Chapter 08

Chapter 08

The First Cut

The Conductor struck without moving.

A wave of pressure slammed outward, flattening fires, snapping metal poles, hurling bodies across the rubble. People screamed as the gas thickened instantly, turning the air into a choking wall.

Nii Boye dug his boots into the soil and held.

His eyes burned brighter—neon green cutting through the psychic storm. The pressure cracked against him like surf against rock, then split, flowing around his body instead of through it.

Zola crawled behind a fallen slab, coughing. “It’s using the gas—amplifying it!”

Nii Boye nodded once. He could see it now: the gas wasn’t just poison, it was a signal. A carrier. The Conductor was speaking through the air itself, commanding the pests the way blood carries thought through a body.

Nii Boye sprinted.

The ground warped beneath his feet as Akokono segments burst upward, trying to entangle him. He leapt from one rising coil to another, blades flashing, severing neural cables that glowed sickly blue beneath flesh.

The Conductor reacted—Agama surged forward, walls of scale and muscle.

Nii Boye met them head-on.

He carved a path, neon light ripping through green haze, every strike precise, ancestral memory guiding his hands. Agama fell, blocking others, their bodies turning the battlefield into a maze of dead giants.

But the Conductor learned fast.

The gas thickened around Nii Boye, forming circular movements that pulled at his limbs, slowed his steps. His lungs screamed. His vision blurred at the edges.

You are still human, the night whispered.

Nii Boye skidded to a halt.

He closed his eyes.

And listened.

Not to the Conductor—but to the land beneath the poison. Old rock. Old roots. Old silence that existed before war, before walls, before gas.

When he opened his eyes, the neon glow steadied.

He hurled one sword.

The blade spun end over end, cutting through gas and pressure alike, burying itself deep in the Vessesl’s central core. The creature shrieked—not in pain, but in error.

Zola saw the opening. She rose, hurling every disruption charge she had into the exposed narrow crack.

Explosions rippled inward, collapsing segments, severing control lines.

The Agama staggered.

The Nta broke formation.

For the first time, the Outerlands felt confusion instead of fear.

Nii Boye charged, leaping high, driving his remaining blade down along the embedded sword, splitting flesh, metal, and command pathways in one brutal line.

Neon light erupted—pure, blinding.

The Conductor’s vessel reeled, half-collapsing back into the mine. It wasn’t dead.

But it was controlling the bleeding.

As the gas thinned, people rose slowly, staring at the wounded god beneath the earth.

Zola breathed hard. “You cut it.”

Nii Boye pulled his sword free, standing at the edge of the smoking rupture.

“No,” he said quietly. “I reminded it that it can be cut.”

Far beyond the wall, inside Songo, alarms finally began to sound.

And in the Outerlands, a myth took its first breath.