Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“How hard can it be to fly a plane? It’s just pulling the steering wheel and hope we don’t crash” Rendo already boarded at the cockpit, only to be welcomed by the multiple confusing buttons and two steering wheels in front of him. “THERE’S TWO WHAT THE FUCK”

“Krab, are you familiar with this plane model?” Juy asked, taking a seat at the aisle side where her friend was circling in places, pulling out their camera to see if it was anything familiar.

“Oh this is.. a Boeing 737…” Krab’s voice lowered as the cold sweat formed on their forehead. “Ah well there’s mutliple Boeing 737s anyways I’m sure we’ll be fine!”

“Move out of the way, I’ll fly it.” Just as everyone was doing their thing, Zayn stepped up and shoved Rendo out of the pilot’s seat. The way he commanded it somehow brought a couple of his friends in peace. At least, someone knows how to operate a plane.

“You’ve operated a plane before Zayn?” Crisis asked in which Zayn pulls out what seemed to be a license card. Upon further inspection, it says ‘GTA certified pilot’. “See? Trust me I have experience.”

“GTA?! WE ARE COOKED” Rue exclaimed, holding their head and practically looking like ash baby at this point. However, Runey patted Zayn’s shoulder assuring him. “I trust you with my life”

Meanwhile on the passenger cabins, Fritz, Con, HD, Haze and Syndi were at the passenger cabin somehow recollecting everything that has happened. Fritz who was keeping tally of his kill streak, spoke up regarding their destination.

“Let’s get out of this stupid country and fly to Russia.” Fritz declared, swinging back bloodied metal bat over his shoulder with a grin. Russia was a 26 hours flight and they could at least get 26 hours worth of rest.

“We’re colonizing Russia?” Haze asked who just finished polishing his dagger. “Count me in”

“No no that’s bad” Con argued, backed up by Gon. “We’re just going to seek refuge in that country!”

Just when Syndi was about to speak up, who seems to be pointing out that Russia’s refuge is strict when it comes to letting people on, was hushed by Fritz with a glare.

“Not another word from you, Syndi. Talk when you managed to kill more than I did.” Fritz then turned to Con and Gon who seemed to be on the edge of their seats thinking. “They’ll never know, Russia is big”

Just then, a couple of shrieks was heard in the cockpit that took their attention, rushing in there as fast as they could.

“ZAYN ARE YOU SURE THAT’S SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN” Crisis shrieked, seeing how there’s now multiple blinking red lights that seemed to dance in some kind of way. Rue and Runey looked at each other before gulping, and Rendo who was acting as the co-pilot was just staring at the oddly nice display of red blinking lights.

“Chill, I have a LEGO license to fly a plane too. We’ll be fine” Zayn said, flicking random buttons. Surprisingly, the plane’s engine actually started. Zayn was the most surprised of them all before adding a comment, “.. It actually worked.”

“What happened?!” HD and his group asked worriedly and frantic. before seeing that it was just them messing with the plane.

“Zayn you can drive a plane?” Fritz asked, brows raised.

“What do you take me for?” Zayn replied cooly with a grin.

“Based.”

Krab and Juy was with Kari and his group who was roaming around the big plane for possible resources. Krabs was taking picture of the interior for memories (she says) while Juy was helping out clear the path. After all, the plane seemed to be abandoned.

“If i open this door and zombies come and get me, I’m throwing Kari first” Onions joked which Noah stifled a laugh. Kari, who was unamused, just rolled his eyes as he held on his gun in case they get jumpscared by a hoard of undeds.

“I'm pushing you first and closing the door if that happens.” Kari spat back, Onions simply whistled in amusement.

Funnily enough, there was none yet the cabin felt eerie.

“What if it’s right behind me” Juy brought up, holding a crowbar in case they get attacked.

“I’ll protect you Juy!” Krabs exclaimed, turning around to check on Juy. Just in time, there were a few that came out of nowhere, most likely they were startled. Krabs shrieked, catching Kari’s attention who was the closest to them. Out of instincts, he pulled out his gun and shot the undeads with precision that they dropped to the ground as soon as the bullets hit their heads.

“Let’s not jinx anything shall we?” Noah pointed out, Onions was about to make a joke but nodded instead.

After a few minutes of scurrying around the cabins, they found a handful of resources that may last them for a few days at least. Along with the abandoned luggages on the overhead, they also managed to find clothes to wear.

As they all gathered at the first class cabin, Rue had Crisis sitting beside them patting their shoulders. “Don’t stress about it too much Crisis. At least we’re ready for take off”

Crisis only made a weary thumbs up before slouching back at the chair. Fritz came out of the cockpit after he had a conversation with Zayn regarding their destination.

Krabs and Juy invaded Crisis’ personal space, coddling together like an inseparable trio which Rue had to move beside Runey, who seemed to be busy looking out in the window.

Kari was sitting beside Haze who was sitting beside Onions. He seemed to be busy looking at the distant buildings from the window.

Con, Gon and HD are another inseparable trio the group has, that they automatically occupied the three seats in a row.

Syndi and Noah were talking about how to split the resources they found, the discussion slowly dying out when they heard a crackling noise from the speakers.

“Ahem ahem. This is your pilot Zayn—“

“—And Rendo”

“Rendo shut up you’ll get yoru turn”

“No fuck you i’ll go first”

The speaker emitted their voices in which they heard their little bickering, an awkward sweat forming on the group’s heads.

“Anyways. we’re all flying to Russia. Sit back and relax because your amazing pilot Zayn is here to ensure a smooth ride”

“And Rendo!”

Then followed by another bickering which they just laughed on. As the plane prepares for take off, everyone settled down. To their surprise, it was a smooth take off. Zayn and Rendo were actually good pilots despite having no experience whatsoever.

Once the plane was in the sky and steady, the two self assigned pilots turned on autopilot so that they can rest and join the others too.

“But how do we land?” Con asked, catching up to everyone’s conversation. This momentarily stopped the conversation until Zayn answered his question with the most confident tone known to man.

“Fuck around and find out.”

Chapter Text

The plane flew for hours, a steady hum above the place they were leaving behind. Fritz was dozing, his bat propped against his seat. Krabz and Juy were quietly looking over the photos they'd taken. Runey and Rue had fallen asleep on each other’s shoulder—one head on top of the other. Their two pilots were leaning on the windows, gazing at the distant sky. It was peaceful amidst the chaos.

“Y’know, this entire outbreak was awfully suspicious from the very start.” Crisis started a discussion, addressing the situation at hand. “There’s no way that the scientists don’t have a countermeasure for this. And plus, a virus that turns living people to braindead walkers?”

HD spoke up, popping the last few candies on his mouth. “I say it’s a planned pandemic.” Remembering the obstacles they faced before hijacking this very plane, he seems to be sure of his statement.

“lt also gave some of us a power up. Just look at Fritz’s bat, it’s literally frozen to the core.” And Noah was right, the bat that was leaning on Fritz’s leg space was coated in cold spikes of ice.

“Does anyone else know if they got a new ability?” He asked, glancing at the others who were awake. Most of them had shaken their heads in response. “Because for all I know, that’s mostly everyone who discovered theirs. At least hoping no one is a ticking time bomb here as their power.” He joked to lift the mood which definitely worked.

“So now what? Once we arrive in Russia’s stronghold, what’s our next move?” Addressing the elephant in the room, Syndi sighed rather stressed. “As far as my knowledge goes, these safezones are very strict with the gifted.”

“Gifted? Is that what the people with powers are called?” Con asked, wanting a clarification.

“Yeah, apparently they’re called like that because they can help fend off the undeads.” Onions and Haze emerged from the back with a couple of bottled waters, distributing it to each of them. “So if we get there, some of us who are ‘gifted’ are given no choice but to comply” Haze added, plopping down to his seat.

Then the first jolt hit. A deep, metallic sound screeched through the fuselage. The crunch was followed by a deafening shriek of tearing metal. The left wing dipped violently, and the plane spiraled into a nosedive. Alarms blared a frantic tone, oxygen masks dropped, swinging like hanged men.

This was it. The "finding out" part.

Everyone snapped to attention. A second later, the starboard engine outside the windows erupted into a shower of sparks, then fell dark. The plane immediately violently tilted sideways as the engine sputtered before dying out.

"Zayn! Rendo!" Crisis yelled, clutching her armrests. The sudden movement caused everyone to hold on tight on their seats.

The two were already scrambling back into the cockpit. "It's dead! The autopilot disengaged and I don't know how to bring it back up" Zayn shouted, mumbling that his GTA sessions didn’t teach him how to do this.

The plane began its descent, clouds whipping past the windows. The intercom crackled. "Everyone better brace for impact! It’s about to go down!" Rendo's voice was a panicked shriek.

Chaos erupted in the cabin as the gifted ones began to help lessen the impact.

"HD, Con, Gon—get everyone into brace positions! Now!" Haze’s voice cutting through the panic. He didn't wait for a reply. A shimmering, translucent blue barrier erupted from his hands, coating the interior walls of the cabin like a second skin. "This will absorb the initial impact! Hold it steady!"

The plane trembled once again, the port engine now sputtering. The oxygen masks dropped, swinging wildly.

Runey was already moving with such speed. She took a deep breath and exhaled, not air, but a dozen perfect, shimmering air bubbles. They shot through the cabin, each one closing in on a person's face and settling over their head like a diver's headwear. "Breathe normally!" she commanded, her voice clear inside the bubble she wore.

Outside through the window, a vast, unbroken expanse of emerald green rushed up to meet them—the Amazon rainforest.

"I can't pull up!" Zayn screamed from the cockpit.

"I've got the landing!" a voice broke through the cockpit, rushing in. It was Rue. She phased through the door, materializing between the pilots' seats. Her hands flew over the controls, her eyes closed. "I touched the schematic in the maintenance manual. I know this plane." A complex array of levers and buttons glowed with a faint, golden light under her fingertips as she manifested the ghost of the plane's own perfect, functional controls.

"Zay, we need to soften the landing!" Onions shouted back.

Zay was already standing in the aisle, his hands raised. His eyes turned the colour of a tempest, "I'll clear a path!". Through the windshield, the sky above the plummeting plane darkened. A localized storm cloud materialized in seconds. With a deafening crack, a fork of lightning lanced down, striking the dense canopy of trees directly in their path. It struck again and again, vaporizing trunks and creating a clearing in the jungle.

