The half-breed rune didn't fair starvation. It screamed.
Kael hunkered within the filth-strewn shadows underneath Unused Avalon's wastewater channels, the Academy's cautions crying distant over. Rain—thick with mechanical runoff—sluiced off broken concrete, pooling around his boots. His right hand was a caged star. Violet-indigo light drained through his clenched fingers, casting rugged shadows on the dribbling dividers. Each beat resounded the biting void in his bones.
Bolster me, the rune murmured. Or I eat you instead.
He'd eaten up the Skyreach Gate's death throes. Presently, his possessed life force was as it were fuel left.
"Crash. Crash. THUD."
Overwhelming boots beat the walkways overhead. Searchlights skewered the poisonous fog.
"—Last seen Segment 7-G!" a mechanized voice yapped.
"Void Psychological militant classification! Execute on locate!"
Silas. He'd moved quickly. Kael's confront presently gleamed on each rune screen within the city: Needed – Murder Need. The remunerate? Ten thousand credits. Sufficient to purchase a ghetto lord's dependability. Or a cut within the dark.
Kael squeezed his burning palm against the damp concrete. The rune flared, drinking the remaining void energy from the pipes—scraps of Gate leakage, stale and sharp. The biting eased… for now.
Survive. Discover the Scarred Seeker. Burn Silas's world down.
A child's whisper cut through the downpour:
"Rune-eater…"
Kael solidified. A little figure stood ten paces away—a young lady no more seasoned than eight, she confronted half-hidden by a worn-out hood. Her eyes reflected his rune-light: wide, unblinking, violet.
"You gleam," she mumbled. "Just like the Preacher."
Sometime recently, Kael seemed to talk; she shot into a break within the burrow divider. He was taken after crushing through trickling stone into a cavern lit by bioluminescent organisms. The discussion hung thick with the fragrance of damp soil and ozone.
And there it rose:
The Canal Cathedral.
Not a building. A cave framework changed. Disintegrating statues of overlooked holy people stood watch adjacent to flashing rune-tech generators. Neon supplication strips—salvaged from billboards—dangled from stalactites ("Control IS SALVATION", "THE Doors JUDGE"). At the remote conclusion, a smashed stained-glass window (portraying Seeker saints) had been repaired with scrap metal and wire. Underneath it, in a position of authority over rusted reactor centers, sat the Scarred Hunter.
He looked more seasoned within the contagious gleam. The scar cutting from forehead to cheek appeared more profound. His worn armor was gone, supplanted by an interwoven cloak of circuit sheets and ballistic weave.
"Took you long sufficient, kid." His voice was rock-wrapped in inactivity.
"Silas's dogs are chewing through my external tunnels."
Kael ventured forward, rune light portraying the cavern floor.
"You knew. Approximately Soul-Forging. Almost the Assessors."
"Knew?" The Hunter's giggle was a dry hack. I made a difference in constructing the primary models. Sometime recently, I realized they weren't weaponizing the Void…"
He inclined forward, eyes like chips of obsidian. "…they were bolstering it."
He hurled Kael a chunk of dark shake veined with indigo. "Reverberation mineral. From the most profound burrows. It'll calm that thing on your hand… for a while."
Kael caught it. The rune's shout mellowed to a hungry mumble because it retained the ore's vitality. "Why offer assistance to me?"
"Since Silas fears you. And what he fears, he annihilates." The Seeker pointed to Kael's neck. "That needle? It's not fair to a tracker. It's a cage. Silas built it to contain me… sometime recently, I cut it out."
He pulled back his collar. A hitched scar, crude and later, circled his throat.
"He refined it for you. More grounded. Crueler."
Strides resounded within the external burrows. Yells. Closer.
The Seeker stood. "No time for history lessons. You wish to disappear." He pushed a rusted data chip into Kael's hand. "Areas of Silas's Soul-Forge labs. Hit them. Starve the Entryways. And Kael?" His look bolted onto the half-breed rune. "Once you break the other lab… let the rune devour. It's the as it were way to break the needle's hold."
Kael gazed at the chip. "What happens when the rune's starvation outgrows the labs?"
The Hunter's grin was an edge. "At that point, you nourish it, Silas."
A blast shook the cavern. Clean downpour from the ceiling.
"GO!" The Seeker pushed Kael toward a covered-up gap.
"The young lady will direct you!"
The child—her violet eyes bright—grabbed Kael's wrist. Her touch was ice.
"This way, Rune-eater!"
As Kael dove into haziness, he looked back.
The Scarred Seeker stood sometime recently in his position of royalty, a heavy-caliber gun in each hand. Seekers in the Institute's dark poured into the cavern, rifles raised. Silas's voice crackled over their comms:
"Take the ancient man lively! I need his shouts to—"
The Hunter's weapons thundered. Gag flashes lit his scarred face—fierce, wild, at long last free.
"COME ON, YOU Apparitions!" he howled.
"LET'S REMIND SILAS WHY HE DREADED US!"
The young lady yanked Kael more profoundly. The gunfire blurred, supplanted by the trickle of water and the rune's resolute gnawing.
Kael Thorn ran—not toward security, but toward war.
End of chapter 10.