I wake to the taste of thunder.Air crackles around me, alive with that sharp, burnt-metal smell you get when a wire snaps and spits. A hiss, like a television left on in an empty room, rings inside my skull. My eyes sting. The world refuses to resolve into focus at first—just a smear of electric blue and shadow.Then shapes sharpen. Violence of detail. Too much. Tower walls breathing like machinery. Floors flickering from solid concrete to lattices of glitching geometry. The air itself stutters between frames.I’m back.Back inside the tower that swallowed me.But the tower is wrong. Less solid. Like it’s trying to render itself from bad memory.My palms are pressed against the floor—skin buzzing, bones vibrating. I lift my head and a burst of white noise screams behind my eyes. Pixels scatter and reform in the corners of my vision. I bite down the urge to scream.I remember falling. The Rift ripping me apart. The Void eating my name. I remember claws made of signal disruption tearin

The streets below were fractured, neon bleeding into smoke and static.Every step I took toward the tower made the ground hum beneath my boots. The city had changed while Helena was gone. Buildings flickered like broken holograms. Traffic lights pulsed in sync with some invisible heartbeat. Even the wind seemed to vibrate against my chest.I shouldn’t have been able to move so freely, but the pulse from the tower… it reached me.Subtle. Tentative. Warning.And it didn’t care that I had no control.I gripped the metal railing of a fire escape and leapt across the alley, landing hard, barely keeping my balance. My eyes tracked the tower, where floors still bent, flickered, and screamed under the strain of Helena’s emergence.Shards of glass floated like snow suspended mid-air, edges glowing white-hot with her static. Sparks arced outward, fizzling into the streets.Somewhere inside, Helena moved. Alive. Unpredictable. Dangerous.The first ECHO Division agents I encountered were in the l

The city was holding its breath.From our vantage atop the tower, I could see the streets below trembling with residual energy. Windows rattled, neon flickered, and the fog hung heavy, thick with static. The blackout zone was still unstable, the grid warping under the lingering influence of the tower’s pulse.But the disturbance wasn’t just here.I noticed it first in the alleyways, far from the tower’s reach. Small sparks, seemingly random, darted along cables, traffic signals, even the rails of the subway system. Then the hum began—a second, subtler vibration, faint but unmistakable.Helena turned toward me, eyes narrowing.“That’s… not me,” she said, her voice a mix of curiosity and alarm.“I’m not generating that pulse.”We scanned the city from our elevated position.The anomaly emerged near the Eastline District—an area already compromised by ECHO Division experiments. Buildings twisted unnaturally, shadows moving against the laws of light. I could see static arcs crawling over

The city wasn’t a city anymore.From the tower’s upper levels, I could see streets bending like molten glass. Streetlights twisted into jagged spears of light, traffic signals arcing across the sky. Concrete split in half and floated, hovering over shattered asphalt. The anomaly wasn’t just inside the tower—it had infected the veins of the metropolis itself.Helena’s pulse surged. Static wrapped around her, coiling like a living crown. Her eyes, jagged rings of white light, scanned the chaos below. Every time she moved, the building’s pulse adapted, bending reality enough to give us a foothold. But even she couldn’t contain what the anomaly was doing.“Luca!” she shouted. “The streets—they’re moving! The anomaly is… rewriting the city!”I swallowed, gripping a fractured railing. Neon arcs jumped between buildings, forming jagged grids of energy. Subway cars twisted mid-ride, suspended in the air as if the laws of gravity had decided to take a holiday. Vehicles collided with impossible

The city screamed.From the tower’s vantage, I could see it unraveling. Streets ripped apart, vehicles twisted into impossible angles, and entire blocks of buildings folding like origami under the anomaly’s will. It had grown smarter, faster, more unpredictable, shaping reality to its pulse.Helena’s static flared like a halo of light around her, arcs snapping outward to stabilize the immediate area of the tower. But beyond its protective radius, chaos ruled. Neon signs bent violently, power lines lashed like whips, and subway tunnels shivered, threatening to collapse.“This isn’t containment anymore,” Helena shouted, her voice layered with white-hot static.“It’s an offensive now.”We dropped to the streets. The pulse of the tower followed, forming a protective aura around us as debris rained from above. Sidewalks buckled, metal shards whirled through the air, and the anomaly moved through the city like a predator through its territory.I tried to gauge its strategy. It wasn’t random