Seyfe stormed down the dim corridors, no longer caring about stealth or restraint.
The flickering lights stuttered overhead as the facility began to groan—metal expanding, pipes bursting, the very walls quivering like a body in agony. Blood-red warning sigils pulsed on the floor beneath him, and alarms somewhere in the distance tried to whine—but the system was too broken to finish the scream.
Each breath he took was laced with smoke, copper, and that ever-present stench of rotting organs mixed with preservatives. His boots splashed through puddles of spilled fluid—some chemical, some human.
Every chamber he passed, he slashed open.
Glass caskets housing grotesque beings shattered. Amniotic fluid spilled, followed by howls and death throes as malformed limbs flailed helplessly on the ground.
"No more of this." His voice was a growl.
With every step, his weapon gloves shifted—dagger, sword, spear—cutting through anything that moved or pulsed with life. He hacked through security walls, carved through observation rooms, and toppled over cabinets filled with grim surgical tools.
The entire facility had become a cryptic hell, and Seyfe was the embodiment of vengeance tearing through it.
Finally, he returned to the central chamber—the very core of this nightmare.
There it stood:The corpse still seated on its throne of sinew and wires.The green, formless heart, still beating. Still pulsing. Still powering the entire corrupt system.
Seyfe stepped closer, breath heavy, the light of his glove flickering.
thump. thump. thump.
It was slower now.
Taunting him.
"You shouldn't have lived," Seyfe whispered. "You should've been allowed to die."
He raised his sword.
And plunged it.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
Again.
Over and over, blade sinking into the pulsating green mass, which gave no resistance—yet refused to die.
The chamber shook.
The walls convulsed. Veins in the walls split open, leaking green-black bile across the ground. The corpse on the throne began to shiver, not from life, but from recoil—like the system itself was rejecting the violence.
Seyfe kept swinging.
Slash. Stab. Hack. Rip.
Each strike was heavier than the last. Each breath more ragged. Blood—his and others—flecked his face, his suit, his gloves.
thump…
…thump…
.....thump.
The heart pulsed slower.
The chamber's tremors grew more violent.
Cracks split the floor around him. Pillars toppled. Sparks rained from above. The air felt heavy—as if the plane itself was collapsing in response to the dying core.
And then…
With one final roar, Seyfe drove his spear through the entire corpse and into the throne itself—impaling it through the seat of power.
The heart finally burst, releasing a spray of green light and mist, blinding and suffocating.
Everything began to fall apart.
The ceiling above cracked.
The floor gave out.
And Seyfe, barely catching his balance, looked up at the storm of debris and fluid cascading around him and muttered:
"This place goes down with me if it has to."
Then the world turned black.
The soft scratching of pen on paper was the only sound in the sterile office of Unit 23-B. Aki Varess sat alone at her desk, brows slightly furrowed, gloved hand skimming through the latest Veiler squad reports. Her other hand nursed a lukewarm cup of imported jasmine tea—one of the few personal indulgences she allowed herself in this god-forsaken concrete tower.
Stacks of files lined the right edge of her desk, each labeled with names she knew all too well. Missions reviewed, cadets assessed, fatalities confirmed. The mundane part of being a handler—the real part of leadership few understood.
Outside her reinforced window, the sky over the capital simmered in late-afternoon orange, hazy with dust. Another day with nothing out of place. Another moment of quiet.
Then—
WREEEEEHHHHHH!!
The alarm shrieked across the building—high-pitched, urgent, and wrong. Not a drill. Not a system check.
Aki immediately rose to her feet. Her tea spilled across the floor, forgotten.
Within seconds, her comm tablet lit up, a dozen requests and reports flashing. Her eyes narrowed at one in particular, labeled with a priority BLACK header.
"Grade A Rift Tear - Coordinates: Great Canyon - Immediate Containment Required"
Her heart didn't skip. Aki Varess didn't panic. But her spine straightened just a little too rigidly.
"Grade A… in the canyon?" she muttered under her breath, swiping open the feed.
The room was soon filled with the distorted, static-laced voice of an informant Veiler stationed near the region.
"—Handler Varess, confirmation required! We've just had a Grade A Tear, at least 500 meters across, pulse wave visible from neighboring cities!—"
"This isn't like the others, ma'am—it's… mutating. The tear is… feeding? It's siphoning surrounding layers and pulling fragmented realms with it!"
"—and ma'am… there's trace energy signatures. They match one of our own. Code designation: SEYFE."
Aki's breath halted.
Seyfe.
She turned, voice low, precise.
"Activate all Overseer tracking programs. Patch into all long-range realm-scanners. Get me visual on the canyon—now."
An assistant bolted into her office, still in uniform, sweating.
"Ma'am, are we issuing a Code Black Extraction?"
Aki's gaze didn't leave the flashing rift data on her screen, which now showed unstable echoform activity peaking far beyond safe thresholds.
"No." Her voice cut like tempered glass. "We're not ready for an extraction yet."
"But—!"
"We don't even know if he's alive."
The room went still.
For a moment, all Aki could hear was the faint, warped echo of a shriek playing over the canyon's long-range monitors. It wasn't human.
But something had woken up.
And if Seyfe was in the center of it…
She reached for her coat.
