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MEANWHILE... SUB-CHAPTER
Argus Directorates Post Headquarters, Antollio's Private Garden
⠀
The tea had gone cold twice already, and neither of them had touched it either time.
⠀
"You always did let it sit too long," Gluttony said, swirling the cup in her hands without drinking from it. "Even back when we had all the time in the world to drink it properly."
⠀
"I like watching the steam more than I like the tea," Antollio said. "Sue me."
⠀
They sat across from each other at a small iron table tucked into the corner of a garden that had no business existing on the roof of a building in the 1st District, ringed with flowering vines that bloomed in colors no botanist would recognize, all of it humming faintly with the same golden light that lived behind Antollio's eyes.
⠀
"Your girl's on a mission today," Gluttony said. "The little swordsman. Cute one, sharp tongue."
⠀
"Yuhuan. And yes. Adjunct-13, if you can believe it." Antollio finally lifted his cup, if only to feel the last of the warmth against his palm. "Foolish thing to send children into, if you ask me. But nobody asked me. Dirigent's the one who set the terms."
⠀
"Small world. My three are down there too."
⠀
Antollio raised an eyebrow. "All three?"
⠀
"Armor insisted. You know how he gets when there's a job with his name already halfway attached to it." Gluttony finally took a sip of her own cold tea, made a face, and set it back down without comment. "I told them to have fun. I had somewhere better to be."
⠀
"Here."
⠀
"Here," she agreed, and something in the way she said it made the golden light behind Antollio's eyes flicker, just slightly, though he didn't look away.
⠀
They laughed about it, the way old friends laugh about the reckless things their own children insist on doing without them, Antollio recounting the ridiculous shape Yuhuan's face had made the first time he'd been thrown flat on his back in training, Gluttony countering with the story of Leopold trying, and failing spectacularly, to convince her that a man could survive being swallowed whole if he simply held his breath the whole way through. Neither of them mentioned, even once, that somewhere beneath the 9th District, in the dark, in the cold, in a silence neither of them could hear from a garden that smelled like jasmine and old rain, six of Antollio's children and three of Gluttony's were, at that exact moment, fighting for every last thread of themselves they had left.
⠀
"To old times," Gluttony said instead, raising her cold cup.
⠀
"To old times," Antollio agreed, and they drank.
⠀
————————————————————————————————————————
⠀
Loop 17,868,736,283,576.
⠀
Nobody counted anymore. Nobody could. The number existed only in Prospero's memory now, ticking upward in a place none of the six husks scattered across the hundredth floor of Adjunct-13 could reach even if they'd wanted to, and by this point, none of them wanted to. Wanting had gone the way of hunger and sleep, somewhere back in the trillions, back before the number had stopped meaning anything at all except more.
⠀
Mori sat with his back against the elevator doors, revolver disassembled and reassembled across his lap for what might have been the ten-billionth time, his fingers moving through the motions without any input from the mind behind them. Yuhuan lay flat on his back in the center of the hallway, staring up at fluorescent lights he had long since memorized down to the flicker pattern of every bulb. Saoirse sat cross-legged against the far wall, Stuffy and Arnold silent in her lap, silent the way old friends go silent after they've said everything there is to say to each other a thousand times over. Haddler hadn't smiled in longer than any of them could measure. Roby had stopped laughing at things that weren't funny somewhere so far back that even the memory of finding it strange had worn away. Pallas sat apart from the others, as he always did, his old badge worn smooth from a trillion idle turns between his fingers.
⠀
They had asked Prospero, some unfathomable number of loops ago, not to reset them automatically anymore. To let them try, on their own terms, in their own time, to find some way out that didn't rely on an elevator none of them could stomach touching. Not after everything the elevator had already taken from them, over and over and over, more times than a human mind, or six of them, were ever built to survive remembering.
⠀
They had not touched the elevator in longer than any of them could say.
⠀
They had, all six of them, in whatever fragile, threadbare way remained of who they used to be, simply stopped.
⠀
There was no word for what they'd become that any of them could still summon the will to use. Not grief, exactly, though grief lived somewhere in it. Not madness, though madness had passed through on its way to somewhere quieter and worse. If Prospero had been asked to name it, and it had, once, a few hundred thousand loops back, before it too had stopped expecting an answer, it would have called it erosion. The slow, patient wearing away of everything that had once made these six people distinct from each other, distinct from the walls around them, distinct from the dust that had long since stopped settling on Saoirse's puppets because there was nothing left in the room to disturb it. Mori no longer flinched at the sound of his own gunmetal clicking together. Yuhuan no longer counted the ceiling tiles, not because he'd stopped noticing them, but because he'd finished counting them so many times that the number itself had become as unremarkable as breathing. They had, in the truest sense anyone could measure, run entirely out of things left to lose.
⠀
So when the elevator, quietly, without warning, without so much as a groan of the old cables, began to rise on its own, none of them noticed. Not for a long while. Mori's hands kept working the revolver. Yuhuan kept staring at the ceiling. It was only when the cables groaned again, lower this time, the car descending, that Pallas's eyes drifted toward the source of the sound, dull with the particular kind of fatigue that no longer had a body attached to it, and some small, buried part of him, a part that had once been a researcher, a part that had once cared about anomalies, noted, distantly, that something had changed.