"Fritz! The port engine is on fire!" Syndi pointed, her voice tight.

“Yeah, I can see that!” Though sarcastic, Fritz was already there, his cryokinesis in play. He slammed his palms against the fuselage wall. A wave of intense cold shot through the metal, and with a loud hiss, the flames on the struggling engine were snuffed out, a thick layer of blue ice coating the nacelle.

The ground was terrifyingly close now.

"Krabz, now!" Juy shouted.

Krabz, who had been muttering under their breath, slammed their hands on the floor, dark energy pulsing outwards. In the newly cleared scar in the jungle below, the earth churned. Dozens of skeletal arms, belonging to long-dead jungle creatures and worse, erupted from the soil. They interlocked, forming a macabre, writhing net of bone over the scorched earth, a final, cushioning layer to their crash landing.

"BRACE!" Runey shouted from the aisle while Haze was pouring every ounce of his energy into the barrier. The blue light intensified, solidifying into a crystalline shell inside the plane.

The impact was a symphony of disaster—the tearing of metals, the snap of countless trees, and the sound of the landing gear shearing off. The bone-net Krabz had summoned shattered on impact, but significantly slowed down the plane’s speed. Haze's barrier flared bright white, dampening the deceleration that would have turned their wikipedia’s pronouns to ‘was/were’. The plane skidded, plowed a deep furrow in the earth, and finally, came to a groaning halt.

Silence.

It was broken by the drip of fluid and the crackle of the small, scattered fires started by Zay's lightning. The cabin was a wreck, but intact. One by one, Runey's air bubbles popped. People unbuckled their belts, trembling, but alive.

As they staggered out through a torn-open section of the fuselage into the humid and green of the jungle, a figure emerged from the tree line. A young woman with soot-smudged clothes and eyes that held a familiar fire. She looked at the messy crash site, then at the group of survivors.

"Fulmer?" Gon asked, stepping forward. “It’s you isn’t it!”

Fulmer gave a relieved nod. "Saw the lightning. Figured it was either a god or some survivors fleeing. Looks like I was half right." A small, controlled flame danced over her palm, a beacon in the dim light. "Welcome to the outskirts. Brazil's about a hundred miles that way." She jerked a thumb. "You picked one hell of a landing spot."

“How in the world—What huh how are YOU here?” Rendo pointed at Fulmer, surprised at the coincidence. He was the last one to get off of the cabin, dusting himself off.

“My archeology gig brought me here, which is funny because there’s literally nothing here. The coordinates were wrong and it was supposed to be at the other end of this forest.” Sighing, Fulmer shaked her head upon remembering the mishap that happened.

Fulmer and her companion, a lean man with a composure opposite of hers, approached the group. "This is Julian," She introduced. "He heard you coming from five miles out. Said it sounded like the sky was tearing in half."

Julian gave a tight smile, his eyes scanning the traumatized group. "We should move. That was not a quiet arrival. It'll draw attention."

The reality of their situation began to sink in. They were in the middle of one of the most unforgiving environments on Earth, with limited supplies and, for some, no way to defend themselves beyond wits and courage

The humid air of the Amazon was a thick, filled with the shrieks of monkeys and the chirping of insects. The group stood in a dazed semicircle around the wreck of the plane, the reality of their situation settling in.

"We're alive," Con said, his voice barely a whisper, as if saying it too loud might break the miracle.

"Barely," Gon added, already scanning the immediate area with HD. "The fuselage is compromised. We can't stay here for long so we’ll have to camp somewhere.”

But before they continued to move, Rue took a deep breath, voice booming. "Everyone down!" She commanded, "Injuries?"

A chorus of shaky "I'm okays" and "just bruised" answered her. The blue barrier had held but the force of the crash had left them all battered.

"The plane won't be safe for long, either," Syndi added, her eyes already scanning the wreckage. "We should salvage everything we can, fast." She darted back into the torn fuselage with a speed that surprised even her, followed by Noah, whose enhanced reflexes made him perfect for grabbing items from precarious, dangling compartments.

"Syndi, the overhead bins are unstable," Noah warned, just as a bin swung loose. He caught it one-handed, barely flinching. "Got it." He began handing down bags to Syndi, who was already efficiently sorting through them, creating piles: food, medicine, tools, and useless items.

"Juy," Runey said, turning to her. "What are we dealing with? Environmentally?"

Juy, though pale, attempted to focus. Her eyes scanned the immediate area. "That vine with the heart-shaped leaves? Don't touch it, it causes a blistering rash. But see those broad-leafed plants over there? They're a good source of clean water if we cut the stems properly. And we need to be wary of caimans near any water source." Her knowledge was a sudden, vital anchor in their unfortunate predicament.

"Right. HD, Con, Gon," Fulmer called. "You're on shelter and camp duty. This clearing is as good as any."

The trio snapped into action. "We can use the torn fuselage panels as a base," HD stated, pointing. "Con, find me straight sturdy branches about this thick." He held up his hands. "Gon, see if you can gather any dry leaf litter for insulation. We need to be up before dark."

As the group started to move, Kari, who had been quietly checking his gun, froze. He looked at a narrow fissure in the wreckage, a gap no wider than a man's hand. "The first-aid kit is lodged in there," he said. Kari then looked at the crack in the fuselage, letting his hand to enter. To his shock, his fingers began to shimmer, breaking apart into a cloud of particles that flowed through the crack like sand before reforming on the other side. He pulled his hand back, whole. "Huh," he said, a slow grin spreading across his face.

"Whoa," Rendo breathed. "So you're not just a good shot?"

Kari looked at his own hand, a flicker of understanding in his eyes. "Seems not. And the shot..." He raised his pistol and, without even seeming to aim, fired a single round. A hundred yards away, a vine snapped, dropping a ripe fruit directly into Noah's waiting hands, his reflexes allowing him to catch it effortlessly.

"Sharpshooter's eye," He confirmed quietly. The revelation of Kari's new ability sparked a quiet confidence, but the focus quickly returned to survival.

"Show-off," Onions remarked, but he was busy. He had found a relatively flat piece of wreckage and was using a stick to sketch a map. "Okay, we crashed here. Fulmer says the outskirts are a hundred miles... that way." He pointed, certain. "The river we can hear is to the north. We'll need to use it, but carefully."

"Reptiles are my specialty," Rendo chimed in, trying to lighten the mood. He peered into the undergrowth. "So if you see a big scaly friend, you call me before you panic. Most of them are more scared of you." His comedic presence was a nervous relief.

Crisis stood near the wreck, her eyes closed. "The emergency transponder was in the tail section," she recited, her photographic memory replaying the plane's manual she'd glanced at hours ago. "It's probably destroyed, but the black boxes are more durable. They're bright orange. If anyone can find them in this mess, it might help... someday." She directed Fritz, who used his cryokinesis to freeze and shatter a tangled mess of wiring, clearing a path for others to look.

As dusk began to fall, the camp took shape. HD, Con, and Gon had constructed a sturdy shelter using fuselage panels and branches. Runey had used her water-breathing to safely check the nearby river for threats and returned with a bag made from a waterproof seat cover, full of fresh water.

Zay, with a focused look, summoned a gentle, warm breeze to dry out the damp ground around their camp, while Fulmer used his pyrokinesis to start a controlled, contained campfire in a pit she lined with stones.

"Food," Syndi announced, laying out their salvaged rations. "It's not much. We'll need to supplement."

"I can try to hunt," Kari offered. He picked up a small, sharp piece of metal. With his newfound vision, he eyed a ripe fruit high in a distant tree. With a flick of his wrist, the metal shard flew, hitting the stem dead-center and dropping the fruit. Noah, with his quick reflexes, darted forward and caught it before it hit the ground.

Julian, who had been sitting silently with his eyes closed, suddenly held up a hand. "Everyone quiet." The camp froze. "There's a group moving about half a mile east. Heavy footsteps. Not animals. They're... searching."

A tense silence fell over the group. The normals looked at the gifted, and the gifted looked back, a silent understanding between them. They were a team, powers or not.

"Right," Haze said, voice low and steady. "Krabz, can you give us some early warning? Something small, just to let us know if they get close."

Krabz nodded, placing a hand on the earth. A few small, skeletal bird feet scratched their way out of the soil and scuttled silently into the undergrowth, acting as sentries.

"Fritz, I need a perimeter wall of ice, just a low one, to slow anyone down and make noise if they cross it," He continued.

Fritz grinned, pressing his hands to the ground. A ring of ice, two feet high, crystallized into existence around their camp, glittering in the firelight.

Rue phased through a tree at the edge of the clearing, rematerializing. "I can be our scout. I'll turn intangible and see who they are."

"And I," Zay said, his eyes crackling with barely contained energy, "will have a storm ready. Just in case."

The normals gathered in the center, near the fire. Juy identified a stack of sturdy branches that could be used as clubs. HD, Con, and Gon sharpened them with salvaged tools. Onions updated his map with the suspected enemy position. Syndi prepared a first-aid station. Rendo kept a watchful eye on the treetops for snakes, and Crisis mentally cataloged every escape route she could see.

As dusk began to paint the sky in shades of purple and orange, they had a camp. A shelter was being made from salvaged materials and large leaves under HD, Con, and Gon's direction. A small, controlled fire—courtesy of Fulmer—crackled at its center, keeping the darkness at bay.

They were a long way from safe. But as they sat around the fire, sharing a meager meal of salvaged rations and safe fruit Juy and Syndi had found, a new dynamic had been forged. They were a team. The normals weren't liabilities; they were the vital part of it in which keep the, grounded. And in the heart of the vast, unknown Amazon, that part was the only thing keeping them from falling apart.

Chapter Text

As the light of the first hour breaks through the cracks of their makeshift camps, it was time to get going. Rue was the first one to get up, careful not to startle the others awake. To her surprise, Onions, Noah, and Kari were alreay up, discussing their next route.

The tension from the previous night's alert turned into a grim determination by morning. The unknown seekers never breached their icy perimeter, but the message was clear: they couldn't stay.

