– CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE –

  THE ANAGRAM

  Americ-Ana stepped out of the Jump Chronos Station and the vault beneath the altar received her like an old lung, dark, full of stagnant air and bad promises. The immediate sensation wasn’t “portal,” it was “place.” The smell of something kept too long, of cold metal, of damp stone, of a structure assembled inside rock. The sound of footsteps felt smaller there, swallowed by surfaces that didn’t return an echo properly, as if even noise were property of THE-IMPERIUM.

  She had already been there.

  And her body remembered before her mind did.

  The floor, even in its genericness, brought back the memory of King Solomon laid out, dead, reduced to weight and silence. It brought back the trace of the chase, fear running after her, demons rising from corners that shouldn’t have corners, the desperation of dragging Poppandacorn along as if he were the last piece of meaning in a world with no manual. The last time, she had arrived by accident, or by one of those cosmological ironies that pretend to be accident. Now she wasn’t lost. Now she was armed with intention.

  “Chancellor. Nioh. Poppa.” The words crossed her mind like a survival list. She had come to prove what was real, because lately reality had been wearing the face of a prank.

  Astyam went straight ahead, without hesitation, like someone who knows the way and hates having to admit it. He came with Antichrist in his arms, steady, his gaze clean, guiding Americ-Ana and Wwwyye through the shadows and the vault’s rough structure, toward the center where Solomon’s Temple had been raised.

  The light ahead wasn’t “beautiful.” It was functional. A distant brightness cutting through the darkness and giving away volume, height, shape.

  And then the Temple appeared head-on.

  Wwwyye stopped for a second, and her reaction came out before any filter.

  “Wow. Damn. THE-IMPERIUM really doesn’t mess around. This is incredible.”

  Americ-Ana focused on the Temple’s fa?ade, standing there like a blow of history assembled inside a vault, oriented as in the ancient description, facing east, as if even direction were an oath.

  There was a portico at the front, the “entrance before the entrance,” wide across the Temple and pushing outward like an invitation and a threat, twenty cubits in width, ten in depth, a kind of architectural mouth that said, “from here on, you’re not just a person anymore.”

  And flanking the entrance, like two guardians guarding nothing but symbolism, were the two bronze columns, free-standing, imposing, each with its name engraved into the very idea of it, Jachin and Boaz.

  Americ-Ana saw the doors, and even from a distance the design was recognizable on an instinctive level. Worked wood, carvings that didn’t apologize for being religious, cherubim, palm trees, open flowers, everything overlaid with gold as if brightness were armor against the world.

  She felt her throat tighten, not with admiration, but with strangeness. Because moments earlier, on that same atypical night, it had still been unfinished. It had still looked like a construction site. It had still carried the smell of improvisation laced with blasphemy.

  Not now.

  Now it was finished.

  And that finishedness was terrifying.

  Americ-Ana swallowed hard and spoke out loud, as if hearing her own voice might help keep the ground in place.

  “I was here moments ago with Poppa and GummyAir and this was still being raised, and now it’s completely finished. Like Wwwyye said, THE-IMPERIUM doesn’t mess around.”

  She took another step, and the bad memory hooked her ankle from the inside.

  “But wait.” Her voice trembled, an old fear returning in new clothes. “When I was here, this place was full of demons building everything. Where are they now? They chased me and Poppa.”

  Astyam frowned as if her words were a language he’d never studied.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he replied, dry, realistic. “When I came here to find where the scream was coming from, there were no demons at all, and the Temple was already finished, raised.”

  Wwwyye shrugged, trying to find logic in a place that didn’t respect logic.

  “Maybe they finished the job and left, went back to the legions they belong to, or maybe they went back into the KING MatNat spheres of the ones they’re bound to.”

  Americ-Ana was about to answer, about to insist, about to open her mouth to say that nothing in there felt “simple,” but the sound cut through the air first.

  A scream.

  “You there! Help! Please, help me, I’m here.”

  Americ-Ana’s stomach dropped because she knew that voice. Knew the timbre, the urgency, the kind of desperation only someone used to commanding the world would feel when she discovered the world knows how to bind, too.

  The three of them turned in the same direction, as if the body had received the command before the mind.

  Up ahead, at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple, was the Chancellor.

  But not standing, not whole, not in control.

  She was on the ground.

  Bound.

  Immobilized.

  Thrown there as if she were an object.

  Americ-Ana felt her blood go cold and boil at the same time.

  And then no one said another word.

  They ran.

  When they got close enough for the light to cut out details, Americ-Ana recognized it at once.

  They weren’t ropes.

  They weren’t handcuffs.

  It was that impossible texture, white and dense, stuck in layers, as if someone had woven steel into the shape of a spiderweb.

  She dropped to her knees beside the Chancellor, her heart beating far too fast, and her voice came out steady on pure instinct.

  “Nioh Nemmesis was here… this material is Spyder’s web.”

  Astyam was already kneeling too. He set Antichrist down on the floor and knelt beside the Chancellor, trying to find a weak point, a section that would give.

  Wwwyye dropped to her knees on the other side and plunged her hands into the web with anger, pulling, trying to unravel it, trying to tear it.

  “My God,” she muttered, straining with her whole body. “This thing feels like steel.”

  Americ-Ana touched the surface of the web with her fingertips. The texture was cold, rigid, and at the same time alive, as if it remembered the shot that had created it.

  “This is indestructible,” she said, feeling disgust rise and urgency turn into a blade. “It’s Spyder’s web, Nioh’s robot.”

  The Chancellor was breathing in short bursts, trapped, her chest rising and falling with effort. Even immobilized, her gaze still carried that gleam of command, as if she were trying to order her own panic around.

  “It seems you already know something about Nemmesis,” she said, breathless.

  Astyam didn’t take his eyes off the web.

  “We know a lot. But we’re here looking for answers too.”

  The Chancellor drew in air as if she were pulling time.

  “I was supervising Solomon’s Temple before returning to my office to join you,” she said quickly, her voice breaking between one breath and the next. “When suddenly Nioh Nemmesis appeared. He was dragging Poppandacorn along the ground.”

  Americ-Ana felt her stomach drop.

  The Chancellor continued, her gaze fixed on an empty point, as if she were still seeing the scene.

  “When I asked what he was doing here, he simply fired a weapon at me and then I got trapped in this spiderweb.” She swallowed hard. “Then he just turned his back and walked away as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

  Americ-Ana rested her hand on the web holding the Chancellor, as if touch could be a promise of release, even knowing it couldn’t.

  “Madam Chancellor,” she said, her voice low and urgent, “as Astyam said, we’ve discovered a lot, but we still have many doubts. For now, what we know is that Nioh Nemmesis is a homunculus.”

  Wwwyye turned her face, anger gleaming in her eyes.

  “And not just any homunculus,” she drove in. “Rabbi Worse Devil’s homunculus.”

  The Chancellor’s reaction was immediate, visceral.

  “What?” Her voice rose, and panic crossed her face like a living shadow. “What do you mean? What are you talking about? How is that possible?”

  She tried to move, the web wouldn’t let her, and desperation came in waves.

  “Oh my God,” she gasped. “We need to activate the drones, alert the authorities now. THE-IMPERIUM is in danger.”

  Astyam nodded, hard.

  “We will. But first we need to get you out, Madam Chancellor.”

  Wwwyye pulled again, her hands already marked by friction, and the web didn’t give even a millimeter.

  “This is impossible,” she said through clenched teeth. “This thing is indestructible.”

  Astyam looked around, sweeping the ground, the structures, the shadows, like someone searching for a piece deliberately left behind.

  “There has to be something here,” he said. “Some tool that can help free the Chancellor.”

  Wwwyye let out a short sound, half a humorless laugh.

  “Or we can drag her to the Jump Chronos Jump.”

  The Chancellor shook her head with difficulty, her voice cut by lack of air.

  “No.” She said it, and there was command even inside desperation. “There won’t be time. It’s a waste of time. Do this instead, go get help, quickly. I’ll be fine.”

  Americ-Ana refused at once, as if the word “fine” were an insult in that place.

  “Never.” She said it, feeling anger rise as defense. “I’m not leaving you here, Madam Chancellor. Alone, with the risk that Nioh Nemmesis is lurking.”

  The Chancellor stared at her, and for a second her gaze was blade and plea at the same time.

  “Then split up,” she ordered. “You, Americ-Ana, stay with me. The other two go get help.”

  Wwwyye answered without hesitation, her voice dry.

  “I’m not leaving you two alone here either.”

  Astyam added, blunt.

  “Neither am I.”

  Americ-Ana felt desperation climb into her throat and searched for an exit at her own neck, as if the necklace were a door.

  She ran her hand along it, found the KING MatNat sphere, felt its conscious weight, and the idea came like a spark.

  “Wait,” Americ-Ana said fast, breathless. “I know how to free the Chancellor.”

  She lifted her gaze, eyes bright with urgency.

  “I have the demon Andras. I can ask him to free the Chancellor.”

  The sentence barely had time to exist.

  Something looped around her.

  Cold.

  Tight.

  Too fast to be thought.

  Americ-Ana felt pressure wrapping her body as if the air had turned into a hand. She tried to turn, tried to get up, but there was no space. The world narrowed in a second.

  She hit the ground.

  Her shoulder struck first.

  Her face came after.

  Pain burst, brief, but it didn’t even have time to become pain properly, because what mattered was the sensation of being consumed by threads.

  Americ-Ana blinked, tried to pull in air, and when she looked, she understood.

  She was immobilized too.

  Her whole body was covered in spiderweb.

  Fallen beside the Chancellor, trapped, glued to her own destiny.

  She tried to move her arm, and the web answered with cruel rigidity, as if each attempt only tightened another knot.

  Her gaze darted, desperate.

  Wwwyye was on the ground too, covered, writhing, trying to scream and unable to.

  Astyam was trapped the same way, his body fighting the impossible, his face taut.

  The vault beneath the altar went silent for a second, and that second seemed to laugh at them.

  Then came a cough.

  A small sound.

  And right after, a voice, low, clear, loaded with reproach as if it were talking about a ruined task.

  “You weren’t supposed to be here, Americ-Ana,” the voice said, and each syllable felt like a finger tightening further. “You ruined everything.”

  Americ-Ana tried to turn her face, and managed only enough to see.

  Nioh Nemmesis was walking in.

  Small, barely over fifty centimeters, moving forward with a calm that felt impossible in that scene. Almost childlike in size, and utterly monstrous in control.

  Dragged along the ground, Poppandacorn came behind, caught by one leg.

  The dragging sound was horrific. Metal. Plastic. Plush.

  Poppandacorn looked deformed. The plush torn in several places, exposing parts of the metal, and in some areas the inner circuits, worn by the friction, showed like exposed technical wounds. His face held no expression, no light, no theater, nothing.

  Completely gone dark.

  Completely powered off.

  And Nioh pulled him as if he were hauling an object, as if that weren’t someone.

  Spyder kept pace beside him, silent, obedient, like a shadow with legs.

  Americ-Ana tried to move again, but the web wouldn’t allow it. The sensation was of being glued to a fate that didn’t ask permission. Her face still burned from the fall, her shoulder throbbed, and air came in short, snagging. The weight of guilt and fear mixed with the sight of Poppandacorn scraping along the ground like a broken object.

  She stared at Nioh, eyes burning, and her voice came out truly torn.

  “Nioh, how could you do this? I trusted you.”

  Nioh answered coughing, the sound small and irritated, as if his own body were failing while he tried to hold the pose.

  “Don’t come at me with that paladin-of-morals crap.” He spat the words with contempt. “You’re just another stupid puppet of THE-IMPERIUM.”

