2025-08-05 08:59:09
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Exactly This Mistake
The figure in the rain vanished before I could wake the others.By morning, I was almost convinced myself it was just exhaustion playing tricks on me.Almost.“New intel came in overnight,” Dr. Aveline announces over the comm. I straighten up. “Satellite scans spotted an abandoned research station forty klicks northeast. Pre-Devourer era. Could be where your beacon came from.”Could be. Everything’s ‘could be’ these days.Devon checks his ammunition quietly. “Why wasn’t this station on our original surveys?”“Under fake terrain mapping.” Aveline pauses. “Someone didn’t want it found.”“Someone. Always someone else pulling the strings.” I respondI rotate a holographic blueprint above my wrist, the labs, the central core, and the corridors. “Looks simple,” I tell the team.“Simple?” Kira slings her pack over one shoulder. “When has anything been simple since we found the beacon?”Never. But maybe that’s when we start trying.***The station squats in a dry valley, concrete cracked,
The Safehouse
The safe-house smells like dust and someone else’s life. Faded family photos line the mantel, and the couch sags in all the wrong places, but it’s real. Solid. After the sterile command hub and the failed launch, real feels like a gift.“Pass the salt,” Devon mutters, sawing at a bland MRE with a plastic knife that’s threatening to snap in half.Kira nudges the little packet toward him. “Beef stew, my ass. Tastes like cardboard.”“Cardboard with texture,” I say, poking at my meal. “Somehow worse.”Devon lets out a quiet laugh through his nose.And for a moment, just a breath, it’s like we’re somewhere else. Not fugitives. Not fractured. Just kids again, pretending the world isn’t cracked wide open.Kira leans back against the arm of the couch, her lips curled into a rare smile, the kind that touches her eyes. Devon’s posture softens too, like his muscles finally got permission to stop bracing for impact.Peace, real or not, feels like a foreign language. But we speak it anyway.“Re
The Broken Mirrors
Dr. Aveline's heels clicked against the polished floor as she led me down a corridor I hadn't seen before. The walls here were different—reinforced steel with observation windows every few feet, like viewing ports into aquarium tanks."I have three individuals I'd like you to meet," she said, her voice carrying that clinical detachment I'd grown to despise. "Think of them as... case studies."The common room beyond the reinforced door stretched wide and sterile, furnished with basic chairs and tables bolted to the floor. Three figures occupied the space, each isolated in their own invisible bubble of wrong.The first thing I noticed was the boy with winter-gray hair who couldn't have been older than nineteen. Marcus, according to the nameplate on his chair, sat perfectly still until he didn't. One moment he was motionless, the next he stood beside the far wall, fifteen feet away. The air itself seemed to catch up late, papers on nearby tables fluttering as displaced atmosphere rushed
The Price of Power
Maintenance corridors smell like bleach and copper pennies. During shift change, these passages empty—perfect for moving someone who makes electronics die by proximity. "The containment protocols were designed for standard neural interface complications," Dr. Aveline says as we descend three levels. "Nothing prepared us for this level of integration." Through reinforced observation windows, I glimpse medical pods filled with monitoring fluid. The third pod contains a figure suspended in red liquid that pulses with familiar light. Devon floats unconscious, arms spread wide, head tilted back like he's drowning in reverse. Tubes snake from his spine into monitoring systems displaying fractal neural patterns that shift when observed. "How long has he been like this?" "Since the simulation ended," Kira admits, her voice tight. "His neural pathways didn't rebuild like yours. They... opened. Like doorways we can't close." A shadow materializes from the corridor junction ahead—Garrett s
Fractured Awakening
The medical bay ceiling tiles swim into focus. Real tiles with water stains and hairline cracks, not the endless liquid-metal surface that had tried to kill me.Real fluorescent lights hum overhead, casting harsh white light that makes my eyes water.I lift my right arm and froze.Bio-metallic veins snake beneath my skin from fingertips to shoulder, pulsing green-silver like captured lightning. They branch and merge in geometric patterns that shift when I flex my fingers."Kira?""Here." Her chair scrapes against linoleum. "You've been out for six hours."I sit up. The movement flows too smoothly, as if the joint’s been lubricated by alien engineers.The hospital gown crinkles as I swing my legs over the bed's edge."This isn't the simulation.""No. You're back in the real world." She holds up a scanner, its LED display already flickering erratically."Sort of."The device starts smoking the moment she points it at me. Acrid plastic burns my nostrils as she drops it with a curse."T
Conduit of Chaos
They don’t fight like individuals. They fight like thoughts—coordinated, simultaneous, recursive. One moves, another adapts, the third calculates your next breath. Blades shift mid-swing into tendrils, fists, spears. Liquid metal reshapes before contact, cutting from angles I can’t track. I land hits, two, maybe three, but they heal before my sword finishes its arc. They’re learning faster than I can bleed. “Three of them,” I pant between clashes. “Sharing everything they learn.” “Integration is spiking beyond readable thresholds!” Kira’s voice, taut with panic. “Devon, his neural patterns are… they’re lighting up like a reactor core.” “Each hunter is compiling shared data,” Dr. Aveline says. “He’s not fighting three opponents. He’s fighting the sum of their species’ memory.” “Wonderful,” I mutter, rolling under a slash and swinging upward. The plasma blade carves a line through one torso, blue fire against molten black, but the alien recoheres in a blink. “He’s bleeding too
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