The mountain had a seam.
Eloy stopped at the crest of the ridge, one hand braced on a wind-scoured boulder. The foothills fell away. Scrub grass and broken rock tumbling into a valley where something rose that didn't belong. A structure. Not built on the mountain. Built into it. Seamless alloy swept upward from bedrock, curving in ways stone didn't curve, catching the gray dawn light and throwing it back cold.
Behind him, boots scraped frost-cracked rock. Isolde. Then the softer crunch of Maya's steps, halting at the ridge edge.
The outer wall stood a hundred meters high. No battlements crowned it. The surface was smooth, pale metal, unbroken except for the glyph carved above the entrance. Fifteen meters tall, edges still sharp after a thousand years. The same crossed-circle inside a hexagon that sat quiet against Eloy's collarbone, suppressed to a passive receiver, waiting.
[ghostrunner_x]: boss arena detected. that's a boss arena.