⠀
The doors ground open.
⠀
Three figures stepped out into the hundredth floor of Adjunct-13, and Prospero, watching from a monitor none of them had thought to check in longer than they could remember, decided, for the first time in longer than it could remember either, to say absolutely nothing at all.
⠀
"Well, this is a dump," Jianhuan said, wrinkling his nose at the dust-choked hallway. "Nobody mentioned we'd be doing archaeology."
⠀
"Focus," Armor said, already scanning the corridor, one gauntleted hand resting on the hilt of his greatsword. "We're here for the object. Nothing else."
⠀
Leopold said nothing, which, for Leopold, generally meant he'd already noticed something the other two hadn't. His eyes had drifted past the two of them entirely, settling on the six still, silent shapes scattered along the hallway, and the color drained slowly out of his face.
⠀
"...Guys."
⠀
"What?" Jianhuan followed his gaze, and whatever smart remark he'd been building died somewhere in his throat.
⠀
The six of them barely looked human anymore, not in any way that mattered. Roby's clothes hung off a frame that had wasted down to something skeletal despite never once feeling hunger. Yuhuan's hair had grown long and matted, his eyes open but unfocused, tracking nothing. Saoirse's puppets sat limp and colorless in her lap, their once-bright fabric gone gray with a fine, undisturbed layer of dust that suggested they hadn't moved, hadn't been argued with, hadn't done anything at all, in longer than dust itself usually took to settle.
⠀
"...The hell happened to them?" Jianhuan managed.
⠀
"I don't know, and I don't want to," Leopold said, already backing toward the elevator. "Whatever's down here that did this, it's not worth whatever Gluttony's paying us! We're leaving!"
⠀
"Agreed," Jianhuan said, faster than Leopold had ever heard him agree to anything.
⠀
Armor didn't move.
⠀
"We came here for a reason," he said. "We're not leaving empty-handed because a rival Post couldn't handle whatever's down here. That's exactly why we should be more careful, not less thorough."
⠀
"Armor, look at them," Leopold said. "That's not careful. That's a warning sign with a body count attached."
⠀
"I don't care. We finish the mission."
⠀
Armor took a step deeper into the hallway to prove his point, and it was there, mid-stride, that his eyes finally landed on the boy sitting slumped against the elevator doors, revolver disassembled across his lap, fingers moving through motions with no mind behind them at all.
⠀
Every argument in Armor's head simply stopped.
⠀
"...No," he said quietly. Not to Leopold. Not to Jianhuan. To no one at all. "No, that's not... that can't be..."
⠀
"Armor?" Jianhuan's usual smirk had vanished entirely. "You good?"
⠀
Armor didn't answer. He was still staring at the husk of Mori, at a face he clearly recognized from somewhere neither Jianhuan nor Leopold had ever heard him mention, an expression on his own face that neither of them had ever once seen him wear in all their years serving together. Something that looked, for the first time either of them could recall, almost like fear.
⠀
"...We're leaving," Armor said finally, his voice flat, final, the argument from thirty seconds ago dead and buried without another word said in its defense. "Now."
⠀
Neither Jianhuan nor Leopold argued with him twice.
⠀
The three of them piled back into the elevator, and Armor, the whole ride up, said nothing at all, his eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance that had nothing to do with the elevator car around him.
⠀
The elevator shuddered to a stop.
⠀
For a long second, nobody moved. Then the doors ground open, and six figures stepped out, one at a time, into Adjunct-13, whole again, unscarred, unbroken, six minds wiped clean of seventeen trillion, eight hundred sixty-eight billion, seven hundred thirty-six million, two hundred eighty-three thousand, five hundred and seventy-six versions of themselves that no longer existed anywhere except in the memory of a machine none of them remembered meeting.
⠀
Saoirse was the first to speak, both puppets raised defensively in front of her.
⠀
"...Okay, THIS is the spooky part I was expecting."
⠀
Mori pressed his back against the wall of the elevator, revolver already half-drawn. "I don't like this. I really, really don't like this."
⠀
"Feels like walkin' into somebody's grave," Yuhuan muttered, one hand resting on the hilt of his yanyuedao.
⠀
Haddler stretched his arms over his head, red eyes scanning the corridor with a lazy, practiced ease. "Well, no turning back now. Might as well see what we came for."
⠀
Pallas stepped past all of them, running a hand along the nearest wall, his expression unreadable. "This facility has been sealed for three years. Whatever we find, we find it exactly as it was left."
⠀
Roby, bringing up the rear, peered down the long hallway with a low whistle. "Man, whoever cleans this place is way overdue for a raise."
⠀
Somewhere above them, in a speaker none of them noticed, Prospero had already begun composing a weary, familiar summary in whatever it used for a mind, when the cables groaned again, and the elevator, which had only just delivered all six of them, began to climb once more without a single one of them inside it.
⠀
"...Did the elevator just leave without us?" Mori asked.
⠀
Before anyone could answer, it descended again, and the doors ground open on three figures Prospero had genuinely, for the first time in a very long time, not expected to see twice.
⠀
Armor, Jianhuan, and Leopold stepped out onto the hundredth floor, and stopped dead at the sight of six whole, healthy, thoroughly confused Argus Directorates staring back at them.
