It smelled of steel, rot, and antiseptic.
The underground layers of Amalthea's Sector Nine had no windows, no color, and no memory of mercy. Walls pulsed with veins of ether-thread wiring, faintly glowing with the residual energy of fractured Plane shards. Humming machines loomed like executioners, cataloguing every twitch, every pulse, every breath of the empire's forgotten children.
Code Seven sat still within his pod.
His back was straight. His eyes were open. No fear. No thoughts. The pale blue gel around him refracted the artificial lights above, illuminating the jagged scars across his chest and spine—remnants of countless incisions, injections, and implants. Tubes ran from his spine into the walls like umbilical cords feeding a beast far older than man.
He had no name. Only a designation etched into the glass before him:
SUBJECT 007. GEN-V STRIKER. STATUS: STABLE.
On the other side of the reinforced glass, two scientists argued in whispers.
"He's the only one left from Batch Nine," murmured the older one, adjusting his gloves. "The rest destabilized during the psyche-brain graft."
"And yet his neural lattice is adapting. His readings spiked again yesterday. He's suppressing trauma faster than any other subject we've seen. Look."
They stared at the monitor. No spikes in heart rate, no emotional variance. No anger. No sadness. Just silence.
"He doesn't feel," the younger one said finally. "They made him perfect."
A third voice joined them, cold and without inflection. "You assume perfection is sustainable."
They turned. Overseer Luthan entered the chamber with hands clasped behind his back. He wore no lab coat. Only the black armor-robe of Amalthea's inner authority, trimmed with crimson and marked by the sigil of the empire: a black spear piercing a red sun.
"He will be marked tomorrow," Luthan said. "The Infinite Planes are watching. It's time to test his potential where it matters."
"But sir," one of the scientists started, "he's only—"
"Ten years," Luthan cut in. "Yes. Exactly the minimum for a Striker. You know the law."
Silence.
In the pod, Code Seven blinked.
---
The next morning, the walls of the facility trembled.
Not with explosions. Not with sound. But with presence.
Across the universe, when a being is chosen, the Infinite Planes speak only to them. And it spoke to Seven in silence. A searing light cracked through the ceiling of his mind. Not warmth. Not fire. Something deeper. Something that etched itself onto the soul.
It branded his core, rewriting something inside him with ruthless precision.
A line of glowing text shimmered before his vision, burned into the air, seen only by him.
[YOU HAVE BEEN MARKED BY THE INFINITE PLANES]
[SIGIL ACQUIRED: VOIDSTEPS]
He didn't flinch.
The gel inside his pod began to vibrate.
Alarms didn't sound at first. Not until the gel boiled into steam.
Then the pod cracked. Glass spidered into webs. Tubes snapped and flailed like severed nerves.
By the time the guards reached his chamber, Code Seven was already standing in the middle of the room, steam hissing around him like mist on a battlefield. His skin was flushed, but his expression was carved from stone.
He moved like instinct. Like programming. Like death.
The first guard raised his rifle. In the next blink, he fell. His throat didn't bleed—it collapsed inward as if something crushed it from within.
The second didn't even draw. Seven blurred. A step, not a dash. One moment there, then behind. The man dropped, spine shattered.
A whisper from the Infinite Planes tickled the edge of Seven's thoughts:
[VOIDSTEPS ACTIVATED]
Seven kept moving.
The halls burned red as lockdown protocols slammed into place. Vault doors sealed. Automated turrets descended. But it was too late. The weapon had chosen freedom. And the Infinite Planes had opened their door.
He didn't remember where the ritual circle was placed—only that they taught every Striker how to use it in case of emergency deployment. They had never imagined this emergency.
As soldiers flooded the hallway behind him, Code Seven traced the half-burned runes with blood drawn from his palm. His, or someone else's—he couldn't tell. The markings sizzled. Energy surged.
A hand grabbed his shoulder.
Seven turned.
It was Overseer Luthan.
"You were made to obey," the man whispered, his voice almost reverent. "Why run, Subject Seven? The war needs you."
For the first time, Seven spoke.
His voice was quiet. Rough from disuse.
"I wasn't made to be yours."
And he blinked.
The sigil activated again.
One moment he stood before Luthan.
The next—he was gone.
The ritual circle ignited in white-blue flame and collapsed inward like a dying star.
