The fog didn't let up.
If anything, it thickened—pressing down on us like a second skin, curling through our lungs like it belonged there. NULL wasn't just in the air now. It was the air.
Every step forward felt like trespass.
We moved in near-silence, the sound of our footfalls swallowed whole. The trees, if they could still be called that, grew stranger with each mile. What once looked like roots had become spinal cords; what looked like branches now twitched like veins.
Violet stayed close. Her hand never left the hilt of her blade, and her eyes scanned everything like it might move—because here, it could.
I could feel the weight of the first seal still pulsing gently at the base of my spine. Not active. Just awake. It didn't speak to me, but it watched.
Like it was waiting.
"Do you feel that?" Violet murmured.
I nodded. "We're not alone."
We weren't.
A shape flickered to our left, just beyond a wall of haze. Tall. Lurching. Human once, maybe. Now? Whatever NULL had done to it, there was no coming back. Its form stuttered between frames, limbs stretching, folding, then snapping back into shape like it was made of memory instead of muscle.
It turned toward us.
No face. Just smooth skin where features should've been. And a hole in its chest.
Not torn.
Etched.
NULL pulsed out of it like breath.
It charged.
I moved without thinking.
The fog didn't clear.
It never did. It just shifted—pulling away from where the creature had vanished, like the NULL itself had recoiled from what we'd done. The space it left behind felt thinner somehow, like something had been holding it up from beneath… and now that support was gone.
Violet sat beside a twisted root, shoulder heaving, one hand pressed against her ribs. I moved to help her, but she waved me off.
"I've had worse," she grunted. "Didn't feel like bone."
Still, she winced when she stood. Her blade was smeared with something that wasn't quite liquid, wasn't quite vapor. It hissed softly, evaporating off the metal like steam.
"What was that thing?" I asked.
She didn't answer right away. Just stared at the spot where it had disappeared.
"A Runner," she finally said. "Once."
I blinked. "You're sure?"
She nodded slowly. "I saw the straps… on its wrist. The emblem. Standard-issue. But the rest of it…" Her voice dropped. "NULL didn't just take it over. It changed the memory of what it was. Like it rewrote the idea of its body from the inside out."
I thought back to the way it moved. Not glitching—but stuttering through space, like it no longer understood time or direction in the same way we did.
NULL wasn't just corruption.
It was identity rot.
"I don't think that thing attacked us," I murmured. "I think it was drawn to the Seal."
Violet looked at me, lips pressed thin. "You said it felt like it was testing you."
I nodded.
She stared at the ground for a while, then back into the fog. "Then we need to be ready. Because that was just a fragment. A symptom."
I felt it too.
The deeper we went, the more seen I felt.
Not watched. Not hunted.
Recognized.
NULL knew I was here. It didn't care about Violet. It didn't care about what I carried.
It cared about what I was becoming.
We moved again, slower this time. Not because of fear, but because the terrain was shifting beneath our feet. Rock and soil were giving way to something else—like tissue, like melted obsidian, soft and cracking with each step.
The fog began to pulse rhythmically around us. Not in time with our steps, or with the wind.
But in time with something deeper.
Like a heartbeat buried beneath the Zone itself.
We reached a ridge of jagged bone-colored stone, and on the other side, nestled in a bowl of rotting earth, we saw it:
A structure.
Sunken.
Partially collapsed.
Surrounded by massive, dark pylons still humming faintly with power.
The walls were marked with symbols—some in Dracus dialects, others older. Faint, spiraling patterns that hurt to look at directly. Like the meaning behind them was still alive.
Violet exhaled. "This is it."
"What is it?"
She looked at me. "Where they buried the first one."
My heart kicked.
"The first what?"
Her eyes didn't leave the structure.
"The first subject they tried to overwrite with NULL."
She turned to me.
"And the first one that survived."
Voidscar came off my back in one fluid motion, the blade humming with a low resonance the moment it tasted the air. Violet was already circling wide, her movement barely audible over the weightless hush of the Zone.
The creature didn't run like something possessed—it floated just above the ground, limbs dragging and twitching, body phasing forward in jarring, stop-motion bursts. It covered ten feet in the blink of an eye.
I met it halfway.