“I scouted the area as soon as I woke up, no traces of whatever group was trying to find us last night. All clear.” Stretching his arms, Kari stated. Noah was sitting on the fallen log while Onions on the other hand, was updating the improvised map of the jungle he created with Kari’s assistance.

“Fulmer said it’s a hundred miles down. River closeby, if we follow it would lead to the ocean or the outskirts, depending which way we go.” Crouched on the ground, stick in hand, he drew broken lines that allowed him to visualize their route.

“Morning. You guys are early, planning the route too I see.” Rue approached and glanced at what the two guys were making. Kari leaned on the nearby log beside Noah which was striked down by Zay’s lightning a day ago. He nodded, gesturing at Onions. “he’s figuring out the best route to get outta here fast.“

Onions sighed, stick tapping against the damp earth as he stared at the map and route they were about to take. Meanwhile, Rue caught on what he was on about.

“Realistically speaking, It would take us three to five days to get out of here with our pace. But I think we’ll be fine. We’ll utilize our abilities, save our energy, and hope for the best. I promise we’ll be fine.” She spoke in a soft yet determined tone, enough to ease their impending worries a little.

“Yeah. Just make sure you don’t run out of fuel, we can’t have any more casualties.” Onions reminded in which Rue took note of.

As the sun rises, so did the others. Fulmer, Julian, and Haze had woken up to a tiny scream from Juy and Krabz’s tent, saying that they felt something crawl on their skin in which Rendo immediately responded with “It’s a harmless spider.”, sending chills on both girls. Runey, Crisis, and Fritz were the next ones to wake up. Con, HD, and Gon had been putting down their makeshift tents. Haze, Zay, and Syndi were the last ones to get up.

With the salvaged rations and fruits Syndi had foraged with Juy’s guidance and Noah’s strength, they had their morning meal. It wasn’t much but it’d do. Fulmer lit up a small flame to help with melting Fritz’s ice he created, while Runey filters the melted ice through her air bubbles. Julian offered his help by packing the purified water to each canister that Rue manifested a while back.

Then finally, it was time to go.

The jungle was a living, breathing obstacle course. Every step’s a battle against thick mud, tangled vines, and biting insects. But under Rue's leadership, the group began to move with a new, terrifying efficiency.

"Onions, you're our compass. Kari, you're our eyes. Runey, you're our pathfinder. Everyone else, follow our lead and be ready," Rue commanded, her voice calm but firm. She’d phased through a dozen trees while everyone was getting ready, scouting the immediate path for the fastest route.

Onions, map in hand, pointed. "The river is our fastest way out. It flows roughly east-southeast. If we can follow it, we'll hit a tributary that leads toward the outskirts. But the direct path is a swamp."

"Then we don't take the direct path. We make use of the swamp." Rue said then turned. The walk to the said swamp wasn’t far and they stopped. After having Haze to levitate over and scout the surrounding area for threat, Rue started her plan.

"Zay, we need a bridge. Not a big one, just something to get us across the road."

Zay nodded, his eyes flashing. He raised his hands, and the humid air coalesced. A localized wind whipped up over the patch of the swamp. With a series of sharp cracks, lightning struck several large dead trees on the far side, splintering them. Zay then had the wind push the logs into place across the deepest, most treacherous part of the bog, creating a unstable but functional bridge.

"Fritz, solidify it," Rue ordered.

Fritz stepped forward, laying his hands on the first log. A wave of frost shot across the wood, coating it in a thick gritty layer of ice that provided stability. "Watch your step, it's slippery." he warned, though the path was now walkable.

As the group carefully navigated the icy bridge, Kari stood watch, his precise vision scanning the canopy. He spotted a venomous snake coiled on a branch directly above Syndi's path. Without a word, he disintegrated his arm into particles, the shimmering cloud flowing up through the leaves. It reformed just behind the snake, grabbing it by the head before it could strike, and tossed it far into the jungle. Syndi passed underneath, completely unaware of the danger she'd avoided.

Runey, meanwhile, was in her element near the river. When the path was blocked by a dense thicket of thorny bamboo, she didn't slow down. "Haze, a small barrier please, just ahead of me angled forward."

Haze complied, creating a wedge-shaped shield. Runey had used the barrier to create an opening between the bamboos. She then dove into the river, her eel-like agility allowing her to move through the water at an incredible speed, bypassing the impenetrable land obstacle entirely. She emerged 45 meters downstream, waving them forward.

"Krabz," Rue called out. "We need to know what's ahead, beyond the next bend."

Krabz closed her eyes, their necromantic energy seeping into the earth. A moment later, a skeletal tapir, missing most of its ribs, clawed its way out of the soil. It trotted clumsily but silently down the path, acting as their remote scout. "The path is clear for about 200 meters," Krabz reported after a moment of concentration. "Then it narrows between two rock faces."

When they reached the narrow path, Fulmer stepped up. "Stand back." She focused, and a controlled jet of red-hot flame shot from her palms—not to destroy, but to cauterize. Fulmer swept it across the rock faces, incinerating the dense curtains of vines, thorny bushes, and likely any insects hiding within, leaving a clean smoldering passage for them to get through.

The normal members of the group watched in awe, their own roles effectively in use. HD, Con, and Gon used their survival skills to quickly create makeshift sleds from large leaves and branches when Fritz created sheets of ice to slide heavy salvaged supplies down steep inclines. Juy pointed out the edible fruits and roots as they trekked the path, preventing them from having to stop and forage. Crisis's photographic memory allowed him to confirm Onions's directions, recalling the shape of a particular mountain peak or a unique tree formation from his map.

Rendo's knowledge of reptiles proved invaluable when Krabz's skeletal tapir disturbed a nest of caimans. While Haze threw up a barrier to block the largest one, Rendo identified a smaller, more aggressive species and shouted precise warnings about their attack patterns, allowing Noah to use his reflexes to dodge and deflect a lunging reptile with a well-aimed kick.

By the end of the day, they had covered a distance that would have taken a normal expedition a week. They were exhausted, but morale was high. As they made camp in a new clearing warmed by Fulmer's fire, a sense of united purpose settled over them. The outskirts no longer felt a hundred miles away. It felt inevitable.

The night arrived just in time their camp settled down. Just like yesterday, they had their respective groupings of three to make things more efficient. There was no room for arguments or complaints—all of them wanted to get out of here as soon as possible.

“First thing we have to do the moment we get into the city is locate the safezone. We don’t know what lies in the city, but I’m sure that there would be signs that points to it.” Around the fire Fulmer ignited, they all sat. She initiated the conversation, mind solely focused on the imminent task at hand.

“Haze should take the high ground to scout and Kari could join him.” Crisis suggested, glancing at Kari and Haze who understood what needs to be done. “Sounds good, we’ll go.” Haze confirmed.

Gon, who just finished building their tent, joined the group. “In any case, It’ll be nice if we get weapons to defend ourselves from. In case of emergency.” He stated. Rue caught on his implication and nodded. “I’ll provide something. Like a knife or metal bats. Whichever works.”

Meanwhile on the other side of the fire, HD had been fascinated with how their new powers worked. “When you… summon, the dead… do you also get to feel their last moments?”

Krabz, who had been staring at her hand, perked at the sudden question. “Sometimes when the soul is too strong, I could feel them. But most of the time they act as an extension of my senses. So it’s like I’m a puppeteer and they’re my marionettes.” She pondered for a while, voice hushed. Krabz really hasn’t figured out the full extent of her new powers. When it first came to her, it was in the middle of panic and chaos therefore she had little to no time exploring the potential of her ability.

“I guess that makes sense. We’ve been using your necromancy as a secondary scout to cover larger areas.” HD replied, stretching out his cold hands by the fire. “It looks impractical, but it’s handy.”

They had their moments, little chats with each other and lighthearted jokes made by Rendo followed by whispered laughs and giggles by those who finds his jokes funny. It was a sight to see, despite their predicament.

By night, everyone had gone back to their tents. Rue however, stayed out to keep watch, in case sudden threat appeared. She didn’t instruct Fritz, Krabz, nor Haze to put another security, they needed to conserve their energy.

“And you needed to conserve your energy too. Here, take this. Gon taught me how to brew it. Might help you sleep.” Syndi sat beside Rue, handing out a canister filled with tea.

Rue, surprised, simply took the canister and carefully sipped the freshly made tea. “Thank you, Syndi…” Her gaze was at the distant twinkling night sky.

“You’re worried, maybe even afraid that you’d fail to lead us. But you know, we can hold out on our own too. You don’t have to lead us all the time.” Syndi told Rue, the other wide eyed. “I can tell. You’re tensed.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.” Rue chuckled, then stood up to stretch her body. “I guess I should get my rest too.”

“But what about the safety perimeters?” She asked one last time. Rue didn’t turn back but stopped in her tracks.

“I’ve placed spiky traps and an alarm around, while everyone was having fun. No need to worry, goodnight Syndi.”

Then it was lights off.

It was the another day of them navigating through the thick jungle of Amazon. Checking up on Crisis and Onion’s information, they weren’t far off from the outskirts of the city.

“With the pace we’re going, we’ll get there by the third day—or fourth, if we encounter problems on the way.” Fulmer said, stuffing her hands on her pocket before ordering Julian to carry their things.

So their trek began. The Amazon was a wall of green, but the gifted ones began to tear it down while the normals keep them steady.

Haze launched into the air with a grunt of effort, hovering unsteadily at first. "Whoa... okay." He rose above the canopy, his body silhouetted against the morning sun. "I see the river! It's about a klick north of here! There's a bend up ahead—we can cut the corner if we go straight through this ridge!" His aerial reconnaissance eliminated hours of blind wandering.

The "ridge" was a tangle of thick undergrowth and fallen trees. Fritz stepped forward, his hands extended. A wave of frost shot from his fingertips, freezing the moist greenery. The leaves and vines became brittle and white. Noah,with his enhanced strength, stepped up next and shoved a shoulder into the frozen mass. It shattered like glass, clearing a path with minimal noise or effort. "Now that's handy," he grinned, wiping frost from his jacket.

When they reached the riverbank, the water was wide, brown, and moving fast. "Caimans," Juy pointed out, spotting several logs with eyes.