  Americ-Ana felt her stomach twist, and her gaze dropped to Poppandacorn’s body, to the tears, to the exposed metal, to the silence where there should have been theater.

  “What did you do to Poppa?” she demanded, her voice trembling with rage. “Why is he still unconscious? Why is he broken and scraped raw?”

  Nioh took a step and dragged Poppandacorn a little farther, as if he wanted the scraping sound to answer for him. Metal, plastic, plush. A sound that felt like humiliation.

  “That silly teddy bear of yours was more useful than you imagine,” Nioh said, coughing again, and his mouth formed a short, venomous smile. “I don’t know how it happened, but that stupid teddy bear carries remnants of Astaroth’s powers.”

  Americ-Ana’s blood ran cold.

  Nioh crouched and lifted Poppandacorn’s little finger, as if he were displaying a stolen key. Purple light leaked from it, thin, intense, pulsing like a fever.

  “This purple light coming out of that idiot teddy bear’s finger is the essence of Astaroth’s powers,” Nioh went on, proud, as if he were showing off a trophy. “And through it, I can cross every portal in THE-IMPERIUM without any problem.”

  The vault beneath the altar seemed to shrink all at once. Americ-Ana felt horror strike, a kind of horror that wasn’t only emotional, it was strategic. Wwwyye’s eyes went wide. Astyam went still for a second. The Chancellor drew in air as if she’d swallowed a nail.

  Americ-Ana shook her head, desperate, trying to deny reality with the force of her throat.

  “No, no, no,” she whispered, and her voice broke. “That’s not possible. You’re lying. You’re a liar.”

  Nioh let out a short cough, like a bad laugh.

  “How do you think I ended up here,” he said, his voice growing steadier in its cruelty, “inside the guarded and impenetrable vault beneath the altar, without being killed by Ophanim and Lacrimosa?”

  He pinched Poppandacorn’s little finger between his fingers, like someone holding a lever.

  “In that stupid teddy bear’s finger is the key to having THE-IMPERIUM under control.”

  Astyam spoke low, almost a whisper, as if he feared the air itself might betray a thought.

  “Chancellor, how is this possible?”

  The Chancellor answered with short, trapped breaths, but lucid, as if analysis were the only thing she still had left.

  “If Poppandacorn truly carries remnants of Astaroth’s powers,” she said, her tone the tone of someone confirming a disaster, “and that seems to be true, then Poppandacorn, and anyone carrying Poppandacorn, can enter and leave any place in THE-IMPERIUM. Even if Astaroth is no longer in THE-IMPERIUM, Astaroth is still one of the 72 demons of the Ars Goetia.”

  Wwwyye turned her head toward Nioh with disgust and rage mixed together.

  “But if the point is to have Astaroth’s powers in hand to enter and leave freely from anywhere, any portal,” she said out loud, with no restraint, “why didn’t Rabbi Worse Devil come personally with Astaroth’s seal, why did Rabbi Worse Devil send that pile of shit and sperm in Rabbi Worse Devil’s place? Is Rabbi Worse Devil a coward?”

  The Chancellor tried to respond, still trapped, her voice coming out broken.

  “THE-IMPERIUM has a strong repelling shield against Rabbi Worse Devil…”

  But Nioh interrupted. He began to shout and cough at the same time, as if indignation were tearing his lungs apart from the inside.

  “How dare you call my Abba a coward, you filthy, alienated one?”

  The coughing fit came hard, and he hunched a little, but he didn’t lose the hate. His eyes went wet and bright, and for a second Americ-Ana saw something childish there, a desperation hidden inside the monster.

  Americ-Ana, trapped in the web, strained her neck, her voice coming out in a tremor that was memory turning into accusation.

  “That’s why you stayed under the Statue of Sisyphus all the time,” Americ-Ana said to Nioh. “The stone Sisyphus carries is a portal. You knew that, but you had no way in, until Poppa’s little finger started glowing with that purple light.”

  Nioh spat a cough and answered, as if delivering a victory lesson.

  “Exactly.”

  He stared at Americ-Ana, and his voice grew heavy with a sick satisfaction.

  “You have no idea how surprised I was to see the book with the codes Helena Blavatsky created in your hands, Americ-Ana, inside that stupid teddy bear.”

  Americ-Ana felt an inner shiver, not the shiver of a portal, the shiver of a premonition.

  “In that book is all the filth, all the rot that THE-IMPERIUM carries and hides under the rug,” Nioh went on, and his coughing cut through the sentences like a blunt blade. “But that is about to end, because what was missing to bring the Glory of God again and create a new original KING MatNat sphere with all 72 seals fell into my hands like a gift.”

  The Chancellor’s eyes widened, panic returning in the shape of wounded authority.

  “What do you mean by that, Mr. Nemmesis?” she demanded, and her voice trembled with indignation. “What do you know, Mr. Nemmesis? This is a matter of the highest secrecy of THE-IMPERIUM. As Chancellor of Portals, I demand an explanation, now.”

  Nioh let out a short laugh, choked on it, and coughed right after, as if his own body hated that pleasure.

  “No problem, Chancellor.”

  He gave Poppandacorn a hard yank. Poppandacorn’s body struck the ground and the torn plush showed even more metal. Then, with the casualness of someone opening a backpack, Nioh worked at Poppandacorn’s belly.

  A compartment opened.

  Americ-Ana felt her heart stop for a second. It was like watching someone violate a body, even if it was a body of toy and metal.

  Nioh shoved his hand inside, feeling around, and pulled something out.

  He lifted the object the way a priest lifts a sacred relic.

  “As you can see,” he said, his voice loaded with triumph, “I have in my hands what was missing to activate Solomon’s Temple and bring the Glory of God again.”

  He extended his arm farther, displaying it.

  “I have in my hands Adoniram’s gift.”

  It was a small box wrapped in parchment, and the words written on it glowed in gleaming golden ink, as if gold had been made to be seen even in the dark.

  Astyam let out a small sound, something like a whimper of fear and recognition.

  “Oh no. It can’t be.”

  Wwwyye’s face tightened, indignant.

  “I don’t know what an Adoniram gift is, but whatever it is, that belonged to Beni, son of Abda, and Beni gave it as a gift to King Solomon, you idiot.”

  Nioh laughed and coughed at the same time, choking on his own amusement.

  “You’re more ignorant and deluded than I thought, you walking anime.” He wiped his mouth with a nervous gesture and went on, his voice full of the pleasure of correcting. “‘Beni’ isn’t a proper name. ‘Beni’ is a Hebrew word that means ‘my son.’”

  Wwwyye’s expression twisted, but Nioh didn’t stop.

  “Abda’s son is actually named Adoniram.” He lifted the little box a bit higher. “Adoniram was the Master Builder of Solomon’s Temple, and he gave King Solomon a powerful, sacred manuscript containing Psalm 74.”

  Americ-Ana felt her skin prickle from the inside, as if the word “Psalm” carried physical weight in the air.

  “Psalm 74 speaks of destruction and prepares the ground for reconstruction,” Nioh said, a feverish gleam in his eyes, and he pointed the little box toward Solomon’s Temple as if he were aiming a sacred weapon.

  He laughed again, and the coughing came harder, interrupting the laughter in spasms.

  Wwwyye screamed, her voice exploding inside the vault.

  “I’d rather be ignorant, deluded, and a walking anime than be a pile of sperm mixed with shit, you damned homunculus. Get us out of here!”

  The word “homunculus” hit Nioh like a slap. He flushed at once, irritated, and a coughing fit doubled him over for a second.

  He lifted his face, furious.

  “Who do you think you are to call me that?” he shouted, trembling with rage. “I have a father, I have my Abba, and I am deeply loved by Abba.”

  That was when the Chancellor, all of a sudden, began to laugh.

  First a short sound.

  Then a burst of laughter.

  Then another, louder, as if something inside her had snapped from holding fear and disgust and politics in for too long.

  Wwwyye looked at Nioh with a taunting cruelty, using the laughter like gasoline.

  “Well, look at that.” She said, snorting. “Seems we’ve got a pile of shit and goo with Pinocchio syndrome. You think you’re a real boy? You want to be a real boy?”

  The Chancellor laughed louder.

  Wwwyye went on, her eyes bright with provocation.

  “You’re nothing but a monster. We know what you did to Trinity Bustanay, you worm. Get us out of here!”

  The Chancellor’s laughter turned into something close to an attack, loud, uncontrolled, and Nioh went even redder, the coughing coming more violent.

  Between one choke and the next, he spat the words with hate.

  “How do you know about Trinity?”

  Americ-Ana stepped into the conversation, her voice trembling with rage and pain at the same time.

  “I went in person to the place where you kept Trinity hostage all this time, Nioh.” she said, and each word felt torn from her throat. “You’re a monster for everything you did to Trinity. Trinity didn’t deserve that. No one deserves to go through what Trinity went through.”

  Nioh’s coughing worsened even more, as if the accusation had turned into sand inside him.

  The Chancellor laughed louder, and it was driving Nioh insane. He turned on her, shouting, like an enraged child who doesn’t know where to put frustration.

  “SHUT UP, YOU DAMNED MESTIZA! I NEED TO THINK!”

  The Chancellor’s laughter died in the air like a snuffed candle.

  For a second, the vault seemed to breathe.

  Then she spoke, and her voice came with an absurd calm, almost cruel, as if she had found amusement in humiliation itself.

  "You know what’s funniest about all of this?" she said. "This homunculus has been right under my nose the whole time, and I didn’t notice."

  The Chancellor drew in a breath, and her gaze went distant, thick with belated logic.

  "I’m the one who permits the entry of candidates for academic status into THE-IMPERIUM," she continued, and the sentence arrived as confession and joke at once. "This homunculus was always there, so obvious, and I simply didn’t see it."

  Americ-Ana felt a shiver in her stomach.

  "What do you mean, Madame Chancellor?" she asked, her voice trembling. "What do you mean by that?"

  The Chancellor let out another burst of laughter, and the sound struck the vault like a hammer.

  "Nioh Nemmesis is an anagram for 'Semen Hominis,'" she said, and the laughter returned at the end of the line as if it were punctuation. "'Semen Hominis' is a Latin expression that means 'seed of man', that is, spermatozoa."

  She laughed loudly, out of control, and her face seemed to glow with discovery and despair.

  Wwwyye looked at Nioh and fired off with venomous irony.

  "You're so pathetic that even Rabbi Worse Devil wanted to screw you over with your name," she said. "Your name literally means cum."

  The Chancellor laughed even louder.

  And Nioh… Nioh snapped.

  He started kicking and flailing, stamping his feet in rage, red-faced, shaking, like a child throwing a tantrum, but trapped inside a body that should not exist.

  "SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!" he screamed, his voice coming out shrill with hatred and despair. "Respect my father, respect my Abba. Don’t call him that. My Abba loves me."

  Wwwyye went deeper, with that cruelty only someone trapped and afraid can pull from their pocket.

  "Loves you so much he sent you alone on a suicide mission, you damned homunculus," she taunted. "THE-IMPERIUM is going to destroy you."

  The Chancellor laughed louder, and it seemed to punch holes in Nioh’s head. He doubled over, red, drooling, his body shaking as if fever and hatred had fused together.

  "My Abba would never do anything bad to me," he said, his voice breaking into sobs that turned into coughing. "My Abba loves me. I am unique, important, and special to him."

  Wwwyye didn’t stop. She smiled like someone turning a blade.

  "You're just another disposable homunculus in your ridiculous, pathetic family of homunculi," she said. "You're not even a real human being."