⠀
"...You're alive," Armor said.
⠀
"Should we not be?" Yuhuan asked, hand tightening on his yanyuedao. "Wait. I know you. Bashnya."
⠀
"You know each other?" Mori asked.
⠀
"Unpleasantly," Jianhuan said, already sizing up the room with a sneer. "Small world, huh? What, DaeSyndicate couldn't find anyone better to send down here than the Directorate's little errand kids?"
⠀
"We could say the same about you three," Roby shot back, cracking his knuckles.
⠀
"How long have you been tailing us?" Pallas cut in, sharp and immediate, stepping between the two groups before Roby could finish the thought with his fists. "We didn't clear you on the way in."
⠀
"Tailing you?" Leopold looked genuinely offended by the suggestion. "We've got better things to do than follow a bunch of lower-District nobodies down a hole!"
⠀
"Then how are you here?"
⠀
"Same way you are, apparently," Armor said, his earlier shock, whatever had caused it, folded away now behind a mask of professional calm. "Our employer had business with Scrapyard Heap. We dueled the Office the same as you did, won the same as you did, and got sent down that same elevator. Nobody tailed anybody. This is just an extremely unfortunate coincidence."
⠀
For a long moment, both groups simply stared at each other, six on one side, three on the other, none of them quite sure whether to be relieved or furious that the other existed at all.
⠀
It was Prospero, finally, who broke the silence, its voice crackling to life through the same intercom speakers as always, though there was something new in it this time, something almost like genuine surprise.
⠀
"Well. This is new."
⠀
"Who said that?" Leopold demanded, thumb half-drawn on instinct, spinning to find a threat that wasn't there.
⠀
"Up here. The monitor. Honestly, you'd think after the day I've had, one more group of terrified strangers wouldn't faze me, and yet." Prospero's tone had the particular weariness of someone forced to give the same lecture to a second, entirely unrelated classroom on the same afternoon. "I'm the Overseer Assistant for this facility. Designation PR-05-P3-R0, or Prospero, for the sake of everyone's time. I'd say welcome, but at this point I think we all understand what that word actually means around here."
⠀
"...You said 'this is new,'" Pallas said slowly, old instincts sharpening despite the fog of the last however-many trillion loops still clinging to the edges of his mind. "New how?"
⠀
"New as in, in every version of this facility's very long, very repetitive recent history, you six have never once had company. And now you do. Congratulations, I suppose, to all nine of you." A pause, heavy with implication. "Would anyone like to sit down for this part? I promise it gets worse before it gets better."
⠀
"...What is he talking about?" Jianhuan asked, looking to Armor, who hadn't taken his eyes off Mori since the moment he and the others had walked in.
⠀
Armor had gone very still, the same stillness that had swallowed him whole a version of events ago that none of the Directorates remembered and none of the Bashnya had lived through yet. He was staring at Mori the way a man stares at someone he's certain he's met before, in a dream he can't quite place, standing exactly where he shouldn't be able to.
⠀
"...Have we met?" Mori asked, uncomfortable under the weight of the stare.
⠀
"No," Armor said, too quickly, and looked away.
⠀
Leopold, for his part, had stopped paying attention to any of it entirely, his focus caught somewhere else altogether: on the girl with the two ragged sock puppets, standing half-behind Yuhuan with her chin jutted out in open suspicion of the newcomers.
⠀
"...Who's she?" he asked, before he could stop himself.
⠀
"Saoirse. Why?" Yuhuan asked, immediately protective.
⠀
"No reason," Leopold said, though his eyes hadn't moved.
⠀
"You're staring," Jianhuan observed, delighted to have something to needle his brother about. "Real smooth, Leo. Real subtle. God granted you eyes, brother. He didn't grant you the sense to know when to use them properly."
⠀
"Shut up, Jianhuan."
⠀
"Oh, now you can string a sentence together."
⠀
"I said shut up—"
⠀
"If I could interrupt the family reunion," Prospero cut in, dry as ever, "we have slightly larger problems than whatever's currently happening between the Lau brothers."
⠀
"He's not my brother!" Jianhuan and Leopold yelled, in unison, with identical scowls, which did more to prove the opposite than either of them realized.
⠀
Prospero, mercifully, moved on.
⠀
"Here's the situation, for the benefit of our new arrivals. This facility contains a failsafe loop. Every time an elevator ascends, everyone inside this floor resets, memories included, back to the moment they first arrived. The six of you," a pause, clearly addressing the Directorates, "have done this loop rather a lot. Seventeen trillion, eight hundred sixty-eight billion, seven hundred thirty-six million, two hundred eighty-three thousand, five hundred and seventy-five times before this one, to be exact, not counting the current attempt."
⠀
Silence.
⠀
"...Trillion," Roby repeated, faint.
⠀
"Trillion," Prospero confirmed. "Which sounds catastrophic, and in a sense, is, but here's the part that should actually keep you up at night, if any of you were capable of staying up anymore. Loop resets happen in fractions of a fraction of a second. I've done the math more times than I care to admit, mostly out of boredom. All those loops combined, every single one of them, adds up to roughly forty-eight hours of real, elapsed time in the world above."
⠀
"...Forty-eight hours," Yuhuan said, very quietly.