"On it," Fritz said, cracking his knuckles. He focused on a section of the river directly ahead, and the surface began to churn and solidify. With a great groaning sound, a bridge of ice, three feet wide, formed across the water. "It won't last long in this heat," he panted, sweat beading on his forehead. "Cross fast."

Runey was in her element. She slipped into the water upstream, her eel-like agility allowing her to scout the crossing. "The ice is stable!" she called, her voice clear without a bubble. She kept a watchful eye on the displaced caimans, ready to create a distraction if needed.

The normals crossed carefully, with HD, Con, and Gon using long branches as support. Rendo spotted a particularly large caiman lurking near the opposite bank. "Hey, big guy! Nice day for a swim, huh?" he called out, his bizarre reptilian rapport somehow making the creature sink beneath the surface.

On the other side, the terrain became marshy. Zay stepped up. "Stand back." He took a deep breath, his eyes clouding over. A localized wind, dry and hot, swept down from the sky, pushing the oppressive humidity ahead of them and drying the soggy ground underfoot into firm, passable earth. He staggered slightly afterwards, Julian offering to support. "Controlling it... is harder than just summoning it," he admitted.

Kari found his new skills invaluable for scouting. When Onions pointed to a seemingly impenetrable thicket, Kari would simply disintegrate into a shimmering cloud of particles, flowing through the gaps and reforming on the other side to report what he saw. His precise vision pinpointed the safe pathways and the ripe fruits from a distance, conserving their energy.

Then they faced a deep ravine.

"It'll take hours to go around," Onions said, frustrated.

Rue closed her eyes, concentrating. "A winch and. cable. We’ll zipline across." A golden glow manifested in her hands, solidifying into a perfect, functional replica of the winch, complete with a grappling hook and a coil of strong cable. Haze, looking weary from sustained flight, took the hook.

"I've got one good lift left in me," he grunted. He flew shakily to the other side, secured the hook around a massive kapok tree, and flew back, his landing more of a controlled stumble.

Syndi, the fast learner, figured out the winch's mechanism instantly, creating a zip-line for them to cross one by one. Crisis, with her photographic memory, directed each person on the safest way to secure themselves.

By the third day, the toll was evident. Fritz could only produce small chips of ice for their canteens instead of solid blocks. Zay could barely muster a breeze. Haze's flights were short and low to the ground. Rue could only materialize small, simple objects like a knife or a canteen, and even that left her pale.

It was the normals who carried them through the rest. Juy found energy-rich nuts and some safe edible fungi. *HD, Con, and Gon built secure shelters each night with effortless skill. Noah carried the most exhausted of the gifted without complaint. Onions' unwavering sense of direction never faltered.

Finally, as the group collapsed at the edge of a clearing, Onions consulted his sun-bleached map and the position of the sun. He looked up, a slow, triumphant smile spreading across his face.

"That's it," he said, his voice hoarse but clear. "Beyond those trees... it's a road. A proper one. We're out."

“Finally, we’re almost there.” Con felt hopeful, and so did the others. They made it out of the Amazon jungle without losing a limb, and that’s something to celebrate about.

“Until we actually get in there, I’m keeping my expectations low..” The very grounded Krabz said, her statement bringing the other’s cheers to a halt. Noah, who was carrying her, also agreed.

“She’s right, but that’s only because we want to survive. Now let’s go!” Rue chuckled and marched through the last few trees, then welcomed by the sudden bright light of the city.

Chapter Text

The change was abrupt. One moment, they were trekking through the final, stubborn curtain of jungle vines, and the next, they stood on a cracked asphalt road. Before them lay not the bustling outskirts of a Brazilian city, but a skeletal remains of one.

The air, once filled with the cacophony of the rainforest, was now dead and heavy. Weeds pushed through the concrete of collapsed gas stations. Rusted cars, some with doors still agape, sat on flat tires, their innards spilling out like metallic entrails. Windows in the high-rises were blown out, staring down at them like the empty eye sockets of a skull. The only sound was the mournful whistle of wind through hollow ruins.

"Onions?" Rue's voice was a hushed whisper, the eerie silence slowly getting onto them.

Onions, his face pale, consulted his mud-stained map. "This. ... This should be a town called Manaus. It's supposed to have a few thousand people. A market. A bus station." He looked up at the devastation. "The safe zone was a military outpost on the other side of this town. We have to cross."

A collective shiver ran through the group. The jungle had been a known enemy. This was a tomb.

"Right. New rules," Fulmer said, her voice strained. "We move fast, we stay quiet. Kari, you're on high ground. Scout ahead."

Kari didn't need to be told twice. His body dissolved into a shimmering cloud of particles, flowing up the side of a crumbling three-story apartment building like golden smoke. He reformed on the roof, lying prone. "Clear for two blocks straight ahead," his voice came down, unnaturally clear and focused as he used his precision vision. "I see a roadblock of burnt-out trucks. We'll need to go around."

"Rue, can you phase through the buildings on the left flank? Check for threats inside," Zay asked in a tone that’s borderline commanding.

Rue nodded, her form becoming insubstantial. She stepped through the wall of a nearby shop, disappearing. She returned moments later, looking queasy. "Empty. But... there are still plates on tables. It's like everyone just vanished in the middle of dinner."

Then they moved. The uncomfortable atmosphere heavy on their trail.

Haze led the way, his hands constantly up, a shimmering blue barrier forming and re-forming ahead of them like the prow of a ship. Every time a piece of debris crumbled from a building, his barrier flickered to deflect it. Every time they crossed an open street, he expanded it into a wide, translucent wall. With each block, his breathing grew more labored, his steps heavier.

"Haze, man, you're shaking," HD said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "You need to take a break."

"Can't," Haze gritted out, sweat pouring down his temples. "We're exposed. One stray shot, one collapse... I can't stop."

Zay was their arsenal. When Kari spotted a collapsed bridge over a polluted canal, Zay didn't hesitate. His eyes rolled back, and a localized storm cloud boiled into existence above the chasm. With a deafening crack, a fork of lightning blasted the rubble, clearing a precarious but passable path. Though strays gone off, earning surprised gasps from the rest. The effort sent him to one knee, gasping.

"Zay, that's enough!" Crisis pleaded, her photographic memory cataloging his pallor. "You're going to give yourself a heart attack! And you almost hit us, it’s getting out of your control!”

"We don’t know what we’re dealing with exactly. For all I know, they’re zombies. And they could be anywhere," Zay wheezed, staggering back to his feet. "We need to keep moving. Speed is safety."

Fritz used his cryokinesis to create silent, slick ramps over piles of debris, but the constant usage was taking a toll on him, causing his fingertips to start freezing and blue. Fulmer incinerated piles of rotting refuse and swarms of aggressive insects that seemed to be the only life left, the heat waves from her hands visibly wavering. Krabz kept a small army of skeletal rats and birds scuttling through the sewers and alleys, their dead eyes serving as their surveillance network, the mental strain making them clutch their head in pain.

The normals worked tirelessly to support them. Juy identified contaminated water sources, warning them away from stagnant pools glittering with a sickly rainbow sheen. HD, Con, and Gon used their survival skills to rig up a makeshift pulley system to lower the exhausted gifted ones down a steep rubble slope when Haze and Rue was too drained to create a barrier-ramp. Noah and Rendo carried most of the supplies, their normal strength pushed to the limit. Syndi and Crisis looked after them, rationing their dwindling water and food, forcing sips and bites into the hands of the gifted who were too focused to remember to care for themselves.

The arguments started after the tenth block.

"Stop!" Julian commanded, his voice cutting through the gust of the wind. He stood in front of Haze, who was swaying on his feet, his barrier flickering like a dying lightbulb. "This is insane. You're going to kill yourselves before whatever did this finds us!"

"We don't have a choice!" Rue shot back, phasing back through a wall. Her form was slow to solidify. "My intangibility is getting harder to maintain. That means my body is hitting its limit. But if I don't scout, we walk into an ambush."

"Kari hasn't blinked in an hour!" Onions yelled, pointing up at the roof where Kari was still perched, a statue with a gun. "He's going to burn out his eyes!"

"Then we'll be blind!" Kari's voice rasped down, raw with fatigue. "I see movement in the windows to the east. Flickers. We're not alone. We can't slow down."

It was a horrific predicament. Their powers were the only thing cutting a path through this lifeless city, but each use was draining their very life force. The normals could only watch, support, and plead, utterly helpless to stop the self-destructive act of their friends.

As they rounded a final corner, the military outpost came into view. Or what was left of it. The chain-link fence was torn apart. The main building was a shell, scorched black by fire.

But there, painted on a remaining wall in faded, peeling yellow, was a symbol: a circle with an arrow inside. And beneath it, the words "Zona Segura - 5km Norte."

They had a direction. But the cost was written on the trembling faces of the gifted. They had reached the outskirts, only to find a different kind of jungle, one that was consuming them from the inside out. The safe zone was five kilometers away. It might as well have been five hundred.

“Let’s find a place to stay for the night, please. We’re all tired and fighting wouldn’t do us any good.” Krabz spoke up, finally letting go of her skeletal scouts, leaning to Juy for assistance in which she supported.

“I agree with Krabz. That abandoned store looks spacious enough for us. We should restock on supplies as well, in case.” Runey added, pointing at the big and somewhat intact building a few walks away from their location. It was a tough day for them, after all.

The silence in the abandoned department store was a stark contrast to the jungle’s cacophony. Dust danced in the late afternoon light slanting through broken windows. The gifted ones were utterly spent. Zay lay propped against a stack of paint cans, eyes closed, his storm-summoning hands now limp in his lap. Haze’s barriers were gone, the energy to maintain them simply exhausted. Rue sat with her head in her hands, and Fritz shivered despite the warm air.

Julian, his head cocked, had chosen a spot near the boarded-up entrance. "I'll take first watch. My ears are the best alarm system we have right now." He didn't need powers; his natural hearing sharpened by a lifetime of attention, was a vital asset. He positioned himself where he could hear both the street and the alley, his body still but his mind actively filtering the sounds of the dead city.

Inside, the scene was one of careful recovery. HD, Con, and Gon had barricaded the back door with shelves and created a defensible perimeter within the store itself. Noah, using his strength, had helped Fritz shift bags of concrete to reinforce the windows.

