Samuel’s energy flared like a supernova, surrounding him and Sarah with a cocoon of light and shadow. Across the Obsidian Bloom, the Gatekeeper Host emerged from the veil, tall and thin, with eyes like liquid void and tendrils of psychic energy coiling from his fingertips.He was wearing the skin of a man, but the presence within was ancient—wrong, as though something from beyond this dimension had been poured into a fragile, unwilling vessel.“Welcome, Samuel,” he said, voice a whisper and a roar all at once. “It’s been so long since I’ve looked upon my successor.”Samuel stepped forward slowly. “I’m not your successor.”“No? And yet you opened the Vault. You danced with the light of the Gate. You heard its whisper, and you didn’t run.”“I survived it,” Samuel growled. “That’s not the same.”Sarah stood at his side, her body trembling but her stance firm. “You used me,” she hissed. “You branded my soul when I was still a child.”The Gatekeeper Host smiled coldly. “We preserved you. H

At 3:07 a.m., a piercing alarm shrieked through Site Theta-7, jerking the entire Vanguard base into motion. Red emergency lights flashed down the corridor. Samuel was already awake when the alert came—he hadn’t been able to sleep. He hadn’t slept in three days.He burst into the command room, where Aria was already typing furiously on the console, her face pale in the red light.“What is it?” Samuel demanded.Aria didn’t look up. “A signal just pinged from an old IMA beacon. Location: the heart of the Altai Mountains. Russia.”“Didn’t we disable all the old IMA sites?”“Yes,” she said grimly. “Which is why this one shouldn’t be active. And it’s broadcasting in Spiral’s frequency band.”Samuel’s eyes narrowed. “Repeat that.”“The Spiral isn’t dead,” she said, standing slowly. “You know that. We all saw the fractures. But this? This is a direct challenge.”Joey appeared at the doorway, holding a half-eaten protein bar. “You guys always start the end of the world without me?”“We may be

The mountain was quiet, unnaturally so.Not a whisper of wind. Not a bird in the sky. The silence of the world after a scream.They had emerged from the memory vault beneath the ice shaken, disoriented, and irrevocably changed. Sarah walked ahead, barefoot in the snow, her breath curling in the freezing air—yet she did not shiver. Her eyes still glowed faintly, twin beacons in the gathering dusk. Something had awakened within her, and it frightened everyone except her.Joey kept glancing back at her. “I’m just gonna say it. She’s giving me major creepy oracle energy right now.”“Shut up, Joey,” Samuel muttered, walking at her side. “She’s still Sarah.”“No,” Aria said quietly, trudging behind them. “She’s becoming someone else. The seal he passed to her—whatever Subject Zero was—it marked her. She’s in sync with the Vault now. With it.”Samuel stopped and turned. “With what?”“The Spiral,” Sarah said before Aria could answer. Her voice was calm, but it had an echo now, as if layered o

The last rays of sunlight filtered through the jagged mountain ridges, casting long shadows over the Vanguard camp. Samuel stood in silence, eyes locked on the still-glowing remnants of Arthur’s broadcast. The words echoed in his mind:"They’re not just trying to enter the Gate anymore. They’re trying to become it."“What the hell does that mean?” Joey asked, pacing furiously near the fire. “How do you become a gate? Is this metaphorical? Are we talking body horror? Mass possession? Cosmic assimilation?”“Calm down,” Aria said, her voice tense. “Omega Prism. That name’s not new. It was shelved years ago—on paper, anyway.”“Then un-shelve it,” Samuel said. “Now.”Aria pulled up a projection from her wrist device, filtering through encrypted files like flipping through pages of a cursed book.“Omega Prism was originally a contingency project,” she began. “Designed in case the original Gate couldn’t be opened through genetic keys alone. The theory was… if they couldn’t unlock the vault w

The dawn was a smudge of red on the snow-dusted horizon as the Vanguard mobilized.The Himalayas loomed ahead like sleeping giants—frozen, sacred, and ancient beyond measure. But beneath the surface of this natural fortress, something far more dangerous than cold or height awaited: the hidden path to the Mirror World.Samuel stood at the front of the convoy, his black coat fluttering in the frigid wind, his breath steaming in the pale morning light.Behind him, a lean group of Vanguard operatives checked their gear—relic-based climbing anchors, encrypted teleportation nodes, and psychic dampeners. All of them bore scars from recent battles. All of them knew they were marching toward a threshold that might erase them from existence.“Are you sure the coordinates are accurate?” Samuel asked, eyes locked on the holo-map projected from Joey’s bracer.Joey zoomed in on a ravine marked with layered red sigils. “This is as close as I could get, cross-referencing what we extracted from the Om