Site Theta
Rowan jolted awake to the smell of ozone and ash. A cacophony of gunfire, static, and distorted screams rang in his ears. He lay on shattered glass—glass that showed flickering reflections of a hundred versions of himself.
He saw Lucian dying—screaming as echoes pulled him into a collapsing Rift.
Then himself, bleeding out on a battlefield of bones.
Then neither of them. Just an empty, broken world under a dead sky.
"Rowan," Haru's voice cut through the fog, breathless and sharp. "Stay with me."
Rowan's eyes cleared, locking on Haru's face, tense with concern. Haru didn't need to say anything—Rowan grounded himself, pushing through the weight in his chest by sheer will.
Lucian crouched beside them, a hand on Rowan's chest, grounding him with firm pressure. His eyes were storm-gray, locked with focus.
"You're back," Lucian said. "You slipped too deep."
Rowan exhaled shakily. "It felt real."
Lucian's jaw tightened. "It was."
Around them, the battlefield churned. Structures glitched in and out of visual alignment, and puddles on the ground reflected past events in real time. Echoes emerged like phantoms reborn—warped versions of memories.
One wore Rowan's face with burned-out eyes, arms outstretched in pleading agony as it dragged a chain of spectral bodies behind it, each whispering Rowan's name. Another, Lucian's voice, but a stranger's form.
Mira stood atop a collapsed wall, her elemental rifle humming like a living being.
She switched firing modes mid-pivot—from lightning burst to firestorm—and let loose an arcing chain of electricity that danced between three echoes. She didn't stop to admire the carnage. As they convulsed and vaporized, she slammed her palm into the receiver, flipping it into overdrive.
A volatile firestream launched from the barrel, incinerating a charging echo with a screech of ignited air. She dropped to a knee, exhaled, and tracked the next wave. Her eyes were distant, calm.
"Taking the north flank," she announced.
Without waiting, she vaulted forward from the wall and skidded into position behind a pile of fractured stone. From there, she popped three shots—precision bursts that detonated just above the echoes' heads, showering them in fire from above.
Her aim was pure suppression—forcing them into predictable movement.
"Push them into my firefield," she barked to Lucian.
"Done," he growled.
Lucian advanced, pulling the field toward him with flicks of his fingers. His telekinetic control twisted the terrain—he ripped a slab of broken street from the ground and hurled it sideways to block the retreat of several echoes. Then he formed a gleaming blue spear mid-air and drove it into one of their skulls. The weapon shattered on impact, but another was already forming in his other hand.
They were painting the field with precision: Mira from above, Lucian reshaping the lines, Rowan shielding behind.
Rowan's hands trembled, but he didn't waver. His breath hitched, resonance still raw from the earlier pull. But he was steady. Observing. Calculating.
He scanned the field with sharp clarity, eyes glowing faintly as he adjusted his stance. Echoes closed in from the west—he stepped forward, drawing their attention with a sharp burst of guiding resonance. It was subtle, not overpowering, just enough to disrupt their cohesion and focus them on him.
Lucian lifted a discarded steel bar telekinetically—thin and ragged—and hurled it into an echo's path. As it flinched, his spear struck clean through its chest.
"I'll hold the rear," Rowan said. "Don't let them circle us."
He turned, facing the crumbling alley behind them alone, ready for whatever came next.
"They're drawn to emotional resonance," Haru warned. "That spike from Rowan triggered a surge."
Lucian stepped forward, eyes narrowing. He raised a hand—and with a flex of will, launched a construct of raw psychic force. It shaped into a sleek spear mid-air, cutting through three echoes in a clean line.
But more came.
One wore Lucian's old Academy uniform. Another whispered, "You left me."
Lucian's corruption spiked. Rowan felt it before the alarms did.
"Lucian," he called. "Don't listen to them."
Lucian's gaze flicked back.
Site Delta
Ari slammed her knives into the ground, sparks erupting under her boots as the warped terrain shifted beneath her. Her breath fogged in the air—not from cold, but from the unnatural drain the storm was taking on her.
Two echoes charged.
She spun, slashing both in a fluid motion. Her dual blades moved like extensions of her arms—arcs of silver that gleamed even in the dark haze. One echo dropped, its throat split. The second reeled back, only to have Ari drive her boot into its chest and use it as a springboard.
She vaulted mid-air, twisted, and landed with both blades plunging into the skull of a third echo waiting below.
Blood—if it could be called that—splashed across her mask. She wiped it with her sleeve and pushed forward.
The hallucinations came hard then. Quinn—dead. Over and over.
She nearly dropped her guard.
"Stop it!" she screamed, and drove her blade into her own hand, a clean stab. The pain brought clarity.
She adjusted her grip and fell back into stance, eyes scanning for Quinn.
Dain, meanwhile, barreled into the echo horde with a gleeful roar that rattled the corrupted terrain. He dove into the mass of shifting shadows like a man possessed, fists flaring with spatial interference as he punched straight through a phantom's torso. The echo ruptured mid-scream.
He blinked out of existence and reappeared in the air, flipping once before slamming both fists into the ground. A violent ripple erupted, turning the dirt beneath the echoes into liquefied distortion—sucking in their legs and crushing their forms inward.
"Hell yeah! Who's next?!" he shouted, eyes wild.
A towering echo loomed up behind him—some sort of composite horror made of multiple faces.
