There's one last surge of copper defenders as Zyrian tilts toward oblivion, one last desperate charge of snakes. Then the shot rings out and it all comes to an end even as Elidibus makes his last grasp at Steel's knowledge. The copper snakes drop where they are, lifeless, and the room seems to shrink around them and become something more physically possible than it was before. Steel simply lays tangled in the wires, bloody and inert, gone from this world as anything other than a broken physical shell. Whatever his powers within his own realm, whatever powers given to him by finance and politics, it seems he was ultimately nothing more than human in this way.

Around them, Steel's victims claw their way back to consciousness and out of the entangling wires. Whatever happens now is up to the survivors.