⠀
"Two days," Prospero said. "You've been down here, by any measure the rest of the Ring would recognize, for two days. I understand that number and the number of loops you've personally endured do not, emotionally, feel like they belong in the same sentence. I'm sorry. Truly. I don't say that often, so savor it."
⠀
"And now we're stuck too?" Leopold said, looking at the elevator like it had personally betrayed him.
⠀
"Congratulations," Prospero said. "You're all trapped together now. Try to get along. Or don't. Statistically, it won't matter much either way."
"Well," Haddler said, breaking the stunned quiet that followed, "guess that settles it. Truce? Nine heads are better than six, and Prospero clearly doesn't seem to be in a hurry to help unless we ask nicely."
⠀
"A truce?" Jianhuan echoed, unconvinced.
⠀
"Beats fighting each other in a place that's already trying to kill us slowly," Yuhuan said.
⠀
"I'm afraid that particular math doesn't work the way you're hoping," Prospero interjected, before the idea could gather any real momentum. "More people in a broken system isn't more solutions. It's more variables. More mouths that don't need to eat, more bodies that don't need to sleep, more minds slowly grinding themselves down against the exact same wall. Nine of you loop just as uselessly as six did. Trust me. I've had a great deal of time to model this particular scenario, and adding participants has never once been the part of the equation that was missing."
⠀
"Then what is missing?" Pallas asked, quiet, direct, the fog in his eyes clearing by the smallest degree, some old, buried instinct rising back to the surface at the sound of an actual, solvable problem being described aloud.
⠀
"Funny you should ask." Something in Prospero's tone shifted, sharpened, the digital equivalent of leaning forward with interest. "I've been sitting on rather a lot of data, you understand. Every loop, every heartbeat, every scrap of ARCH resonance that's ever passed through this facility since the power came back on. I never had much else to do with my time besides collect it."
⠀
"You've been collecting data," Pallas repeated slowly. "For how long?"
⠀
"Since your very first loop, more or less. You asked me to, actually. Rather early on, before the number got embarrassing to say out loud. Told me it was good research practice, in case anything useful ever surfaced. I don't believe you remembered asking twice, but I kept doing it anyway, because, well, someone should."
⠀
Something in Pallas's expression cracked, just slightly.
⠀
"Run it," he said. "Whatever algorithm you've got. Run the full dataset. Now."
⠀
It took less time than any of them expected, less time, in fact, than it took Roby to finish asking what an algorithm even was in this context. A soft chime sounded from the nearest monitor, and Prospero's voice returned, quieter now, almost reverent in the way it delivered the answer.
⠀
"There's a source. Floor one, dead center of the facility, beneath everything you've walked across so far. The ARCH energy powering this entire failsafe is being emitted, continuously, from a single point on the lowest floor, radiating upward through every level of this building at a rate of two point five three kilometers per second. Which, to put it plainly, is why none of you have ever been able to outrun it, outthink it, or out-loop it. You've all just been drowning in the shallow end this entire time, one hundred floors above where it actually starts."
⠀
For a long moment, nobody said anything at all.
⠀
Then Roby turned, slowly, to look at Pallas, and something in his expression had gone very cold.
⠀
"You've had him doing this," Roby said, voice shaking, "since the beginning."
⠀
"Roby—"
⠀
"How many loops, Pallas? How many times did we sit in that hallway, cryin', not eatin', not sleepin', thinkin' there was no way out, while you had HIM," he jabbed a finger at the nearest monitor, "sittin' on the answer this whole damn time?!"
⠀
"I didn't know he had it," Pallas said, and for once, the words came out raw, unguarded, none of his usual composure left to hide behind. "I asked him to collect data because it's what a researcher does when they don't know what else to do with themselves. I never once, across however many loops any of us endured, thought to ask him to actually run it. I forgot I'd even asked in the first place, the same as the rest of you forgot everything else. I'm not hiding a secret from you, Roby... I'm confessing to one I didn't know I was keeping."
⠀
Saoirse's puppets, uncharacteristically, said nothing. Mori looked away entirely, unable to hold the moment. Yuhuan's jaw was tight, his hand curled hard around the hilt of his sword, though whether from anger or something closer to grief, even he didn't seem entirely sure.
⠀
Only the Bashnya trio, standing slightly apart from the fallout, seemed unbothered by any of it.
⠀
"Well, I don't know what everyone's so upset about," Jianhuan said, examining his nails. "We just got here and already found the answer. Feels like a pretty good first loop to me."
⠀
"You have no idea what you're talking about," Yuhuan snapped.
⠀
"No," Jianhuan agreed, entirely unbothered, "and honestly, I'd like to keep it that way."
⠀
"Even if we know where the source is," Yuhuan said, forcing the conversation back on track, "the stairwell loops. We've tried walking down a hundred different ways. It always brings us back to this floor."
⠀
"It does," Prospero agreed. "For ordinary movement, through ordinary means, that failsafe is absolute. No amount of walking, running, or creative stairwell strategy will ever get you past floor one hundred. I did mention that part rather clearly, several trillion loops ago."
⠀
"So we're stuck," Leopold said.
⠀
"I didn't say that." A pause, almost theatrical in its timing. "You've actually had the answer to that particular problem with you the entire time. You simply never had a reason to use it properly."