  She narrowed her eyes, as if taking aim at his pride.

  "You were born inside a bottle of alcohol that Rabbi Worse Devil was going to throw away."

  The effect was immediate.

  Nioh gagged, and then he vomited.

  His small body folded in on itself, and the cough became a spasm, and drool ran down as if the rage had melted something inside. He trembled, red, frantic, and the words came out mixed with vomit and indignation.

  "Shut up, you damned thing," he spat and coughed. "I’m special to my Abba. Don’t call me a homunculus. I’m much more than that, my Abba told me."

  The Chancellor kept laughing as if her head had slipped out of control.

  Then Nioh fumbled through his pockets with trembling hands and pulled out the little bottle of "syrup."

  He brought it to his mouth as if it were air.

  And stopped.

  The bottle was empty.

  He stared as if he couldn’t believe it. Looked again. Shook it. Nothing.

  His face twisted into an expression of pure panic, and the episode worsened as if the ground had been ripped out from under his mind.

  He screamed something incomprehensible, and hurled the bottle to the floor with force.

  The glass shattered.

  The sound of the splintering cut through the vault beneath the altar.

  And then Nioh, still kneeling, hunched over, fell onto his side.

  His whole body began to tremble.

  A convulsion.

  "What is this?" Americ-Ana screamed, trying to pull the body and discovering, again, that there was no body, only web. "What’s happening to him?"

  Astyam, bound, his neck forcing an impossible angle to see, answered with his voice failing somewhere between shock and instinct.

  "It looks like he’s… transforming?"

  Wwwyye twisted, the web creaking softly, and let out a shout that was more rage than fear.

  "What the fuck is this?"

  On the floor, Nioh convulsed as if his body had decided to expel its own human shape. His skin began to bubble. It wasn’t sweat, it wasn’t ordinary fever, it was an internal activity, as if something underneath were pushing, digging, trying to be born. His whole body shook in spasms, and the vault beneath the altar became saturated with that wet sound of something alive losing its structure.

  Americ-Ana felt panic rise with a metallic taste.

  "We need to get out of here," she said, her voice trembling. "This isn’t going to end well."

  The Chancellor shifted inside the web, trying to win a millimeter of freedom, and her tone came hard, authoritarian, almost irritated by other people’s fear.

  "Calm down, children," she said, breathless. "He is taking his original homunculus form."

  The sentence struck Americ-Ana like a confirmation she did not want to have. Her eyes could not look away, not out of courage, but out of hypnotic horror. She watched the metamorphosis as if the world were forced to show the trick all the way to the end.

  Nioh’s body changed. His mass reorganized. The human contours lost meaning, as if hands, legs, face, all of it were only a polite version of something much older and much more wrong. What remained was a ball of manure, alive, moving, with a whitish, sticky, milky liquid pulsing through scattered veins.

  It was still taking shape.

  And then it took another.

  The mass rose in a slow, grotesque movement. It became a large head, heavy, deformed, and from it two lateral arms and two legs emerged. The creature stood up, swaying, as if it were learning how to exist again.

  And it began to walk.

  Toward them.

  Americ-Ana screamed. Astyam screamed. Wwwyye screamed. The sound of the three blended with the sound of the web holding their bodies to the floor, with the sound of the vault keeping everything without mercy.

  "Get out of here, you disgusting monster!" Wwwyye yelled, her voice trembling with hatred.

  The Chancellor screamed too, and her voice sounded like the roar of a lioness defending her territory.

  "Leave the children in peace!"

  The head staggered closer. Each step felt like an engineering mistake committed on purpose. And then, suddenly, that head split open down the middle, as if a fissure had been torn into matter itself.

  The stench came like a punch.

  A horrible stench of feces, hot, acidic, so concentrated that eyes burned at once, and Americ-Ana’s nose burned from the inside, as if the smell had a blade. Her throat closed in a reflex of vomit and fear.

  Inside the opened head there was a bizarre little humanoid.

  It drooled from its eyes and from its deformed mouth, as if it were crying and salivating at the same time, and it was stuck to nerve endings, living threads that linked the small body to the large body, as if those endings were the reins that controlled the carcass.

  It moved, and the head with legs and arms obeyed like a zombie horse.

  It came straight to Americ-Ana.

  She tried to pull back and couldn’t. She tried to raise her hand and couldn’t. All she had was her gaze and her panic.

  The creature came within centimeters of her face.

  The little being touched Americ-Ana’s face with hideous little arms, and the slime and the feces-marks stayed on her skin like a stamp of profanation. The sensation was cold and hot at the same time, sticky, invasive, and the disgust turned into vertigo.

  Its voice came low, far too intimate, like a confession made with poison.

  "I had such beautiful plans for the two of us. We were going to run away together. Your grandparents and Poppandacorn would come with us. We would be happy anywhere in the world you wanted, but you ruined everything."

  Americ-Ana trembled so hard she could feel a tooth knocking.

  He brought the deformed face a little closer.

  "You kissed me and you held me and you deluded me, just like all women always do."

  Americ-Ana breathed in pieces, trying to find the Nioh she had known somewhere that perhaps had never existed.

  "Please," she said, almost without a voice. "Don’t hurt me. You’re not the Nioh I know. The real Nioh is in there somewhere."

  The little being tilted its head, and the milky liquid pulsed in the veins of the larger body as if answering the sentence.

  "But I am Nioh Nemmesis," he said, and there was a sickly sweetness there. "The beloved of Abba."

  Americ-Ana saw the movement before she understood.

  He moved as if to kiss her.

  Her stomach turned to ice.

  The Chancellor shouted, her voice cutting through the vault like a sacred command.

  "Nioh Nemmesis, step away from that student now."

  He ignored her.

  He kept pressing forward, slowly, as if savoring her fear.

  Wwwyye, pinned to the floor, found the only weapon she had, and shouted with force, like someone firing a shot into an enemy’s ear.

  "Your time of freedom is on a timer, Nioh. Trinity Bustanay went to call the authorities."

  The sentence hit.

  The little being stopped mid-gesture, and the head with arms and legs seemed to hesitate too, as if the news had yanked a thread inside him. His attention slid off Americ-Ana, and he backed away a little, looking toward Wwwyye with a kind of new hatred, mixed with urgency.

  "Then we’d better be quick," he said, and his voice went colder. "I’ll be right back."

  He smiled, and the smile did not seem human, it seemed like a function.

  "And when I come back, I’ll have a very special surprise for you, Americ-Ana."

  He raised one of the little arms and pointed as if he were showing a secret.

  "You won’t believe what that little purple finger of that silly teddy bear of yours is capable of. When it touches the little tree of colored stained glass, where I have already been tonight, we can gain access to anywhere in the world."

  The word "world" came out like a threat and a promise.

  "Anywhere at all."

  The little being let out a burst of laughter, and the laughter came with drool from the eyes and from the mouth, like a laugh that could not tell whether it was pleasure or pain.

  Then the head closed.

  The fissure sealed with a wet crack, and the stench seemed to stay trapped inside it, but it did not go away, it clung to the air, burning.

  The bizarre body moved, far too fast for something so wrong. It staggered, but it obeyed. It turned toward Poppandacorn, grabbed the broken little body, and began to drag it across the floor again.

  The dragging sound returned, metal, plastic, plush, like a mechanical lament.

  The head with legs and arms moved away, swallowed by the shadows of the vault beneath the altar, until it vanished from sight.

  And the silence that remained was not relief.

  It was the promise that he would return.

  Wwwyye thrashed with all the strength she still had. The web did not give. On the contrary, it seemed to have a will of its own, as if each attempt to escape were a command for it to tighten further.

  "How is this possible?" she growled, her whole body trembling with rage. "It feels like the more I move, the tighter this thing gets."

  Americ-Ana tried to pull her arm and felt the same cruel answer. The web did not only bind, it punished. She took a short breath, her heart beating too fast, and looked toward the emptiness where Nioh had disappeared, as if expecting him to come back at any second.

  "We need to find a way out of here and call the authorities," she said, her voice failing. "Before Nioh comes back. Now that he’s revealed himself as a homunculus, he seems completely beside himself. I’m afraid."

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  Astyam turned his face, trying to see past his own panic. His eyes ran over the floor, over the darkness around the Temple, over anything that could serve as an anchor.

  "Wait a moment," he said, confused, and his tone grew sharper. "Where is Antichrist? Did anyone see him?"

  Americ-Ana tried to remember the last second the little fox had been there. Nothing came with clarity, only the feeling that the world had lost pieces.

  "No," she answered, forcing her neck to look around.

  "Me neither," Wwwyye said, and began to search with her eyes as if she could pull the fox back with rage alone.

  The three of them began to shout, the sound hitting the vault and coming back with a bad echo, an echo of something stored away.

  "Antichrist!"

  "Antichrist!"

  "Antichrist!"

  The Chancellor breathed hard, trapped in her own web, and for an instant it seemed her fury was greater than her pain. The voice came out like a thought slipping loose.

  "I still can’t believe I didn’t notice there was a damned homunculus among this year’s initiates." She swallowed hard. "How could I be so stupid? How were my original version and my 'Sweet' version not able to see that?"

  Americ-Ana froze. The sentence entered her like a snap. Fear gave way to a sharpened attention, the kind that is born when someone realizes they’ve been deceived for a long time.

  "Wait, what?" Americ-Ana said, panic turning into demand. "Original version, 'Sweet' version? What does that mean, Madame Chancellor?"

  The Chancellor blinked, as if realizing she’d said too much.

  "What? How?" She hesitated, and tried to retreat back into herself. "Ah... nothing... nothing important. I was just thinking out loud."

  Americ-Ana didn’t let it go.

  "Madame Chancellor, forgive me, but if you don’t start explaining yourself now," Americ-Ana’s voice rose, trembling, "when we get out of here I’m going to the QUEEN ORION bunker, in the Geburah Pyramid, and request an investigation against you. I’m tired of all this confusion."

  Americ-Ana’s throat tightened, and the tears came without asking permission. The web held the body, but what hurt more was the feeling of being trapped inside a game whose rules no one bothered to explain.

  "A few moments ago I was in a bizarre laboratory," Americ-Ana continued, crying, the air coming in jolts, "and I saw you and other people, including Seth, floating inside an even more bizarre tank, completely unconscious."

  The Chancellor closed her eyes for a second, as if trying to keep herself from coming apart. Her voice grew lower, firmer, trying to impose order on chaos.

  "Americ-Ana, please, calm down. Letting emotion take over in a moment like this and losing your calm only makes things worse."

  That only made Americ-Ana cry harder. The feeling of having no ground, no map, no one reliable, swelled like fever.

  "I just don’t know who else to trust," she said, her voice breaking. "Everything here is so full of mysteries and secrets. Everything here is so surreal, and sometimes I feel like I’m going to lose my mind."

  Astyam and Wwwyye, bound the same way, tried to say something to her, to hold back the tide, but no word seemed large enough.

  The Chancellor watched Americ-Ana come undone and made a decision, like someone cutting a knot with a knife.

  "Okay. Okay." She took a deep breath. "I’m going to tell you about that laboratory you saw. But please, promise you’ll calm down."

  Americ-Ana looked at her with wet eyes, anger and fear mixed together, and nodded. Astyam and Wwwyye stayed alert, their silence turning into focus.

  The Chancellor drew in a slow breath and began.

  "There is a club, the 'Mister Dolphin Club,'" she said, and the name sounded absurd in that place. "This club is associated with the Ars Goetia demon Ronove. This club was founded by TRIPLE ONE FOODS."

  Wwwyye frowned at once.

