Chapter 64: Bond, Money and Blood
The staircase seemed endless. Not because it was long, but because each step required more than simple movement—it required acceptance. A silent pact with the absurd.
Eren descended with Kaela close behind, his eyes still alert. The architecture around them oscillated between Gothic and biotechnological: curved columns formed by fossilized collagen, runes flashing like sleepy eyes, and luminous veins running down the walls as if the underground dome itself were alive.
The smell was dense, metallic, a mixture of laboratory, profane temple, and ancient library.
At the end of the staircase, the entrance opened like an eyelid—the walls retracting, revealing an immense space.
The Headquarters of the Core.
The Dome of the Four Thrones.
Living maps stretched across floating panels on the ceiling, showing not fixed continents, but shifting patterns of affinity, monster routes, and patches of emotional instability that danced like constellations. Artifacts pulsed on tables and pedestals, each with its own frequency, vibrating like isolated hearts.
And then, they appeared.
Four figures, each emerging from a different direction, as if they were the cardinal points of an inverted world.
Eren recognized them from fragmented visions, flashes from previous encounters, but seeing them live was... something else.
The woman on the left advanced first, her steps as steady as scalpel cuts. Hair shaved on one side, neon-green eyes that seemed to pierce flesh and thought. The runes on her skin vibrated like organic circuits.
"Eren Vale," she said, without greeting, without reverence, "you are even more... functional than the fragments suggested."