Helena descends through West Island toward the port and encounters Ivy with Crowther’s corpse. Ivy admits she betrayed Headquarters and killed Crowther because the Necromancer promised to return Sofia, refusing to accept that Sofia is dead. Helena realizes Ivy, not Cetus, enabled the Undying victory.

At West Port Lab, Helena uses her necromancy to seize control of nearby necrothralls and sends them to place her phosphorus bombs through the warehouse’s ventilation. The bombs detonate, triggering a catastrophic chain reaction that collapses the lab and destroys Bennet’s work. Injured, drugged, and nearly overcome by grief for Luc, Helena forces herself up because she promised Kaine she would return.

Helena injects herself with a stimulant meant for Kaine and fights through chimaera, necrothralls, Aspirants, and Lancaster. She then confronts a lich using Althorne’s corpse and discovers the talisman belongs to Atreus Ferron, Kaine’s father. Before Helena can kill Atreus, Lancaster and other Aspirants overpower her, break her wrist, and knock her unconscious.

Helena wakes in a cage in Headquarters with Matron Pace, badly injured and stripped of nearly everything except Kaine’s hidden ring. The Undying torture captured Resistance members: Rhea is flayed by Titus’s reanimated corpse, and Alister’s severed remains hang nearby. Morrough arrives with Luc’s reanimated body, forces Luc to kneel as if begging for immortality, then crushes Luc’s skull in a public demonstration of conquest and humiliation.

After the spectacle, prisoners are sorted. Pace tries to protect Helena but is pushed into the cull cage with her, then falls and is badly injured. Mandl recognizes Helena, learns Bennet died in the lab’s destruction, and claims Helena for the stasis warehouse, using pain and healing to make Helena afraid before fitting her with another cuff.

In the warehouse, Mandl removes Helena’s record so Helena can vanish into stasis without paperwork. Helena realizes interrogation could expose Kaine, especially if Morrough searches her memories, so Helena uses her weakened resonance to bury the last two years and redirect her mind toward Luc instead. Trapped conscious in a freezing stasis tank, Helena feels Kaine’s ring burning as he searches for her, but forces herself not to think of him and repeats the promise that she will not break.