  "Then that club belongs to Patron Uvo." She spat the name as if it were filth. "He is the CEO of TRIPLE ONE FOODS."

  "Exactly," the Chancellor confirmed. "And one of that group’s objectives is to create new products for the Poopghene franchise."

  Americ-Ana felt a bitter taste in her mouth. Poopghene had always sounded like a gimmick, like marketing. Here, it felt like an altar. Besides, it was impossible not to think of Poppandacorn.

  "As you know, all technology and innovation in THE-IMPERIUM come from demonic knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence," the Chancellor continued. "And the 'Mister Dolphin Club' always uses the Ars Goetia demon Ronove for that."

  Astyam spoke with the tone of someone fitting a piece that had been loose.

  "That explains why it’s always someone from the Organ 'The Strategist', tied to Patron Uvo, who manages to secure a pact with the demon Ronove."

  "Exactly!" the Chancellor said, as if relieved that someone was following.

  Americ-Ana forced the question, because it was either that or break.

  "But what do those bodies inside the laboratory, including yours, Madame Chancellor, have to do with the production of Poopghene food?" She swallowed hard. "How does it connect? Why are you and Seth part of it?"

  The Chancellor took a deep breath, and for a second her mask of authority seemed to falter, revealing fatigue.

  "As I already told you, Americ-Ana, I wasn’t in a position to study at Equal One Zero Academy," she said. "Bringing Seth here was very challenging."

  Her voice grew rougher, more real.

  "TRIPLE ONE FOODS, through the 'Mister Dolphin Club', pays people so that new products can be tested on them before they go to market, before they are sold to THE-IMPERIUM’s consumer," she paused, as if the pause were shame. "Seth and I applied and submitted ourselves to some tests so we could get money. Expenses in THE-IMPERIUM are enormous, and Seth is still at Equal One Zero Academy, which makes everything even more complicated. Seth isn’t a scholarship student like you are, Americ-Ana."

  Americ-Ana felt shock turn into a crooked kind of understanding, and then the memory of the "Sweet" and "Sour" panels in the laboratory came rushing back.

  "So this new product from the Poopghene franchise that you and Seth agreed to be part of as an experiment has something to do with the rings with a dolphin insignia that I’ve been seeing everywhere?" Americ-Ana asked.

  "Exactly," the Chancellor replied. "Seth and I were the first to try a new product from the Poopghene franchise that consists of a lollipop ring."

  Americ-Ana felt her brain protest. A lollipop ring. A laboratory. A dolphin demon. Everything seemed like a joke, until it turned into a knife.

  "And by using this ring," the Chancellor continued, "the person wearing it creates two clones. Two versions of themselves, one 'Sweet' version and another 'Sour' version."

  Wwwyye let out a short laugh, without humor.

  "Let me guess." She rolled her eyes. "The 'Sweet' version of the clone brings out the good things in your personality. And the 'Sour' version of the clone brings out the not-so-good things in your personality."

  "Exactly," the Chancellor said.

  Wwwyye breathed through her nose, sarcastic.

  "Man, that’s so THE-IMPERIUM."

  Americ-Ana wore a thoughtful expression, as if assembling a mental puzzle with pieces that cut her fingers.

  "So wait a second..." she said slowly. "Does that mean that when you, Madame Chancellor, use 'honey' in your sentences, that’s your 'Sweet' version?"

  The Chancellor smiled, a smile that seemed to confess an uncomfortable truth.

  "Exactly. Although saying 'honey' is part of my original version." She breathed. "This version of mine here is the 'Sour' one."

  Americ-Ana felt her stomach tighten. Everything in her wanted to scream, "this is madness," but the entire night had been a catalog of madness that worked.

  "My 'Sweet' version, for example, has an aversion to traveling through Jump Chronos Station," the Chancellor continued. "Tonight, in particular, when I saw I would have to be hard on you because of Miss Helllwk’s disappearance and because of Americ-Ana’s approach to Mr. Nemmesis’s cell, I chose the 'Sour' version."

  Astyam’s eyes widened, his curiosity cutting through the fear.

  "Did everything go well with those experiments, or were there any side effects?"

  "Ah... everything went great," the Chancellor replied. "It was a success."

  The casual way she said "success" made Americ-Ana feel a small nausea, different from before, an ethical nausea.

  "Right after Seth and I reacted well to the new product," the Chancellor continued, "other people already volunteered to be the first in THE-IMPERIUM to use the new product."

  Americ-Ana drew in a breath.

  "That’s why I saw Beni, I mean, Adoniram, Abda, Patron Uvo, Thor, Jessie, Donnie, Parys Bloodpure, and Nome-Rocky in that bizarre laboratory."

  The Chancellor confirmed it only with a nod.

  Astyam spoke, and his mind seemed to run faster than his bound body.

  "I think this whole clones thing will be a success, especially because, according to THE-IMPERIUM’s newspapers, the number of people against the exploitation of Moss Human has only been increasing."

  He swallowed hard and threw out the question no one wanted to ask.

  "But wait... if you, Madame Chancellor, are the 'Sour' version and you said you 'chose' between the two versions, where is the original Chancellor?"

  The Chancellor answered without hesitation.

  "In the laboratory Americ-Ana said she saw."

  The sentence fell like weight.

  "Everything that happens to me," she continued, "to this 'Sour' version, and also to the 'Sweet' version, is simultaneously recorded and captured by the memories, by the conscious, the unconscious, and the subconscious of the original Chancellor. We are linked in everything."

  Astyam let out a small sound, half fascination, half horror.

  "It really is fascinating," he said. "Like Wwwyye said, very typical of THE-IMPERIUM."

  The Chancellor concluded with the same calm of someone reciting a technical sheet.

  "All thanks to the teachings of the Ars Goetia demon Ronove."

  Americ-Ana felt the question rise like urgency.

  "But wait... does that mean all those people I saw in the laboratory are the original versions?"

  "Yes," the Chancellor replied. "Everyone in there is an 'original.'"

  She narrowed her eyes, noticing the fear on Americ-Ana’s face even with the web covering part of it.

  "But why the question? You still seemed worried. Why?"

  Americ-Ana spoke quickly, as if she needed to pour it out before she collapsed again.

  "Nioh Nemmesis was there in that laboratory," she said. "And what if, all of a sudden, he does something bad to all those original versions?"

  The Chancellor went rigid.

  "That would be a tragedy," she said, and the word "tragedy" there was not drama, it was calculation. "What happens to the 'Sweet' and 'Sour' clone versions does not affect the 'original' version. But if something happens to the 'original' version, the 'Sweet' and 'Sour' versions feel the impact immediately."

  Americ-Ana felt her mind fire off.

  "Chancellor, are you okay?" she asked, almost without noticing the question was a test. "If you are okay, that means Nioh didn’t do anything to the Chancellor’s original version."

  Wwwyye shifted inside the web as if she wanted to tear her own body open to escape.

  "That’s even more reason to get out of here as fast as possible," she said, furious. "There’s too much at stake. We can’t let that little runt Nioh Nemmesis draw the Glory of God and escape unscathed. He has to pay for his crimes."

  The silence that followed was short.

  Astyam went suddenly still, as if his body had switched off panic to switch on his hearing.

  "Wait... silence!" he said, low. "I’m hearing something."

  Americ-Ana felt her stomach tighten, and the vault seemed to grow darker than before.

  "I’m hearing something too," she whispered. "Has Nioh already come back?"

  The Chancellor breathed, and her voice came tense, but different. It wasn’t fear, it was recognition.

  "I’m hearing something too," she said. "But wait... I know that sound."

  The sound drew closer, growing in the dark like a promise of movement, until it became something identifiable, a small, insistent rhythm, almost impatient.

  Everyone turned their heads in the same direction at the same time.

  And then he appeared.

  Head Keys came forward at a brisk pace, his disproportionate feet striking the floor in a hurry, making those characteristic little noises, half indignant, half happy, as if his whole body were saying, "I’m here, I’m here, I’m here."

  The Chancellor let out a cry that didn’t fit her, a cry of pure joy, almost childish.

  "My goodness! Head Keys! I never thought I’d be so happy to see you."

  Head Keys darted to her and began to hop in little jumps, brushing against her, making tiny sounds of euphoria, like a little guard who finds the queen and wants a medal.

  Astyam drew in a breath, relieved.

  "That’s an excellent sign," he said. "It means Trinity Bustanay managed to call for help."

  "It means help is coming," Wwwyye added, with a brief smile that lasted a second and turned back into tension.

  The Chancellor recovered her posture quickly, as if happiness were only a reflex allowed for an instant.

  "But that doesn’t mean we can stand still," she said, hard. "We need to act. Quick, Head Keys, help me get rid of this web."

  Head Keys was already about to move toward her, but Americ-Ana forced her voice through the web, urgency tearing at her throat.

  "Madame Chancellor… forgive me, but don’t you think it would be better for Head Keys to free me first?" She swallowed hard, panic trying to turn into strategy. "I’m in possession of the demon Andras in my KING MatNat sphere. He can help us."

  The Chancellor blinked, calculating, and nodded.

  "Well thought out," she said. "Head Keys, help Americ-Ana get free first."

  Head Keys turned at once and ran to Americ-Ana.

  She was lying there, swallowed by that thick layer of Spyder web, dense, glinting faintly under the distant light, with the texture of braided steel. The web held her body like a cocoon.

  Head Keys came close and, for a second, petted Americ-Ana’s face, brushing his little head against her, as if to say, "I’m here."

  The Chancellor almost growled.

  "Head Keys, this is no time for games," she shouted. "Quick! Free the girl before the enemy comes back."

  Head Keys startled, gave a little hop, let out a tiny sound like someone being scolded by the highest authority, and changed completely.

  His body went rigid.

  Americ-Ana took a deep breath and, with a minimal movement of her chin, pointed to her chest, to the neck area where the necklace was fastened beneath the web.

  "Here," she said, her voice tight. "Can you break through this layer of web?"

  Head Keys made a short, determined sound and attacked with the only resource he had.

  His teeth.

  He bit into the edge of the web with force. And the web answered like steel. It didn’t tear, it didn’t give, it didn’t offer even the slightest “softness” a living material should have. It was like trying to eat a grate.

  Head Keys didn’t give up.

  He bit again. And again. His whole little body trembled. His big feet kicked at the air in uncoordinated movements, looking for purchase, looking for traction. Each bite came with a furious little noise, as if he were cursing the web with his own mouth.

  Americ-Ana felt the tiny tugs in the web near her neck. She felt Head Keys’s effort as if it were a little engine of courage working on top of her.

  He bit, pulled, twisted his head.

  Nothing.

  He bit again.

  Nothing.

  The effort began to turn into desperation. Head Keys increased the intensity, his little feet thrashing, his whole body entering a ferocious struggle, like a little soldier who is afraid but goes anyway.

  Until he lost his balance.

  He fell backward, onto the floor, on his back.

  He lay there for a second, panting, making a weak little sound, almost spent, as if he were trying to pull air through his mouth.

  The Chancellor shouted at him, and her voice sharpened with urgency.

  "Quick, Head Keys! Strength! This is no time for distraction. Strength! Come on!"

  Head Keys moved his big feet as if trying to wake his own body. He turned over, pushed himself up with effort, and came back.

  Again.

  Teeth on the web.

  He bit.

  He pulled.

  His head shook as if it might explode from effort. The sound of his teeth striking the hard strand was dry, frustrating, cruel. He tried to carve a path centimeter by centimeter toward Americ-Ana’s neck, where the necklace lay hidden.

  The struggle seemed impossible.

  And yet he kept going.

