The transition from the warmth of a village fire to the chill of a Neridian Sanctuary was not a leap. It was a fall into an abyss.
Grey woke to a vaulted ceiling of damp weeping stone. The air was thick with ozone and stagnant salt water, nothing like the earthy warmth of Seaside, nothing like anything he had ever breathed before.
His wrists were raw, skin chafed red by manacles that hummed with a low irritating vibration against his bones.
It wasn't prison. Not exactly but something worse.
To his left, Daryl from three huts down sat with his face buried in his hands, shoulders shaking.
To his right, a girl lay completely still, eyes fixed on the ceiling with the vacant glassy stare of someone who had stopped being present some time ago.
Grey stared at the ceiling and said nothing.
'So this is where we ended up,' he thought. 'Think. There must be a way out of this'
He catalogued what he could from where he lay.
Stone walls. Iron bars. Torchlight moving with the draft of something ventilated from far away.
The distant sound of contained water somewhere below. He had no name for this place yet but he would learn it.
"Quiet," a voice said, cold and crisp.
A man in teal robes walked past the bars, clipboard of polished whalebone in hand, two guards trailing behind him with the crest of a crashing wave embossed on their armour. He glanced at the still girl without slowing.
"Subject 04 is unresponsive. The resonance test must have damaged her neural pathways." He made a note.
"Dispose of her and bring Subject 09 to the dais."
The gate shrieked open. Rough hands grabbed Grey by the collar and dragged him out.
He didn't try to fight. He knew that things would be a lot worse if he fought them.
---
The experimentation room was built around a central structure of clear quartz and copper wiring that hummed with something predatory even before they strapped him down.
The lead researcher, a man called Valen, stood at the controls with the focused expression of someone who had stopped seeing people a long time ago and felt no particular way about it.
"We are looking for the Divine frequency," Valen said, more to himself than to Grey.
"The raid indicated a massive energy surge. If it isn't in the chief's daughter it must be hidden in one of these vessels. Tidal Pressure to Level 4."
The pain was not like anything Grey had experienced before. Invasive, pressurised, water-aspected mana forced through his pores and into his veins like liquid glass, searching for something inside him to provoke into revealing itself.
'There's nothing to find,' he thought through the haze of it. 'Good luck.'
"N-nothing," he gasped anyway, his back arching against the straps. "There's nothing—"
"Persistence is the key to discovery," Valen replied. "Bring the Siren's Needle."
A long thin needle of refined spirit-glass hummed against the skin near his heart. A wave of artificial terror crashed over him, forced and clinical, designed to make a bonded beast lash out in protection of its contractor.
Deep inside Grey, in the small warm space behind his ribs, something watched from the dark and did not move.
---
Weeks became months.
The Sanctuary became a routine of pain and just enough food to keep a heart beating.
Grey watched the numbers dwindle with the attention of someone who had nothing else to do and had decided that watching carefully was the only thing available to him.
Daryl was first. During a Level 6 resonance test the boy's spirit veins couldn't take the pressure. Grey watched through the bars as Daryl's skin turned mottled purple before he simply stopped.
The guards removed him with the same energy they used for anything else that had stopped being useful.
'Don't look away,' Grey told himself. 'Remember it.'
Then there was Elara, a girl who liked to remind of his status as an orphan.
She survived ten months, showed signs of a Mid-Tier bond, and was briefly treated better for it, given bread and clean water while the researchers got their hopes up.
Mid-Tier bonds and High-Tier bonds were rare and could only be found in high grade beasts.
When they discovered her beast was a Lesser-grade Water Viper and not the Divine Beast they were looking for, the disappointment turned practical. They attempted a force-evolution using experimental catalysts.
The effect lasted for roughly an hour before she ceased to be anyone recognizable.
Grey survived because he was useless. To the Neridians he was a control subject, a baseline for what a human without a High-Tier bond looked like.
They stopped wasting their more intensive tests on him after the first few months and that gave him time and relative freedom to observe.
He watched the guards. The fluid water-style stances, the rotation of the patrols, who cut corners and who didn't.
He absorbed the rhythm of the facility the way he had once absorbed the rhythm of the forest back home, looking for the pattern underneath the surface, the place where something predictable could eventually become something useful.
And he watched Lysa.
