2025-10-17 07:53:40The air was thick with smoke and panic. Sirens blared in the distance, the kind that made your stomach twist , not because of the sound, but because of what always came after.
“Move! Everyone, move!” shouted a guard as people flooded out of the shattered metro tunnel.
Bruce Miller stumbled forward, clutching his bleeding side. His shirt was soaked crimson. The concrete ceiling above him groaned like a dying beast.
Somewhere behind, the sound of screeching metal ripped through the chaos. “Bruce, get up!” a voice yelled.
He turned, dazed, to see David Foreman, tall, calm, perfectly unhurt, standing amid the carnage, eyes blazing with that same superiority Bruce had hated since their academy days.
“Leave me,” Bruce gasped. “You’ve got people to save.”
David’s jaw tightened. “You were never built for this, Bruce. I told you to quit before someone got killed.”
Bruce forced a bitter smile. “Guess you were right.”
The tunnel shook violently. A creature emerged from the shadows, skeletal, armored, and crawling on all fours.
Its eyes glowed blue, unholy light flickering behind cracked bone. A Hollow Fiend, the kind that devoured energy, not flesh. Bruce froze. He didn’t even have a weapon.
David, however, stepped forward, unsheathing his silver blade with measured ease. “Stay down. You’ll only get in the way.”
Bruce wanted to shout back, to prove he wasn’t useless. But his body gave out, and he fell to his knees as the Fiend lunged.
David met it mid-air, steel flashing, the clash echoing through the tunnel like thunder. Sparks flew. Stone shattered.
Bruce’s vision blurred as he crawled away, his fingers brushing against a jagged piece of rebar. He pressed it against his wound, desperate.
Then the Fiend screamed a horrible, distorted sound, and exploded in a shockwave of blue fire. The blast threw Bruce backward.
His head slammed into the wall. He tasted blood. The world dimmed, sounds fading into dull echoes. “David…” he croaked.
No answer. He forced his eyes open, and saw David walking away through the haze, his back turned, blade dragging behind him. “Don’t” Bruce’s hand trembled. “Don’t leave me.”
No one heard. The world went silent. His vision darkened. He thought of every humiliation, every training failure, every time David smirked when the instructors called Bruce “average.” The word stabbed deeper than any wound.
“Average,” he whispered. “I’ll show you average.”
His heartbeat slowed. One beat. Two. Then stopped. Everything went black, except for a faint light hovering before him. A thread of blue energy curled around his chest, pulsing like a heartbeat. Do you want to live?
The voice wasn’t human. It came from inside him, cold yet intimate. “Who, who’s there?” Bruce whispered. Answer, and pay the price.
His body convulsed. Pain ripped through him, sharp, raw, alive. The blue light burrowed into his wound, spreading veins of energy under his skin.
He screamed, the sound echoing through the void. You heal… or you die.
His eyes snapped open. He was lying amid the wreckage, breath hitching. His wound, gone. The blood, evaporated. His heartbeat, thunderous.
But something was wrong. He could feel everything. The pulse of life in the survivors above. The faint flicker of dying energy from the Fiend’s corpse.
Even David, miles away, glowing like a beacon of arrogance. “What… what is this?” he whispered.
A paramedic ran toward him. “Hey! You’re alive? Stay still, you’re bleeding internally!”
“I’m fine,” Bruce said. His voice was steadier than it had any right to be.
The medic frowned. “Fine? You were clinically dead”
Bruce grabbed his wrist instinctively. The moment he touched him, light surged again, blue veins flaring under both their skins. The medic gasped, then froze as his fractured arm knit back together before his eyes.
Bruce jerked back, horrified. “I didn’t mean to”
“What did you just do?” the medic whispered.
“I don’t, I don’t know!”
He stumbled away, heart pounding. His reflection flashed in a broken mirror, veins glowing faintly, pupils silver-white.
Then the visions came. Buildings burning. David standing atop a hill of corpses. Bruce himself, hands drenched in blood not his own.
He blinked, and they vanished. “Hallucination,” he muttered. “Shock. It’s just shock.”
But the whisper returned. This is only the beginning, Healer.
He clutched his head. “Shut up!”
Sirens neared again. He had to move. If anyone saw him like this, they’d lock him up, or worse, dissect him. He stumbled toward the tunnel exit, light flickering in his veins with every step.
When he reached the surface, the night air hit like ice. Police lights painted everything red and blue. Reporters shouted. Cameras flashed.
And there, standing on the edge of the chaos, was David Foreman, his perfect white uniform spotless, his sword resting casually on his shoulder. Their eyes met.
David’s expression didn’t change, but his fingers twitched, just slightly, as if recognizing something. “Bruce?” he said slowly. “That’s… impossible.”
Bruce’s heart raced. “You left me to die.”
David tilted his head. “I thought you already did.”
Bruce took a step closer. “What did you see back there? The explosion, the light”
David’s eyes narrowed. “That’s what I came to ask you.”
The ground trembled.
Both men froze as the tunnel behind them cracked open, blue light spilling out like liquid fire. From the ruins, something moved, not human, not whole, yet pulsing with the same energy now burning inside Bruce.
The medic screamed. “It’s alive!”
Bruce turned slowly, realizing what he’d done. The creature, the Hollow Fiend he’d watched David kill, was rising again. Its bones twisted, flesh reforming around glowing veins identical to his own.
Its head snapped toward Bruce, jaw splitting into a grin. Healer, it whispered, voice echoing through his mind. You brought me back.
Bruce stepped backward, trembling. “No… no, I didn’t”
David drew his blade. “What the hell did you do?”
Bruce didn’t answer. His hands were glowing again, pulsing like living fire. And deep inside, that cold voice laughed. You heal… or you die.
The monster lunged.