The three of them moved with quiet efficiency. They found plywood and nails, using hammers from the shelves to board up the broken front windows, leaving only narrow slits for visibility. They dragged heavy tool chests and bags of gravel to create a barricade at the door, a sturdy, physical defense now that magical ones were offline.

“Juy,” Syndi said, “See if there’s anything left in the back that’s safe. Check for rats.”

Juy carefully investigated the stockroom. She found a case of sealed water bottles, a gold mine, and several undamaged packs of nuts. She also identified the droppings of common pests, ensuring they avoided contaminated areas.

Noah, with his enhanced physicality, was on heavy-lifting duty, moving shelves to create a defensible inner perimeter. Rendo, meanwhile, was peering into dark corners with a flashlight. “Just checking for geckos and such,” he explained with a weak but genuine smile. “Might need a friend later.” His lightheartedness, though strained, was a comfort.

"Here," Syndi said softly, kneeling beside Rue. She had found a first-aid kit and was carefully cleaning a cut on Rue's arm that she hadn't even noticed. "You pushed your phasing so hard, you were materializing inside splinters of wood." Rue winced but gave a grateful nod.

Juy was with Haze, offering him a paste she'd made from crushed aloe leaves found growing in a cracked planter outside. "For the headache," she said. "Channeling that barrier gives you a migraine, doesn't it? It’s subtle, but I noticed." Haze accepted it with a surprised, weary thanks.

Rendo was trying to lighten the mood. He'd found a box of party sparklers and, with Fulmer's barely-there pyrokinetic help, got one lit. He waved the fizzling sparkler near a drowsy Krabz. "Hey, look. Skeleton fireworks." Krabz managed a weak smile.

Runey sat with Zay, who was shivering from his overexertion. She created a single, small, warm air bubble and gently pressed it against his chest, a localized heating pad. "Just breathe," she whispered.

Onions was cross-referencing his hand-drawn map with a faded, water-stained city map he’d found pinned to the wall. “If the highway is here,” he muttered to Crisis, “and the broadcast mentioned a safe zone at the old sports stadium… that’s here. It’s not far. Maybe a day’s walk.”

Crisis, with her photographic memory, nodded. “I remember the broadcast codes. The safe zone uses a specific frequency for updates. If we find a working radio, I can identify it.”

They were tired, all of them, but it was their combined efforts that made it bearable.

Fulmer, leaning against a stack of paint cans, finally spoke, her voice hoarse. "We were stupid. We almost left you all defenseless."

"It wasn't stupid," HD replied, looking up from sharpening a makeshift spear from a garden hoe. "It was brave. And a little dumb. But we're a team. When your arms get tired, we carry the load."

A comfortable silence fell, warmer than Fulmer's fire had ever been. It was Rendo who broke it, his voice uncharacteristically soft. "You know, back on the plane, I was terrified. I mean, *terrified*. But seeing you all... Haze making a shield out of nothing, Zay calling a storm... it was the coolest, most insane thing I'd ever seen. I'm just... glad I'm with you guys."

Juy smiled. "Even when Zay tried to fly us with a GTA license?"

"Especially then," Rendo said, and a genuine, weary laugh rippled through the group. “You guys… you know we’d be dead ten times over without you, right?” he added, looking at the slumped forms of the gifted. “The plane, the jungle… this.”

Gon nodded vigorously. “We were stupid to let you push so hard. We should have stopped you sooner.”

Haze let out a weary sigh, a faint smile touching his lips. “And you’d be right. We were idiots. But… seeing this place… the emptiness… all I could think was ‘get them to safety, now’.”

“We’re a team,” Runey said, her voice hoarse from creating oxygen bubbles. “Not just you protecting us. All of us. Together.”

Kari, who had been silently observing, spoke up. “My keen eye… it’s good. But it’s Noah’s reflexes that caught that fruit. It’s Onions’s map that’s leading us. It’s Syndi’s quick thinking that has us organized.” He looked at Juy. “And it’s your knowledge that tells me which plants can poison a blade.”

One by one, they shared a moment. Fritz, still shivering, accepted the blanket Gon offered him this time without argument. Rendo made a silly face at Crisis, who finally cracked a real smile. Julian, from his post, gave a soft thumbs-up, indicating he heard their conversation and agreed.

The atmosphere was warm, heartfelt. It was a fragile acknowledgment of their bond forged in catastrophe.

A memory that should’ve been frozen in time.

Yet, moment was shattered by a distant, echoing BOOM.

It wasn't an explosion. It was deeper, heavier, like a colossal slab of concrete being dropped from a great height. The sound rolled through the dead streets, vibrating in their chests.

Julian stiffened, his head cocked. “Movement,” he whispered, his voice sharp with alarm. “Lots of it. Dragging feet. No talking. Just… shuffling. Heading this way. Fast.”

Everyone was on their feet in an instant. The gifted ones forced themselves upright, swaying with exhaustion but eyes wide with adrenaline.

They peered through the slats in the plywood. Emerging from the side streets, drawn by the sound was a horde. Dozens, then hundreds. They seemed to moved with a jerky uncoordinated march, their clothes torn and stained. Their eyes were a vacant milky-white, and their mouths hung slack. They didn’t look like rotting corpses; their flesh was intact, but grey and sickly, with visible, pulsing veins of a sinister green tracing their skin. They act purely on instinct—a single, horrifying purpose in their shambling steps.

“I don’t think… they’re dead,” Kari murmured, his sharpshooter’s eye analyzing them with cold clarity. “Their bodies look alive, it isn’t rotting either. But there’s nothing behind their eyes. It’s like… their minds are gone.”

“They’re not slowing down,” Julian whispered, his voice tight with a new kind of fear. “They’re… targeting us. Specifically.”

The first one reached the bent shutter and didn’t pound on it. It simply began to methodically tear at the metal with bare hands, its fingers bleeding but feeling no pain. Another joined it, then another, their combined strength making the metal shriek.

“We can’t stay here!” HD yelled. “Back door! Now!”

The group scrambled. Con and Gon shoved aside the barricade Noah had built. But as Noah pulled the door open, a braindead face was already there, its mouth opening in a soundless gasp. It lunged with the speed of a striking snake.

Noah, with his incredible reflexes, grabbed its head and slammed it into the doorjamb with a sickening crack. It went limp, but two more took its place. “Go! Go!” he shouted, holding them back.

They burst into a narrow alley, the sounds of the store being dismantled behind them but alley was a dead end.

“Up! The fire escape!” Onions pointed, his cartographic mind instantly mapping their only option: to jump over the roofs.

Haze, pushing through his exhaustion, summoned a flickering barrier to block the alley, buying them precious seconds. “Hurry!”

HD and Gon boosted people up the rusty ladder. Julian was halfway up when he screamed, “They’re coming over the roofs!” The braindead were climbing. Not with skill, but with a terrifying, single-minded persistence, swarming the building faces like insects.

Zay, his face a mask of fury and fatigue, roared and thrust his hands skyward. A violent wind shear ripped through the alley, throwing several of the climbers from the walls to smash onto the pavement below. He groaned from the strain, but stayed on his feet.

They reached the roof, but they were trapped. The rooftop was a vast, flat space, surrounded by a low parapet. And from every adjacent roof, the braindead were emerging.

“They’re herding us,” Crisis said, his photographic memory piecing together the rooftop layouts. “There’s no way out.”

“We have to jump! It’s the only way!” Runey pointed at the treacherous gap between from where they are and to the next roof. It was risky but there was truly no other option.

It happened in a blur of instinct and horror. Two braindead vaulted the parapet with unnerving agility, making a beeline for Juy, who was helping a staggering Fritz. HD and Gon, acting as the group’s unshakeable foundation, moved as one. They shoved Juy and Fritz behind them and met the charge head-on.

HD swung a pipe, caving in one’s skull. Gon grappled with the other, but a third, which none had seen, dropped from a higher rooftop onto his back. There was a wet, tearing sound. Gon didn’t even scream. HD turned, his cry of his friend’s name cut short as the one he’d felled scrambled up and sank its teeth into his throat.

The group watched in frozen, abject horror. Their anchors, their survivalists, were gone in less than five seconds. There was no time for a final word, no heroic last stand. Just a brutal extermination.

A sound ripped from Con’s throat, a raw, guttural scream of loss and rage. The emotion was a lightning rod. “HD! GON! NO!”

The gifted ones, pushed past exhaustion by the shock and fury, felt a surge of adrenaline-fueled power.

“YOU ANIMALS!” Zay bellowed, and the sky above the rooftop exploded. A micro-storm of hail and lightning rained down on the advancing horde, incinerating and shredding a dozen of them in a spectacular, draining display.

Haze, tears of rage streaking through the grime on his face, erected a dome of solid, brilliant blue light over their group, the strain causing a nosebleed to trickle from his nose. “NO MORE! NOT ONE MORE!” But it flickered more violently, causing him to bleed even more.

The temporary boost was costly, but it cleared a path. “There! The next building!” Runey yelled, pointing to a roof two meters away. “It’s lower! We can jump!”

“I’ll make a bridge!” Rue screamed. She phased through the parapet and, on the other side, manifested a shimmering golden plank of energy. It wasn’t materialized to the brim but it had the ghost of a bridge, sturdy enough to cross quickly. Rue then slammed it into the opposite roof. “RUN! I can’t materialize it for long, hurry!”

They fled across the luminous bridge. But as Onions and Crisis, the brains of their operation, reached the middle, the braindead adapted. One of them, with a horrifying leap, landed on the energy bridge itself. It didn’t try to cross; it simply began clawing at the manifestation with an instinctual understanding of its nature. It aimed to lunge at Onions and Crisis, planning to take their vital navigators down.

Fritz turned around to save them, shooting a desperate icy spike at the braindead but his aim wasn’t at its best and his frost wasn’t enough. “MOVE MOVE MOVE!” He shouted at Onions ans Crisis who scrambled to move.

But the bridge flickered. It happened all so fast. Crisis pushed Fritz, sending him tumbling on the other side and being caught by Noah. Onion was pulled by Crisis as they reach to grab Rue’s hand.

But for a terrifying second, the braindead lunged at Onions pulling him by the leg. Time seemed to slow down as Rue’s semi-manifested bridge flickered and dissipated. With no time to react, they fell silently into the seething mass of bodies below. Their screams were swallowed almost instantly.