My strike should've cleaved through its chest, but it shifted mid-lunge, flickering an inch out of phase. My blade scraped across its ribs instead, drawing no blood—just a burst of NULL mist, like pressure releasing from a cracked seal.
It brought its hand down toward my head—elongated fingers, bone-thin, twitching. I ducked low, twisted, and drove my knee into its side.
That connected.
It let out no sound. No scream. Just a tremor that shot through my leg on impact, like I'd hit something hollow and ancient.
Then it swung back, hard.
I raised Voidscar in time to block, but the impact sent me skidding backward. My boots dug into the soft ground as I gritted my teeth, the vibration from the blow crawling through my arms like cold fire.
Violet struck from behind.
Her blade pierced clean through the back of its neck—but instead of collapsing, the thing convulsed, limbs flaring outward in all directions like a star collapsing in reverse. It threw her off, hard, sending her flying into the roots of a bent tree.
I shouted her name—just once—but I didn't get a chance to move.
The creature surged again, sprinting toward me in that stutter-step, phasing motion that made my stomach churn.
I didn't think.
I stepped into it, pivoted, and drove Voidscar into the center of its chest.
Right through the NULL-etched hole.
The moment my blade pierced it, everything stopped.
Fog stilled.
The air pulled inward.
The creature seized up—arms out, twitching wildly—before a sudden pulse of NULL exploded outward from the wound.
I was flung back.
Hard.
The impact knocked the wind out of me, slammed me into the ground, and blurred the world into streaks of violet and white. I rolled, coughing, ears ringing. When my vision cleared—
It was gone.
Just... gone.
No corpse. No scorch marks. No blood.
Only a faint black stain where the NULL had exploded, and the scent of something metallic and sour lingering in the air.
I sat up slowly, head pounding.
Violet limped over, one hand to her ribs, her other dragging her blade behind her.
"That wasn't like the others," she muttered, voice low.
I shook my head, still catching my breath. "It wasn't trying to kill us."
She looked at me. "What do you mean?"
"It was... testing something."
She didn't speak.
Neither did I.
Because whatever that thing was—it left more than just a mark on the ground.
It left a feeling in the air.
A message.
One I hadn't heard yet.
But I would.
I stared at the structure.
It didn't look like a tomb. Or a lab. Or even a vault. It looked like something that had been forgotten on purpose—half-swallowed by the earth, half-consumed by time. Even now, it felt like the land wanted to reject it. The NULL around it twisted unnaturally, the fog forming tight, spiraling funnels above the black pylons, circling without dispersing.
I took a step forward.
The first Seal at the base of my spine tensed.
Just a flicker. A twitch.
Not pain.
Anticipation.
Violet placed a hand on my shoulder. "We don't go in blind. We scout it, we listen to the walls. Places like this… they remember everything. And if this is where the first subject was kept—then it's not a building."
"What is it, then?"
She looked down at the ground beneath our boots. The soil was darker here. Oily. Almost... breathing.
"It's a mouth," she said. "And I think it's been waiting to open again."
The wind stopped.
The fog stilled.
And somewhere below—deep beneath the rotting stone—we heard it:
Three knocks.
Not loud.
Not desperate.
Just… patient.
Like something in there knew we were finally close enough.
Like it knew my name.
I didn't speak.
Neither did Violet.
We just stood there.
Waiting.
Listening.
The first door didn't look like a door at all.
It was stone—solid, veined with black veins of NULL-threaded ore. But it throbbed faintly with each knock from below, sending small ripples through the dust. A seal carved deep into its center pulsed once, then went still. Not one of mine. Not Violet's either.
Something older.
Something buried.
We approached slowly, blades sheathed but ready, every step a conversation with the tension in our legs.
There was writing along the edge—etched in a language I didn't recognize, but somehow understood anyway. The letters weren't just words. They were memories.
They told a warning.
That which cannot be erased, must be sealed.
That which cannot be sealed, must be divided.
And what remains... must not be named.
Violet read it too. Her voice was barely a whisper. "This wasn't meant to be found."
"Then why is it still pulsing?"
The ground beneath us let out a long, slow breath.
The door shuddered once.
Then split—just enough to show a sliver of black beyond. No light. No torch-glow. Just a void.
I stepped forward.
Because deep down, I already knew:
This is where they tried to erase me.