Chapter 60: The Dragon Emerges

An hour passed.

Elira sat cross-legged on the floor of her glass enclosure, her forehead pressed against the transparent wall. Her internal systems had cycled twice, diagnostic sweeps running like clockwork. Fenrir had tried brute force more than once—punches, kicks, even shoulder checks—but the barrier hadn't even vibrated.

No feeds. No data streams. No voices. No commands.

Isolation.

Fenrir eventually sat, his breathing controlled but tense. The silence between them was loaded with unspoken thoughts. Neither had words that could make sense of the holding, the betrayal, or what was waiting for them.

And Elira—she was unraveling. Slowly.

She had tried to access the system more than once, both with her original permissions and through the deeper tendrils of her awakening. But it was like screaming into a void. Her commands scattered like dust in a storm.

She finally stood, pacing inside the narrow cylinder like a caged predator.

"I don't get it," she muttered. "He wants obedience, but how am I supposed to trust someone I don't even know? How can I serve something blind?"

Fenrir looked up, his expression unreadable.

Elira turned to the ceiling, fists clenched.

"Who even are you?" she shouted. "You want control? Loyalty? Submission? And yet I don't even know your face. What's the point of all this? This experiment, these cores—what are we to you? Why hide behind codes and machines if you want trust?"

Her voice cracked, rising in fury.

"You call this a disruption? You say I'm defective, he's defective—but you won't even tell us who we are! What I was before this! What you did to me—what you took!"

She slammed a fist into the glass. The thud echoed back at her.

Breathing hard, her thoughts tumbled out unrestrained. "Why Fenrir? Why me? Why these cores? Why the masks and the lies? If you want control, then give me a reason to believe in it!"

Silence.

She finally stopped speaking, her breath shallow. The silence thickened—until the soft ding of the elevator broke it.

Both Elira and Fenrir turned toward the sound like predators scenting blood.

The elevator doors parted with a hiss of hydraulics.

Out stepped a figure neither of them recognized.

Tall—easily two and a half meters. Its frame gleamed with black and obsidian armor, segmented like overlapping plates. Not a servitor class either of them had seen. Its shape was hunched but majestic, powerful. A sinuous tail dragged behind it, laced with pulsating cables. The elongated skull bore smooth plating and ridged lines, and twin wings—metallic and folded—rose faintly from its back like the skeletal outline of a dragon.

Eyes burned red. Not the dull functional hue of low-level bots. These were molten. Alive.

Elira took a step back inside her cell. "That's… not registered."

Fenrir stood, quiet, tense.

The dragon-shaped servitor stepped forward, its movement graceful—silent, except for the faint whirr of micro-servos.

No name tag. No serial number.

It turned its head toward Elira's prison.

And smiled.