The air didn’t just feel cold; it felt broken. The steady hum of high-voltage transformers was being overridden by a jagged, rhythmic pulse of white noise that made the shadows on the walls vibrate.
Vincent stood in the center of the derelict floor, his silver eyes wide and unblinking, glowing with a frenetic, artificial intensity.
/ “Do you hear that, Victor? The dragon isn't just breathing fire... she’s breathing frequency.” /
Vincent took a step forward, his movements hitching—a deliberate, physical glitch that sent a wave of interference through a nearby discarded television set.
“You call yourself a Young Prince, Raenys?” Vincent’s voice was a low-fi crawl, echoing from his own throat and the TV speakers simultaneously. “But you’re burning in an era of silicon and copper. Your 'dragon fire' is beautiful, but it’s so... analog. So slow.”
Victor was slumped against a rusted support beam, his hands pressed hard against his ears as if trying to keep his brain from leaking out.
“Please... stop,” Victor rasped, his voice barely audible over the roar of the static. “The noise... it’s too much. The heat from the girl and the scream from the machine... I can’t tell where the fire ends and the glitch begins.”
He looked up at the "Blessed Creature," Raenys, who seemed to be the source of a heat that was threatening to melt the very wires Vincent was trying to hijack.
“He’s right, you know,” Victor whispered, his gaze shifting to WildKard. “You’re six steps ahead of everyone else,... but you’re walking right into a furnace. Is there a 'Mind Palace' left for you to hide in when the dragon decides to turn your static into smoke?”
Vincent let out a high-pitched, distorted laugh, reaching out toward the air.
“We don’t want to watch it burn, Raenys,” Vincent hissed, his voice now a multi-layered broadcast. “We want to watch it glitch. We want to see what happens to your 'Blessed Wrath' when we run it through a distorted amplifier.”
