God Ash: Remnants of the fallen. Chapter 1116: Whitehielm (2)

The city had gone blind.

From the broken corridor where they stood, Cain could see the towers beyond flickering unevenly, lights stuttering like the dying breath of a colossus. Screens across the skyline blinked out, billboards froze, drones fell limp into the streets. The Grid’s voice was gone, silenced in one clean stroke.

For a long mont, nothing moved. The silence was heavier than the scream had been. Then the city began to rember itself—old engines coughing to life, candles sparking in windows, people shouting in sudden dark. Without the Grid, Daelmont’s hand had slipped from every corner of the spire.

Roselle holstered her pistol with deliberate care, eyes scanning the skyline. "We just turned a city into a battlefield."

Steve wiped his face with a sleeve, streaking soot across his skin. "We turned it into sothing it should’ve been all along—its own."

Hunter said nothing. His silence had grown into sothing Cain no longer mistook for calculation. It was grief. Or anger. Or both, wrapped too tight to unravel here.

Susan leaned against the broken wall, her rifle slung low. She spat dust and blood, then looked at Cain. "What now? We’ve lit the fire. Do we stand here and roast, or do we move?"

Cain scanned the street below, where shadows already stirred. Hunters without their Grid-fed precision stumbled in the alleys, disoriented. But they weren’t the only ones. Civilians poured into the dark, voices rising—so in fear, so in awe, so in a rage that had waited too long to wake.

The city was no longer Daelmont’s machine. But neither was it free. Not yet.

"We move," Cain said at last. His voice carried without effort, steady as the blade at his side. "We cut through before Daelmont finds another leash."

Roselle gave a thin smile. "And where exactly is through?"

Cain’s eyes fixed on the spire above, the council chambers looming high, silhouetted against a fractured dawn. "Up."

The word landed like an order, not a suggestion.

They threaded back into the spire, moving through corridors half-dead with failing lights. The hum of power had beco a stutter, a broken heartbeat echoing through the walls. Every step felt like walking through a body in collapse.

On the fifty-ninth floor, they passed a hall filled with civilians—n and won staring wide-eyed at the blank terminals, clutching each other as though the silence itself might kill them. So looked to Cain’s group with hope, others with hatred. He ignored them all.

Roselle didn’t. She paused, t the gaze of a woman holding a child, and for a heartbeat her mask cracked. Then she moved on, faster than before.

By the sixty-seventh floor, the hunters caught them again.

They ca with blades and rifles, their movents uneven without the Grid’s coordination but still deadly. The firefight was brutal, corridors filling with smoke and blood. Susan’s rifle barked, Roselle cut down stragglers with cold precision, Cain’s blade sang its old rhythm—clean arcs, final strokes.

Steve covered his ears between bursts of fire. "We can’t hold them off forever!"

Cain’s answer was a strike that split armor from throat. "We don’t hold. We climb."

They pressed upward, floor after floor, each one contested, each one bought with blood. Hunter fought now, his pistol spitting fire, his silence broken into grim focus. Still, Cain watched him. Even in the violence, Hunter’s eyes kept searching, calculating, as though the real war had yet to be fought.

At the seventy-fourth floor, they broke into a service hall, doors blown wide from the shockwaves above. The air was hotter here, tinged with the acrid bite of burning circuits. Sowhere ahead, the council was waking to what had been done to them.

Steve staggered against a wall, coughing hard. "Cain... I can’t—"

Cain pulled him up by the collar, steadying him with a strength that was part fury, part necessity. "You don’t get to stop. Not here. Not now."

Roselle pushed past them, eyes sharp. "He’s right. If we hesitate, we get buried under what’s coming behind."

Susan reloaded with trembling hands, sweat streaking her dirt-caked face. "Then push. If this is the climb, we climb till it kills us."

And so they did.

By the eightieth floor, their bodies scread with exhaustion, but the sight that t them pulled the breath from their lungs.

The council chamber was no longer hidden. The walls had split in the blackout, revealing its glass heart perched high above the spire. Figures moved inside, silhouettes frad by the fractured light. Cain could see them clearly—the Daelmont council, the hands that had ruled through Grid and fleet. Not hunters. Not drones. n and won of power, suddenly bare.

Roselle’s voice was a whisper, but it cut deep. "There they are. The hands."

Susan drew in a shaking breath. "And we’re the blade."

Hunter stared at the chamber, his face unreadable. "You don’t know what cutting them will do. The city without the Grid is already chaos. Cut its rulers, and you drown it in blood."

Cain looked at him, the weight of every climb, every loss pressing into his shoulders. "The city was drowning already. We’re just dragging the ones who held it under."

Steve pressed a hand against the glass, eyes wide. "Then we finish it."

Above them, the council moved like shadows against the light, unaware of how close the blade had co.

Cain lifted his sword. The climb wasn’t over. It never was.

They advanced, step by step, toward the chamber where history waited to be cut open.

But as Cain’s foot touched the final stair, a tremor rattled the glass walls of the chamber. The council turned—not in surprise, but in recognition. They had been waiting. Figures in dark armor stepped from the shadows behind them, carrying weapons not powered by the Grid but sothing older, rawer.

Roselle hissed through her teeth. "They planned for this."

Hunter’s hand twitched toward his pistol. Cain’s grip on his blade tightened. The climb wasn’t the end. It was the door.