Outside, the world fell silent as the last echoes of the collapse faded into a strange, heavy stillness.

Ethan stood motionless in the Inhibitor Chamber, his eyes following the lines running across the blood red walls, which pulsed with a faint and sickly light. At the center of the room lay the shattered remains of the device he had come for, the Inhibitor. He had never actually seen one before, only heard descriptions, and he had expected something sleek and metallic, something sharp with gears and soft glows, a piece of forgotten high technology. But what he found looked more like a ruptured heart.

The lower portion, the base, still held traces of actual machinery, smooth alloy wrapped around dense circuitry, but from that base had grown a grotesque, organic mass that was now torn open. Its surface was covered in thin, vein-like tubing that had climbed up the walls, glistening with an oily film that gave the entire chamber a slick, unsettling sheen.

"Ethan? What's wrong?" Lyla's voice came softly from beside him. She had seen his expression change the moment they stepped inside, the easy humor leaving his face and something colder and more focused taking its place.

He raised a steady hand and pointed at the ruined, heart shaped core. "When you broke it, was it beating?"

"Yeah," Lyla said, wrinkling her nose as the memory returned. "It had this steady thump, thump, thump, like a real heart. Creeped me out."

A grim understanding flickered through Ethan's eyes. "This chamber, this entire place, it's a Blood Clan construct."

"Blood Clan?" several voices echoed at once.

"Yeah. Remember where I brought Uncle Jed back from?" Ethan asked.

"The other world…"

"Umbral Star?"

"The Sea of Death?"

Different names floated up, all pointing to the same terrible place.

"Right," Ethan said, lowering his voice. "And what we fought there, at the end, was the Blood Clan. A race that thinks only about consuming and destroying. They are powerful."

The memory of that final stand surged back with sharp clarity, too sharp for comfort. So many lives lost. Julian, the city Lord's son, shredded an arm. Three of Beastfall City's four great priests dead, leaving only Hank standing. And all of that had been against foot soldiers. Not one Blood Clan commander had bothered to appear.

He gave them the short version, stripped of the details he didn't want to revisit. Even without those parts, the weight of what he described settled heavily over the group. Faces paled, and the room grew quieter as the scale of all of it sank in, far beyond guild politics or dungeon loot.

"If this is really a Blood Clan structure," Williams said, his brow tight. He had always been the tactical mind of his old unit, a man who rarely spoke unless he had cut to the point. "Is this supposed to be part of the lore, or is it something else entirely?"

"Come on, man, it's just a game," Leo said, shrugging, as if the conversation had gone off a cliff.

"Leo, are your brains made of solid rock?" Evelyn shot back, rolling her eyes. "After everything that's happened to Ethan, you still believe Ethereal is just a game?"

Leo opened his mouth to argue, but Ethan cut across him.

"Save it. We're on a clock," he said, his attention sweeping the chamber once more. "Spread out and look for anything. This thing showing up here can't be about a single broken Inhibitor. The whole structure…" He paused as the comparison finally settled into place. 'It feels like I'm standing inside a ship. A Blood Clan gestation ship, just on a smaller scale.'

The image that rose in his mind was the vast living vessel the Blood Clan's Supreme Being had once controlled. Deep inside its core he had faced the Blood King and seen a heart shaped mass a hundred times bigger than this one, beating with the same awful, patient rhythm.

"Ethan!"

Lyla's voice snapped him from the memory. He crossed to her side in three quick strides. "What did you find?"

"Here." She lifted one of her arrows and used the fletching to point toward a spot low on the wall.

At first, Ethan thought it was just another pulsing vein like the rest. But when he crouched and looked closer, he saw it was something else entirely, a rounded, swollen node that had detached from its surrounding tissue and settled halfway into the metal floor plating, as if it had grown there deliberately.

He reached out with a slow, careful motion and pressed his palm against it.

The node shivered under his touch. Then, without warning, a wet, hungry suction gripped him and pulled his hand inside up to the wrist.

"Shit!" He jerked back on instinct and his hand slid free right away, coated in that same oily fluid that clung to the chamber walls.

Before anyone could speak, the entire Chamber came alive.

A deep vibration rolled through the floor, a low hum that seemed to rise from the metal itself. Lights snapped on in wild colors, streaks of blue, red, green and white flaring across the walls and ceiling like an erratic heartbeat. Electronic beeps layered over one another, growing sharper until they merged with a cascade of alarm klaxons. A voice followed, mechanical and cold, speaking in a guttural, alien language that echoed off the living metal.

Then, from the broken mass of the Inhibitor, a beam of prismatic light burst upward. It narrowed and condensed into a single hovering point.

A scroll appeared there, bound in dark leather and glowing from within.

Ryan was closest. He did not hesitate for even a second. He reached out and snatched it out of the air.

[Global System Alert]: Player [MyElderBrotherIsADog] of the Northern Frontier Region, Dragonspire, has obtained [Divine Ability Scroll: Sundering Shot]! Coordinates: 654561.546181… Item is soulbound for 12 hours. Drop on death…]

The announcement rang through their minds, sharp and impossible to ignore. For a moment, nobody moved.

Ryan stared at the scroll in his hand as if wondering whether it might explode.

Ethan felt the shock just as strongly. A Divine Ability scroll, and not just any Divine Ability. Sundering Shot.

Sundering Shot was the kind of ability that turned players into disasters. It made your attacks splash outward, hitting every hostile creature near your target. The higher the ability tier, the higher the splash percentage.

A Divine tier meant a fifty percent splash. Strike one target, and everything around it took half the damage. It turned single target attacks into accidental area of effect destruction. In a crowded fight, one hit could ripple through an entire mob pack, chaining out again and again until everything in reach collapsed in a spiral of damage. It was easily one of the most terrifying offensive abilities in the entire game.

Whoosh.

Before Ethan could finish processing any of that, Ryan's arm flicked forward. The scroll shot toward Ethan's face in a clean line of white light.

Reflex took over before thought. Ethan's hand snapped up and caught it.

[Global System Alert]: Player [NotADruid] of the Northern Frontier Region, Dragonspire, has obtained [Divine Ability Scroll: Sundering Shot]! Coordinates: 654521.546281… Item is soulbound for 12 hours. Drop on death…]

"…What?" Ethan looked from the scroll to Ryan, trying to understand what had just happened.

Ryan had simply thrown it to him. No hesitation. No second thoughts. Ethan felt a sharp stab of want surge up, something immediate and raw, but he pushed it down just as quickly. Ryan had been the one to get it. That was what mattered.

"You already have what, six Divine Abilities?" Ryan said, shrugging as if he had tossed away a copper coin. "Didn't you say collecting them triggers some hidden twelfth one? Divinity, right? I wanna see what that does. I haven't even bothered with a Common ability, let alone a Divine one. This thing'd be completely wasted on me."

He sounded honestly curious and completely unbothered by the fact that he had just given away one of the rarest offensive abilities in existence.

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