  Astyam, bound, watching it, felt something old and human being born there, the urge to root for someone, as if cheering were real magic.

  "Head Keys!" he began.

  Wwwyye joined in, without even thinking.

  "Head Keys!"

  The two of them, their voices trapped in the web and in urgency, began to repeat it like a war chant, like fuel.

  "Head Keys! Head Keys! Head Keys! Go! Go! Go!"

  And Head Keys heard.

  His little body went rigid.

  His expression, if that face could even have an expression, tightened as if he were a mini Spartan about to die with honor. He let out a short, ferocious little sound, and bit with everything he had.

  It was a bite that seemed impossible for a creature twenty centimeters tall.

  But something gave.

  A sound.

  A thin snap.

  A microfissure.

  The web opened a small tear, a crack in the mesh, minimal, almost ridiculous to an outside eye, but to Americ-Ana it was a door.

  She felt the air come in differently.

  She felt the necklace more within reach.

  Her eyes widened.

  "Yes! Yes! Yes!" she shouted, and her voice almost turned into laughter of relief. "Head Keys! You did it! It’s already possible to reach the KING MatNat sphere!"

  Head Keys let out a triumphant little sound, exhausted but alive, and angled his body toward the opening.

  Americ-Ana swallowed, her heart beating so hard it seemed it wanted to tear the web from the inside.

  "Quick, boy," she said, with sharp urgency. "Take the KING MatNat sphere and put it in my mouth."

  Head Keys hesitated for a millisecond, as if he understood the weight of the task. And then he did it.

  He leaned over Americ-Ana, put his mouth into the fissure with absolute care, found the necklace, and took the KING MatNat sphere between his teeth as if it were a fragile egg.

  Americ-Ana opened her mouth.

  Head Keys placed the sphere on her tongue, slowly, almost ceremonially, as if placing a key on an altar.

  Americ-Ana closed her eyes at once.

  Her tongue held the sphere.

  Her mouth closed.

  She tried to concentrate, to try to summon the demon Andras as if summoning an ancient force, a name that had to obey.

  But then something passed.

  A shadow, fast, cold, so close it almost touched Americ-Ana’s face.

  Americ-Ana opened her eyes in shock.

  Head Keys was no longer there.

  The fright made her draw the sphere even deeper into her mouth, pressing it against her tongue, protecting it the way someone protects a secret with their teeth.

  And then reality snapped into place with violence.

  Nioh Nemmesis had come back.

  Spyder, the robotic spider, in a fraction of seconds, projected one of its long metallic legs.

  The leg cut through the air with a predator’s precision.

  And caught Head Keys midair, the way a spider catches a fly in the middle of flight.

  Americ-Ana’s eyes chased the blur and found the scene before her brain could understand it.

  Nioh Nemmesis was there, in homunculus form, and Spyder beside him, motionless, perfect, with its metallic leg raised like a slaughterhouse hook.

  Head Keys was trapped on it.

  Head Keys shook in the air like a living doll that refuses to die. The huge little feet kicked at nothing, the whole little body trembled, and the little noises he made had turned into a desperate sequence, short, insistent, like a coded plea for help.

  Americ-Ana felt the KING MatNat sphere crushing her tongue, and her closed mouth became an extra panic. She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t call out. Couldn’t spit. She could only watch.

  Nioh took a step.

  The head of the homunculus Nioh split open down the middle, like a fissure that should not exist, and the air was seized by a hot, filthy, aggressive breath. The smell hit the nose like a slap. Americ-Ana felt it burn inside, as if the air itself had turned chemical.

  Inside, the little humanoid appeared, drooling, stuck to the endings that controlled that mass. His eyes carried a sick satisfaction.

  Spyder brought the leg closer.

  No hurry.

  No mistake.

  And released Head Keys right toward him.

  Head Keys tried to bite the metal leg in desperation, tried to twist, tried to turn his head as if he were a tiny beast. Head Keys had no hands, but he had courage, and his courage was screaming.

  Nioh grabbed Head Keys with his bizarre little arms.

  The force didn’t come like a punch, it came like a press. Americ-Ana saw Head Keys’s little body being compressed, and heard a short, dry snap, something being crushed by something that doesn’t care.

  "No!" Wwwyye screamed, and her scream got trapped inside her own body, because the web tightened more when she thrashed.

  Astyam roared with rage, trying to tear his chest out of the web as if it were possible to break steel with anger.

  The Chancellor shouted an order that no one there had the power to obey.

  And Nioh, with that calm of someone playing, brought Head Keys to the open fissure.

  First, the little feet.

  Head Keys kicked with everything he had, striking air, striking nothing, striking destiny as if it were matter. His little noises grew louder, thinner, almost a mechanical sob. He struggled so hard that his whole little body vibrated, trying to escape in the only language he had.

  The little being’s teeth closed.

  The sound was sticky.

  It wasn’t an animal bite, it was crushing. A dry, hard crack, with a short echo in the stone of the vault. Head Keys jerked all at once, as if his life had taken an electric shock.

  Nioh clamped down again.

  And again.

  With each bite came a different snap, like a part breaking, like material giving way. Small pieces fell to the floor with a clink, a metallic sound that felt like an insult, because that was part of him becoming floor.

  Head Keys still tried to fight. Tried to pull the legs back. Tried to push with the body. The little feet no longer kicked with the same force, the movements grew uncoordinated, desperate, as if the body itself were losing its senses.

  The little noises changed.

  From a plea for help they became malfunctions. They turned intermittent. Choked. Like a toy running out of battery, still trying to work because it refuses to accept the end.

  Nioh pulled harder.

  Americ-Ana watched Head Keys’s little body vanish little by little into the fissure, and the worst part was the way Nioh made a point of not hurrying. He wanted the time. He wanted the audience. He wanted the helplessness.

  A louder snap.

  More final.

  Head Keys arched one last time, and the sound he let out wasn’t a scream, it was a thin little noise that died halfway through, cut off, as if someone had yanked a plug from the socket.

  Silence.

  A filthy, heavy silence that made the vault feel larger, colder, more wrong.

  Nioh chewed.

  The sound was wet and hard at the same time, like metal ground against something sticky. Disgust surged up in Americ-Ana so strongly she almost lost the sphere in her mouth. She clenched her jaw by instinct, holding the sphere as if it were the only thing that could still save someone.

  Nioh swallowed.

  The homunculus head closed with an organic sound, like a door of flesh.

  He stood still for a second, satisfied.

  He let out a loud, obscene belch that seemed to hit the walls and come back twice as strong.

  He laughed.

  "Thanks for the snack. Though I prefer my Abba’s precious blood, a little bite now and then doesn’t hurt."

  Astyam made a sound of hatred that turned into a sneeze. Wwwyye sobbed with rage. The Chancellor held her breath, as if guilt had turned to stone in her throat.

  Americ-Ana cried in silence, because her mouth was occupied by a sphere, and her despair occupied the rest.

  Nioh looked straight at her and smiled, savoring the cruellest detail: she couldn’t answer.

  "From what I saw, I arrived at just the right time," he said, sweet as poison. "Were you trying to run away, Americ-Ana? Just when I brought you your big surprise?"

  Americ-Ana’s gaze trembled. She tried to breathe in through her nose without choking, and the tears ran thicker, hot, uncontrolled.

  Nioh made a short gesture to Spyder.

  Spyder vanished into the darkness for a few seconds, too fast, too silent.

  And came back.

  Dragging something.

  The sound came first, scraping stone, insistent, heavy, as if the entire vault were being scored by a metallic fingernail. The thing emerged from within the darkness, being pulled into the light, centimeter by centimeter.

  The noise Spyder made wasn’t only dragging, it was humiliation.

  Americ-Ana saw the trail on the floor first, a wet line, glinting under the vault’s distant light, as if something had been pulled without care, without respect, without soul. Then she saw the web, thick, layered, wrapped like a cocoon.

  And then Americ-Ana’s mind tried to do what it always does when it meets the impossible.

  Americ-Ana’s mind simply denied that reality.

  It wasn’t that. It couldn’t be that. There was no way she could have crossed the bunker, the game, the portals, the levels, only to end up looking at this. Her mind tried to swap the shapes, swap the faces, invent another explanation. It tried to delay reality for a few seconds, as if delay were a shield.

  But the world didn’t ask permission.

  Trapped in Spyder’s web, tied up like packages, were Americ-Ana’s grandparents.

  Grandfather. Grandmother.

  That instant when two realities touch without right, without warning, without shame. The world of THE-IMPERIUM, with its demons, its seals, its clubs, its laboratories. And the small, domestic, human world, where wrinkled hands existed, the smell of coffee, repeated phrases, and safety. It was like watching a living room fall into a profane altar.

  Americ-Ana felt the ground vanish beneath her without her moving.

  The KING MatNat sphere was still in her mouth, heavy, pressing against her tongue, and the moan that escaped didn’t become a word. It became a trapped sound, a muffled sob, a malfunction. Her vision blurred with thick tears. Her throat closed. Her stomach turned to stone.

  Nioh watched that expression the way someone watches a toy breaking.

  He laughed.

  Americ-Ana tried to focus on her grandfather’s face. He was unconscious, his mouth slightly open, his body surrendered, as if the world had switched him off with a button. She looked at her grandmother, and it was the same. Unconscious. Suspended between living and becoming an object.

  The web held them as if it were holding merchandise.

  Then Nioh made the gesture.

  Slow. Deliberate. Cruel in the detail.

  The homunculus’s grotesque hand passed over Americ-Ana’s grandmother’s face, as if it were a caress, as if it were ownership. The palm left a dirty, dark, sticky mark. A streak of feces and whitish liquid, like a signature.

  Americ-Ana felt her blood boil.

  Her chest heated like a furnace. The world turned red on the inside. It wasn’t only rage, it was a sudden fever, a desire to destroy the universe with her teeth.

  She pushed the sphere with her tongue.

  The sphere slid, slick with saliva and despair, and wedged between her teeth. Her jaw hurt from the pressure. Her mouth opened a little, just enough for her voice to pass through, small, clenched, almost an animal whisper.

  "Demon Andras… I want to be set free now."

  There was no beautiful flash.

  There was an answer.

  Spyder’s web snapped as if it had been judged. The strands tightened for a second, resisting, and then they broke in rapid sequences, bursting around her body. The pressure vanished all at once, and Americ-Ana fell to the side, free, spitting air as if she had returned to existence.

  She stood up slowly, a little unsteady, still with the sphere between her teeth, and tore the sphere out with her hand, gripping it hard, as if it were her heart outside her chest.

  Nioh stayed still for a second.

  His expression opened into disbelief, as if reality had made a mistake against him.

  Then it turned into desperation.

  "How…?"

  He didn’t finish. He understood too fast.

  Nioh spun toward Spyder and gave a short command. Spyder leaned in, the metallic leg adjusted its angle, and a jet of web shot out like a bullet, fast, precise, going straight for Americ-Ana’s chest.

  The web didn’t reach her.

  It was cut in midair.

  A dry crack, like a whip being snapped, and the white mesh fell in pieces before it could touch her.

  Americ-Ana no longer had her own skin.

  The demon Andras had answered as armor.

  Snake skin appeared fused from neck to feet, like a second living body, dark, gleaming in thin plates that seemed to breathe with Americ-Ana. The outline of Americ-Ana’s face went harder. Her eyes looked deeper. The air around seemed to chill out of respect and fear.

  And Americ-Ana’s left hand was no longer a hand.

  It was a blade.

  An arm that ended in a sword, organic and absurd, as if bone had stretched itself into a weapon and the skin of the demon Andras had stitched everything over it. The blade seemed at once ancient and newborn, and the sensation was that it wanted to cut.

