Heng Faces the Sky's Underside

Heng roared, the psychic agony of his severed anchor chain a raw wound against his will. He lashed out with a grav-wrench, the makeshift weapon singing as it sliced through the air, aimed at the shimmering distortion Zero projected. "You broke the main anchor! You let *that* in!"

Zero’s voice, impossibly distant and laced with a strange calm, echoed in the chamber. "The descent... is the only direction left. To cling... is to drown in stillness."

The city groaned, a sickening sound that Heng felt in his bones. Debris, once only threatening to drift upward, now cascaded downwards, a horrifying perversion of the Pull.

He saw it then, not just Zero’s machinations, but the true consequence of Tiechui’s sacrifice and Reflection's fragmented mind: the Sky's End Anchor was not holding them, it was *pulling* them.

Heng stumbled back, catching himself on a riveted bulkhead. The familiar vertigo was gone, replaced by a sickening sense of being irrevocably *unmoored* from his own reality. He could feel Reflection’s awareness, a fading ember within the Anchor’s core, her memories dissolving like mist.

Zero’s influence pulsed again, a wave of fractured thought promising an end to the struggle. "Let go, Heng. See the end..."

The downward resonance intensified, not from the city’s failing anchors, but from a new source, directly above. A colossal shadow detached itself from the impossibly bright ceiling of the upward abyss.