The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.
No screaming. No grinding metal. No psychic whispers. Just the wind rustling through the broken garden.
I fell to my knees.
"Mom!" Ryan ran to me, wrapping his arms around me.
Lily stumbled out of the tunnel, supported by Alex. She looked at the pile of ash that had been the Lord.
"Is he...?" she asked.
"He's gone," I said.
We sat there for a long time, just breathing. The survivors emerged from the tunnels one by one, blinking in the grey light of dawn. They looked at the destruction—the broken walls, the burnt fields, the corpses.
They looked at us.
We were covered in blood and dirt. We were broken.
But we were alive.
"The Core," I said suddenly, struggling to stand. "We need to check the Core."
I stumbled toward the chamber. The door had been ripped off. Inside, the floating sphere was spinning slowly, cracked and dim.
[BASE INTEGRITY: 1%]
[CORE STATUS: CRITICAL]
"It's dying," I whispered.
Dr. Okoye knelt beside it. "The corruption... the Lord was feeding on it. He damaged the matrix."
"Can we fix it?"
"I don't know," she admitted. "Maybe. If we had a power source. A big one."
I looked at the ashes of the Lord. The Null-Dust hadn't just killed him; it had crystallized the energy inside him.
"Ryan," I said. "Bring me the ash."
Ryan ran out and scooped up a handful of the grey-white powder. He brought it back.
I poured it over the cracked sphere.
The System flared.
[HIGH-ENERGY BIO-MASS DETECTED]
[ABSORBING...]
[CORE STABILIZING...]
The cracks began to knit. The dim light grew brighter.
[BASE INTEGRITY: RESTORED]
[BARRIER: RECHARGING]
We had done it.
We had killed a god and saved our home.