  Americ-Ana took a step and leveled the sword at Nioh.

  "You messed with the wrong granddaughter, Nioh. Let my grandparents go, now!"

  Americ-Ana lunged.

  Nioh flinched backward on instinct, and Spyder threw itself in front of him like a shield. The metallic legs struck the floor with a crack of steel. The spider body rose and hurled itself at Americ-Ana, fast, heavy, a machine hunting destruction.

  The impact was brutal.

  Americ-Ana pivoted and cut.

  The blade went through one of Spyder’s legs and the sound was metal screaming, a high shriek, sparks spraying like insects of light. The leg hit the floor with a dry thud, still twitching.

  Another leg came right after it, trying to pin the sword, lock the arm, dominate the movement.

  Americ-Ana cut again, short and precise.

  Another leg fell.

  Spyder reorganized without hesitation. Where a leg was missing, an internal structure opened, and a new piece projected outward with a quick click, as if its body had an infinite reserve of limbs. The machine didn’t feel pain, it only recalibrated.

  Spyder fired web.

  The web came for the sword-arm, trying to glue the blade, gum up the cut, neutralize the only real danger.

  Americ-Ana dragged the blade along the floor and whipped it up with violence, tearing the web in the motion as if cutting wet cloth. She heard, behind her, the muffled screams.

  Wwwyye still trapped. Astyam still trapped. The Chancellor still trapped.

  And her grandparents there, motionless, hanging in cruelty.

  Americ-Ana swallowed the panic and spat the next command with the same courage that hurt.

  "Demon Andras… clothe Astyam and Wwwyye in infernal armor. Now!"

  The request barely finished, and the answer came like a bite.

  The skin of the demon Andras rose over Wwwyye’s body first, like a serpent dressing a serpent. The web tightened for a second, but the armor made the strands lose their hold, opening enough space for her to rise with rage in her eyes. In place of her right arm and hand, a hammer was born, thick, heavy, sheathed in Andras’s skin, with a handle that seemed muscle and weapon at the same time.

  Astyam rose too, the armor fused to his body, his face darker, his gaze more focused. In place of his right hand, a large spiked ball appeared, coated in the same snake skin, like a living war star, made to crush.

  Spyder realized the mistake too late.

  Wwwyye surged forward like fury.

  The hammer struck a metallic leg and the sound was like a bell breaking, metal buckling, the machine staggering for half a second.

  Astyam came from the opposite angle and swung the spiked ball with his entire body, striking Spyder’s mechanical abdomen. The impact made the spider’s body creak, and for a second it seemed less perfect, more mortal.

  Americ-Ana seized the opening and cut two more legs in quick succession, fast, without mercy.

  But Spyder was the kind of thing built to win through persistence.

  It stepped back and opened its body, as if drawing in breath. Three jets of web shot out at different angles, one for the sword, another for the hammer, another for the spiked ball. The meshes weren’t coming just to bind an arm, they were coming to bind the entire body, to glue shoulder, chest, neck, to lock the knee.

  Americ-Ana tried to cut in midair. Wwwyye tried to crush. Astyam tried to swing.

  The web won by volume.

  It stuck.

  It tightened.

  It pulled.

  In seconds, Americ-Ana, Astyam, and Wwwyye were trapped again, glued to the floor, the demon Andras’s armor resisting, but being swallowed by the pressure, as if Spyder were learning how to outmaneuver even the demon.

  The Chancellor, still trapped, shouted with a blown-out voice.

  "Americ-Ana, strength! Be strong! Use the demon Andras to your advantage. Focus on him!"

  Americ-Ana tried. She clenched the sphere in her hand with everything she had, as if to crush it. Tried to breathe. Tried to want again.

  Spyder didn’t wait.

  One of its metallic legs lifted and came down like a punch toward the Chancellor.

  The impact was dry, heavy, without heroic drama.

  The Chancellor’s “Sour” version toppled, her head hitting the floor, and she blacked out at once, her body going limp inside her own web.

  The sound of the vault seemed to worsen.

  Nioh laughed, satisfied, and stepped back, like someone who lets the toys fight while he sets up the spectacle.

  He went into the shadows and came back dragging more bodies.

  It wasn’t just one. It was several.

  Bodies soaked in "stasis fluid", dripping onto the floor, skin gleaming under the distant light as if they had been fished out of a tank. Hair stuck to foreheads. Clothes clinging. Dead weight scraping stone, stone, stone, in a rhythm that felt like a cruel clock.

  Nioh added those bodies to Americ-Ana’s grandparents, drawing everything closer, stacking fates.

  Nioh stood still for an instant, staring at Americ-Ana as if he were looking at the only piece of the world that still made sense to him.

  "I really liked you a lot, Americ-Ana." The voice came out wet, faltering, as if it came from a place that wasn’t a throat, but the bottom of a vial. "Everything I said was true. I had plans. I was going to take it seriously when I said I wanted to run away with you."

  He took one more step, and his smell arrived before the rest. A hot, organic, wrong stench, mixed with that thick milk that seemed to exist inside him, and that made the air in the vault seem to spoil.

  "You always surprised me. You surprised me in the best possible way." The little humanoid’s tiny eyes gleamed with a kind of sick hope. "I needed a way to get inside the portal that exists in the stone of the Statue of Sisyphus, and you simply threw the solution into my arms."

  Americ-Ana squirmed inside the web. The demon Andras’s skin resisted, snapping under the pressure, but it did not break. She felt the strands tighten over her shoulders, her chest, her ribs, as if every breath were a request for permission.

  "I had been captured by that useless worm, Patron Uvo, and you simply appeared out of nowhere and shot him, setting me free," Nioh said like someone listing proofs of love. "I was sincere when I offered that device, there in Mulafossur, the one that makes tropical juices. I was sincere when I took the risk and took the blame in your place when you were caught with the Diary of Helena Blavatsky."

  He tilted his head, almost tender, almost pathetic.

  "Don’t you see, Americ-Ana? We are the same. You and I. We are marginalized, we don’t fit, and even so we never gave up." His grotesque hand pointed to the side, to the bound cocoons. "Look… I brought your grandparents."

  Americ-Ana’s heart gave a leap that felt like a fall.

  "It was easy to find them after I got access to Poppandacorn’s purple finger and the little tree of colored stained glass inside the stone of the Statue of Sisyphus." Nioh smiled, and the smile looked stitched on. "We can run away from here with your grandparents and Poppandacorn as soon as I complete the ritual, the Glory of God comes down, and I take the new original KING MatNat sphere with the 72 seals."

  He opened his arms as if offering the sky.

  "We can go anywhere you want. Just us. We would live well, happy, like in a dream."

  Those words, the way he said them, didn’t sound like a promise.

  They sounded like a prison with pretty decoration.

  Americ-Ana felt rage rise with the taste of iron on her tongue. She looked into those small eyes, shining with expectation, and answered in a voice cut with hatred.

  "I may be marginalized, I may not fit into any group. But even so, I would never do the monstrous things you did."

  She screamed and thrashed, and the web creaked, the fibers vibrating like steel. Beside her, Wwwyye and Astyam fought within the bindings too, their whole bodies shaking, the demon Andras’s skin snapping like armor under a press.

  Nioh took a half step back, as if he had been slapped.

  "Don’t you understand?" He pointed at her with a homunculus finger, trembling. "Don’t let THE-IMPERIUM’s ideologies blind you. You’re not like them. You’re like me."

  "NEVER!" Americ-Ana screamed, and the scream came out so whole it seemed to tear the still air of the vault. "YOU ARE A MONSTER! You trapped Trinity Bustanay and kept her hostage, worse than an animal. You have no heart, Nioh, you’re just an identical copy of Rabbi Worse Devil."

  Her throat was burning, but she didn’t stop.

  "I may not understand much here in THE-IMPERIUM, but if there’s one thing I understood from the first moment I heard it, it’s this: Rabbi Worse Devil was a monster for forcing a student to stay with him, even against her will, and you, being a mass of his semen and feces, are no different. What do you think you’re going to do? First you imprison Trinity, and then you want to run away with me, for what? I’ll tell you for what. People like Rabbi Worse Devil always want control, to manipulate, to feel big by controlling someone. You’re no different. You’re a narcissist, and unlike Rabbi Worse Devil, you aren’t even a real man."

  The web tightened more, as if reacting to her despair.

  "You’re nothing but a disgusting, despicable homunculus. And as if that weren’t enough, you kidnapped my grandparents. GET ME OUT OF HERE NOW!"

  The silence that came after was short.

  It was the kind of silence that exists only so the world can gather momentum.

  Nioh’s eyes lost that sick “dream” shine and turned into glassy rage.

  "You’re just another THE-IMPERIUM brainwashed girl," he spat, the words flecked with thick saliva. "Don’t ask for mercy when your hour comes, you bitch. I tried to help you. I tried. But you didn’t want it."

  He drew a deep breath, and it seemed even his mass was bubbling from the inside.

  "Look what you forced me to do."

  Nioh turned his head slowly, like someone choosing a piece on a board. And began to walk toward the fallen Chancellor, still wrapped in web, unconscious.

  Americ-Ana felt ice run through her spine inside Andras’s armor.

  "Not that…" Americ-Ana said without meaning to, her voice breaking. "How could I forget the Chancellor’s ‘Sour’ version… I could have freed her… I… I…"

  "Nioh!" Americ-Ana screamed, trying to drag herself, but the web held like a fist. "Step away from the Chancellor. What are you going to do? Step away now!"

  "If you touch a single strand of her hair, I’ll kill you, you piece of shit!" Wwwyye howled, thrashing so hard the web seemed to vibrate.

  Astyam tried to keep his voice steady, but it came out cracked. "Nioh, we can still talk. Don’t do anything rash."

  Nioh didn’t even look at them.

  "I don’t want to talk anymore," he said low, and it was more frightening than shouting. "Enough talking. It’s time to act."

  Nioh’s hand grabbed the Chancellor’s cocoon as if he were picking up a parcel. The web stuck to his fingers, pulling strands, making little snaps. He lifted her body easily, as if it weighed nothing. The homunculus head tilted, and Americ-Ana realized, with delayed horror, that he wasn’t taking the Chancellor away.

  He was taking her to his mouth.

  "No!" The screams collided, one on top of the other. "Don’t do this! Stop! Stop now!"

  The mouth of the homunculus Nioh opened.

  It wasn’t a normal mouth. It was a tear. A cut that seemed to open in the middle of the mass, as if his “face” were only a shell splitting apart. The stench came out in a wave, hot, fecal, and made eyes burn at once. The air turned thick, unbreathable, as if someone had poured rot into the vault.

  Nioh shoved the Chancellor’s cocoon inside.

  The web scraped along the edge of the tear, making a dry, harsh sound, like very thick cloth being pulled through a small hole. Her body slid in slowly, snagged on the strands, and for a second her unconscious face appeared between the layers, pale, still, like a wrapped doll.

  Americ-Ana felt her stomach turn so violently she almost vomited inside her own web.

  Nioh swallowed.

  His neck expanded in a wrong way, the mass vibrating, the milky veins pulsing faster, and he strained as if he were doing it with pleasure and rage at the same time. The sound of a throat working, an ugly, deep, repeated “glup,” like a clogged pipe finally giving way.

  He pulled the rest inside with both hands, as if he wanted to speed up the humiliation, and sealed the tear with a wet snap.

  The mouth vanished.

  Only the expression of the little humanoid inside remained, drooling, breathing fast, eyes shining with satisfaction.

