Noah descended the stairs quietly, one hand trailing along the wall as the light above grew dimmer with each step.

The basement corridor was narrow and low, the air cooler down here, carrying the faint smell of dust and old machinery. The flickering lights from the floors above did not reach this far. The only light came from thin strips of pale blue running along the base of the walls, barely enough to see by.

He reached the bottom and stepped through the open doorway into the chamber.

He stopped.

He put his spear in the storage ring.

’Okay... everything is just like yesterday,’ he thought while looking at it.

The machine filled most of the room.

It was enormous, a towering structure that dominated the entire space, its surface smooth and dark but covered in faint seams and embedded panels, each one lined with thin strips of dim blue light that pulsed slowly and steadily, like a heartbeat.

Thick cables and reinforced pipes extended from its sides in every direction, disappearing into the walls and floor, branching outward like veins feeding the entire building above.

At the top of the structure sat a half-spherical glass dome.

Inside it, a sphere of concentrated blue energy hovered in place. It was not still, but shifting, swirling gently like a storm contained inside a glass jar. Light rippled across its surface continuously, casting slow-moving reflections across the chamber walls.

A low, steady hum filled the room.

A backup power generator. The kind built to keep an entire building running if the main electricity failed. Massive, reinforced, and clearly still functioning even in the ruined state of the mall around it.

Noah looked at it for a moment.

Then he smirked.

He pulled out his smartphone and typed a quick message to Travis. He hit send, pocketed the phone, and walked around to the other side of the machine.

There in the wall was a hole.

Wide enough for a person to fit through, the edges rough and uneven. He had made it himself.

Last night, after the argument with Ophelia, he had walked away from the base loud enough and angry enough that the student watching from the rooftop would have something worth seeing.

It was not like the argument occurred because he was angry. But he wanted to have an argument deliberately.

He had shouted, stormed off in the opposite direction, and made sure he looked like someone who simply needed to cool down alone. Nobody had followed him. He was not exactly someone most students felt compelled to check on.

Leonard had call him. Noah had told him not to worry and that he would not be coming back that night. Leonard had accepted it without pressing further.

With no one following him, Noah had made his way to the mall in the dark and found the basement.

The chamber sat on one side of the building, its outer wall connecting directly to the ground above at street level.

He had worked through the whole night with a shovel shaped from condensed ice, cutting through the wall steadily.

For an ordinary person, it would have been impossible. Days of physical labor with no guarantee of progress. But with his stamina and mana, he had kept the ice blade sharp and his body moving without stopping.

He even used mana recovery potions.

The tunnel he had carved was long and narrow, running from the chamber wall downward and connecting to the sewer system that ran beneath the road just outside the mall. The main road sat close enough to the building that the distance had not been too great.

So it was easier.

He had finished before dawn and returned to base as if nothing had happened.

His clothes were dirty, but again, this VR city was ruined. Dust flew in the air constantly. So it was normal to have dirty clothes.

Noah looked at the tunnel entrance now and nodded to himself.

"Okay, let’s start it," he said with a smirk.

He stepped inside it and turned back to face the machine, crouching low within the opening. He kept himself inside the tunnel, the wall of the hole framing him on all sides.

He exhaled slowly and let his mana rise.

An ice spear formed in his right hand. Long, sharp, dense. He wrapped additional mana around it, compressing the ice tighter, hardening it beyond its natural state until the tip could punch through reinforced metal without shattering.

He kept the temperature cold with mana at the place where he was holding the shaft. The surface was rough, like numerous microscopic jagged edges across it. This created a mechanical grip on the spear.

So his palm would not slip.

Above his shoulders, two ice swords formed and floated, angled forward, waiting.

He looked at the glass dome at the top of the machine. The swirling blue energy inside it shifted and pulsed.

He pulled his left foot forward.

Then he threw the spear with everything he had.

At the same moment, he pushed his intent outward and both ice swords shot forward alongside it.

He did not wait to watch.

The moment everything left his hands, he spun around, kicked off the tunnel floor, and ran.

’Fuck! I need to run faster,’ his blue eyes serious as he sprinted.

Behind him, the spear punched through the glass dome.

The swords drove into the machine’s outer casing and through the cable bundles along its side.

For one brief second, the hum of the machine rose in pitch.

The blue current spread wildly across the surface of the machine.

It spread across the whole room.

Then the basement disappeared behind a wall of sound.

BOOMMMM!!

The explosion was massive.

It was not just loud, it was physical, a pressure wave that rolled through the tunnel and hit Noah in the back like a shove, throwing his body forward.

Burning flames hit him as well. Heat waves struck his back.

His body was thrown too far forward by the explosion.

The ground around the basement was pushed far aside by the imapct.

The ground above started to tremble as if it would fall at any moment.

The small tunnel he made behind already started to crumble and filled with soil whole shaking violently.

While Noah’s body which was thrown, it was landed near the sewer, he got up, and kept moving. He took out a healing potion and drank it while running, crouched low, the tunnel walls tight around him, moving as fast as the narrow space allowed.

Behind him, he could hear the chain reaction of the generator going off. The basement and ground floor were destroyed. With it, the base was also gone. Because of that, the structural supports of the building crumbled, the grinding groan of the building above beginning to lose what was holding it up.

The huge building was slowly falling down on one side.

---

Above, the fighting stopped.

Not because anyone chose to stop. Because the floor beneath them lurched.

The explosion rolled up through the building from the basement like a wave moving through water.

Dust exploded from every crack in the walls simultaneously. The lights, already flickering, died completely for one full second before the emergency strips kicked in with a weak red glow.

Then came the sound every person in the building felt in their chest before they heard it with their ears.

The deep, slow crack of structural failure.

"What was that?!" someone shouted on the third floor.

On the fifth floor, Damien spun around, his eyes going immediately to the floor beneath his feet as it tilted slightly to the left.

"Everyone out! Move now!" he shouted.

But it was already too late to make it.

The building did not collapse all at once. It came down in sections, the floors above the basement dropping first as the supports gave way, pulling everything connected to them downward in a cascading series of crashes that filled the entire mall with a roar of breaking concrete and shattering glass.

Leonard had just reached the third floor corridor when the section of floor in front of him simply disappeared, dropping away into the dust below. He had no time to stop. He went down with it, his shout cutting off as debris came down on top of him.

Kaelan saw the ceiling above him fracture and moved, but not fast enough. A section of the upper floor came through, catching him across the shoulder and driving him down hard.

Damien took three running steps toward the escalator before the wall beside it collapsed inward and cut off the path entirely. The floor tilted sharply beneath him and he went sideways, grabbing at a broken railing that held for one second and then gave way.

The building came down around all of them.

Dust and darkness. Everything went silent.