The loss was a physical blow. Their navigator. Their living library. Gone.

Fulmer's eyes blazed. "YOU TOOK MY FRIENDS!" she snarled, and a wave of fire hotter than anything she’d ever produced erupted from her, incinerating the waves of creatures in the walls crawling that was approaching them. It cleared their vicinity for a moment before another hoard was forming below.

“NO!” Rue screamed in horror, she gasped for air and coughed blood as the strain of her manifestation ability and loss of another friend weighed on her. But the hoard is coming fast and they had to move.

“WE HAVE TO GO!” Rendo swallowed the lump in his throat, the painful truth of their situation sinking in.

The retreat became a bloody, fighting scramble down the new building’s interior stairs. In the chaotic, close-quarters fighting in a dark hallway, Noah and Syndi made their choice. The group was in a pinch and the horde pressing in from behind.

“Go! We’ll hold them!” Noah yelled, using his strength to shove a heavy filing cabinet into the path. He may not have abilities like his friends, but there’s something he can do to make sure everyone can go to safety.

“We’ll be right behind you!” Syndi lied, her voice trembling but resolute. She stood back-to-back with Noah, a knife in her hand. The fast learner applying her skills one last time. They fought with a desperate beautiful fury, giving the others the ten seconds they needed. The last thing the group saw was Noah being overwhelmed, still swinging, and Syndi falling silently under a swarm of grasping, feeding hands.

“NOAH! SYNDI!” Kari, his vision blurred by tears, was disintegrating and reforming, his particle-form slipping through grasping hands to deliver point-blank and brutal strikes with his gun. But for every one he shoots down, two more took its place. He formed back against his will, unable to keep it atomized. Runey had to physically pull Kari as they continue running, sobbing and stumbling.

There was no time to grieve, they had to get to safety.

The survivors—Rue, Zay, Haze, Runey, Fulmer, Kari, Julian, Juy, Rendo, Con, and Krabz—burst out onto a new street, their numbers horrifically thinned. The rage was gone, replaced by a numb, running terror.

Krabz, fueled by grief and a desperate need to protect what was left, summoned a wave of necrotic energy. Skeletal hands erupted from the asphalt, trying to grasp the ankles of their pursuers. But the effort was too much. A braindead, ignoring the bones, lunged past the defense and swiped a clawed hand across Krabz’s chest, opening a deep, grievous wound.

Krabz crumpled with a choked gasp.

“KRABZ!” Juy screamed, trying to pull them along. They can’t lose another one.

“I’ve got them!” Con yelled, heaving his friend’s limp body over his shoulder, his own body screaming in protest. They ran, turning a corner into a seemingly clear plaza.

Con laid Krabz down. Juy immediately applied pressure to the wound, but the blood flow was too severe. Krabz’s eyes fluttered, looking at their friends’ devastated faces—at Juy’s tears, at Con’s grim determination.

“Sorry… guys…” Krabz whispered. Then, their eyes rolled back, and their head lolled to the side. The life left their body and she were still.

A wail of utter despair went through the group. Another one. Another friend.

“Please please please… Let all this be a nightmare…” Rue stumbled to Krabz’s side, kneeling and holding her cold hands, sobbing and whispering prayers that will never reach her. They stayed quiet for a long minute and the hoard never came.

Perhaps they were safe.

Temporarily.

Now, it was time to mourn the dead.

Chapter Text

The silence in the empty plaza was heavier than any battle. It was broken by a small shattered sound from Rue. She looked at Krabz’s still form, then at the empty spaces where Onions, Crisis, HD, Gon, Noah, and Syndi should have been.

“I promised,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “I promised we’d all get out.” Her phasing ability which was always a controlled focus, reacted to her immense grief. “I FAILED!” Overwhelmed, her phasing reacted to her turmoil. She didn't move toward the wall; she fell backward into it, the solid concrete swallowing her like water as she sobbed, disappearing into its depths.

"Rue, stop!" Con's voice was raw, ragged. He didn't move to follow her. He just stood, shoulders shaking, tears carving on his ashen face. HD and Gon were his dear friends, his foundation. Their brutal deaths replayed behind his eyes, and a helpless sob wracked his body. He cried for them, for all of them, his grief too vast to contain.

Zay didn’t make a sound. He stood apart, his back to the group , shoulders rigid. When a lone shambling figure appeared at the end of the plaza, he didn't summon a storm. He simply pointed a single finger. A bolt of pire white lightning lanced down from the clear sky and vaporized the creature entirely. The effort made him stagger but he straightened up, silently demanding more pain, more punishment for his failure.

Haze watched them all, his own heart a lead weight. He walked over to Con, placing a firm steady hand on his back. “They chose, Con.” he said, his voice low and thick with his own unshed tears. “They saw the threat and they put themselves in its path for us. We dishonor that sacrifice if we fall apart now. We live. That’s the only way their deaths mean anything.” He was the anchor, trying to hold the shattered state of their group together, even as he was drowning himself.

Fulmer was the opposite of steady. “MEAN ANYTHING?” she shrieked, whirling on Haze. A corona of flame erupted around her. “THEY’RE DEAD! IT MEANS NOTHING!” She unleashed a torrent of fire at a wrecked car, melting its frame into a puddle of slag. “I’LL BURN THEM ALL! EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM!” Julian approached her carefully. “Fulmer, stop. You’ll burn yourself out.”

“DON’T TOUCH ME!” she shrieked, swinging a fist wreathed in flame that he narrowly dodged. “You don’t get it! You just met them!” Her fire ablaze and hotter than it ever was that it started burning in her own sleeves.

“I get that they were my friends too!” Julian shouted back, his own composure breaking. “I get that if you keep this up, you’ll kill what’s left of us! Is that what you want? To add our names to your list?” His words spoken with a painful truth, finally cut through her fury. The flames around her sputtered and died, leaving her trembling and hollow.

Fritz wasn’t listening. He stalked to the perimeter, and with a series of furious shouts, launched volleys of icy spikes at the surrounding buildings, shattering windows and embedding deep in the brick. “Why couldn’t I do more?!” he screamed at the frozen spikes. “Why was I so WEAK?!”

Rendo just sat, slumped against a wall. The ever-present humor was gone from his eyes, replaced by a hollow emptiness. He looked at his hands, useless in a fight. He’d joked about throwing Kari to zombies. Now, real friends were dead and he had done nothing. The weight of survival guilt was crushing him.

Runey cried openly, her body wracked with sobs, huddled against a broken wall. “If I just… if I had made bigger bubbles… faster bubbles…” Kari stood beside but not touching her, his fists clenched so tight his nails drew blood from his palms. His sharpshooter’s eye—his greatest asset—felt like a betrayal. He had seen the threats, but not the right ones, not in time. “I saw them all,” he whispered, “and I still couldn’t stop it.”

Juy had stopped trying to stem the flow of blood from Krabz’s wound. She sat back on her heels, her face pale. She bit her lip until she tasted copper, staring at the ground. All her knowledge of flora and fauna was useless here. She had depended on the gifted to be the shield, and when the shield had shattered, she had nothing to offer but bandages and regret.

They grieved, each trapped in their private hell of loss and blame—for HD, the steady hand; for Gon, the quiet strength; for Onions, their guiding star; for Crisis, their living memory; for Syndi, the quick mind; for Noah, the unbreakable shield; and for Krabz, their morbidly cheerful photographer, lying cold on the ground.

The grief was a thick, suffocating fog. They were seven—no, eight, including Rue—battered souls surrounded by ghosts, with the body of their friend cooling on the ground before them.

It was Julian who noticed it first. His head, which had been bowed in sorrow, snapped up. His eyes widened. “Do you… feel that?”

A low, sepulchral thrum began to vibrate through the plaza, a frequency that was felt more than heard. It was dark. Ancient. and the source was Krabz’s body.

Faint violet light began to pulse from the horrific gash on their chest. The air grew cold, a deep, soul-chilling cold that was different from Fritz’s ice. Tendrils of black and violet energy snaked out from the wound, coiling around their limbs and torso.

“What’s happening?” Runey whispered, her tears freezing on her cheeks.

“Get back!” Haze yelled, summoning a flickering, weakened barrier between the group and Krabz’s form. “Everyone, get back!”

They scrambled away, eyes wide with a fresh, exhausted terror. They were too tired to run, too heartbroken to process another threat. Was this some new horror? Was Krabz’s body turning into one of them?

The dark energy intensified, pulsing like a dying star. It wrapped Krabz in a cocoon of shimmering violet light and palpable death. The thrumming reached a deafening crescendo in their minds.

And then, it collapsed inward with a sound like a final, shuddering breath.

In the sudden, absolute silence, Krabz’s back arched violently off the ground. A ragged, sucking gasp filled their lungs, a sound that should have been impossible.

Her eyes snapped open.

They were no longer the warm brown their friends knew. They burned with a steady, unnatural violet light.

Krabz was alive.

Her own necromancy, a power that commanded the line between life and death, had reflexively, instinctively, refused to let its master cross it. She looked at their stunned, terrified friends—unable to believe what had just transpired before her.

The silence that followed was shattered by a single, choked sound from Con. It was half a sob, half a laugh of pure, disbelieving relief. He stumbled forward and pulled Krabz into a long hug, ignoring the faint, unnatural coolness of their skin. “You’re alive,” he breathed, his voice thick. “You’re alive...”

Wave of desperate, euphoric celebration washed over the exhausted survivors. Runey let out a watery cheer, and Juy rushed forward, her medical instincts warring with her joy. Even Fulmer’s rage seemed to momentarily simmer, a stunned smile touching her lips. Fritz clapped a hand on Krabz’s shoulder, a genuine weary grin spreading across his face. For a fleeting moment, the crushing weight of their losses was lifted by a miracle.

But Krabz did not celebrate.

“I… I came back,” she whispered. Her head snapped up, frantic eyes scanning the group, counting the missing. “But they didn’t. Why didn’t they? I should… I should be able to…”

Krabz’s violet-eyed gaze was frantic, scanning the faces around them, then dropping to her own hands. Shoving Con away, not with malice, but with a desperate urgency. “I… I have to try,” stammering, voice still a ragged scrape.

