The hanging wires reach for Cortana and Steel, ready to ensnare one and free the other. Yelena's bullet strikes at the root of them, sending sparks flying as the mass of wires drop to the floor, adding to the chaos of broken machinery. A fire ignites above their heads, the reek of smoke from plastic and metal filling the air.

"You're so--small!" snarls Zyrian, wild-eyed, caught between fury and terror. He struggles to get his arms free, scrabbling at Cortana, at the wires on the floor, at her grip tightening on his throat. He twists and writhes in the wreckage of his altar, one desperate hand reaching for the copper snake stunned by the thrown gun, foiled by a strike from Elidibus that takes the construct out.

In his own digital world, Zyrian Steel was to be a god. Here in the land of the waking, he is but a man. His defenders, wires and snakes, seem to mirror his increasing desperation along with his increasingly clumsy movements as he teeters on the brink of unconsciousness, gasping for air that will not come.

It takes perhaps twenty or thirty seconds before his struggles weaken, then cease, leaving only the copper snakes still sluggishly trying to reach his attackers, slow enough now to be easily picked off as they come. His heart still beats--it takes some few minutes, after all, for a human to die from strangulation.