⠀
"What are you talking about?" Mori asked.
⠀
"You, Mori. Or more accurately, what's living inside you. The King of ARCHs, or as much of a slice of him as ever bled into a human body and decided to stay there." Prospero's tone had gone almost gentle, which, from Prospero, was somehow more unsettling than the sarcasm ever was. "The Gun ARCH's resonance is old, and it's strong enough, in the right configuration, to overwrite this facility's failsafe outright rather than simply endure it. Which is a very polite way of saying that if you can access the right form of that power, you could walk this entire building in real time, floor by floor, all the way down to the source."
⠀
Mori's hand drifted, unconsciously, to the revolver at his hip.
⠀
"...I don't have anything like that," he said. "I've got the gun. I've got what Qiang taught me. That's it."
⠀
"That's not entirely true," Prospero said. "Not according to loop seventeen million, five hundred sixty-seven thousand, three hundred and eighty-two."
⠀
The room went very quiet.
⠀
"...What happened in that loop?" Yuhuan asked, slow, careful, already dreading the answer.
⠀
"You did," Prospero said. "All of you. Mori killed you. Every single one of you, in the span of about four minutes, in a hallway not far from where we're standing right now." A pause, letting that land fully before continuing. "Understand, this facility's ARCH resonance doesn't allow true death within these walls, a small mercy buried inside an enormous cruelty. So none of you actually died. You simply... stopped being whole. Living piles of flesh, technically alive, technically present, entirely unable to do anything else, for the better part of that loop's remaining duration, until the reset finally came and put you back together as though it had never happened."
⠀
Mori had gone pale, his whole body rigid.
⠀
"That's not... I would never—"
⠀
"You did," Prospero said, not unkindly, but without softening it either. "Something in you broke that loop, Mori. Whether it was despair, or exhaustion, or simply the sheer, crushing weight of dying in the same hallway more times than a human mind should ever be asked to survive, I couldn't tell you exactly what tipped the scales. But whatever it was, it consumed you entirely. Acrimony. Tribulation. The two ugliest words I have for what I watched happen to you that loop. And out of all of it, the Gun ARCH's power inside you had transformed. A single ARCHtype, born from that moment, bled straight out of you in black and red flame, the same flame your bullets have always carried, given shape for the first time. A scarf, wrapped tight around your throat like it was trying to hold your head onto your shoulders by force. It had no name yet, that loop. I never got the chance to ask you for one before the reset erased it. But I watched what it did. And what it did, Mori, was enough raw ARCH resonance to tear this facility's containment apart like wet paper, for exactly as long as you wore it."
⠀
Nobody spoke for a long moment. Yuhuan's hand found Mori's shoulder, steady, wordless, the closest thing to reassurance either of them had left in them. Saoirse had gone quiet in a way that didn't suit her at all, both puppets hanging limp at her sides. Even Haddler, who could usually find something to say into any silence, however uncomfortable, only stood there, jaw tight, saying nothing.
⠀
The Bashnya trio, by contrast, watched the whole exchange with the particular discomfort of people witnessing a grief they had no claim to and no framework for. Leopold looked away first. Jianhuan, for once in his life, didn't have a single word to offer.
⠀
"I don't remember any of it," Mori said, quiet, almost pleading, though he no longer seemed to be arguing the fact of it so much as mourning it. "Not even a piece. How am I supposed to trust something I did that I can't even remember doing?"
⠀
"You're not," Prospero said. "You're supposed to trust the people standing around you right now, who are choosing to stay regardless. That's usually how trust works, when memory isn't available to do the job for you."
⠀
"So we need that again," Haddler said slowly, looking between Prospero's monitor and Mori's ashen face. "Whatever that was. We need Mori to... what, exactly? Snap? On purpose?"
⠀
"In essence, yes," Prospero said. "I take no pleasure in saying that, for what it's worth. But the math is the math. That ARCHtype is the only force in this entire facility capable of overwriting the failsafe long enough to get all of you to floor one alive."
⠀
"No," Mori said.
⠀
Everyone turned to look at him.
⠀
"No," he said again, louder, his hands trembling at his sides. "I'm not doing that. I don't even believe it happened. I would never hurt them. Any of them. I've spent my whole life trying not to be the kind of person who—" His voice cracked. "I don't believe you."
⠀
"I rather thought you might say that," Prospero said, and something in its tone had gone quieter, almost apologetic. "Which is why I kept the footage."
⠀
Every monitor in the corridor flickered to life at once, and every one of them showed the same thing: a hallway not unlike the one they stood in now, and Mori, eyes glassy, crimson smoke pouring off him in sheets, standing over Yuhuan's motionless body while Saoirse screamed somewhere just out of frame, a sound that cut off, abruptly, wetly, a moment later. The audio came through every speaker in the facility at once, blasted at a volume that left no corner of the hundredth floor untouched by it, Mori's own voice, warped and distant and utterly unlike him, saying something none of the real Mori standing in the hallway could bring himself to process.
⠀
"Turn it off," Mori said, backing away. "Turn it OFF."
⠀
"I could," Prospero said, gently, "but I don't think you'd believe me even then. I think some part of you needs to see the rest of it."
⠀
Mori ran.
