Seyfe landed hard on a slab of fractured red stone, his boots skidding across loose gravel before catching. The rift spun around him like a vortex of broken glass and ash. Above, warped skies split between darkness and sickly green lightning. Below, the Grand Canyon had mutated—massive skeletal trees protruded from the cliff faces like ribcages, roots of twisted corpses threading the rock walls like veins.
The echoform screeched from somewhere behind. Seyfe turned just in time to see the hulking monster crash through a wall of bone-thorns, its three-story-tall form leaking acid and rage.
Its last remaining eye—once dim—now burned a vivid green, narrowed with sentience.
"You are… decay," it spat in a layered, gurgled voice.
Seyfe rolled sideways as acidic spit sizzled into the stone beside him. He summoned his glove weapon, activating the fourth silver line—a pistol formed, sleek and humming.
Bang. Bang. Click.Each bullet slammed into the echoform's stitched chest—but it wasn't enough. Not anymore.
It leapt, impossibly fast, its monstrous arms stitched from beasts and broken bodies swinging with thunder. Seyfe dove again, tumbling across a corpse-rooted patch of ground that moaned as he passed. As he slid behind a jagged rock, he hissed through gritted teeth.
"Adapted again, huh?" he muttered, cycling the glove. Second line active—sword.
The blade hissed into place. He dashed left—his feet landing on what looked like hard soil, only to realize it was a forest floor made of corpse flesh, twitching fingers writhing beneath him. He grit his teeth and charged forward anyway.
The echoform landed behind him with a quake, tail of serpent-heads snapping and biting. One nicked his arm, slicing through the Veiler suit. Blood seeped down as he twisted mid-run, slashing one snake-head clean off.
"Enough of this!" Seyfe dove into the nearby forest.
The trees twisted—limbs instead of branches, torsos forming trunks, eyes blinking open. The entire forest was shrieking.
Seyfe turned it into his weapon.
With a flick, he activated the sixth line—his shield formed, tanking a tail whip that would've torn him in two. He countered with a spear (third line), slamming it into the base of a tree and causing a cascade of corpse-limbs to fall on the echoform. A temporary trap.
He didn't stop. He activated the fifth line—sniper—leapt onto a high root structure, and fired at the eye.
Bang.
A splash of black ichor.
"I don't die in here," Seyfe muttered. His body burned with exhaustion, cuts painting him in crimson, but the forest obeyed his will now. He triggered the palm square, coating his body with full Veiler armor—silver, shimmering, durable.
He charged the echoform.
It screeched, fury echoing across planes. It no longer relied on instinct—it now learned, anticipated. And even as it weakened, it fought smarter.
The rift twisted. Phases blurred. The environment flickered—from forest to canyon and back again.
Seyfe screamed back.
"Then die angry."
------------------
The sound of repulsor thrusters hummed above the cliffs as five extraction crafts hovered over the distorted section of the Grand Canyon rift zone, each one manned by a rapid-response unit from Overseer Squadron.
Inside the command skiff, Handler Aki Varess stood rigid, a tablet in one hand, her other gripping the railing tight as turbulence from the warped air buffeted the vehicle. The rippling rift tore against the horizon—green energy flashing across the sky like ruptured auroras. The readout showed unstable reality layering and unclassified echoform activity.
"We're not stabilizing anything until we find Seyfe," Aki said sharply.
Beside her, Saline, fully suited, was scanning for temporal trails with her customized Veiler visor. The feed flickered, disrupted by anomaly static.
"Reading multiple fractures," she muttered. "But his signal is strong—faint, flickering—but present. He's still in there. Somewhere deeper. His core marker hasn't been overridden yet."
Emi, seated in the secondary cockpit, glanced over her shoulder. "We're not dealing with a clean rift. This is looping. Whatever's in there is causing recursive folding—we'll need layered anchors or we risk being dragged into an unstable echo pocket."
"Already deployed," Aki said, flicking her fingers on the tablet. "Anchor nodes 1 through 3 in place. We need boots on the ground."
From the adjoining skiff, Jerome's voice crackled through the comms:
"Permission to break formation and enter deeper. I'll scout ahead."
Aki's eyes narrowed. "Not alone. You go, Saline goes with you. Emi holds the anchor post with the backup node. We're going in controlled."
The rift pulsed again, more violently this time. Sparks shot across the top of the canyon as a low scream—like metal being crushed by a thousand tons—echoed across the planes.
Saline shivered. "That sound… that's not natural. Whatever he's fighting in there… it's not an echoform we've cataloged before."
Aki whispered under her breath. "It's evolving…"
With a flick of her hand, the Veiler strike signal went live.
"Overseer veilers—initiate breach protocol. Full sync suits, weapons hot. Our target is Seyfe. Our threat is unknown. If you're afraid, stay back—because what's on the other side of this tear is beyond standard Veiler doctrine."
One by one, the veilers snapped into formation.
