A Team of Glass

Pazzo’s old sanctuary was a mausoleum of failed ambition.

The six Zinox had sought refuge here after the desperate, impossible victory at Broken Tooth Pass. They were a portrait of exhaustion; bruised, battered, and caked in grime, but for a fleeting moment, they had moved as one. A team. It was a fragile, unfamiliar feeling, and it was about to be shattered like glass.

Nicolas felt the precariousness of their unity like a physical weight. Every moment they hesitated, every silent breath they took in this tomb of invention, felt like another grain of sand slipping through the hourglass. He had to push them forward.

“Alright, Pazzo, you have your six Zinox,” Nicolas said, his voice cutting through the heavy silence. “We held up our end. What’s the next move?”

Slowly, Pazzo lifted his head, his eyes reflecting the faint, orange light of the coals. The familiar, condescending smirk that always set Nicolas’s teeth on edge spread across his features. “Ah, yes. An excellent question,” he purred, his tone dripping with a chilling placidity. “About that…”

The atmosphere in the room didn’t just change; it fractured. With a movement so fluid it was almost imperceptible, Harmon and Maris shifted their positions. They rose from the floor and placed themselves strategically behind Hector and Bruno, creating a new, terrible alignment. A low, dissonant hum began to emanate from Harmon, a sound that vibrated in the bones and made the teeth ache. At Maris’s feet, thick, thorny vines erupted from the cracks in the stone floor, slithering silently across the ground.

An alarm bell forged in countless ambushes shrieked in Hector’s mind, his hand instinctively snapping to the grip of his bow. Bruno, caught completely off guard, could only manage a confused grunt. But it was Katrina who reacted with the speed of a striking viper.

“What the hell is this?” she hissed, her twin tantos already in her hands, gleaming like slivers of ice in the firelight. Her eyes, narrowed and lethal, darted between her former allies, calculating angles and trajectories. “Talk. Now.”

“I’ve simply brokered a new arrangement with our more… cooperative friends,” Pazzo explained, his voice maddeningly casual. He gestured a hand toward Maris and Harmon. “A more efficient one. With their unique abilities, I can acquire the necessary components for my device far more quickly. Then, of course,” he added, his gaze locking onto Nicolas, “I will still require your brain.”

“Pazzo, you diseased son of a bitch!” Nicolas roared, the cold shock of betrayal giving way to a hot surge of fury. “I knew we shouldn’t have trusted you!”

“I am a man of science, journalist. I pursue the most logical path to achieve my goals,” Pazzo countered with a dismissive shrug. “And the most powerful motivator in any world, real or digital, is the desire to go home. Is it not?” That simple, unadorned question was heavier than any threat, for it was a truth that resonated in every soul trapped in that room.

Harmon’s voice, when he spoke, was thick with a shame that could not mask his desperation. He refused to meet Nicolas’s gaze, focusing instead on a point on the far wall. “I’m sorry, Nicolas. Truly. But we can’t fight Gein. Not him. Besides… I miss my home. Do you have any idea what it was like? Being that lunatic Volta’s slave? He’d talk to his ‘electric ghosts’ more than he’d talk to me. I just… I want to be free.”

“And my death is the price for your freedom?” Nicolas shot back, the anger in his voice curdling into a bitter, aching disappointment.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be hunted for two years,” Maris whispered. Her eyes shimmered with unshed tears, but the resolve in her voice was like steel. “To never sleep in the same place twice, to see a monster in every shadow. I watched those Black Knights… they don’t stop. Ever. This is the only way. I just want it to be over.”

Seeing the fracture lines deepening, Pazzo turned his attention to Katrina, a predator sensing an opportunity to isolate the most dangerous member of the opposition. “Come now, Katrina. You, of all people, want a way out. This is a simple transaction. Join us. It is the only logical choice.”

A sharp, humorless laugh escaped Katrina’s lips. “Logical? You’re the one who dragged us into this mess,” she spat, her voice dripping with venom. “You promised a way out, and you led us right into the fire. The only thing I’ve learned is that the only person you can rely on in this world is yourself.”

A crack appeared in Pazzo’s calm facade. He leaped to his feet, his eyes now blazing with a zealot’s fire. “This damned game is on the verge of total collapse! The systems are failing, the code is corrupting itself! I refuse to squander our final opportunity because of your sentimental attachments! Being trapped here for eternity was never, and will never be, part of my plan!”

Nicolas saw the raw, terrifying logic behind Pazzo’s desperation. This man would burn them all, burn this entire world to ash, if it meant he could find his way home. He clenched his fists, his muscles coiling for one last, hopeless fight. “So be it,” he growled through his teeth.

The room held its breath, a powder keg about to explode. Hector’s bow was drawn taut, an arrow aimed not at Maris or Harmon, but at Pazzo’s heart. Katrina crouched low, a coiled viper ready to strike. The hum around Harmon intensified into an ear-splitting frequency, and the roots at Maris’s command began to splinter the very stones of the floor.

And then, a deep, groaning crack echoed from above.

A fine shower of dust rained down, and with a sound like tearing metal, the entire ceiling of the sanctuary was peeled away as if a giant hand were opening a can.

As debris and stone rained down around them, a silhouette blotted out the starless, ink-black sky. The visage of Suge, like a snake shedding its skin, dissolved and cracked like porcelain, sloughing away to reveal the pale, sharp, and brutally familiar face beneath.

Gein looked down upon the small, desperate figures caught in the trap he had so perfectly arranged, and he smiled. It was not the smile of a victor, but of a god enjoying his grand, personal theater.

“Finally,” his voice boomed, echoing in the sudden, shocked silence, a sound that promised an end to all their petty squabbles. “I’ve found you.”