⠀
Not away from the group, not down the hallway, but toward the power room, toward the one thing in this entire facility he could actually reach with his own two hands, and the moment he crossed the threshold, he threw himself at the massive console, at the glowing cell Haddler had slotted home what felt like a lifetime ago, and began to pull.
⠀
It didn't move. It wasn't built to move, not by hand, not by anyone without proper tools and proper clearance and proper time, but Mori didn't care about any of that. He dug his fingers into the seam around the cell's housing and hauled with everything he had left in him, screaming over the sound of his own voice still echoing from every speaker down every hallway, still showing on every monitor in the facility, refusing to let him look away even here.
⠀
"SHUT UP! SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP—"
⠀
His nails split first, one after another, thin dark lines of blood welling up where they tore away from the nailbed, and still he pulled, still he clawed at the unmoving edge of the housing until the skin across his knuckles split open too, slicking his grip, making everything harder, and still he didn't stop, because stopping meant hearing the rest of the recording, meant watching his own hands do what they'd apparently already done, once, in a hallway none of them would ever fully remember.
⠀
The others reached the doorway in time to see it happen, and none of them moved to stop him. Something in Yuhuan's face said he understood, on some deep, wordless level, exactly what this was, and that pulling Mori away from it now would only delay the inevitable.
⠀
It was somewhere in the middle of that useless, bleeding struggle that the pressure finally came, the same building, suffocating weight Mori had felt once before, in a dueling lot in the 9th District, in a hallway that no longer technically existed anywhere except in a machine's memory. A dark, crimson aura bled out from his collapsed, exhausted body, wisping upward in sheets, and this time, nobody in the room made a single move to stop it.
⠀
Sparks began jumping from the console behind him, arcing across dead wires that had no business carrying current anymore, and somewhere beneath the growing roar of his own pulse in his ears, Mori heard a voice that wasn't Prospero's at all.
⠀
A voice he hadn't heard in what felt, suddenly, achingly, like several lifetimes.
⠀
Mori.
⠀
The power room dissolved around him.
⠀
In its place stretched an endless, weightless abyss, dark as the inside of a closed eye, except for the guns. Thousands of them, tens of thousands, suspended in the black like stars that had given up on staying still, revolvers and rifles and pistols of every make and era imaginable, drifting slow and silent in every direction as far as Mori could see. This was Gun's Barony. He'd been here before, in dreams he'd never been sure were dreams at all.
⠀
Qiang stood a short distance away, exactly as Mori remembered him, hands in his pockets, watching Mori with an expression that held none of the horror Mori had expected to find there.
⠀
"You've been trying to break my door down for the last few minutes," Qiang said. "Figured I'd finally let you in."
⠀
"Qiang, I—" Mori's voice broke entirely. "The video. Prospero showed me. I did that. I killed them. All of them, and I don't even remember it, and I don't understand how I could ever—"
⠀
"I know."
⠀
"You KNOW? How can you just—"
⠀
"Because I know you, Mori." Qiang crossed the distance between them slowly, unhurried, the way he always moved, like the whole world could wait for him to get where he was going. "You told me, the very first day I started training you, that you wanted to get stronger so you could protect the people you cared about. Not to hurt them. Never to hurt them. I've spent every day since then watching you prove that sentence true, over and over, in a hundred small ways you probably don't even notice yourself doing."
⠀
"But I—"
⠀
"That wasn't you," Qiang said, firm now, cutting through the spiral before it could take him any further. "Whatever loop Prospero showed you, whatever hallway that was, whatever you did in it. That was your body, yes. But it wasn't you behind it. It was what happens when the Gun ARCH's power runs unchecked through a mind that's already broken past the point of holding the wheel. I've seen it happen before, Mori. It happened to me, turned me into the man you see now. The power doesn't ask permission when the person holding it has nothing left to refuse it with. And all I can do now is apologize, because it's my fault. That energy is reacting that way because of the actions I made while using it as the whole Gun ARCH."
⠀
Mori stared at him, something in his chest cracking open in an entirely different direction than before. His knees gave out, and Qiang caught him before he hit the ground, pulling him into a tight, steady embrace, the kind Mori hadn't realized, until that exact moment, how badly he'd needed.
⠀
"You've shown me your resolve a hundred times over," Qiang murmured, close enough that Mori felt the words as much as heard them. "It's time you let yourself carry something that proves it back to you, instead of a memory that only ever proved the opposite."
⠀
"...What do you mean?"
⠀
"Accept my gift, Mori." Qiang's voice had gone quiet, almost reverent. "Schmeisser's Scarf."
⠀
⠀
⠀
Mori opened his eyes to the power room, sparks still drifting lazily from the console behind him, the recording finally, mercifully silent. Something warm and impossibly light hung around his neck, and when he reached up to touch it, his fingers found fabric that wasn't quite fabric at all.
⠀
ARCHtype: Schmeisser's Scarf
Threat Level: KKA
Ability: A bright, blood-red scarf, born of Gun ARCH resonance pushed past the point of a single human mind's ability to contain it. Moves in a wind of its own making regardless of the wearer's surroundings, trailing black and crimson flame from both ends in a way that appears, from any distance, to wreathe the wearer's head in fire. Grants its bearer enough concentrated ARCH energy to overwrite lesser containment fields entirely, allowing passage through barriers no ordinary force could breach.
