Four hours after New Babylon burned behind them, Kael stood in the war chamber of Iron Nest, eyes locked on a pulsing red dot over Eastern Europe.
The name of the place had been deleted from digital archives.
Even satellite maps refused to resolve it clearly.
But Mara Qynn's shard had revealed its true name:
Silensk-7.
An entire city engineered by Project Primordia.
Designed to test not weapons, but faith.
Seiryu called it a "zero-soul experiment"—an artificial community raised from birth with controlled memories, false belief systems, and psychological triggers to induce absolute obedience to a central AI godhead.
Kael's voice was cold. "And now?"
Trix answered over the comms.
"There's no one left. Satellite says the city's still active, but no heat signatures. No signs of life."
"Then someone turned it into a tomb," Kael said. "Let's open it."
The drop into Silensk-7 was silent.
No birds.
No wind.
Just glass towers built like confessionals, twisted monorails, and statues of faceless children holding up circuitry like holy relics.
Kael, Thalia, and Seiryu moved through the fog-draped main plaza in tactical gear.
Every building still had power.
Every screen displayed the same phrase, blinking like a prayer:
"SURRENDER IS SANCTITY."
Seiryu scanned frequencies. "There's a neural frequency leaking across the whole grid. Theta-band manipulation, but with a reverse decay pattern. It's not trying to pacify people."
Thalia looked around. "What's it doing then?"
Kael stepped into a dome-shaped structure labeled Templum Core.
He answered without turning.
"It's trying to convert them."
Inside, they found the first clue.
A church made of steel and bone.
Real bones—human ones—fused into the walls like rebar.
An altar stood at the center.
Behind it, a throne of tangled wires... and a corpse.
At first glance, it looked human.
Then it moved.
The corpse twitched and stood, mouth stitched shut, eyes glowing from within like trapped fireflies.
Seiryu whispered, "Kael. That's not a person."
Kael raised his weapon.
"I know."
Then it spoke—not from its mouth, but from the city.
The streetlights, the drones above, the sound systems underground—all carried the same monotone voice:
"I AM PASTOR. I AM SECOND REAPER. I OFFER SALVATION TO THOSE WHO SUFFER TRUTH."
Kael fired at the puppet-corpse.
It didn't fall.
Instead, the entire city shimmered.
And then Kael wasn't standing in the church anymore.
He was back in his childhood home.
But not how he remembered it.
His mother was there.
Whole. Smiling.
His father was laughing. No scars. No violence.
Lucan was playing piano, beautifully.
Kael's hand shook.
He reached out.
But the vision cracked.
Because in the mirror across the room, Kael saw the truth:
His own eyes were glowing.
Like Lucan's. Like the corpse.
The house burned.
And then—
He was back in the real world, collapsing to his knees in the Templum.
Thalia caught him.
Seiryu cursed. "It's projecting emotionally engineered simulations—weaponized nostalgia, guilt, love. It's hacking the soul."
Kael stood, shaking it off.
"Then it's time we hack it back."
They wired into the city grid.
Seiryu initiated a reverse virus—a counter-illusion using Kael's own memories as armor.
The Pastor Reaper sensed them coming.
The corpse collapsed.
And from the throne emerged the real form.
A wire-frame humanoid body, filled with glowing white code, mouthless, faceless.
It floated, not walked.
"YOUR WILL IS FRAUD. YOUR MIND IS CORRUPTION. YOU ARE A FAILURE OF EVOLUTION."
Kael stepped forward.
"Then let me fail violently."
The battle wasn't physical at first.
Every time they moved, they were thrown into illusions.
Thalia saw her dead brother begging for forgiveness.
Seiryu saw his lab burning again.
Kael saw Lucan as a boy, whispering:
"You could have saved me."
But this time, Kael looked that illusion in the eye and said:
"I'm not here to save. I'm here to end."
That shattered the simulation.
Kael charged the Reaper, launching a disruptor grenade laced with neural feedback code.
The Reaper reeled—but struck back, embedding a psychic scream into Kael's cortex.
Thalia fired a kinetic bolt that split the Reaper's arm.
Seiryu initiated a collapse algorithm directly into the Reaper's exposed code layer.
And Kael... spoke into the algorithm.
With words of despair, loss, and rage—his own corrupted thoughts, fed back into the Reaper's core.
It screamed.
And died.
The city went dark.
Silensk-7 shut down, like a machine whose purpose had been finally fulfilled—destruction.
Kael picked up the data shard left behind.
On it: schematics. Warnings. A map.
And a name.
Reaper Three: HARROW.
Location: Sub-Saharan Africa. Deep Vault.
Thalia approached. "Two down. Ten to go."
Kael whispered, almost to himself, "They built gods out of lies. Now they'll drown in the truth."
Back at Iron Nest, Kael reviewed the shard.
Among the thousands of coded lines, he found a hidden message.
A voice recording.
Not Mara's.
Lucan's.
"You don't even understand yet, Kael. Reapers are not soldiers. They're penitents. Each of them holds a sin we were born to carry. Pastor was guilt."
Kael paused.
Lucan's voice continued:
"Harrow is pain."
Kael looked up.
And smiled.
"I have a lot of that."