She scrambled to her knees and slammed both palms onto the cracked asphalt. The familiar dark energy pulsed out, seeping into the ground. A dozen skeletal hands erupted from the ground around them, scrambling uselessly, clutching at air. “Come on! Come BACK!” they screamed at the empty plaza, their voice cracking with desperation.

The celebration died as quickly as it had begun. The skeletal hands crumbled into dust. Krabz slumped forward, their shoulders shaking with silent, heaving sobs. “I can’t,” they whispered, the word a death knell. “I can only make them move… I can’t… I can’t bring them back Not like… not like this.” They clutched their own chest, where the power that had defied death now felt like a cruel joke. “Why me? Why did I get to come back and they didn’t?”

“Why?!” Krabz cried out, pounding the ground. “I can control them! I can make them walk! But I can’t… I can’t bring *them* back!” She looked at their friends, expression a mask of torment. “Why am I here? Why me and not them?” The survivor’s guilt poured out of her, cold and suffocating, dousing the group’s fragile joy.

The celebration died, leaving a silence more profound and painful than before. Their once shared joy curdled into the acid of survivor’s guilt, and it needed an outlet.

Fulmer’s brief smile twisted into a snarl. The relief had been a bandage on a festering wound, and now it was torn away. Her fiery gaze swept the group and landed on Fritz. “Why you?” she echoed, her voice low and dangerous. “Why are any of us here? Because some of us were too clumsy to watch where we were aiming!”

Fritz flinched as if struck. “What are you talking about?”

She rounded on Fritz, her finger jabbing like a knife. “You,” she seethed. “On the roof. Your hail. It was too wide. You forced them to the edge! If your aim wasn’t so damn clumsy, Onions and Crisis wouldn’t have fallen and you would’ve killed the braindead instead!”

“That’s not true!” Fritz shot back, his own grief turning to defensive anger. “I was trying to give us traction! If your fire hadn’t drawn every one of those things from three blocks away, we wouldn’t have been on that roof in the first place!”

“Don’t you dare!” Fulmer screamed, a ring of fire igniting around her feet. “I was clearing a path!”

“You were making a beacon!” Zay’s voice, cold and quiet, cut through the air. He wasn’t shouting, but every word was a shard of ice. “You all were. Making noise, wasting power. You might as well have called them to us.”

“Beacon? What about your storm, Zay?” Fulmer whirled on him. “You were so busy showing off, you didn’t even see the ones climbing up behind us!”

“I was saving your scorched hide!” Zay retorted.

“You were feeding your own ego!” Her fire had crawled up in her arms, even scorching the tips of her hair. Their heightened emotions only fueled the uncontrollable.

Zay’s words were a match to gasoline. A blaze even Fritz cannot put out.

“My vision failed,” Kari snarled, stepping forward, his particles shimmering at his fingertips. “But at least I was trying to see the threat! You just blew everything up without looking!”

“And what good did your seeing do?” Runey cried, turning on him, her grief twisting into something sharp. “You saw them fall! We all saw them fall! Knowing how it happened doesn’t change it!”

“Don’t!” Haze yelled, throwing a barrier up between each of them, but it flickered weakly, strained from his earlier efforts.

But his voice was lost in the storm.

It escalated from shouts to shoves. Fulmer, incensed, lunged at Fritz, a fist wreathed in fire. Fritz reacted on instinct, a shield of jagged ice erupting from his arm. Fire and ice collided with a violent hiss, steam exploding around them.

“Fight me then, you coward. Hiding behind your ice like you always do!” Fulmer roared, unleashing a torrent of flame.

“You reckless arsonist!” Fritz yelled back, answering with a blast of freezing wind that turned the steam into a cloud of razor-sharp ice crystals.

It was no longer a disagreement; it was a battle. They were exhausted, emotionally raw, and their powers were extensions of their shattered states. With a guttural scream, Fulmer lunged. A whip of fire lashed out. Fritz crossed his arms, and a wall of ice erupted to meet it. Steam exploded through the plaza with a violent hiss. The fight was no longer just words.

Fire met ice in a brutal elemental dance of grief. Fulmer was a torrent of unrestrained rage, fireballs melting craters in the ground. Fritz was a blizzard of defensive fury, creating jagged ramparts and firing volleys of icy needles that sizzled into steam before they could reach her. A stray jet of flame singed the sleeve of Con’s shirt, making him yelp and stumble back. A wave of frost from Fritz’s retaliation flash-froed a puddle at Julian’s feet, nearly making him slip.

“ENOUGH!” Haze bellowed, throwing a another flickering barrier between them. But against their emotional whirlwind, it shattered under the combined force of a fireball and an ice spike.

Zay watched, his face a stony mask. “Fighting each other won’t bring them back,” he stated, his voice devoid of emotion. “It just proves we’re already dead.” Then he added, “Let them, maybe if they get it out of their system, they’ll stop whining. We’re all to blame.”

His harsh truth was the final straw for Kari, who dissolved into particles and rematerialized right in front of Zay. “You don’t get to stand there and judge! You killed as many as you saved!” His words pierced, pulling Zay by his collar aggressively, those sniper gaze narrowed in hurt and fresh anger.

Runey stared at Zay, her face crumbling. “You think… you think I didn’t try?”

The chaos was up and evident. The gifted, exhausted and emotionally shattered, were turning their powers on each other. Haze was desperately trying to separate people, his barriers sputtering and failing. “Just… stop. Please.” He breathed out, clearly nit having the will to fight in him anymore.

He looked around at the fractured, fighting, accusing faces—Fulmer and Fritz trying to genuinely harm each other, Zay throwing verbal grenades, Kari and Runey now turning on him—and his shoulders slumped. His barrier finally sputtered and died. He had failed. He couldn’t keep them together. The bonds they had built was tearing itself apart in the ruins of the city, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

But in midst of it all, Rendo, who had been watching with hollow eyes, didn’t move to intervene. He was too tired. Instead, he just spoke, his voice barely a whisper, but it cut through the noise like a blade.

“Has anyone seen Rue?”

The fighting didn’t stop immediately, but it faltered. Fulmer lowered a flaming hand. Fritz let the ice around his fist recede. Juy, who had been shielding a frantic Krabz from the stray blasts, looked up. “She… she hasn’t come back?”

Con, rubbing his singed arm, shook his head. “She’s just… grieving. She’ll be back. She needs time.”

But the question hung in the air, a new, cold dread seeping into the space their heated anger had occupied.

It was then that Krabz spoke, voice small and strained and yet it commanded a moment of brittle silence. She was still on their knees, looking from one battered, furious face to another.

“I’m… I’m worried about her too,” she said. Taking a shaky breath, the violet light in her eyes dimming to a soft glow. “When I was… gone,” Krabz began, anxious evident on her tone. “I saw something. I felt something. It’s about this place. About what’s happening. But I won’t say it,” Krabz continued, their gaze sweeping over the group. “Not until we’re all together. Not until Rue is here.”

Chapter Text

The foreboding silence that fell after Krabz’s declaration was shattered by a shared unspoken fear: Rue was still out there. The argument, the blame, the fighting—it all curdled into a cold, sharp urgency.

“We need to find her. Now.” Haze said, his voice rough. There was no dissent.

Julian closed his eyes, focusing his hearing, filtering out the whisper of the wind through broken windows. “Nothing,” he muttered, frustration evident. “No sobs, no breathing… no footsteps.”

It was Kari, his sharpshooter’s gaze sweeping the rooftops, who pointed a trembling finger back the way they’d came from. “The building. The roof where… where they fell. She’d go there. She’d blame herself.”

The logic was sound, and terrifying. The thought of returning to that place of death made everyone hesitate. But they had to move.

Before they could, a sharp, high pitched shriek sliced through the air from the other side of the wide boulevard adjacent to the plaza. They ran uncoordinated, the recent fight forgotten in a surge of adrenaline.

They found her in the middle of the four-lane road.

And the sight made their minds recoil.

It wasn't destruction. It was... wrongness. The very fabric of reality had unraveled in a silent scream around Rue. A fire hydrant hung upside down in the air, as if the ground were above it, a stream of rust-brown water frozen solid in a grotesque, suspended arc. The cars were no longer vehicles; they were sinister, metallic organisms. Frames twisted into agonized shapes, one fusing with a lamppost as if both were made of melting wax, another was a sedan twisted like taffy through the hollowed-out shell of a bus—metals fused in a sinister, metallic braid. The brick walls of the surrounding buildings didn't crumble—they *crumpled*, like discarded paper, their edges soft and blurry, as if the very concept of 'solid' had been forgotten. The air itself hummed with a nauseating energy, a static charge that felt like the universe had been scratched raw.

Rue was on her knees at the epicenter of this impossible scene, hands clutched to her head. She wasn't just crying; she was trembling with a primordial terror. Her eyes, wide and unseeing, reflected the horror of what she had unwillingly done.

"Stay back!" she screamed, her voice cracking with hysteria as she saw them. "Don't come near me! It's me—I'm doing this! I'm dangerous!"

The group stood frozen, not by fear of her, but by the sheer, mind-breaking scope of the power on display. This wasn't phasing. It was reality itself coming undone.

Runey was the first to break the stunned paralysis. Ignoring the wrongness underfoot, she moved forward with the cautious grace of someone approaching a wounded, feral animal. "Rue," she said, her voice soft but firm, cutting through the psychic static. "It's us... and Krabz."

Krabz followed, steps slow and deliberate, her own bizarre resurrection making her desensitized. They moved past a car that had been turned inside out, its seats and engine exposed in a visceral, impossible autopsy.

Rue flinched as they approached, squeezing her eyes shut. "I couldn't stop it... I just wished it was all a dream and... and the world listened."

It was then she dared to look up, gaze landing on Krabz. The shock was absolute. A disbelieving sound escaped her. “You’re… you’re alive?” The words were a prayer. For a single fleeting second, a hysterical false joy lit her features—a spark of light in the overwhelming darkness. She clutched at Krabz’s arm, the proof a temporary anchor in her unraveling world.

Once Rue had calmed enough to stand, though she still trembled, Krabz looked at the assembled, fractured group. “Now that we’re complete, it’s time to talk.”

They huddled, but not closely. Fulmer stood apart from Fritz, Zay leaned against a warped lamppost, his arms crossed. The air was thick with unsaid words and fresh, bewildering fear.