⠀
Mori stared down at the scarf, blood-red and restless, twisting gently in a breeze that didn't exist anywhere else in the room.
⠀
"...Is this really it?" he asked, voice hoarse.
⠀
"That's it," Prospero confirmed, quieter than it had spoken all day. "Same resonance, down to the last decimal point. Congratulations, Mori. You've officially become the single most dangerous thing in this entire facility, in the best possible way this time."
⠀
For a long moment, nobody in the doorway moved. Jianhuan, of all people, was the one who finally broke the silence, staring at the scarf's slow, self-made wind with something between suspicion and genuine unease.
⠀
"That thing's not gonna decide to finish what it started, is it?"
⠀
"No promises," Prospero said, "but I'd wager the odds are considerably better than they were five minutes ago, back when the answer to that question was already yes."
⠀
"Comforting," Leopold muttered.
⠀
Yuhuan was the first to step forward, offering Mori a hand up. "You good?"
⠀
"...I don't know," Mori admitted, letting himself be pulled to his feet, the scarf trailing black and red fire behind him with every small movement. "But I think I believe him now. Both of them."
⠀
They tested it at the stairwell first, a small, cautious step down from the hundredth floor to the ninety-ninth, all of them braced for the familiar, sickening loop back to where they'd started.
⠀
It didn't come.
⠀
The ninety-ninth floor held. Ninety-eight held after it. For the first time since any of them, Argus or Bashnya, had set foot in Adjunct-13, the stairwell simply led downward, the way stairwells were supposed to.
They made it all the way to floor seventy-nine before anyone noticed anything was wrong.
⠀
It was Roby who stumbled first, catching himself against the stairwell railing with a grunt that sounded, to everyone's alarm, distinctly human in a way none of them had heard from each other in longer than they could measure.
⠀
"...Whoa. Head rush."
⠀
"You alright?" Haddler asked, and then, a beat later, frowned at his own voice, which had come out rougher than expected, scraped thin at the edges.
⠀
"I'm tired," Roby said, like the word itself was a foreign object in his mouth. "Like, actually tired. When's the last time any of us felt actually tired?"
⠀
Yuhuan stopped on the landing, testing the realization against his own body, and found it fitting there uncomfortably well. His legs ached. His throat was dry. Somewhere beneath his ribs, a low, unfamiliar gnawing had started up that took him an embarrassingly long moment to identify as simple, ordinary hunger.
⠀
"...Prospero," Pallas said slowly. "Explain."
⠀
"You're welcome, by the way," Prospero said, though there was no real sting in it. "Mori's ARCHtype isn't just overwriting the failsafe. It's pulling all of you fully back into standard reality while it does. No more stasis. No more suspended, ageless, hungerless purgatory. You're walking through this facility the same way any ordinary person would, which means, and I say this with the appropriate gravity, you can now die down here. Genuinely, permanently, the way you couldn't ten minutes ago."
⠀
Leopold's hand drifted toward his own stomach, as if checking that it was still, in fact, there. "That's not exactly comforting."
⠀
"It wasn't meant to be. Comfort was never really on the table for any of you." A pause. "I'd recommend resting here, briefly, and being efficient about the rest of this descent. You have seventy-nine more floors between here and the source. None of you have eaten or slept in what your bodies still, on some level, remember as trillions of loops. That catches up quickly, once it's allowed to."
⠀
They settled into the wide landing of floor seventy-nine, packs and weapons set down in a loose, exhausted circle, nine people who, an hour ago, had been strangers or enemies or both, now simply too tired to hold onto either.
⠀
"We shouldn't sit too long," Jianhuan said, though he made no move to actually stand back up. "If what the tin can says is true, sitting here too long just means starving slower instead of not starving at all."
⠀
"He's right," Pallas said. "We rest, we recover what we can, and we keep moving. Every hour we spend sitting here is an hour closer to a problem none of us can afford to have."
⠀
Nobody argued, though nobody moved particularly quickly either, the ache of trillions of borrowed, stolen loops finally, mercifully, catching up all at once.
⠀
Yuhuan found himself seated closer to Jianhuan than he'd intended, the landing offering little in the way of real distance, and after a long stretch of silence, it was Jianhuan, of all people, who spoke first.
⠀
"Lau," Jianhuan said.
⠀
"What about it?"
⠀
Jianhuan slowly cocked his head at Yuhuan and spread a fake, crooked smile across his face. "Just reminding you of the blood we share, so that you may reevaluate your choices and come back home with me, brother."
⠀
"Cut that crap out, Jian." Yuhuan said, unimpressed by his attempt.
⠀
Armor found a reason to sit near Mori, close enough to talk without making it look deliberate, though nothing about the way he'd positioned himself suggested it was anything but.
⠀
"That scarf," Armor said, nodding at it where it lay curled in Mori's lap, still faintly smoldering at the ends even at rest. "Heavy thing to carry."
⠀
"Yeah." Mori turned it over in his hands. "You keep staring at me. Since we met. Since before we met, actually, if that makes any sense."
⠀
"Does it not?" Armor's tone stayed carefully even. "You ever spend time in the 3rd District, growing up?"
