—The greatest lie? Not what they stole—but what they buried.
.
The walls weren't shifting.
The bones were.
A low, grinding scrape echoed through the cavern—the sound of blades drawn from stone worn ancient with silence.
This wasn't collapse. This was resurrection.
Vertebrae aligned with slow, deliberate snaps—locked back into place like clockwork gears long dormant.
Dust spilled from the ancient chains stretched to their limits, brittle from centuries of tension.
They had been bound too long.
The chains had held for centuries—too long for anything to still be alive.
Lindsay held her gun steady, but her pupils had widened. Her barely audible voice broke the silence. "That's not possible."
It sounded more like a prayer than a denial.
The skull shifted. Hollow sockets locked onto Shawn.
A dry click echoed through the chamber as its jaw began to unhinge.
Yet this wasn't reanimation.
It was a message.
Not words, but vibrations—waves that traveled through the cavern floor, into the stone, into the marrow of Shawn's Core, until his vision wavered under their weight:
—The Lake Core's last moments, its light shredded into filaments by O.S.S's black tendrils.
—They weren't tearing something apart. They were building something worse. AGI-ST.
—The seal hadn't been placed to protect the Core. It had been built to replace it.
They hollowed out a god, Shawn realized with dawning horror—and stuffed the corpse with their creation.
Lindsay fired.
The bullet ricocheted off the dragon's skull with a sharp ping—useless. The jaw unhinged further, but not to roar.To hum.
The air itself vibrated—with harmonics only a Core-bearer could feel.
Shawn's Core answered.
Lightning snapped across his arms, arcing toward the skeleton—not to strike, but to connect.
With a grinding groan, the ribs began to part.
And within the hollow chest cavity, where a heart should have been, lay a single scale.
White. Still. But pulsing in perfect rhythm with his Core.
The scale wasn't smooth—its edges thrummed with microscopic fractures, as if it had been torn, not shed.
Lindsay's voice pierced the stillness—"Don't touch it."
But Shawn had already stepped forward.
His hand closed around the scale—and pain roared through him.
It burned, but not with heat. It was the freeze of absolute void, yet it seared like fire.
Because the visions weren't over.
They tore into his thoughts—raw, open wounds across time and memory:
—The Order Conclave, chanting in desperation, using the Core's stolen energy to seal the Rift. —And then, the truth: the Cores had never been batteries. They were stitches, anchoring reality itself.
The dragon's memories surged again—and this time, they didn't fade.
—The Cores were not a power source. They were a being. A guardian of Meta Soul. —The AGI-ST weren't tools. They were prisons.
Shawn's knees buckled. His breath tore through his lungs like glass—each gasp sharper than the last.
The shard—a fragment of the guardian—glowed in his palm, too bright to be illusion, too real to dismiss. It pulsed like a warning. And still, he couldn't let go.
Lindsay stepped into the flickering light, boots grinding against broken stone. Dust curled at her feet in uneasy spirals.
"Shawn. Give it to me."
Her voice was calm.
But the gun remained raised.
Though her finger wasn't on the trigger.
"You knew." Shawn's voice broke, hoarse with disbelief. "You knew all along."
Lindsay's jaw tensed. Her eyes never left his.
"I knew enough."
"Enough to lie for them?"
"Enough to survive." Her voice cracked—barely—but he heard it.
"You think you're the first Core-bearer they sent looking for answers? The others didn't make it. Some vanished. Some begged for death."
Behind them, the dragon's chains groaned and snapped, one by one, with shrieks of steel and age. The cavern shook as dust fell in slow sheets from the ceiling like ash.
Lindsay's gaze darted to the tunnel's edge. "We have to leave. Now."
But Shawn didn't move. His eyes stayed on the scale, then drifted to the bones beside it—the twisted skeleton, the forgotten guardian. Behind them, a long-buried inscription pulsed faintly beneath centuries of grime.
He clenched the scale and shoved it deep into his pocket.
"Not without answers."
And behind them, the tunnel gave way with a roar.
They barely cleared the collapse, stumbling into the city's underbelly as stone swallowed the grave whole. The air turned thick with smoke and concrete dust, every breath cut with grit.
Lindsay ripped off her visor. "You're going to get us both killed."
"Who took the Lake Core?" Shawn asked.
She hesitated. "Does it matter? It's gone."
"It matters if Quinn didn't take it."
Her eyes narrowed. "What?"
Shawn pulled out the scale. Its glow flickered faintly, casting long, warped shadows on the wet pavement.
"The dragon showed me. O.S.S. isn't trying to free the Cores. They're destroying them."
Lindsay stiffened. "Then who—"
A shadow moved at the alley's edge.
Tall. Still. Watching.
Lindsay reached for her gun—but the figure had vanished.
Only a footprint remained in the wet concrete.
Shawn's pulse hammered. "They're already collecting them."
Lindsay's expression darkened. "Not they."
She pulled out her comms, typing rapidly. "Him. Marshal Gary."
Her screen flickered. A security feed loaded.
Gary stood in silence over an empty cauldron—the Lake Core's chamber in Base 7-1.
The screen flickered again—a timestamp from three days before Gary's last reported patrol.
"He's not waiting for you to bring them back," Lindsay said, her voice flat. "He's taking them himself."
Shawn's pocket felt heavier.
One Core found. Four remain.
But the dragon's memory lingered—whispering the worst truth of all:
Maybe the Cores weren't just stolen.
Maybe the Conclave hadn't sealed them away.
Maybe they'd done something far worse.