He motioned with one slim, gloved hand.
The thug carrying the mana siphon rod stepped forward, a nasty grin pulling at his scarred mouth. The rod’s crystalline tip sparked faintly, hungry for a target.
Kasserrith spoke softly, almost conversationally.
"You see, the courts were too public for my liking. Too many prying eyes. Too many tedious restrictions."
He circled Prolix with slow, deliberate steps, the embroidered hem of his robe whispering against the marble floor.
"But here, in my own hall?" His smile widened, not reaching his cold green eyes. "No one cares what I do with vermin I find rooting through my affairs."
Prolix kept his expression still, heart hammering against his ribs.
Kasserrith crouched, bringing himself nearly level with Prolix’s bound form.
"I had intended," the noble murmured, "to break your little paws, one by one. To see if perhaps Fennician tinkering could be repurposed for more... enduring entertainment."
His gloved fingers reached out, trailing mockingly along Prolix’s jaw, tracing the black marbling patterns that swirled across his white fur. The touch was surgical, impersonal.
"But now," Kasserrith continued, voice low, "I think a more fitting punishment is in order."
He rose smoothly, addressing the room with a cruel satisfaction.
"I will bind you, little fox. Strip you of your mana. Chain your lattice so tightly you'll beg for silence. You'll serve in my under-works, crafting trinkets and repairs until your fingers fall away — your mind nothing but a broken, clever toy."
Prolix tasted blood where he bit the inside of his cheek to keep from snarling.
A display.
That was all this was to Kasserrith. A lesson. A caging.
The noble turned to his thugs.
"Begin the siphoning. Take no more than half for now. I want him aware when the first binding goes on."
The man with the siphon rod grinned wider and thumbed the activation rune.
The crystal atop the rod flared with a sickly blue light, hungry tendrils of mana-siphoning energy crackling into being around it.
As the thug knelt, raising the rod toward ProlixalParagon’s chest, a deep, bone-deep instinct roared awake inside him — something older and sharper than fear.
Not this way.
Not chained.
Not broken.
Prolix let his head hang low, body slack — a whisper of surrender.
The thug moved closer, lazy and sure, reaching out to press the siphon against Prolix’s sternum.
In that heartbeat, Prolix struck.
He twisted violently sideways, throwing his full weight into the thug’s knee. The thug shouted, stumbling. The siphon rod scraped harmlessly across Prolix’s shoulder instead of latching onto his core.
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The mana in the room recoiled, crackling like dry kindling.
Kasserrith snarled.
"Restrain him!"
But Prolix had already thrown himself into the only option left: action.
Even bound, even dazed, he had two things Kasserrith had never accounted for.
Will.
And invention.
Mana roared through his battered lattice. He triggered the low-level glyphs still faintly etched into the metal clasp of his satchel — a contingency he'd layered days ago in Haidrien’s workshop.
The clasp overloaded, discharging a pulse of static-staggered energy.
It wasn’t a weapon.
It wasn’t even stable.
But it was enough.
The blast knocked the thug backward into a marble column with a satisfying crack, sending the siphon rod clattering across the floor.
Prolix scrambled after it, his wrists still bound, the world spinning around him.
Somewhere behind, Kasserrith shouted again — a sound of pure, furious disbelief.
But Prolix didn’t waste time.
His claws snagged the siphon rod.
The moment his fingers touched it, he flooded it with inverted mana — overloading the fragile device until it popped in a burst of smoke and harmless mana flare.
One thug down.
Weapon neutralized.
Three still closing fast.
And he was still tied.
Prolix’s mind spun through possible paths — calculations, risks, improvisations — faster than the speed of thought.
If he hesitated now, if he faltered—
No.
The Synthete's path wasn’t built on certainty.
It was built on defiance.
ProlixalParagon moved on instinct sharpened by brutal training and raw desperation.
The shattered siphon rod in his hands sparked and fizzled, mana spilling out like blood from a ruptured artery. He wrenched the cracked casing free with his claws, yanking loose the unstable core embedded deep within.
A half-formed idea clawed its way to the surface of his mind: unstable mana + raw soul affinity + controlled detonation = forced spatial breach.
It was suicide to attempt in an enclosed place.
It was also his only chance.
Prolix gritted his teeth, twisted a length of binding wire from the broken siphon frame, and jammed the filament directly into the leaking core. Mana howled along the makeshift circuit, greedy for structure.
He didn't give it time to stabilize.
Instead, he shaped it—sloppy, half-formed, brilliant—into a Constructive Disjunction Node, a device designed not to create, but to tear open enough space to break free of physical containment.
Fracture it, ride the chaos.
It would rip reality at the seams—but if he timed it right, he could escape through the breach before it imploded.
If he timed it wrong…
He shoved the device against the marble floor and triggered it.
The world screamed.
A pulse of abyssal energy lashed outward, folding the room inward like crumpled paper.
The polished marble shattered. Mana lamps exploded. The heavy tapestry-lined walls twisted into grotesque, spiraling tunnels of stone and fabric.
Kasserrith and his thugs staggered back, shielding their faces from the howling wind of unraveling matter.
ProlixalParagon launched himself through the breach—
—and into madness.
He tumbled into the open air of Sern Ka’Torr—but not the city he had left behind.
The entire harbor district twisted unnaturally, the docks stretched out like broken clock hands, the ships caught mid-motion, frozen between crashing waves that hung in the air like shattered glass.
The air rippled with static, heavy and wrong.
Above him, the sky fractured—rivers of color bleeding through jagged seams in reality, leaking into the world below like threads pulled loose from a tapestry.
Mana howled everywhere.
Reality itself had been wounded.
>System Notification:<
>Warning! Catastrophic Construct Failure Detected!<
>Localized Anomaly Has Expanded Beyond Containment.<
>Sern Ka’Torr has become an Instant Dungeon: “Fractured Harbor of the Synthete.”<
>Dungeon Level: 15-25<
>Dungeon Type: Instability Anomaly (High Threat)<
>Time Remaining: 23 Hours 59 Minutes<
Prolix's heart lurched in his chest as he read the notifications blazing across his vision.
This wasn’t just a localized breach.
This was a full spatial collapse.
An accidental dungeon creation event.
And it wasn’t limited to Kasserrith’s estate—
the entire city of Sern Ka’Torr had been pulled into the vortex of his unstable device, the twisting energies reshaping streets, buildings, even the ships into fragmented, surreal landscapes full of volatile mana storms and ruptured ley fractures.
He stumbled forward, his steps unsteady on the warped cobblestones.
Anchor points glowed faintly in the distance—crackling leylines wrapped around broken statues, collapsed bell towers, and spiraling mana fractures where the docks had once been.
The Troupe.
His mind jolted violently.
They’re still here.
They were trapped inside this nightmare with him.
And if he didn’t stabilize the dungeon’s core before the timer ran out, Sern Ka’Torr wouldn’t recover.
It would be consumed—erased.
The Vermillion Troupe.
The Tinkerers' relics.
Everything.
Everyone.
He tightened his grip on his battered satchel, feeling the thrum of unfinished prototypes, unstable blueprints, and the raw forge of his will.
He had built this.
He would undo it.
ProlixalParagon bared his teeth in a fierce, wild grin and bolted toward the nearest anchor point, the fractured sky screaming above him, the broken city yawning open like a beast awaiting judgment.