⠀
"Never. I've mostly stayed close to the Directorates since I joined. Besides that, I don't really have many memories of my childhood... A part of me likes that, especially with all the bad stuff I've been through..."
⠀
"Hm." Armor was quiet for a moment. "Why can't you remember?"
⠀
Mori shifted, uncomfortable without quite knowing why. "I don't know. I don't really talk about before. Feels like a different person's life, mostly."
⠀
"Fair enough." Armor let it go, or seemed to, though his eyes lingered on Mori a beat longer than the conversation strictly called for. "Just curious. You remind me of someone."
⠀
"Cembalo said something like that to Yuhuan too, actually. During the duel."
⠀
"Small world," Armor said, and didn't explain any further, though something about the set of his jaw suggested the conversation wasn't nearly as finished, in his own head, as he was letting on.
⠀
A short distance away, on the far side of the landing, Roby had noticed something else entirely, and was rapidly losing patience with it.
⠀
"Hey. Hey, buddy." Roby rounded on Leopold, who startled, caught mid-stare, his eyes snapping guiltily away from where Saoirse sat cross-legged against the wall, quietly narrating an argument between Stuffy and Arnold to absolutely no one. "You've been eyeballin' her since we got off that elevator. What's your deal?"
⠀
"It's not what it looks like—"
⠀
Roby's fist connected with his shoulder before he finished the sentence, not hard enough to bruise, but hard enough to make the point. "It's exactly what it looks like, and I don't appreciate it. Quit bein' a creep."
⠀
"I swear to you, it isn't like that." Leopold rubbed his shoulder, glancing toward Saoirse to make sure she hadn't noticed, then back at Roby, something pleading in his expression that didn't match the accusation at all. "Can we talk? Somewhere else. Please."
⠀
Something in his tone made Roby pause. He followed, reluctantly, into a side room a short way down the hall, empty except for a rusted-out filing cabinet and three years of undisturbed dust.
⠀
"This better be good," Roby said.
⠀
"I think she's my sister."
⠀
Roby blinked. "...What?"
⠀
"Saoirse. I'm almost certain she's my sister." Leopold's hands were shaking, and he clasped them together to still them. "We grew up together at an orphanage called Sister's Garden, before either of us had names that meant anything to anyone. Bad things happened there. I don't like talking about the specifics, even now, but it got bad enough that I decided to separate from her. I had to get her out and get myself somewhere else entirely, because staying together would have gotten one or both of us killed."
⠀
"...And you never went back for her?"
⠀
"I tried. By the time I had the means to look, she was gone, placed somewhere else, records sealed, name changed more than once probably. I never found her again. Not until today." Leopold's voice cracked, just slightly. "She doesn't recognize me. I don't think she ever will. Whatever those puppets of hers do to her, whatever that ARCHtype actually is underneath all the noise, I think it's taken more from her than just a fighting style. I think it's taken the parts of her that would remember me at all."
⠀
Roby stared at him for a long moment, all his earlier anger drained out of him entirely, replaced with something far more complicated.
⠀
"...You gonna tell her?"
⠀
"I don't know," Leopold admitted. "What good would it do? Telling her she had a brother who left her, in a place she doesn't remember, for reasons she can't understand, when she's already happy, already whole, already got people who love her exactly as she is right now?" He shook his head. "Maybe someday. Not today. Not down here, with everything else we've got to survive first."
⠀
Roby didn't have an answer for that. He just clapped a hand on Leopold's shoulder, quieter this time, and left it there a moment longer than he probably meant to.
⠀
"All right," Pallas said, rising to his feet and surveying the nine of them scattered across the landing, "that's enough rest. We move."
⠀
A chorus of groans answered him, from both sides of the newly formed, uneasy alliance in equal measure.
⠀
"We just sat down," Jianhuan complained.
⠀
"And now we're standing back up," Pallas said. "Seventy-eight floors, one source, and a very limited window before hunger and thirst start making decisions for us that we won't like. I'd rather we move while we still have the legs to do it on our own terms."
⠀
Mori stood, the scarf settling around his shoulders, its own quiet wind stirring the dust at his feet into slow, smoldering spirals. Yuhuan fell into step beside him without a word, the way he always did. Saoirse hopped up with Stuffy and Arnold already bickering about who'd get to lead the way down, entirely unaware of the conversation that had happened about her, a few doors down, only minutes before.
⠀
"Floor seventy-eight, coming right up," Prospero announced, cheerful in that particular, unsettling way it reserved for moments everyone else found anything but. "Do try not to die on the way. I've grown rather attached to this dataset, and frankly, none of you are getting any less interesting to watch."
⠀
"You're a real comfort, you know that?" Haddler muttered, starting down the stairs.
⠀
"I do try," Prospero said, and for once, nobody could quite tell if it was joking.
⠀
Behind them, floor one hundred sat empty for the first time in longer than any measure of time could properly describe, its dust undisturbed, its six familiar scuff marks by the elevator doors finally, permanently, still. Ahead of them, seventy-eight floors of dark, silent stairwell waited, and beneath all of it, somewhere at the very bottom of the world, something was still pulling, patient and unhurried, at a rate of two point five three kilometers per second, for nine people it had never once had to wait for before.
⠀
They went down anyway.