  Americ-Ana cried without sound, because her body had no other way to process it.

  Wwwyye screamed as if she were going to tear her throat apart.

  Astyam’s eyes went wide, frozen for a second, as if his mind had snapped a gear.

  Nioh wiped the drool with his hand, without a shred of shame, and spoke like someone complaining.

  "There’s no need for all that drama. It’s just one version of the Chancellor. It’s not the real Chancellor. Not yet."

  Nioh gave a short, satisfied laugh, and turned his body.

  Then he went to the bodies coated in "stasis fluid", choosing the next piece of the world to ruin.

  Americ-Ana’s scream came out as if it had been clawed from her chest.

  "Nioh, what are you going to do? Please, stop!"

  The answer came without hurry, almost elegant in its cruelty, like someone explaining a simple rule of a game.

  "If you had accepted my proposal to run away, Americ-Ana, I would have spared your grandparents and put Wwwyye and Astyam in their place." His voice dripped with a cold pleasure. "But since you didn’t… now suffer the consequences of your choices."

  The web tightened again, reacting to their despair as if it had a life of its own. Americ-Ana felt the strand bite into Andras’s skin, creaking, insisting, a pressure that wasn’t only physical, it was psychological, as if the web wanted to teach submission.

  "No, Nioh!" Wwwyye screamed, choking on rage. "Stop! Let us go now!"

  Astyam was screaming too, but his voice came with a dangerous tremor, from someone who had already gone past fear and was reaching the limit where the body can’t take any more.

  Nioh barely looked. He gave a short command, and Spyder began to gather the bodies covered in "stasis fluid" with a machine’s efficiency that felt like blasphemy in there. The metallic legs dragged, lifted, repositioned, everything with that dry sound of metal scraping stone, web stretching, and the slow dripping of the viscous fluid falling and staining the floor.

  Then he walked up to the bronze vessel.

  Americ-Ana recognized it before thinking. Her mind took a second to accept it was still there, inside the vault, as if THE-IMPERIUM had decided to play archaeology with dirty hands.

  "Bronze Sea…"

  Wwwyye turned her face, confused, trying to breathe in air that already felt too heavy.

  "What is it?"

  "The Bronze Sea." Americ-Ana could barely speak, panic rising and falling in waves. "That bronze pool… with the twelve oxen."

  Astyam drew in a breath, and the idea slipped out loud before he could hold it back.

  "Is he going to drown those bodies in there?"

  "No." Americ-Ana’s word came like a reflex, a desperate denial. "That’s not possible…"

  Americ-Ana shouted, her throat scraping.

  "Nioh! What are you going to do? Stop now, please!"

  Nioh finally turned his head, and the expression of the little humanoid inside him seemed satisfied to be seen.

  "Don’t worry. I’m not going to drown anyone." He let the sentence breathe, and its taste grew worse. "In fact, it will be much worse than that. These bodies will serve as a sacrifice so that the Glory of God comes down."

  His laughter echoed in the vault like metal striking metal.

  Spyder, obedient, arranged the bodies around the Bronze Sea. One by one, on top of each ox, as if it were ritual decoration. Americ-Ana felt a kind of vertigo, not dizziness of the body, but dizziness of reality. What had been symbol became practice. What had been myth became a tool.

  Nioh stopped in front of the Bronze Sea.

  He raised the little box wrapped in parchment, the golden ink gleaming under the vault’s uneven light, and began to read.

  Wwwyye whispered, almost voiceless.

  "What is he doing?"

  "He’s starting a ritual." Americ-Ana’s answer came as if swallowing glass.

  Astyam, eyes glazed, added, recognizing the structure, recognizing the intent.

  "He is reading Psalm 74. He is preparing the ground for the reconstruction. He is purifying so that the Glory of God can descend."

  The ancient words, the way Nioh pronounced them, did not sound like prayer.

  They sounded like a key turning.

  First, it was the water.

  The Bronze Sea, which had been still, began to move as if something were breathing beneath it. A small tremor became continuous motion. The motion became a spin. The spin became a whirlpool.

  The bronze reflected everything warped, as if reality were melting along the contour of that circle.

  Then came the wind.

  Not a normal wind, but an aggressive breath that seemed to come out of the vault’s walls, crossing the Temple, lifting dust, tugging at hair, tearing the air out of the chest. Americ-Ana felt Andras’s skin vibrate, as if the armor were reacting to a greater presence drawing near, a presence that did not ask permission.

  Lightning scored the top of the vault, even without a sky. Thunder exploded as if the rock had become too thin to hold it.

  Wwwyye screamed, her voice tearing.

  "We have to do something, before the Glory of God comes down!"

  Astyam turned his face toward Americ-Ana, and his urgency was so clear it almost hurt.

  "It depends on you. Focus. Speak to the demon Andras."

  Americ-Ana closed her eyes for a second, but it wasn’t a second of calm. It was a second of organized desperation.

  She saw her grandparents in her mind like a blade. Saw the filthy touch of Nioh’s homunculus little hands on her grandmother’s face. Saw Nioh’s laughter. Felt the weight of Poppandacorn being dragged, humiliation turning into a wound.

  And then Americ-Ana called.

  It wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t poetic. It was necessity.

  Inside Americ-Ana, the name of the demon Andras became a command.

  The web answered with snaps.

  A snap. Two. Several. The strands tightened as if being pulled to the limit by invisible hands. Americ-Ana felt the pressure give by a millimeter, then another, and suddenly the world made room.

  The web tore.

  Americ-Ana dropped to one knee, then rose with urgent life. She looked to the side and saw that Wwwyye and Astyam were free too, ripped out of the web’s prison as if someone had cut fate with a knife.

  "Quick!" Americ-Ana shouted, and the word came out with the sound of war. "We have to stop this now!"

  They ran.

  The wind struck. Lightning turned everything into flashes, transforming the entire vault into a sequence of violent photographs. The whirlpool in the Bronze Sea roared, and the twelve bodies on the oxen looked like statues of a modern sacrifice, an altar assembled with haste and malice.

  Nioh kept reading, the little box raised, as if it were a standard.

  Americ-Ana got there first.

  She raised the sword-arm, and the blow came down.

  The blade found Nioh’s mass and tore through it, not like flesh, but like matter that should not exist. A cut that carved a path, ripping a roar out of him, a sound animal and childish at the same time.

  The little box almost slipped.

  For an instant, Americ-Ana thought the little box was going to fall into the Bronze Sea and vanish into the whirlpool.

  Nioh turned with pure hatred, the little humanoid’s eyes shining like two headlights of rancor.

  "Spyder…" he growled, spitting thick saliva. "Finish all of them."

  The answer came through the machine’s body.

  Spyder’s metallic legs fanned out, scoring the vault floor with a sharp sound, and the web exploded in short, taut, precise bursts. The wind of the ritual shoved everything, lightning cracked overhead, and the Bronze Sea’s whirlpool sucked at the air around it, making every breath heavier.

  Americ-Ana moved first.

  The demon Andras’s snakeskin clung to her body, vibrating hot, alive, obedient. The sword, made from her own bone and sheathed in the demon’s dark hide, cut the first jet of web in midair. The strand fell in strips, snapping as it hit the floor.

  Wwwyye came in on the same breath.

  The serpent hammer dropped with brutal force, striking one of Spyder’s legs at the joint. The impact threw sparks, the metal gave, the leg toppled and still tried to crawl, stubborn, grinding on the floor.

  Astyam came behind, without hesitation.

  The spiked ball spun through the air and tore apart two lines of web that were hunting for Americ-Ana’s legs. The strands slapped the ground and tightened again, searching for an anchor in anything, ox, column, rim of the Sea, any point that could become a prison.

  Spyder backed off a handspan, then changed its pattern.

  Spyder didn’t stay defending. Spyder attacked.

  A new leg sprouted from the socket where the previous one had fallen, a black module sliding out with a dry click, and the whole assembly surged forward with a speed that didn’t match its size. Two legs seized the sword-arm, locking the motion in mid-swing, and another leg came down on Americ-Ana’s shoulder, forcing her to the floor.

  Americ-Ana felt the blow run through her bones. The serpent armor took part of the impact, but the pressure landed whole. Her face hit the floor, filthy with dust and metal, and the web was already there, coiling around her chest, her neck, her arm, tightening in layers.

  Wwwyye tried to carve out space with the hammer.

  Spyder pivoted and threw a thicker web in an arc that dropped over the hammer and yanked hard. Wwwyye’s body slid a full meter, her nails scraped the floor, and the strand anchored to the base of one of the bronze oxen. The web went so taut it seemed to produce its own sound, a thin, irritating hum, almost musical.

  Wwwyye snarled, pulled back, tried to wrench the hammer free of the loop.

  The web tightened more.

  Wwwyye lost her breath for a second, the demon Andras’s skin creaked, and the hammer stayed caught in the middle, useless, heavy, dominated.

  Astyam surged toward both of them.

  Astyam saw the sword locked, saw the hammer trapped, saw Spyder’s legs anchoring new lines, using the vault’s own chaos, the wind shoving, the lightning lighting the next lunge, the Bronze Sea pulling and flinging a mist of water into everyone’s face.

  Astyam shouted, but the sound almost got lost in the thunder.

  He hurled the spiked ball straight at the web pinning Americ-Ana. The spikes tore the strand, opened a gap, and he twisted his wrist with force, sawing through more lines, one by one, ripping the prison apart at its base.

  The web tried to re-form. Spyder adjusted its angle, fired again.

  Astyam threw himself into the path.

  Spyder’s legs came down on him all at once, striking chest, shoulder, arm, locking his body in a mechanical embrace. The web followed immediately, wrapping his waist and arms, searching for the floor, searching to lock him down.

  Astyam planted his feet.

  The spiked ball slammed into the ground with violence and caught in a fissure in the bronze, holding fast, holding everything. The machine pulled and he pulled back. The sound of friction became a metal scream.

  In that second, the pressure on Americ-Ana gave. The sword was free enough for her to wrench her arm out and rise onto her knees.

  Wwwyye took advantage of the slack in the strand that held her, twisted her body and yanked the hammer free with a jolt, tearing the web in the motion. She fell to the side, coughed, but got to her feet.

  Spyder tried to swing its focus back to them.

  Astyam locked the machine against his own body, holding the legs tight to himself, forcing Spyder to spend its strength there, forcing the attack to fail. The serpent armor on his body snapped, resisting the crushing, but he was being pressed.

  Even so, Astyam turned his face toward Americ-Ana and Wwwyye.

  His eyes were hard, decided, with no room for doubt.

  "Quick!" Astyam shouted, each syllable torn from his chest. "Go! Stop Nioh! I’ll hold Spyder!"

  Americ-Ana looked at him for an instant that hurt more than any blow.

  Wwwyye looked too.

  And then the two of them turned toward the Bronze Sea, toward the homunculus with the little box raised, toward the ritual that was tearing the sky open inside the vault.

  The whirlpool inside it pulled at the air. The wind cut through the throat, dry, aggressive, and the thunder vibrated in the stone beneath their knees. Americ-Ana felt her stomach tighten, an old tightening, a memory of flight, a memory of a dead king on the floor, a memory of demons working in silence and then hunting her and Poppandacorn.

  "Nioh! Stop this now!" Americ-Ana screamed, her voice cracking in the middle of the gale.

  "I’m going to end you, you damned homunculus!" Wwwyye roared, the snakeskin hammer already moving.

  Wwwyye struck the side of the Bronze Sea with a short, brutal blow.

  The impact ran through the entire vault. The bronze groaned, the ox statues trembled, the water inside rebelled in a leap of black foam, and the twelve bodies bound in web shuddered together, hanging and still under that unbridled wind.