Dain spun and slammed his palm forward. A rip in space widened like a jagged grin behind the creature, sucking it backward with a screech.
He teleported mid-combat, landing beside Ari. "Having fun yet?"
She scoffed, ducking a clawed swipe and driving her blade into an echo's side. "Little busy."
Quinn's voice called out across their comms. "Echo wave incoming, two o'clock!"
Dain grinned. "Perfect."
He pulled both fists together, charged them with swirling distortion energy, and detonated them forward in a blast that scattered the approaching echo wave like leaves in a cyclone.
To him, it was chaos. To everyone else, it was controlled devastation.
But they were still surrounded.
Zarek HQ
Elias stared at the central display. "I'm getting cross-site interference. One of the resonance signatures is destabilizing."
Ava leaned over his shoulder. "Whose?"
"Juno Fletcher," he said quietly.
Evelyn spun from the briefing table. "Put it on the main feed."
The resonance waveform spiked, then fractured.
All at once, every HUD, implant, and field device synced to the resonance grid let out a sharp chime.
[ VITAL SIGNATURE LOST ]
[ JUNO FLETCHER — TERMINATED ]
[ RESONANCE BACKLASH DETECTED IN ALL ACTIVE ZONES ]
Site Theta
Rowan screamed.
A sharp chime erupted from his pulse-bound interface, the VIREX Core, a sci-fi tech wrist display embedded with neural sync threads and etched with flowing pulse lines. A crimson display flashed:
[ VITAL SIGNATURE LOST ] [ JUNO FLETCHER — TERMINATED ] [ RESONANCE BACKLASH DETECTED IN ALL ACTIVE ZONES ]
Rowan's vision blurred. He felt something shatter inside him.
Lucian stumbled, gripping his own wrist as the same message glowed across his screen. For a moment, the storm around them dimmed, his pulse roaring louder than the echoes.
Mira's shot went wide for the first time. Even she blinked—her expression unreadable but frozen.
They felt it—not just heard it. Juno's death struck like a bell made of grief, echoing in their cores.
"She's gone," Haru whispered.
Site Delta
A chime exploded from Ari's wrist display.
[ JUNO FLETCHER — TERMINATED ]
She dropped her knives with a gasp, a sound too raw for words.
Quinn stared at his own screen, the glowing red notification burning itself into his vision. His guiding resonance faltered, the emotional link with Ari flickering dangerously. He felt her anguish even before she reached him.
He clenched his fists and closed his eyes, forcing himself to refocus. The storm screamed around them.
He reached out—not physically, but with the stabilizing pulse of a Guide's will. The tether between them reformed, not just in light, but in feeling: guilt, rage, and the desperate need to keep each other alive.
"I'm here," he said aloud, voice shaking. "We finish this together."
Thea, eyes still closed, began to cry silently.
Dain stopped laughing.
Site Epsilon
Lyra screamed, "She's surging!" Her hands glowed with resonance-neutral gel, desperately applying compression over Juno's chest. Another medic—a B-Class named Luna—rushed beside her with an emergency pulse defibrillator.
"Her signature's flickering—get the stabilizer implant now!" Luna barked.
Just meters away, Alexander raised his shield against the advancing echoes, his stance a wall of unyielding precision. Every strike that hit him rang out like iron against thunder, the kinetic barrier flaring in brilliant arcs.
He crouched low, angling the shield to deflect incoming blows into the ground, and used the recoil to uppercut one echo with brutal force.
Another came from his blind side—he pivoted mid-motion and used the edge of his shield like a blade, smashing into its neck with spine-snapping force.
He wasn't just defending. He was funneling. Each movement corralled the enemies into Kira's kill zone.
"Channel them left!" he barked.
Beside him, Kira adjusted instantly. She spun, arms sweeping outward, and sent a volley of razor-thin ice daggers spiraling across the funnel path Alexander created.
The projectiles hit like shrapnel—clean, surgical. She advanced, frost trailing behind her boots. With a stomp, she summoned a waist-high wall of ice to force an echo backward, then vaulted over it with a twisting slash, her ice-coated glove severing the creature at the waist.
"Keep the angle tight. I've got this lane," she called out, voice sharp and controlled.
Alexander slammed a foot into the earth, activating a seismic pulse from his shield. The shockwave forced a group of echoes to stumble, exposing them to Kira's ice spire erupting beneath them.
Their coordination was mechanical. Brutal. Calculated.
And yet, even in their lethal rhythm, both kept glancing toward Juno's failing form.
Something was slipping—and they could both feel it.
Lyra yanked the compact device from her satchel, slammed it against Juno's sternum, and activated it. A pulse of blue energy surged through her body—but her vitals only spiked once, then flatlined.
"She's not responding!"
Juno arched once, eyes vacant—and then her body shattered. Light burst from within, and her resonance disintegrated in a spiral of ash. Leaving just a corpse behind.
Alexander didn't move.
The alert still blared in his ear.
Nolan's scream echoed louder than the environment.
Alexander stood slowly, his shield glowing with unstable energy.
Then he broke.
He launched forward like a storm incarnate, tearing into the horde. Echoes exploded under his blows. Ice cracked. Ground split.
Kira pulled Nolan back, shielding them both.
In the fallout of the surge, silence reigned.
A fracture point had been reached.