlined.
20 seconds. Risk of permanent neural shutdown: 89%.
He fumbled for the reset switch on his chest. His fingers were numb, like blocks of ice. He couldn't feel the metal. He couldn't feel the floor.
I'm going too deep, he realized. The void... it's pulling back.
In the grayscale world, he saw a figure standing at the end of the corridor. It wasn't an Inquisitor. It was a girl, her face half-hidden by a hooded cloak, holding a long, slender rifle. She wasn't moving. She was watching him with eyes that glowed a soft, steady violet.
Is she... a hallucination?
Kaelen's strength gave out. He fell to his knees. With a final, desperate effort, he slammed his fist into the manual reset on his chest.
THUMP.
The world rushed back in a cacophony of sound and color. The smell of burning rubber and ozone hit him like a physical blow. Kaelen collapsed onto his side, his body convulsing as his heart tried to find a steady rhythm.
Every inch of him felt like it had been scraped with a wire brush. He looked at his left arm. The rags had burned away, revealing the Model-7 Core embedded in his flesh. It was no longer glowing gold; it was a dull, bruised purple.
He looked toward the end of the corridor. The girl with the violet eyes was gone.
"I... I survived," Kaelen choked out, his voice barely a whisper.
He looked at the two fallen Inquisitors. He had defeated the elite of the Iron City with nothing but junk and a dead heart. But as he tried to stand, he realized he couldn't remember his mother's face. He couldn't remember the name of the street he grew up on.
The "Toll" had been taken. The Zero-Pulse had eaten a piece of his past to give him a future.
He reached down and took the plasma pistol from the fallen soldier. He had the hardware. He had the core. And now, he had the thirst for more.
"The more risk," Kaelen said, his eyes now tinged with a permanent, electric violet. "The more gain."
He disappeared into the steam of the Lower-Works, leaving the Church's finest to rot in the dark.