로그인We were halfway back to the med-bay when the floor tried to eat us.It wasn’t a shake. It was a concussive, chest-rattling thud that threw me hard against Kael’s side. The lights in the corridor flickered, died, and were instantly replaced by the bloody crimson of the emergency backups. A second later, the second impact hit. THUD.Dust rained from the concrete ceiling. The sound that followed wasn't the roar of a beast or the hiss of acid. It was a deep, rolling boom that echoed across the frozen wasteland, followed by the high-pitched, tearing shriek of the atmosphere being ripped apart."Artillery," Kael snarled, his arm locking around my waist to keep me upright. The playful, lethal Alpha who had just interrogated a spy vanished, replaced instantly by the Exiled King going to war. "They’re using heavy artillery."We didn't walk. We sprinted. By the time we burst into the command center, Mira and Rook were already at the consoles. The holographic table was a chaotic mess of red warn
The deep cells were exactly what they sounded like: a concrete box buried three levels beneath the fortress, where the only sounds were the drip of condensation and the distant, muffled hiss of acid rain against the dome above.I shouldn't have been there. Mira had explicitly ordered me to stay in bed for another forty-eight hours, and Kael had backed her up with that low, gravelly tone that usually meant he was about to carry me somewhere against my will. But when he told me Julian was ready to talk, I'd swung my legs off the bed, grabbed my tactical pants, and said, "Either you help me walk, or I Shadow Step down there and you can explain to Mira why I tore my stitches."He'd sighed, the long-suffering sound of a man who had long ago accepted that logic had no power over me, and offered his arm.Now I was sitting in a steel chair across from Julian, wrapped in Kael's tactical cloak because my own body heat was still struggling to regulate. My royal core was a hollow, aching void,
The med-bay smelled like antiseptic, ozone, and the faint, metallic tang of my own depleted blood. I was propped up on a pile of pillows, an IV dripping nutrient-rich fluids into my arm. My royal core felt like a hollowed-out gourd stuffed with broken glass. Every breath was a chore. Every heartbeat was a reminder of how close I had come to burning out completely.But I was alive. And the dome was holding.Kael stood at the foot of the bed, strapping a tactical thigh holster over his black cargo pants. He was in full combat gear, but he’d added a heavy, sealed environmental cloak over it. The acid rain was still hissing against the dome outside, and if the shield flickered again, he needed to be protected. He looked terrifying. The Exiled Alpha King had returned, and he was looking for blood."You don't have to do this yourself," I rasped, my voice sounding like sandpaper. "Rook can lead the sweep. You need to monitor the shield pylons.""The pylons are stable. Mira is running the di
The shield didn't just fail. It shattered.One moment, the silver membrane was holding strong, filtering the acid rain into harmless droplets. The next moment, there was a sound like glass breaking across the entire sky—a massive, crystalline crack that echoed through the fortress and into our bones.Then the dome was gone.The acid rain hit us like a wall of fire.I screamed as the first drops struck my skin, the chemical burn searing through my tactical gear, through my flesh. Around me, the archive filled with smoke as the acid ate through the ventilation system. The holographic tables sparked and died. The lights flickered and failed."LYRA!" Kael's roar was barely audible over the hiss of dissolving metal and the screams from outside.I couldn't breathe. The air itself was burning. My royal core was a hollow, aching void, completely depleted from holding the shield for the past twelve hours. But I could feel them—three hundred people in the fortress, in the barracks, in the greenho
The shield didn't fall all at once. It died in stages, like a lightbulb filament burning out in slow motion.The silver membrane above us flickered once, then again, the luminescence dimming from brilliant white to a sickly, translucent grey. The hissing of the acid rain outside grew louder, no longer filtered by the dome, and I could smell it—that sharp, chemical tang of sulfur and death creeping through the ventilation."No," I snarled, slamming both hands onto the ignition rod. "No, no, no—"I poured everything I had into the shield. My royal core screamed, the carbonated fizz turning to boiling acid in my chest, but I pushed harder, trying to compensate for the lost generator power with raw, unfiltered lunar energy.The shield stabilized—for maybe three seconds.Then it flickered again, and I felt the pylons start to overheat, the silver mesh glowing red-hot as the system tried to draw power it didn't have."Lyra!" Kael's voice exploded over the comms, thick with sleep and instant,
The schedule was taped to the wall of the archive in Kael's meticulous, block-lettered handwriting.SHIELD CHANNELING ROTATIONLyra: 0600-1200 / 1800-2400Kael: 1200-1800 / 0000-0600OVERLAP BUFFER: 30 MINI stared at it like it had personally insulted me."You made a shift chart," I said, my voice flat. "For holding up the sky.""I made a sustainable operational framework," Kael corrected from where he was leaning against the holographic table, a mug of coffee in one hand and the other resting on the ignition rod. He looked unfairly fresh for a man who had just spent six hours acting as a human battery. His hair was slightly damp, his tactical shirt clinging to his shoulders, but his golden eyes were bright and alert. "The shield draws approximately forty-two percent of your core capacity per hour. At that rate, without rotation, you'd burn out in thirty-six hours. With rotation, we can sustain indefinitely.""Indefinitely," I repeated. "That's a very optimistic word for 'until we die







