They slept only in fragments.
Most of the Gamma Knights rose long before the sky began to lighten, moving with the quiet urgency of people who knew the coming hours would decide whether they lived or died. Gear was checked and rechecked. Weapons were cleaned. The six Depthstrider suits waited in a grim row beneath the steel roses of the garden, matte-black and humming faintly with residual power.
Garet stood apart for a time, still sealed inside the makeshift rebreather that had kept him alive since the Radboleth’s slime first touched him. The choice before him was simple and absolute: remain dependent on the jury-rigged helmet, or risk everything on the power of the SORCER-MK2.
He chose the staff.
The moment his hands closed around it, the AI stirred. Its voice emerged with a faint, unexpected German accent — cold, amused, and unmistakably shaped by the mind of its previous owner. Elmar Ganz. The staff still carried the imprint of the man who had stolen it centuries earlier: a descendant of war criminals, a black marketeer, a killer who had held the weapon for seven hundred years before the Knights finally put him down in the old museum.
The AI tested him with a riddle.
“What is this?” it asked. “One slew none, and yet slew twelve.”
The answer came only after the others helped him work through it. When Garet spoke the solution aloud, the staff’s resistance faded. The AI withdrew into watchful silence.
Garet activated the Radiation Repulsion Sheen. Trillions of nanites flowed across his skin and clothing in a faint iridescent cyan glow, forming an adaptive barrier that burned the last of the Radboleth’s cellular corruption from his body. He tore the rebreather free and drew his first unassisted breath in days.
He was himself again.
The staff’s final warning was quiet and absolute: once they entered the cold, irradiated waters below, its systems would fail. Garet would be on his own.
They spent a full hour sealing themselves into the Depthstrider suits. Status lights flickered to life across each helmet HUD — every one reading *nominal*. Then they walked out onto the cracked floor of what had once been Lake Melkath.
The Geiger counters screamed.
At the center of the drained basin, a dark opening led straight down into the earth. They jumped.
Thirty meters below, they found themselves in a flooded chamber. A large vault-style door to the north hung partially open, a strange greenish glow leaking from beyond. They passed through and descended a flight of submerged stairs. The corridor branched left, then ended at a bulkhead that had been violently forced open from this side. The two metal leaves hung twisted and bent.
They took the left branch first.
It led to a compact filtration chamber dominated by a massive sealed cistern and a tangle of steel and glass pipes vanishing into the walls. The lid of the cistern had been forced open. Mordecai volunteered to climb up and inspect it. The moment he pushed the heavy cover aside, a human skeleton floated free and drifted into the room.
For a heartbeat no one moved.
Then the Water Obbs struck.
They came through the damaged bulkhead in a silent, coordinated rush — two-foot-wide floating eyes propelled by tattered black wings that now functioned as fins. Each center glowed the same sickly green that marked the Radboleth’s influence.
The Obbs attacked the suits themselves, clawing and biting at seals and joints. Arkadiusz, closest to the entrance, took the worst of the initial assault. Warning indicators on his HUD shifted from *nominal* to *contaminated*. The creatures swam with predatory speed, circling constantly, refusing to present easy targets.
Paul’s plasma pistol flared repeatedly in the murky water. Noelani swung her war club with brutal efficiency. Arkadiusz fired his MP5K underwater in short, controlled bursts. Vulgaris struggled with an unfamiliar Mark VII blaster until it jammed, then switched to his club and smashed one of the Obbs against the wall. Garet’s shots were sparse but precise. Mordecai tried to exploit their movements and failed. The fight was close, chaotic, and nearly silent beneath the weight of the water.
When the last Obb finally burst under a plasma bolt, the chamber fell still again.
They returned to the filtration system. Mordecai climbed inside and began the slow, careful work of clearing the clogged filters and repairing minor structural damage. The others kept watch this time. After long minutes the ancient machinery shuddered, then hummed back to life. Brown sludge began to move through the pipes as the system slowly drew contaminated water from the main reactor chamber and began the long process of stripping out particulate radioactive waste and organic toxins — a last-ditch purification cycle designed by the Ancients for exactly this kind of catastrophic flooding.
They pushed north through the twisted bulkhead plates.
Paul stepped onto a section of grating that gave way beneath him. The floor dropped five feet into a shallow sump of radioactive liquid while a hidden valve sprayed the same slurry upward, drenching him. He climbed out unharmed, examined the mechanism, and announced that the Radboleth was using illusions to mislead them. The others stared at him in disbelief.
Beyond the bulkhead the corridor opened into three possible routes.
Noelani studied the signs carefully.
West: the most heavily trafficked path — a wide hallway littered with floating debris and the remnants of long-abandoned equipment.
East: a narrower service corridor, barely wide enough for single-file movement, with what looked like a partial collapse forty meters ahead.
Northeast: a freshly torn tunnel of broken concrete and wet earth, its walls coated in thick green slime and a strange, bubbling purple sludge. The marks of something very large and very recent.
Noelani hesitated, considering reaching out telepathically to the creature that waited somewhere in the dark. She did not know what the contact would cost.
Around her, the others began the methodical work of checking every surface, every joint, every shadow for traps.
The hunt had begun in earnest.
Somewhere ahead, in the irradiated heart of the old reactor, the Radboleth was waiting.
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