  Nioh lost his balance at the rim. The bizarre body swayed, and for a second it looked like he was going to plunge into the whirlpool.

  He didn’t fall into the water.

  He jolted into himself in a spasm, threw himself out, and crashed face-first onto the floor.

  What came out of Nioh from the fall wasn’t blood. It was worse.

  A hot, fetid, viscous mass, the wrong color, spread across the floor and splashed high. A chunk of shit from the homunculus’s skin hit Americ-Ana’s face with physical force, burning her nose, sticking to her tongue, the odor rising up her throat.

  The demon Andras’s snakeskin tried to seal, but the filth found gaps, gathered in the folds, clung to her neck, her wrists, her face.

  "My God… I’m going to vomit…" Americ-Ana let out, breathless, her voice failing.

  Wwwyye didn’t hold it in. She turned her face and vomited for real, her body convulsing, the sound muffled by the wind and the thunder.

  Nioh took advantage of the distraction.

  He rose onto all fours, trembling, and spat more of that whitish liquid mixed with shit. It wasn’t an elegant jet. It was a gob of matter. It got both of them, from feet to head, and the sensation was hot glue sticking and dragging the demon Andras’s skin downward.

  Americ-Ana bared her teeth, rage climbing up into her skull.

  Wwwyye let out a scream that didn’t sound human. It sounded like stone breaking.

  "Damned bastard! I swear I’m going to kill you!"

  Nioh took advantage of the distraction and crawled to the side of the Bronze Sea, far too fast for someone his size. He vanished for an instant behind one of the columns and came back with something in his hand.

  When Americ-Ana understood, her mind seized for a second.

  Nioh was holding Poppandacorn by the leg.

  Poppandacorn’s body dangled in the air, limp, out cold, deformed from being dragged so much. Torn plush showed metal. The little door of the belly compartment swung, crooked. One of the eyes was dark. The unicorn horn looked dirty with old dust, chipped at the tip.

  "Nioh! No! Leave Poppa alone!" Americ-Ana screamed.

  Her plea seemed to ignite something inside him.

  "I really didn’t want things to be like this, Americ-Ana." The voice came thick, with a cough in the middle. "This is all your fault. Look what you made me do!"

  Nioh grabbed Poppandacorn’s little arm. He held the little hand, the purple little finger still pulsing, weak and stubborn, a light that shouldn’t exist.

  Americ-Ana tried to tear away the feces and the whitish liquid still stuck to her body, but it clung, it pulled, it refused to let go.

  Nioh twisted Poppandacorn’s little arm.

  The sound that came out of Poppandacorn wasn’t a scream. It was a dry snap, intimate, mechanical. The kind of sound the world makes when something is broken and never comes back.

  A short flare burst inside Poppandacorn’s body. Sparks. A short-circuit hiss. The torn-off little arm still trembled for an instant in Nioh’s hand, and Poppandacorn’s body answered with a hollow spasm.

  "NOOOO!!!" Americ-Ana let out a roar that tore her throat.

  Nioh yanked open the little belly door of Poppandacorn, shoved the little arm in there with brutality, and slammed it shut. The little door snapped, caught, trembled.

  Nioh held Poppandacorn by the head. The body hung, without an arm, without life, without that familiar childish gesture.

  Then Nioh raised Poppandacorn, and his voice changed texture. It became ritual, it became ancient. Nioh said:

  "Per potestates trium quae unum sunt, Inanna, Ishtar, Astaroth, manifesta nunc."

  The world around answered.

  Thunder gained color. Wind gained color. Purple bolts slashed across the vault’s ceiling and exploded into silence for a second, before the sound came back down on them with violence.

  Purple light raced through Poppandacorn’s body, slipped into the seams, passed through the metal, took the plush, invaded the circuits.

  Poppandacorn trembled.

  Trembled in a wrong way.

  Nioh let go.

  Poppandacorn didn’t fall.

  He floated.

  Purple lightning leapt off him in crooked arcs. The Bronze Sea’s water spun faster, and the whirlpool became a hungry eye. The twelve bodies on the oxen were bathed in a ghostly purple reflection, and Spyder’s webs vibrated, drawn tight, shining.

  Then Poppandacorn’s little body began to grow.

  The plush stretched, snapped, tore. The metal expanded. The panda-unicorn head remained, but the smile was no longer a smile. The mouth opened and showed large, yellowed, aggressive teeth. The eyes lit up purple, unfocused, lifeless, two lamps of a curse.

  The body became something else. A purple mass, translucent, elastic, like those gummy bears, only gigantic, grotesque, pulsing in slow waves.

  At the level of the belly, where the compartment used to be, a circular mouth opened.

  Teeth in rings. Teeth moving in different directions. A mouth that never closed.

  Inside, nothing. A darkness that reflected no light.

  When the metamorphosis ended, the creature breathed for the first time, and the breath made the water of the Bronze Sea shudder.

  The voice came from below, deep, torn out of the earth’s interior.

  "POPPANDAMONSTER."

  The sound shook Americ-Ana’s bones. Her chest hurt. Andras’s skin rippled in gooseflesh, trying to protect what it still could.

  Nioh clapped with his bizarre little arms, happy, delirious.

  "Yes, yes, yes! Kill those two, Poppandamonster!"

  The mouth in the monster’s belly drew in air.

  It wasn’t wind. It was suction.

  Chunks of stone, sand, Temple debris, loose fragments of the vault, everything began to slide along the floor, scraping, clacking, being swallowed by the void and vanishing without sound, without a trace.

  Americ-Ana and Wwwyye were still stuck in the homunculus Nioh’s filth. The shit tugged at their feet, glued their bodies, held them.

  But then the force of the suction ripped both of them off the ground.

  Americ-Ana’s body was yanked forward with violence. Breath vanished. Her stomach rose.

  Wwwyye tried to plant the hammer in the floor. The hammer scraped stone, failed, and she was sucked in too.

  The ring of teeth grew in Americ-Ana’s vision, and the world became a tunnel.

  She felt the teeth pass close, without biting.

  And then everything turned purple.

  Americ-Ana opened her eyes inside a gelatinous interior. The light was purple, dirty, pulsing. She couldn’t move properly. Air wouldn’t come in. Her body was trapped in a viscous pressure that pushed against her chest and her throat.

  The pain came next.

  A chemical fire. A slow acid.

  The purple slime bit at the demon Andras’s skin, trying to eat through the protection. The demon’s skin, trying to protect Americ-Ana, began to react, building layers, re-forming, sealing, but the purple slime pushed in again, insistent.

  Americ-Ana looked at her own knee.

  The demon Andras’s skin was opening there.

  A raw point appeared, exposed living flesh, and the purple slime tried to get in. The snakeskin closed over it again, trembling, fighting.

  Americ-Ana bit back a scream. There was no air for that. Only desperation.

  She turned her face with effort and saw Wwwyye.

  Wwwyye was inside too, her face contorted, eyes wide, the hammer punching through the slime in violent blows. Each strike opened a hole that closed right after, and the slime tried to pull her arm back in.

  Wwwyye didn’t stop. She hit and hit, savage.

  Americ-Ana understood.

  She raised the sword-arm inside the purple slime. The blade wasn’t cutting air. It was cutting mass. Each strike met resistance. Each movement was pain.

  Americ-Ana struck.

  The purple slime tore, opened a fissure, closed.

  Americ-Ana struck again.

  Her face burned. Her scalp stung. Her eyes watered acid.

  Americ-Ana struck again and again, until her shoulder shook.

  Suddenly, the fissure opened wide enough.

  Americ-Ana fell out, spat out, sliding across the vault floor on her side, gasping, shaking, covered in purple slime and filth.

  It felt like being born again, only through the wrong side of the world.

  Americ-Ana rolled and saw Wwwyye still coming out, her hands already outside, the hammer making space.

  Americ-Ana crawled and pulled Wwwyye by the arm.

  That was the second of hope.

  Then the voice came again, guttural, crushing the air.

  "POPPANDAMONSTER."

  The shadow fell over them both.

  The belly mouth pulled again.

  The world turned purple again.

  Americ-Ana was inside Poppandamonster again.

  Wwwyye too.

  The purple slime tightened. The air vanished. The pain rose, stronger, faster.

  Americ-Ana felt the demon Andras’s skin reorganize in layer after layer, trying to keep the purple slime from touching her real body, but the pressure was too great. The knee burned again. The face burned. A thread of panic cut through her mind, cold and absolute.

  Americ-Ana grew weak.

  And then she remembered.

  Not a strategy. Not a plan. A truth.

  "Poppa…" Americ-Ana’s voice came out inside her own mouth, muffled by the purple slime. "I love you so much. You’re more than a toy to me. You’re more than a pet to me. You’re my Poppa. I’m your Mommy."

  Tears mingled with the purple slime.

  Americ-Ana closed her eyes and pulled the memory with the force of someone pulling a thread to keep from falling into the abyss.

  "I remember… the egg… the Poopghene… I held it in my lap, trembling, and I counted three happy memories. I told the first time I managed to send money to my grandparents. I told when I met Madam Chancellor. I told when I met Bylly."

  Americ-Ana’s mind insisted, even without hope.

  "The egg vibrated… the heart of light beat harder… and when it opened, smoke came out with a sweet smell… and you were born. You came out with your little paws, with your eyes shining… with your unicorn horn on your forehead… and you said your name… and I said mine…"

  Americ-Ana swallowed the pain and forced the last part, the part that hurt more than the acid.

  "And you hugged me and called me… 'MOMMY'."

  Suddenly, the gelatinous interior trembled.

  The purple slime failed for a second.

  Americ-Ana felt the pressure change. Felt the monster’s body hesitate.

  A spark snapped outside. The panda-unicorn head malfunctioned, spinning, spitting purple light in uncontrolled pulses. The purple eyes flickered on and off in spasms.

  The slime contracted.

  And then Americ-Ana was expelled.

  She hit the floor, gasping, her chest burning, her whole body trembling, Andras’s skin trying to seal wounds, trying to cover what the purple slime had reached.

  "Poppa…" she whispered, swallowing the sob and the terror. "You remembered. I knew you were in there."

  Americ-Ana lifted her face.

  Poppandamonster staggered. The head spun in a cruel misalignment. Sparks jumped from the horn. The belly mouth sucked and stopped, sucked and stopped, out of control, and the sound was like choking.

  "Americ-Ana!"

  The shout came from the side, slicing through the chaos.

  Wwwyye.

  Her head was out of the purple slime, her face twisted with pain and rage, her arms still trapped inside. She punched, but the mass pulled her back.

  "Wwwyye!" Americ-Ana tried to crawl toward her. "My God… I’m going to help you!"

  "No!" Wwwyye screamed, spitting out her own despair. "Get out of here! Go after that damned homunculus and kill him! Don’t let the Glory of God come down! Don’t let that homunculus get the KING MatNat sphere! Don’t let him get the seventy-two seals!"

  "I can get you out!" Americ-Ana dragged in air with difficulty, her throat burning. "Come!"

  "Go, now!" Wwwyye howled, her eyes shining with rage and fear. "As soon as I get free, I’ll join you! Go!"

  Americ-Ana was stuck for a second inside her own heart, split, torn. Then she turned her body. Turned toward the Bronze Sea, toward the homunculus, toward the ritual still roaring inside the vault.

  "NIOH!" Americ-Ana screamed. Hatred, rage, and fear mixed together.

  Americ-Ana raised the sword-arm, Andras’s skin pulsed on alert, and she charged with all the strength she had left.