---
He didn't know how long he fell.
Time in the Infinite Planes was not linear. Not logical.
There was only descent.
He landed hard, but not on rock. The ground here was made of ash and glass, shifting like memory beneath his boots. The sky was a swirl of purple and crimson, stars dripping like candlewax across a black horizon.
No welcome.
No map.
Only silence.
He took a step forward.
The Infinite Planes voice echoed like a command.
[WHAT SHALL THE PLANES REFER TO YOU AS?]
Code Seven was taken aback but quickly composed himself as he had already heard about the alias system of the planes.
He thought for a moment and said with a resolute voice.
"Seeker"
But across the void, one word echoed like a whisper across distant minds. A name.
[NEW ENTRANT: SEEKER]
---
He walked.
There was no other choice.
The ground beneath his feet shifted with each step, as if uncertain whether it wished to be solid or swallow him whole. His boots—still soaked in blood and gel—left no imprint. The ash drifted over them, weightless and dry, like the memories of a world that had long since burned.
No sky. Only layers of color, bleeding into one another—indigo into wine-red into bruised gold. There was no sun, but light clung to everything as if from within.
The Infinite Planes did not welcome. They observed.
Seven stopped only when he heard breathing.
Not his own.
A sharp, wet inhale. Then another. It came from beyond a jagged slope of bone-white stone, cracked and curled like the rib of some ancient beast.
He crept forward—soundless, calculated. His body remembered everything the empire had beaten into it. No emotion. No hesitation.
Only motion. Only target.
At the crest, he crouched.
Below, tangled in the ruins of a shattered obelisk, a humanoid figure lay bleeding. Female, maybe. One arm twisted the wrong way. Eyes wide open. Not dead.
Yet.
Beside her crouched a thing.
It might have once been a man. Or a creature. Or both. Its skin had the texture of drying wax, melting off a skeletal frame. Dozens of thin, root-like tendrils ran from its back into the ground, like it had buried itself to feed. Its hands—three-fingered, taloned—clutched a blackened shard that pulsed faintly. A fragment. A sigil? A failed one?
Seven didn't wait.
He blinked.
The world folded and unfolded in a breath. He was behind it.
[VOIDSTEPS ACTIVATED]
He didn't question it. Didn't marvel. He simply moved.
His foot snapped forward, heel slamming into the base of the thing's skull.
Bone cracked.
The creature let out a screech that splintered the air like a blade through glass. Its body twisted unnaturally as it scrambled to face him, teeth splitting sideways, eyes like cracked obsidian.
Seven struck again.
A fist. A knee. Another step—blink—into its blind spot.
The creature collapsed without ceremony.
He didn't stop hitting it until it stopped moving entirely.
The woman below moaned faintly.
Seven turned to her. Looked closer.
Not human. Not entirely. Her skin was patterned with scales near the jawline, almost floral in texture, like the bloom of a dying plant. Her eyes—copper slit-pupils—tracked him weakly.
"Kill... it?" she rasped.
He gave a small nod.
She laughed. It was raw. Bitter.
"You'll die here, too."
Then she fainted.
Seven knelt beside her. Examined her injuries. The bones were set too far out of place. No healing herbs. No medicine. He only had what the Infinite Planes gave him—and so far, it had offered power, not grace.
He stood.
No obligation. No command told him to save her.
And yet, something made him look at her again.
He thought of the guards back in Sector Nine. The scientists who called him 'it.' Luthan's hand on his shoulder. Why run, Subject Seven?
He turned away. Started walking.
Then stopped.
The same whisper returned, not from the sky, but from within his bones.
[ACHIEVEMENT REGISTERED: FIRST KILL IN THE INFINITE PLANES]
[RANKING ENGAGED]
[CURRENT RANKINGS: ASH TIER]
Nothing else. Just that.
No glory. No fanfare.
Seven stared ahead. The horizon bent in a way that made distance impossible to judge. Shapes moved in the distance—some too tall, some with too many limbs, some melting into mist.
The Planes weren't meant to be fair. Only infinite.
He looked up—not to pray, but to calculate.
Then he moved again, the copper-eyed girl fading behind him like the last echo of something he almost understood.
---
Far away, beyond stars, a being that had not spoken aloud in millennia blinked once.
And whispered to no one:
"The Seeker walks."