Lucien stepped across a threshold of shattered obsidian tiles, his long, ink-stained fingers trembling as he adjusted the brass focal rings of his remaining grey eye.
The imperial strike on the Obsidian Sinks had forced their guerrilla cell into a state of structural fragmentation. While Gwen held the western passes and the Lycan remnants gathered their wounded in the lower trenches, the scholar had retreated into the deepest, unmapped capillary of the old world's archives.
"The central orbit is executing its third calculation cycle, Lucien," Vane's voice crackled through a broken shard of communication quartz resting on a nearby reading desk. The sorcerer's frequency was wet, interrupted by short gasps of physical pain. "The three stone fingers of the God-King are currently anchoring themselves into the geocentric suture. If you do not provide a counter-equation within the next two rotations, the weight of the sky-nets will permanently compromise the planet's core density."
