Vis and Ostius enter Military’s hidden decision chamber, where a rotating nine-part stone circle stores immense Will. While Ostius distracts the assembled senators and Princeps Exesius with talk of old betrayals, Vis quietly steps across all nine sections and takes the stored power into himself. When Ostius starts to reveal the true meaning of the Hierarchy symbol, Exesius attacks, but Vis stops him effortlessly with his stolen strength and breaks his wrist.

Ostius then exposes that the three Princeps have been ceding their Will upward to a single man who intends to trigger a Cataclysm, and Exesius admits the Cataclysm is “necessary.” The senators also fail to reclaim the Will from the floor, proving Vis now holds it. Ostius produces a written confession covering their roles in the naumachia, Solivagus, and the cover-up, and under threat they all sign it, hoping they may still escape, regroup, and survive the political fallout.

When Ostius turns the prisoners over to Vis, Vis refuses to kill them. Despite his rage, he decides that keeping them alive for trial offers the best chance to avoid a wider Will-fought civil war and to expose the Republic’s rot lawfully. Ostius immediately undermines that restraint by revealing Vis’s true identity as Diago, son of Cristoval of Suus, and by reminding the senators that they hanged Vis’s parents and caused his sister’s death.

Vis demands the truth about Suus. Exesius explains that Vis’s father uncovered the truth about the Cataclysms and was believed to have found a weapon the Republic could not counter, so Military acted; Vis’s family was killed because loved ones might have been told too much. Vis then accuses Quiscil of pursuing that same weapon on Solivagus and of sacrificing children and even his own son for the Republic. Quiscil shows no remorse and sneers that Vis is partly to blame for his friend’s death.

That taunt triggers Diago, Vis’s alupi, who lunges forward and massacres the trapped senators before Vis can stop him. As the deaths strip away the Will Vis was holding, Vis collapses back into weakness and horror while Ostius laughs and treats the slaughter as useful. Ostius beheads Exesius, places the head on the stone circle, writes Mors vincit omnia in blood to stage the chamber as a different kind of political message, removes the bodies through his strange method of travel, orders Vis to flee, and vanishes, leaving Vis alone to run from the coming discovery.