The breach gate opened.
And the Veilers dived into the rift.
The moment Jerome and Saline pierced through the veil of the rift tear, reality folded inwards, pressing against their suits like a living membrane. Their visors flickered as their bodies phased between layers, and then—thud—they hit soil.
Only, it wasn't soil.
Jerome landed first, his boots crunching down on something soft but resistive. He glanced down. "Saline…" he muttered.
She landed beside him, bracing herself with her arm. Her gaze followed his—eyes narrowing behind her visor.
The "ground" wasn't earth.
It was a carpet of pale, contorted human fingers, sprouting like brittle grass. Some twitched, others curled toward their feet like worms drawn to warmth. A few mouths—mottled and malformed—gaped silently from the surface, as though attempting to scream.
Saline turned her head slowly, taking in the entire forest.
Around them stood trees made of flesh, each trunk a tapestry of stitched limbs, exposed ribs, and warped faces. Eye sockets lined the "bark," twitching erratically in every direction—tracking them. The branches above were skeletal limbs that bent unnaturally, forming a canopy that breathed in slow heaves.
"This is… wrong," Jerome said, voice hoarse, clutching his blade. "The kind of wrong you don't come back from."
A low groan echoed between the trunks. It was not a beast. It was everything groaning—the forest itself.
Saline drew her rifle and activated her scanner, though the feedback was corrupted. "No environmental system should sustain this… nothing in the Rift reports matches what we're seeing. These aren't echoforms. They're… graves."
They began to move carefully, stepping over knotted limbs that tried to latch onto their legs.
Jerome paused. "This isn't just some corrupted echo pocket," he said. "This place was engineered."
Saline nodded. "These aren't random formations. There's design—direction. Like it was grown, curated. As if someone... someone made this on purpose."
Suddenly, a flicker in Saline's feed: a movement—a pulse.
"There," she pointed. "North-east, 200 meters. Faint thermal, could be Seyfe."
Jerome's jaw clenched. "Then we move. Quiet. We don't know what hunts here."
They started toward the reading—but all around them, the forest shifted. The limbs above twisted and the mouths below began to whisper.
"Sssseyfe..."
"Ssssuffering…"
Saline froze. "It's calling his name."
Jerome's grip tightened on his weapon. "Then it knows we're here too."
As they moved deeper into the forest, the grotesque canopy darkened above them, and somewhere in the distance, a deep inhuman shriek tore through the air—sharp and sudden, followed by a chorus of wails.
The forest... was waking up.
The air thickened like spoiled syrup as Jerome and Saline moved deeper into the forest, the strange whispering now trailing them with unnatural focus. The sickly green fog that hung between the limb-branches began to stir as if agitated.
Then—snap.
A grotesque lash echoed through the trees.
Before either of them could react, a root—thick, sinewed, and lined with fleshy thorns—burst from the twisted underbrush, shooting straight toward Saline's back.
"MOVE!" Jerome shouted, ramming into her shoulder.
They rolled aside just as the tentacle-like root smashed into the ground, splintering bone and flesh that made up the forest floor.
Saline sprang to her feet, rifle aimed. "It's herding us!"
Dozens of green-black roots emerged from the trees, spiraling through the air like serpents. Each was barbed with pulsating thorns, slick with a gelatinous slime that smoked upon contact with their surroundings.
Jerome activated his Veiler glaive and sliced through one that lunged at his neck. It twitched and curled before withdrawing.
"This isn't random. It's reacting to our energy signatures," he growled.
"Or… to our fear," Saline said grimly, ducking under a lunging tendril.
She retaliated with her sidearm, blasting one clean through the middle—but even severed, it continued writhing. The piece sprouted barbed feelers, latching onto her leg. She cursed, trying to pry it off.
Jerome dashed forward, blade slicing across her leg—not her flesh, but the tendrils. They dropped in a hissing clump.
Then came the roar.
A violent tremor shook the forest. Trees groaned. Mouths screeched. The roots withdrew suddenly, slithering back into the ground.
For a moment, silence fell.
Then the forest whispered again. Not a word, but a name.
"Seyfe…"
The duo looked at each other.
"He's still alive," Jerome muttered.
Saline's HUD beeped—another reading, this time directly beneath them. "There's a deeper level."
Jerome pointed to a gnarled, tree-like structure at the center of a clearing. "There. The roots converged there. It might be an entry point."
Another shriek—far away but growing closer. The same sound Seyfe had once heard in his descent.
Whatever had chased him through the canyon, whatever had pulled him through the tear, was coming back.
Saline's voice turned cold. "Then we don't have much time."
Jerome nodded. "Let's find him. And finish this abomination of a place."
They advanced cautiously toward the fleshy trunk, its bark made from writhing faces and unblinking eyes. The entrance was a gaping mouth, breathing foul green mist. A new scream echoed from within—a scream neither entirely human nor beast.
They stepped inside.