The veil between worlds unraveled like torn fabric, and reality gave way.
When Seyfe opened his eyes again, he wasn't sure if they were still in Sichuan or someplace entirely new.
The storm hadn't stopped. It had evolved.
Endless rain fell sideways and upward, dragging in sheets across a vast grey field that stretched far beyond the horizon. Jagged mountains jutted like broken ribs from the earth, and the sky—if it could still be called that—was a churning maelstrom of black and violet, whispering words they couldn't quite decipher.
The ground was mossy, but not with vegetation. It pulsed faintly beneath their boots like breathing stone. Something alive… or something that remembered being.
"Oh… dear," Saline muttered, holding herself as the temperature dropped sharply, steam curling out from her lips.
She extended one hand, fingers glowing softly—then brighter. A low-rolling wave of flame erupted around her, spreading like a gentle curtain, its heat pushing back the biting cold.
"Gather close," she said, voice tight, "this place is siphoning our body heat."
Seyfe stepped beside her, eyes narrowing as he studied the terrain. Emi and Jerome huddled closer to the flame, their expressions unreadable.
"This isn't just a realm," Seyfe finally said. "It's a… a memory. A broken one. Like the realm itself doesn't know it's dead."
"I've read about rift layers like this," Jerome said, finally steadying his breath. "These aren't random. They're usually aftermaths of something cataclysmic—leftover echoes of… well, something we probably don't want to meet."
"Question is," Emi added, her voice low, "what caused it to open now?"
Thunder rolled sideways across the sky.
Above them, something moved in the storm—a long, thin silhouette, like a tendril, or a tower that shouldn't be able to float.
Ferez squinted toward the distant mountain ridges.
"We need higher ground. If this is a fragment of a previous plane, we might be able to locate a beacon root—something left behind by whoever crossed here before."
"If they're still alive," Emi muttered.
"If we don't freeze first," Jerome added, teeth chattering.
Saline gritted her teeth and intensified the flames slightly.
"Then stay close. I can hold this for a while, but not forever. We move, now."
The team began ascending the cracked slope toward the nearest grey ridge, eyes sharp, weapons at the ready. The deeper they went, the quieter it became.
Even the storm began to muffle—like the world itself was holding its breath.
And somewhere in the static of the storm… something watched.
The sound of rain drummed like thousands of whispered taps across their armor—tap tap tap—unrelenting and cold. Every step squelched into the pulsing ground, blackened rainwater soaking into the fractured moss-like stone beneath their boots.
They moved in cautious formation, barely speaking.
Until—
"Seyfe—over there," Ferez said, his voice low, strained. His eyes narrowed, squinting through the veil of black rain."Did that look like a tall stone pillar?"
Everyone halted.
About two hundred meters away, a jagged silhouette jutted upward through the downpour, half-shrouded by mist. It was unnaturally tall, irregular, and faintly glowing with pale red veins trailing down its sides like infected roots.
The group instinctively crouched, shields and cores bracing for an ambush—but none came.
"I don't like this," Saline muttered, her flame-light shrinking to a steady pulse in her palm."This kind of rain… it's not rain. It feels like it's trying to get in."
"The water's black," Emi said quietly, brushing a droplet from her cheek and watching it smear like ink."It's not natural. That's Echofluid."
"And the only sound…" Jerome added, glancing around, "is us. Just our boots, our breath, and that pillar. Nothing else."
Even the wind seemed to avoid this place.
They moved, slow and steady, deeper into the field, the pillar gradually becoming clearer. Its base was partially sunken into the slanted ground, warped by pressure and time. As they neared, they saw another group—veilers, crouched near the southern edge of the structure, their armor scraped and their expressions grim.
"That's the other squad," Saline said, blinking away the rain."The ones who jumped through the rift just before us."
Their signal identifiers blinked—low power, but alive.
The two groups made careful contact, brief nods and short reports exchanged over sealed coms. Neither team had seen any Echoforms since arriving… and that terrified them more than if they had.
"Where's the enemy?" someone whispered."There's always an enemy in these phases."
No answer came. Just the relentless whispering of rain, and the distant thrum of thunder rolling like a warning.
Seyfe's eyes locked onto the pillar.
Carvings.
Not symbols—gouges. As if something had clawed into the stone repeatedly, and not out of madness.
"There's something here," he said softly."Something waiting. This field isn't just part of a realm. It's a graveyard…"
They stood in silence, soaked to the bone in black water, chilled by the unnatural cold, surrounded by grey peaks and the hiss of storms. Somewhere in the distance… the air twitched.