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Chapter 10 – The Fractured Signal
The world came back as silence. David’s breath hitched; air felt heavier now, static clinging to it like dust. He opened his eyes. Everything glowed faintly blue.The Tower was gone. All that remained was a glass crater stretching for miles, its center pulsing like a dying heart. Rho knelt beside him, face smeared with ash. “You’re alive.”He blinked, dazed. “Barely.”“Don’t move yet.” She checked his pulse, then froze as her fingers brushed his wrist, tiny sparks leapt between their skin. “You’re still charged.”“I told you… it’s the link,” he muttered. “It’s not gone.”Rho looked around. The sky itself shimmered, thin trails of light drifting like auroras. The air hummed faintly, resonating with their heartbeats. “David,” she said slowly, “what did you do?”“I broke the Tower’s core,” he answered. “I thought that would kill the signal.”“Yeah, well, you didn’t kill it. You spread it.”He followed her gaze. Figures moved along the crater’s edge, Genesis soldiers staggering from wreck
Chapter 9 – Resonance Break
The first thing David heard was the siren, low, broken, distant. Then came breath. His own.He opened his eyes to see the Tower’s core in ruin. Glass panels lay shattered, walls bleeding sparks. The hum of the energy field had shifted, slower, deeper, like a heartbeat syncing with his own.Bruce was gone. Rho lay a few meters away, unconscious but breathing. Kane’s body was nowhere in sight.David pushed himself upright. His hands shook, not from weakness, but from vibration. Blue light pulsed beneath his skin, tracing veins like circuitry. He whispered, “What did you do to me…”The Tower answered. Every remaining light in the chamber flickered once, then steadied, matching the rhythm of his pulse. “No,” he said softly. “No, that’s not”“You are the conduit now.”The voice was inside his head, smooth as static, impossible to shut out. David clenched his jaw. “Get out.”“You opened the channel. It cannot be closed.”He stumbled toward Rho, half dragging, half crawling, his reflection f
Chapter 8 – The Pulse Within
The world reassembled in silence. David floated in nothingness, weightless, surrounded by an endless field of shifting light.Each ripple moved like thought, not matter, colors bleeding through one another, forming fleeting shapes that dissolved before his eyes.He tried to speak, but no sound carried. Only the echo of his own heartbeat, louder than it should’ve been. Then came a whisper. “You shouldn’t be here.”“Bruce?”A figure stepped out of the light, half familiar, half fractured. Bruce’s face, but his eyes were pale mirrors, reflecting every color around them. “You opened the link,” Bruce said quietly. “Now it’s open both ways.”David steadied himself, as if ground might appear beneath his feet. “Where is this?”“The Tower’s core isn’t physical. It’s thought rendered real. Genesis used it to shape the Pulse into commands.”“And you’re stuck in it?”Bruce nodded once. “Along with everything it ever touched.”“What does that mean?”Bruce didn’t answer. His gaze shifted past David
Chapter 7 – The Tower’s Heart
Rain hammered the asphalt like static come alive. David moved through the ruins with the Tower pulsing ahead, its light cutting the skyline like a wound.Every few seconds, the pulse throbbed outward. Each wave made the back of his skull ache. “Bruce,” he whispered. “If you can hear me… keep talking.” Only the hum replied.He reached a checkpoint, two Genesis sentries at a barricade, half-distracted by their drones. David slid behind a burned-out car, drew his sidearm, and tossed a shard of glass down the opposite alley.The sound made them turn. Two silenced shots later, they dropped. He moved quick, stripped one of their access bands, and pressed it against the scanner. The gate hissed open.Inside, the Tower’s base was a labyrinth of mirrored corridors and humming generators. The air shimmered faintly, carrying a metallic tang that made his teeth buzz. He touched the wall, it vibrated, alive.A voice cut through the comm: “Foreman. You shouldn’t have come.”David froze. “Kane.”“Yo
Chapter 6 – The Tower Signal
The ceiling above the bunker cracked like thunder. Dust rained over flickering emergency lamps. Cipher snapped her wrist-com open. “Surface teams are breaching two levels up. We’ve got sixty seconds.”David tightened the straps on a borrowed tactical vest. “How do we get out?”“Same way we got in, through the drains.”“Romantic.”“Efficient,” she corrected. “Move.”They sprinted down the corridor, boots splashing through ankle-deep water. Sirens wailed somewhere overhead. “You said you could jam their scanners,” David shouted.“I said I could try.”“That’s comforting.”A wall section ahead exploded inward. Genesis troops poured through the smoke, visors glowing red. Cipher slammed a disc to the floor. “Flash!”Light detonated white. The soldiers reeled; David dragged her past them into the next passage. He glanced back. “You just blinded half your team.”“They’ll live. You won’t if you keep slowing down.”They burst into a service tunnel filled with cables and dripping pipes. The air
Chapter 5 – Echoes in the Static
The blast should have killed him. Instead, David woke to the slow drip of water and the hiss of cooling metal.His ears rang. The tunnel had collapsed into a jagged cavern of stone and twisted rail. Every surface pulsed faintly blue, as if the explosion had burned color into the air.He tried to move. Pain flared down his side; his left arm hung useless. “Rho?”Only the echo answered. “Rho!”Nothing, then a faint click through the comm still jammed in his ear. “vid—static—zone breached”Her voice. Broken, distant. Then silence. “Hold on, I’m coming,” he muttered, dragging himself upright.Something sparked near his boot, his sidearm, half-melted. He holstered it anyway. Above him, the ceiling groaned. Dust rained down. He stumbled toward the faint glow of an exit sign still flickering in the distance.That’s when the static changed. “…not Genesis…repeat…not Genesis…”He froze. The voice was crisp, deliberate, too calm for emergency chatter. “Identify yourself,” he said.No reply. Then
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