"Naya, listen to my plan!" Zulfa shouted over the roar of the night wind carrying particles of the anomaly dust. He dropped low, taking cover behind the carcass of an overturned taxi, while the winged, cable-armored shadow beast before them let out a shrill snort, venting an electromagnetic wave that made the air around them vibrate violently.

Naya huddled beside Zulfa, her breath heaving and her face bleached white. "What kind of plan, Zulfa?! That thing is three meters tall and has steel-wire wings! We can't fight it with a wrench!"

"We're not fighting it physically. We're playing engineering," Zulfa answered swiftly, his eyes locked sharply on an emergency electrical transformer pole leaning at a tilt by the roadside, roughly ten meters from their position. Beneath the pole, a gas-powered portable generator still flickered, emitting a high-voltage electrical hum. "I'm going to draw its attention toward that transformer. The second it lets its guard down, you need to blind its left side using the emergency light grenade in your bag."

Naya's eyes widened, fumbling through her backpack pockets with trembling hands. "Light grenade? You mean a military emergency flare? I brought one, but is that even enough to blind an eyeless void monster?!"

"It'll be enough if you throw it right into its face!" Zulfa barked steadily. "Remember, on three. One... two... three!"

The moment the count hit three, Naya leaped up from behind the car carcass, hurling the blazing red emergency flare into the air as she screamed at the top of her lungs to draw the monster's focus. "Hey, ugly! Catch this!"

Whoosh!

The red flare streaked brightly, detonating right before the winged shadow's hollow void face. An intensely blinding flash erupted instantly, causing the monster to screech in pain, flap its cable wings wildly, and redirect its entire attention toward Naya, who now stood exposed in the open.

"Good, Naya! Run left!" Zulfa commanded.

Without wasting a second, Zulfa vaulted out of hiding. He grabbed the small portable generator near the transformer pole, hoisted it with his remaining muscle strength, and sprinted toward the edge of the intersection. As he ran, he tore the fuel line from the emergency reserve tank of a wrecked motorcycle abandoned near the curb.

The shadow creature recovered from the flare's glare with terrifying speed. Snorting angrily, it lashed its razor-sharp wire wings and rocketed forward in low flight, chasing Zulfa at lightning speed.

"Zulfa! It's right behind you!" Naya screamed hysterically from the safety of the rubble behind them.

Zulfa didn't look back. His calculations were locked down tight in his mind. The exact moment the shadow entity unhinged its maw wide to loose a sonic roar, Zulfa spun around with precision timing down to a fraction of a second.

"Eat this, bastard!" Zulfa yelled.

He hurled the emergency fuel tank straight into the monster's open jaws, then with a single, brutal swing of his heavy hydraulic wrench, he smashed a live, frayed transformer cable straight into the spilled fuel spray.

Bzzzt—!

Clang!

A thousand-volt electrical spark from the transformer cable instantly ignited the oxygen-exposed fuel.

BOOM!

A massive, brilliant-blue explosion erupted from within the shadow beast's chest cavity and maw. Electromagnetic shockwaves and extreme heat ripped through the fiber-optic structure of its body within milliseconds. The colossal entity shrieked—a deafening sound of shattering metal—before its body tore apart piece by piece, dissolving into a flurry of black ash swept away by the night wind.

Zulfa was thrown backward by the blast wave, landing hard against the wet asphalt.

"Zulfa!" Naya rushed over, helping Zulfa sit up and checking him over. "Are you alright? Oh god, your face is covered in soot!"

"I... I'm fine," Zulfa wheezed, coughing slightly as he wiped his face. He looked up, intending to urge Naya to press on toward the utility access shaft.

Yet, before they could scramble to their feet, the ground beneath them suddenly shuddered with a violence that put all previous micro-quakes to shame.

Crack... snap... BOOM!

The sound of collapsing earth echoed deafeningly. The blue energy blast from the preceding fight had apparently triggered a fatal collapse across the arterial intersection's surface. The thick asphalt and concrete paving beneath Zulfa and Naya's boots dropped out entirely in unison.

"Watch out!" Zulfa screamed hysterically, locking his grip onto Naya's hand with all his might.

Gravity, however, proved far too strong. Their footing vanished in an instant, plunging both of them down into a wide-open abyss of darkness.

They plummeted into the earth's belly alongside thousands of tons of concrete rubble, rocketing straight down through a colossal vertical shaft.

Seconds later, a blast of hot air rushed up to greet them as they slammed down onto a cushion of flexible, warmly pulsing cables.

Zulfa blinked his eyes open, fighting to catch his breath, then pushed himself slowly to his feet. He helped Naya up beside him.

The moment they surveyed their surroundings, both of their breaths caught dead in their throats.

They hadn't fallen into a mere drainage channel or standard basement. They now stood directly inside the deepest control chamber of the city's fault heart—a massive ancient cavern serving as the nexus of everything.

Right before them, spinning slowly with terrifying speed, was The Main Valve. The colossal gear-wheel, as wide as a building, pulsed with blazing red energy, venting blinding waves of extradimensional radiative heat that made the air feel as though they were standing inside a volcanic crater.

And behind the parting gaps of that rotating valve, the silhouettes of invisible cosmic entities pressed outward, poised to rip the reality of the world apart for good.