A frequency beyond hearing.
Just then, a deep groan rolled through the storm-soaked earth—like a continent cracking in its sleep.
One of the mountain ridges on the far side of the field collapsed violently, stone and debris falling not in thunderous roars but in a muted, vibrating hum, as if sound itself was being bent or eaten.
And then—A frequency tore through the air. Not sound. Not vibration. It was something deeper. A pressure against their cores. A vibration inside their skulls. Something screamed.
Not from the land.Not from beneath.Not even from the skies.
It was all of it.
"That's not an Echoform..." Ferez breathed.
"There is no Echoform on the ground," Saline said, her voice barely audible now, body tensing as her fire sputtered out into steam."The ground is empty because…"
Their heads slowly turned.
And then—upward.
High above them, hidden in plain sight all along, the grey storm clouds twisted in unnatural arcs, and the mist finally peeled back.
A coiled mass—a skin, layered like the scales of some impossible serpent—wrapped the skies like a second firmament. Its texture blended with the clouds, grey on grey, perfectly still… until it shifted.
And then it opened.
A single, massive eye, the size of a moon, stared down at them. Pale, silvery, cold.
Its pupil was shaped like a crescent moon—not dilated, not searching.It watched. As if it always had.
The light from it didn't illuminate. It only made the world around them more colorless, like memory fading under water.
"Holy…" Jerome whispered, but couldn't finish. His throat clamped shut."Shit."
Everyone froze.
Even the other squad—battle-hardened veilers—stood as still as statues, breath drawn tight in their lungs.
The world around them… echoed. Not with sound, but with fear.A shivering resonance that vibrated through their bones, their cores, their sanctified runes, even the weaver matrices embedded in their weapons began to hum erratically.
The veiler comms crackled with static. Then silence.
"No one said anything about a Sovereign-class Skybreed," Emi said, swallowing hard, her silver hair soaked and clinging to her face."That's not just some mutation... That's something ancient."
"We're not prepared for this," Saline murmured, fire long gone now, her hand instinctively reaching for Seyfe's arm."Seyfe… what the hell are we standing under?"
And Seyfe—Seyfe could only stare.
Aki's boots crunched over loose gravel as she stepped out of the dropship, her crimson eyes scanning the shattered skyline of the Karakorum deployment zone. The air was thin here, tainted with ozone and volatile Weaver emissions. All around her, command drones buzzed to life and signal towers extended, syncing to the remote HQ satellite links.
Handlers from multiple squadrons had already arrived, stepping into their respective command tents, flanked by assistants and junior tacticians. They were deploying, organizing, preparing to stabilize the chaos.
Then the comms flared.
Three pings. Simultaneous.
[ALERT: BROKEN LAYER PHASE DETECTED]– SICHUAN SECTOR– WESTERN RIDGE FRONT– SECTOR 3C—UNMAPPED
Aki's eyes narrowed. "...No," she muttered under her breath.
Inside the command tent, a large digital map flickered violently, and new red zones bloomed across it like hemorrhages. The calm control tent erupted into arguments, typing, moving figures—chaos replacing strategy in real-time.
"We were just beginning reconsolidation!""Why now?! This shouldn't be happening simultaneously!""The temporal markers don't align—this is forced collapse!"
One of the handlers, Ura from the Fallacy Squadron, slammed her hand against the edge of the ops table.
"We're spread thin already. A broken layer phase this wide—it's not natural.""No," another added sharply, "It's intentional."
Aki remained still for a moment. Then she turned to the others, voice calm but cold.
"The Sovereign mutations, the echoform swarms, the missing squads... and now this."
"We're not dealing with random emergence. Someone is curating this chaos."
Jannet growled under their breath.
"If we all go out there, HQ's vulnerable. And if this architect knows that, they're probably planning to strike when we're out."
Aki didn't blink.
"They've already begun."
Silence followed.
The rain outside hit harder against the tent canvas. Somewhere beyond the zone, a gravitational spike blinked on the uplink feed. It was massive—and unmistakably from the Sichuan field.
Aki's gaze locked onto it. Her voice was low.
"That's Seyfe's team…"
She exhaled once, sharp.
"Update all squadrons. No assumptions. Everything—every single echoform, mutation, and core flare—must be logged and mapped to the second. We're in the deep now. And whatever's watching... it just opened its eyes."