"Send reconnaissance. All Veiler cadets are on standby. And prep a handler-class descent team."
She looked out the window again, though her eyes weren't really on the skyline anymore.
"He better still be breathing."
Forty seconds in the past.....
Seyfe stumbled backward, his chest heaving as the last chunk of the grotesque pulsating core finally split under his blade. It gushed thick, green ichor that splattered against the cracked floors of the chamber, convulsing with dying spasms. The whole structure groaned, screeched—as if the facility itself were a living thing screaming in agony.
He stood there for a moment, panting in the silence that followed, his body twitching from exhaustion and adrenaline. His gloves flickered faintly, systems rebooting from the stress. The chamber was falling apart around him—walls warping, supports buckling.
Finally. Finally it's over. He thought.
The rupture layer above his head flickered back into motion. The flickering veil—stable, finally—was supposed to lead him back into a safe layer. A way out of this nightmare.
Seyfe took one last look at the damage he left behind. A smoking ruin. Then he leapt.
The moment he touched the veil, he felt it.
Wrong.
There was something there, waiting.
Something reaching.
A tendril of shadow wrapped around his leg mid-jump—scalding, not from heat, but will. The dimensional pull twisted. He didn't phase into a clean layer. He was yanked.
"No no no—SHIT!"
He crashed into a spiraling rift spiral, his limbs stretched in too many directions, the scent of ozone and rotting bark flooding his senses. Reality warped around him like shattered glass mending wrong.
Then—he slammed into a canyon basin, the wind knocked out of him.
He coughed blood into dust. His ears rang.
And then—
A footstep.
Slow. Heavy. Intended.
He looked up.
There it was.
The Echoform.
But it wasn't the same as before.
It stood tall—towering, its form even more refined and horrid. The slick green fluid no longer leaked from open pipes; it circulated in deliberate, refined motions. The beast's limbs were more proportioned—less stitched, more integrated. The three eyes had become one, embedded in its forehead like an emerald gem of pure malevolence.
It stared at him with intent.
"Ssssayyffeee…"
The voice was gravel and oil and bile all at once. It had learned his name.
Its tail of serpents hissed in unison. Its jagged arms lifted, and it grinned—a knowing grin filled with far too many teeth.
"You—evolved again," Seyfe whispered, his hands tightening into fists. "You piece of shit."
The Echoform tilted its head.
"You… ssshould not have… broken the Heart."
It stepped forward.
Seyfe took a step back, trying to find leverage on the canyon's edge.
"And you shouldn't be talking like a philosopher after eating corpses for breakfast."
The creature's eye pulsed.
The rift behind it churned. Opened wider.
And then it lunged—faster than it ever had.
Seyfe rolled just in time, his glove flaring to life, activating the silver coating around his body with a hiss of light. His full Veiler suit wrapped over him in seconds.
He wasn't sure where this rift was heading—but it didn't matter.
He was being dragged through it, either way.
At the present time.....
The hum of fluorescent lights flickered across the vast operations chamber. Aki Varess stood before the main projection wall, arms folded, her brows furrowed in concentration. Screens displayed layered scans of spatial rift activity over the Great Canyon.
"Confirm it again," she said calmly, but her voice was sharp enough to cut steel. "That's a Grade A tear?"
The operator beside her nodded, sweat glistening down his temple. "Confirmed ma'am. Energy readings spiked beyond Threshold Line Sigma—no doubt about it. It's him. Seyfe's signal reappeared... but only for three seconds before vanishing again inside the rift."
Another analyst chimed in, flicking through a series of distorted visuals and corrupted GPS feeds. "It's unstable, ma'am. Whatever tore open this rift is evolving with each phase. The energy signature shows a core destabilization—something triggered a layered rupture. The source originated from inside the Broken Layer before breaching."
"Four months and now he is trapped... and now this." Aki's jaw tightened.
Around her, the room buzzed into movement. Cadets rushed to terminals, analysts coordinated data. On a side platform, several newly assigned Veilers—Jerome, Saline, Emi—stood in full suit gear, helmets tucked under their arms, waiting for orders.
"Deploy a trace team to the canyon border," Aki barked. "I want full perimeter shielding around the rift. Engage Broken Layer traversal monitors. If that Echoform is still pursuing him—"
"Then he's not running anymore," Jerome interrupted, cracking his knuckles. "He's fighting for his life."
Saline exhaled, her hand hovering near her sidearm. "Shouldn't we send a team in? At least to extract him?"
Aki gave her a hard look. "We can't afford to send anyone in blind. That tear isn't natural. It's artificially forced. And if what we're seeing is correct, that Echoform has adapted far beyond what we've recorded before. This is no longer reconnaissance."
The room quieted as her voice lowered.
"This is containment."
The lights dimmed slightly as a holographic map formed in front of them, showing the massive rift pulsing over the canyon like a jagged wound in reality. A red dot blinked faintly inside—Seyfe's last known signal.
"Until we stabilize the core tear, no one enters. But we do not leave him behind."
Aki turned to a side console and keyed into the squad deployment logs. "Prep a secondary rescue squad. If we can't reach him through traversal, we wait for the next pulse gap. And when it opens—"
She paused.
"—we're dragging Seyfe back home, one way or another."