The air above the Sahel Vault shimmered with heat and silence.
Beneath their feet, hidden under 2 kilometers of reinforced desert strata, lay the third Reaper's domain: Vault IX-PHI, also known as the Pain Engine.
It wasn't on any map.
Because it wasn't a lab.
It was a crucible.
Seiryu studied the fragment of the map from Pastor's data shard.
"The Vault was designed as a psychological resilience test for rogue candidates of Project Primordia. But the failure rate was 100%."
"Failure?" Thalia asked.
"They died?" Trix said over comms.
Kael shook his head.
"No. They broke."
The entrance was a half-buried bunker beneath dunes of ash and sun-scoured bones. The hatch opened with a hiss—Kael's biometric code from Mara Qynn bypassed the ancient security.
Inside, lights flickered like dying neurons.
Each step down the winding shaft brought new heat. Not from flames—but from pressure. A psychic weight pressing on their hearts.
The Pain Engine had already begun.
Vault IX-PHI was built like a spiral.
Each level forced the subject to confront a layer of pain—starting with the physical, then ascending to the emotional, psychological, and finally, the existential.
Seiryu frowned. "If the Reaper still lives here, it's feeding on the pain in this place."
Kael said nothing.
He didn't need to imagine pain.
He remembered it.
Level One: Skin
Steel needles. Gravity chambers. Sonic dissonance to rupture organs. They passed through it untouched—Kael's gear deflected the traps.
But he saw the corpses of those who had not passed. Bodies with expressions frozen in soundless screams.
Level Two: Blood
An arena where clones of the subject fought to the death. The chamber read Kael's DNA and summoned three versions of himself—each twisted by failure.
Kael killed them.
Quickly.
But when he looked into their eyes, he didn't see rage.
He saw begging.
Level Three: Memory
Thalia collapsed here.
She saw her family again. Alive. Whole. And then she saw herself… killing them.
Kael carried her through while Seiryu rebooted her neural sync.
Even Kael swayed here—visions of his mother, alive, choking on fire, blaming him.
He clenched his jaw.
"Pain is permission. Not a prison."
He kept walking.
At Level Four, they found the remnants of Project Primordia's original engineers—thousands of brain scans stored like digital fossils.
Trix buzzed in. "I just decrypted one of the cores. Kael... the Vault wasn't just testing pain. It was mapping it. Trying to understand where the human soul finally snaps."
"And?"
"There was no consensus," Trix said. "Because every person here broke somewhere different. But every single one broke."
Kael whispered, "Except the Reaper."
The Core Level wasn't marked.
But it announced itself.
As they entered the final chamber, all their weapons deactivated. Lights shut off. Air grew thick.
And then—
A voice.
Not digital.
Not loud.
Just present. Inside them.
"You came to kill pain. But pain made you."
The figure emerged from shadow.
Harrow.
No armor. No wires.
Just a human shape, skinless, eyes stitched shut, veins glowing.
Its voice came from their own throats—as if echoing inside their heads.
Thalia screamed. Seiryu dropped to one knee, blood leaking from his ears.
Kael stood.
And Harrow smiled.
"What did you lose first, Kael?"
"My mother."
"Wrong. You lost your innocence. When you watched her die and did nothing."
Kael's hand trembled.
"You think revenge will heal you. But revenge is the child of grief and rage. And children do not conquer monsters. They become them."
Kael stepped forward.
"You're not real. You're pain with a voice. And pain can be burned."
The fight was internal.
Harrow didn't strike with claws or blades.
It used Kael's own regrets—projecting timelines where Kael joined Lucan. Where he became a weapon. Where he betrayed Trix. Killed Thalia. Became Lucan's shadow.
Each illusion was more seductive than the last.
Each one asked:
Why fight? Why suffer? Just surrender.
But Kael had walked through pain.
He didn't fear it.
He understood it.
And so, instead of resisting… he embraced it.
Kael triggered the neural sync core on his belt, allowing the Vault's full pain matrix to enter him—unfiltered.
Agony beyond comprehension.
His heart nearly stopped.
But inside the spiral of hurt, he found clarity.
Not peace.
Not healing.
Just truth.
He had been made by pain—but he chose what to become with it.
And he chose wrath.
Kael surged forward.
One strike.
His hand wrapped in pure neural voltage.
Harrow screamed, a thousand voices dissolving at once.
And then… silence.
Only Kael stood.
Breathing. Alive.
Changed.
In the debris, a data shard pulsed.
He picked it up.
The next Reaper's coordinates flickered on its surface.
Reaper Four: Obsidian.
Location: Unknown.
Kael turned to his team.
"Three Reapers down. Nine remain."
Thalia, still recovering, gave him a look. "And you?"
Kael's eyes were darker now. Calmer. But colder.
"I don't break," he said. "I learn."