She was kept in a glass-walled chamber at the far end of the hall, separated from the others, the primary candidate.
While the rest of them were tested for resonance she was subjected to something called Aura Agitation, a sustained and escalating process that Grey didn't fully understand and didn't need to in order to understand what it was doing to her.
She never cried where anyone could see. He noticed that and filed it away with everything else.
'Hold on,' he thought, every time he caught sight of her through the glass. 'Just hold on a little longer.'
By the twelfth month the facility was mostly empty. A handful of children remained, bodies skeletal, spirits somewhere else.
Valen paced the ward with the energy of a man being held accountable for results he hadn't produced and was running out of time to produce.
"One year!" he snapped at his subordinates. "A fortune in mana crystals and we have nothing but corpses!"
He turned toward Lysa's chamber. "Maximum output. If she dies, she dies. But I will see the colour of her soul before sunset."
Grey gripped the bars of his cell. His stomach dropped through the floor.
'No,' he thought. 'Lysa, no—'
They poured raw, unfiltered spirit energy into her chamber. The air trembled with its force, and glass along the walls shattered.
Grey watched, his hands trembling as he felt powerless.
All twelve months of observation, pattern memorization, and cautious survival meant nothing in this moment when it mattered most.
Then the screaming stopped.
Not because Lysa had died. Because the air itself had been emptied of the ability to carry sound.
A deep resonant hum moved through the floorboards, vast and slow, like the voice of something the size of a mountain singing from very far below.
Arom Lysa's chest a bloom of sapphire light erupted, not the flicker of a common beast, something majestic and terrible and entirely unlike anything the facility had produced in a year of trying.
The silhouette of an Abyssal Kraken tore through the laboratory walls as though they were suggestions.
Translucent tentacles cut through stone and copper and quartz without slowing. The temperature dropped so fast that Grey's breath became visible and the remaining glass in the lamps shattered from the cold.
Valen fell to his knees. His face was a mask of greed and awe in equal measure.
"Divine rank!" he whispered. "It was her. It was always her."
They contained the Kraken through sheer numbers and suppression equipment, the beast not yet close to full strength and therefore containable, barely.
The research phase ended immediately and recovery mode began.
"Prepare transport," Valen ordered, already moving. "Move her to the capital. The Emperor's Sages will handle the extraction."
"And the facility?" a guard asked. "The remaining subjects?"
Valen was already following the levitating cot carrying an unconscious Lysa toward a shimmering blue portal and did not look back.
"Sanitize everything. Use the Void-Eater."
Grey watched Lysa's hand hang limp over the side of the cot as it passed through the portal and disappeared.
He opened his mouth and nothing came out, his voice a raspy ghost of itself after twelve months of barely using it.
The guards swept through the ward with practiced precision spilling oil over the floors and walls, drenching the remaining children, who were too weak to do more than emit faint, pitiful sounds.
A Beast mage draped in a black veil stepped into the center of the room, beginning a low, guttural chant. In his hands was a jagged obsidian shard that seemed to devour the light around it.
Suddenly, the air ripped apart. A jagged purple-black rift tore open, sucking everything toward its center.
Flames leapt to life, stone walls cracked, and Grey lay on the floor, heat searing his legs, his bound wrists useless, smoke filling his lungs faster than he could expel it.
'I promised,' he thought, the edges of his vision going dark. 'I promised him. I promised her. I can't die here. Not like this. Not for nothing.'
His body was not particularly interested in what he had promised.
"Tragic."
The voice came from the deep place behind his ribs, slow and enormous, the weight of a tectonic plate shifting.
His Titan Beast had woken up.
"To die here, like an insect in the mud. Is this the extent of your promise, little human?"
'No,' Grey thought. 'I have to—'
"Then wake up."
The shadows detached from the walls.
They came together in a shape made of pure concentrated darkness, ancient and vast, filling the ward with a presence that made the fires stutter.
It wasn't Kaz at full size. The facility would not have survived that. But it was enough.
A shadowy claw slashed across the Void Rift with an almost casual contempt, bending its chaotic pull effortlessly to its own will. The rift's violent tug shifted instantly, as if obeying a command it could not refuse.
The darkness surged forward, wrapping Grey in a suffocating cocoon.
The world around him slowly grew cold, eventually fading into nothingness.