The alarm was a physical violation. A blade of sound, high and serrated, that tore through the sterile, humming silence of the core chamber. Red light pulsed from emergency emitters, washing the polished black floor in rhythmic waves of blood. The pale blue schematic of Project Chimera dissolved into a frantic lattice of warning runes. The deep, steady thrum of the doomsday engine was lost beneath the shriek of a system screaming its own violation.
Rhys reacted without thought, his body a component of combat logic. He dropped into a low crouch, bringing his sidearm up, the Keystone Slate clutched tight in his other hand. The black rectangle felt impossibly cold, a piece of absolute zero in the sudden heat of the moment. Beside him, Nysa did not flinch, but the faint light in her veins pulsed faster, a frantic, panicked rhythm that mirrored the strobing alarms. Her head was cocked, listening not to the siren, but to the sounds beneath it.
The main blast door, the one they had forced open, was being cut. Not with a pry bar and a prayer, but with the focused, incandescent heat of a plasma torch. A perfect, glowing circle appeared in the center of the thick metal, which then fell inward with a heavy clang, landing on the dark floor like a discarded coin. Through the opening, they came.
They were not soldiers. They moved with a liquid grace that was unnerving, their simple grey robes undisturbed by the haste of their entry. There were a dozen of them, fanning out with practiced efficiency, their faces serene and detached in the pulsing red light. On the shoulder of each robe was a stark white sigil: the diagram of an atom, its nucleus cracked, its orbital paths shattered into chaotic vectors. The mark of the Final Purity.
Then, he entered. Malachi Voss stepped through the glowing circle of the breach as if it were a halo prepared for his arrival. He was tall and gaunt, his skin so translucent that the cold, golden light of his own life force was clearly visible, a slow, deliberate current moving through his veins. His eyes were orbs of milky white light, holding no pupil and no reflection, only a profound and unwavering luminescence. He moved through the blaring chaos of the alarm with a chilling calm, the architect of the storm.
He ignored Rhys and Nysa completely. They were furniture in the room, irrelevant variables in a much larger calculation. His gaze, placid and absolute, fixed on the fused form of Character_9, the janitor of apocalypse. Malachi walked across the polished floor, his steps silent, and stopped before the central console. He looked down at the skeletal engineer, and the expression on his face was not hatred, but a profound and terrible pity.
— You guarded the instrument of salvation, old man, — Malachi’s voice was not loud, but it cut through the shriek of the alarm, a calm, resonant tone that seemed to bend the noise around it. He raised a hand, gesturing to the dead schematic, to the humming heart of the engine buried miles below. — The perfect, final note. The answer to the cacophony of a flawed creation.
His followers moved as he spoke. Four of them broke from the perimeter, their movements synchronized. They did not rush the console but secured it, taking positions that cut off any angle of approach. They were not warriors; they were priests, preparing a sacrament. Their weapons, sleek plasma rifles of a design Rhys had never seen, were held at a low, patient ready.
— But you lacked the faith to use it, — Malachi continued, his voice laced with a sorrow that was more terrifying than any anger. He looked from Character_9 to Nysa, his milky eyes finally acknowledging her. — You clung to the echoes of a broken song, Oracle, when you should have been listening for the silence. The spirit does not want to be sustained. It wants to be completed.
Rhys saw his chance. While Malachi’s attention was on Nysa, he shifted his weight, preparing to fire, to create a moment of chaos. But before his muscles could even tense, one of the cultists turned its head, its own luminous eyes fixing on him. The plasma rifle came up, not as a threat, but as a simple statement of fact. The moment was gone before it was ever born. They were outmaneuvered, outgunned, and utterly trapped.
Nysa felt the weight of Malachi’s ideology press down on her. It was a perversion of the Chorus’s faith, but it was seamless, perfect in its horrific logic. Where the Chorus sought to preserve the spirit, Malachi sought to release it from the prison of existence itself. He was not a heretic. He was the faith’s most devout and logical conclusion.
— The Fall was not a tragedy, — Malachi said, his voice dropping to an intimate, sermonizing whisper that filled the vast chamber. — It was the first verse of the final hymn. It shattered the cage of Matter, but left the spirit trapped in the wreckage, forced to sing the same sad songs of memory and pain. We will not repeat that failure. We will finish the song.
His followers were at the console now, their hands moving over the controls with a familiarity that made Rhys’s blood run cold. They were not guessing. They knew the system. Character_9 had taught them well. They were preparing the interface for the Keystone Slate.
Malachi finally turned his gaze to Rhys. To the black rectangle of dead technology in his hand. His expression shifted from pity to a look of pure, unadulterated reverence. It was the look of a pilgrim seeing a holy relic for the first time. He took a step toward Rhys, his hand outstretched, not in a demand, but an invitation.
— Give it to me, soldier of rust, — Malachi’s voice was soft. — Let us unmake this broken world together.
The air was thick with the smell of ozone and hot metal. The red light pulsed, casting long, dancing shadows that made the chamber feel alive and breathing.
As Malachi’s glowing eyes met his, the shriek of the alarm seemed to fade, replaced by a different sound in Rhys’s mind. It was the frantic, panicked clicking of a Geiger counter from the Slaughter Ravine, the sound it made just before the world had turned to white fire. The memory of the sound was a key, unlocking a door he had sealed long ago.
The core chamber vanished. The red light, the hum, the zealot reaching for the key to the apocalypse—it all dissolved. He was somewhere else. He was somewhere worse.
