Episode-813
Chapter : 1625
He walked away. Faria sat there, the drawing trembling in her hands. She wept, not for herself, but for the man who had forgotten how to see the sun.
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The final attempt came from the one person who knew exactly what it felt like to be frozen. Rosa Siddik.
She didn't bring maps. She didn't bring tarts. She brought silence.
She entered the manufactory late at night. She found Lloyd standing in front of the Aegis suit. He wasn't working. He was just staring at the empty chest cavity where the cockpit would be.
Rosa walked up to him. She stood beside him. She didn't try to touch him. She just let her presence be known. A cool, steady presence in the heat of the forge.
"It is a magnificent machine," Rosa said quietly. Her voice was neutral, clinical.
Lloyd didn't look at her. "It's not finished."
"Nothing ever is," Rosa said. "My mother... she is well. But she is not the same. Trauma changes the shape of things."
It was an opening. A bridge. She was saying, I am broken too. We can be broken together.
Lloyd slowly turned his head. He looked at Rosa. For a second, Rosa’s heart hammered. She saw him. She saw her husband. She waited for the anger, the grief, the accusation. She would take any of it. Even hatred was a connection.
But there was nothing.
Lloyd looked at her face. He scanned her features. But there was no recognition behind his eyes. He looked through her, as if she were made of glass. As if she were a ghost haunting his halls.
He turned his gaze back to the machine.
"I need to recalibrate the thermal shielding," he said to the air. "The heat from the Golem Heart is still too high."
He walked past her. He didn't brush against her arm. He didn't pause. He walked to his workbench and picked up a screwdriver.
Rosa stood frozen. The rejection was total. It wasn't a rejection of her love; it was a rejection of her existence. He had erased her from his reality because she was a variable he couldn't control. She was a reminder of the emotional world he had abandoned.
She felt a chill that had nothing to do with her ice magic. It was the chill of absolute solitude.
"Lloyd," she whispered. It was a plea.
He didn't twitch. He started unscrewing a panel, his focus absolute.
Rosa realized then that the walls he had built were not made of ice. Ice could be melted. They were made of void. They were made of nothing. And you cannot break nothing.
She turned and walked out of the lab. Her footsteps echoed in the silence. She didn't cry. She just felt a piece of herself—the piece that had started to hope—wither and die.
Lloyd kept working. He heard the footsteps leave. He felt the air pressure change as the door closed.
Good, he thought. They are gone. They are safe.
He looked at the screwdriver in his hand. His vision blurred for a second. A single tear, hot and unbidden, fell from his eye and landed on the metal.
He stared at the droplet. He wiped it away with a furious, jerky motion.
"No leaks," he growled.
He put the screwdriver down and picked up the welding torch. He pulled his mask down. The world turned dark, lit only by the blue flame of his work.
He was the Titan. He was the machine. And the machine did not stop until the war was won.
In the darkness of the lab, sparks flew like dying stars, illuminating a man who was busy burying himself alive, one steel plate at a time.
Mina Siddik stood at the perimeter of the Ferrum estate’s central courtyard. The air here usually smelled of pine and fresh rain, but today it carried a subtle, underlying scent of ozone and burning metal that drifted up from the vents of the underground complex. She clutched a heavy stack of leather-bound dossiers against her chest. To any observer, she looked like a scholar coming to deliver a report. The papers were real—translations of Anubis’s lost journals, schematics of ancient golem joints, and theories on spirit-core stabilization. They were valuable. They were necessary. But they were also a lie. She wasn't here for the science. She was here because the silence coming from the estate had become deafening.
Chapter : 1626
She walked past the main residential wing. She didn't look at the windows where her sister, Rosa, might be watching. She didn't look for the frantic energy of Faria or the strategic bustle of Princess Amina. She headed straight for the heavy iron gate that guarded the ramp leading down to the manufactory.
The guards stationed there were not the usual house troops. They were Ken Park’s elite. Men who stood with absolute stillness, their eyes scanning for threats that regular soldiers wouldn't even perceive. They recognized Mina immediately.
"Lady Mina," the sergeant said, stepping aside but not relaxing his posture. "The Master is inside. He has given orders not to be disturbed. He said... well, he said that anyone who enters without a Level 5 clearance will be considered a hostile entity."
Mina adjusted the books in her arms. "I have clearance, Sergeant. And I am not a hostile entity. I am a consultant."
"He hasn't eaten in three days, My Lady," the sergeant whispered, breaking protocol. "We leave trays at the door. He doesn't touch them. We hear... noises. Grinding. Welding. Sometimes shouting at things that aren't there."
"Thank you, Sergeant," Mina said quietly. "I will handle it."
She descended the ramp. The air grew cooler as she went underground, the humidity dropping. The manufactory was usually a chaotic symphony of industry—the clang of hammers, the hiss of steam, the shouting of alchemists. Today, it was eerily quiet. The workers were there, but they moved like ghosts, tiptoeing around their workstations, afraid that any loud noise might trigger an explosion from the private lab at the far end of the facility.
Mina walked through the main assembly floor. She saw Rolf, the head of security, pacing nervously. She saw Alaric and Borin huddled over a workbench, looking pale and terrified. They watched her pass with a mixture of relief and fear, as if she were a sacrifice walking voluntarily into a dragon’s den.
She reached the heavy reinforced door of Laboratory Zero. It was a massive slab of steel, designed to contain magical explosions. There was no handle on the outside, only a keypad for a mana-signature. Lloyd had locked himself in a vault.
Mina didn't knock. She placed her hand on the panel. Lloyd had keyed her signature into the system months ago when they started the Golem Heart research. The panel flashed green, a cheerful little chirp that felt wholly inappropriate for the dread sitting in her stomach. The hydraulic locks hissed, and the heavy door groaned open.
She stepped inside.
The atmosphere in the lab was suffocating. It smelled of stale coffee, machine oil, ionized air, and the sharp, copper tang of blood. The lighting was dim, most of the mana-lamps turned down low, leaving the room in a permanent, artificial twilight.
In the center of the room, rising from a raised dais like a dark idol, stood the Aegis Mark I.
It was finished.
Mina stopped breathing for a moment. She had seen the blueprints. She had seen the frame. But seeing the completed machine was a visceral experience. It stood eight feet tall, a humanoid nightmare forged from matte-black Star-Frost Ore. It didn't gleam; it swallowed the light. The armor plating was angled and aggressive, designed to deflect kinetic impacts and disperse magical energy. The shoulders were massive, housing the railgun capacitors. The helmet was a smooth, faceless visor of dark glass. It radiated a silent, brooding menace, a promise of absolute violence frozen in time. It was a god of war built by a man who had lost faith in everything else.
And beneath this towering metal god, sitting on a small, battered wooden crate, was Lloyd.
He looked like a man who had been hollowed out. His white shirt was grey with soot and stained with grease. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing arms covered in small burns and scratches. His hair was a disaster, a wild thicket that hadn't seen a comb in days. He hadn't shaved, and a dark shadow of stubble covered his jaw, making his cheekbones look even sharper, more skeletal.
But it was his activity that chilled Mina to the bone.
He wasn't building. He wasn't welding. He held a small, microfiber polishing cloth in his hand. He was rubbing a spot on the Aegis’s left shin guard.
Rub. Rub. Rub.
It was a small, circular, obsessive motion.