Krabz took a steadying breath. “When I was… gone… it wasn’t nothing. I felt a pull. And in that pull, I saw… glimpses. Flashes of things that haven’t happened yet. Deaths. And the braindead… they’re just a part of this. A trigger. There’s something bigger.” She met Rue’s eyes. “Our powers… they have more potential. I think mine… awakened when I crossed over. It’s tied to life and death in a way I didn’t understand.”

A heavy silence followed, broken only by Rue’s shaky voice. “She’s right.” All eyes turned to her. She gestured weakly at the nightmare sculpture garden of metal around them. “I did this. I was in the wall, wishing this was all a nightmare, that none of it was real… and the world… it listened.” Her voice dropped to a terrified whisper. “It started to bend. I just wanted it to stop. I wanted you all back.”

The revelation should have been unifying, a moment of awe. Instead, it seemed to highlight the chasm between them. Rue’s eyes, sharp even in her distress, caught the evidence of their conflict: the singed edge of Con’s sleeve, the tear and minor burn on Rendo’s jacket, the scratch on Julian’s ankle from Fritz’s stray ice.

“What happened?” Rue asked, her voice frail. “While I was gone… what did you do?”

No one answered. Eyes dropped to the ground. Shoulders tensed.

Rue looked from face to stony face, seeing the guilt, the anger, the shame. The hope that had flickered in her eyes upon seeing Krabz alive died was replaced by a weary, profound sadness. She let it go. “We need to rest,” she said, voice flat. “We can’t go on like this. We need shelter for the night.”

They found a two-story house a few blocks away, its door splintered but structure intact. It felt less like a sanctuary and more like a tomb. The silence inside was oppressive as they claimed their spaces, the unspoken fight and fresh grief driving them apart.

Zay took the master bedroom, not for comfort, but for isolation. He didn't lie on the bed. He sat on the floor in a corner, back to the wall, staring at his hands. Occasional tiny arcs of electricity crackled between his fingers, a visible manifestation of the storm he was desperately trying to contain within.

Fulmer claimed the opposite end of the house—a small sunroom filled with dead plants. She sat cross-legged on the dusty tile, back to the group, staring out the cracked window. A single, small flame danced obsessively over her palm, growing and shrinking with her ragged breaths. Julian sat silently by the doorway, not intruding, but a quiet sentinel for her spiraling thoughts.

Fritz was in the garage. He leaned against a cold silent freezer, the ambient temperature around him dropping several degrees. He traced patterns of frost on the metal, his jaw clenched, replaying Fulmer’s accusations in his head with each one feeling more true than the last.

Haze tried to maintain a central position, taking a worn armchair in the living room. But his usual calm was gone. He rested his head in his hands, the image of HD and Gon’s final moments playing on a loop behind his eyes. His mantra—their sacrifice had meaning—felt hollow and cruel.

Kari and Runey were together on the corner sofa, placed opposite side of the living room but a space remained between them. Runey had curled into a tight ball, face hidden, while Kari sat rigidly on the edge, staring into the dark fireplace, his particle-disintegration ability making his outline subtly shimmer, as if he couldn't decide whether to stay or flow away from the pain.

Con and Rendo were in the dining room, sitting on the floor with their backs against opposite walls. Con meticulously cleaned a salvaged knife, his movements sharp and angry. Rendo just stared at the ceiling, the usual light in his eyes completely extinguished, the burnt sleeve of his jacket a dark accusation.

Juy had stayed closest to Krabz, guiding them to a small breakfast nook. Krabz sat hunched over the table, staring at their hands—the hands that could command the dead but were powerless to reverse it. The violet light in their eyes was a constant, grim reminder of a second chance they never wanted. Juy sat beside them, not speaking, just offering a silent, steadfast presence that did little to ease the crushing guilt.

Rue took the first watch by the front window, not out of duty, but because she couldn't bear to be in a room with the weight of their collective disappointment. She looked out at the warped street she had created, her new, terrifying power humming just under her skin, a constant echo of her failure.

The house was full of people, but it was emptier than the ruins outside. The rift wasn't healing; it was hardening, each of them trapped in their own private hell of regret, their rest anything but restful.

“It wasn’t the whole truth,” Krabz whispered, their voice raspy. Juy leaned closer. “What I told the others. I saw… more than just how we might die. It felt… predetermined. Like a trap already sprung.” They shuddered, clutching the edge of the table. “There were… glimpses of things that didn’t make sense. Bright, cold screens. Rows of glass tubes filled with… something. And voices, murmuring, but I couldn’t make out the words. It was all so… sterile. And wrong.”

Juy felt a cold knot tighten in her stomach. Their situation, which she thought was a simple matter of survival in a post-apocalyptic landscape, now felt infinitely more sinister. “Krabz… do you… remember anything? Before the breakout? Before the plane?”

Krabz looked up, their glowing eyes wide with a sudden, dawning realization. “No,” they breathed. “I remember the airport. I remember boarding. But before that… it’s just… fog. A blank space. How did I get my power? I don’t know.”

Juy’s blood ran cold. “I don’t either,” she admitted, her voice barely audible. “I just… know things about plants. But I don’t remember learning them. I don’t remember my family.” The mystery was no longer just about where they were, but who they were, and it was a thousand times more terrifying.

By the front window, Rue’s tremors had nothing to do with the cold. She stared at her reflection in the glass, but her mind was elsewhere, trapped in a spiral of catastrophic thinking.

What if I lose control again?  she thought, her breath catching.  What if my anger makes the ground open up and swallow everyone? Her fear was a physical pressure in her chest. What if I accidentally warp one of them?  She pictured Con, or Rendo, their forms twisting and merging with the walls in a silent scream. A fresh wave of terror seized her. Her distress was so potent, so tangible, that the glass of the window in front of her began to lose its solidity. It didn't crack. Instead, it softened, the reflection of her terrified face beginning to ripple and distort as if the pane was turning to liquid, warping the view of the nightmare street beyond.

In the sunroom, Fulmer finally broke the silence, her voice raw and quiet. She knew Julian was on the other side of the doorway, listening. She needed him to hear.

“They made me do it, you know,” she said, the flame in her palm stuttering. “The ‘decontamination team’. After the first wave of the sickness hit our block. My mom… my grandparents… they didn’t turn braindead. They just… died in their sleep. I was sick too, feverish, but I woke up. I woke up different. Hot.” She closed her eyes, the memory scorching her from the inside. “The team came in their sealed suits. They tested me right there in the living room, with their bodies still… still in the house. They said I was ‘asymptomatic positive’. A ‘variant reactor’. They said my family was a biohazard, that their bodies were crawling with the virulent strain.”

She took a shaky breath. “They brought in a flamethrower. I lost it. I screamed at them to get out, to leave us alone, and the fire… it just came. A wall of it, right from my hands, keeping them back from the bedrooms. I didn't even know I could do that. I was just a kid trying to protect my family.”

Her voice dropped to a broken whisper. “The team leader, his voice was so calm through his mask. He said, ‘If you don’t perform the cleansing, we will. But we won’t be gentle. We’ll burn this whole house down with them in it. You can do it. You can give them a clean, respectful fire.’ They handed me a protective suit. I burnt the gloves—I tried to refuse, I screamed and cried, but they just stood there, waiting. They wouldn’t listen to my pleas.”

The flame in her hand guttered violently. “So I did it. My own fire. My power. I had to burn the only people who ever loved me. I had to stand there and make sure it was… complete. There was nothing left to bury. No pictures, no lock of hair. Nothing.”

She finally turned her head slightly, though she couldn’t bring herself to look at him. “That’s why… back there… I couldn’t lose anyone else. You guys… you’re all I have left. You’re my family. And I’m so… so scared of that.” The admission drained her, the flame in her hand snuffing out, leaving her in the dark—the ghost of ash and loss clinging to her in the silent room.

Throughout the house, no one found rest.

In the master bedroom, Zay’s occasional electrical arcs were growing more frequent, snapping in the dark like accusations.

In the garage, Fritz had encased the entire freezer in a block of ice two feet thick, his body shivering uncontrollably from the effort and the emotional cold.

Haze, in the living room chair, hadn't moved. The weight of leadership he’d tried to shoulder felt like it was crushing his spine.

On the couch, the space between Kari and Runey felt like a chasm. Runey’s quiet crying had stopped, replaced by a numb stillness, while Kari’s form flickered more violently, as if he were on the verge of disintegrating and never reforming.

In the dining room, Con had stopped cleaning his knife, simply holding the sharp edge until his palm bled, while Rendo had closed his eyes, but his tense posture showed he was miles from sleep.

They were together under one roof, but the rift of grief, guilt, and unspeakable secrets had never been wider. The night stretched before them, long and unforgiving.

The night carried on their losses, a silent suffocating blanket. Rays of light slipped through the window of the house and yet, not a soul dared to move.

In the dining room, Con’s quiet composure finally shattered. He curled in on himself, shoulders shaking with silent, heaving sobs as memories of HD’s steady hands and Gon’s unwavering loyalty played behind his closed eyes. Rendo didn’t try to offer empty words. He simply moved to sit beside him, their shoulders touching, sharing the weight. Rendo’s own heart ached with the ghost of Syndi’s clever retorts and Crisis’s sharp, knowing smiles—the laughter he could never conjure again.

Across the house, Kari stared into the darkness, insomnia a cage. His sharp mind, usually a tool of focus, was now a torture device that replayed the fall of Onions and Crisis in perfect horrifying detail. The loss was a physical ache, a target his perfect vision couldn’t find and eliminate.

In the master bedroom, Zay’s silence was a thunderclap waiting to happen. The dead bulb in the lamp on the nightstand flickered, not with power, but with the stray currents of his anguish. With every clench of his fist, a tiny arc of lightning would jump between his knuckles, illuminating his tormented expression. He wasn't a savior; he was just a weapon that had failed to fire correctly.

The garage had become a cryogenic tomb. Fritz sat slumped against the freezer, surrounded by jagged spikes of his own creation. Fulmer’s accusations—clumsy aim—echoed in the hollow space of his mind. With each painful echo, another spike of ice would erupt from the concrete floor with a sharp crack, a physical manifestation of the internal lashing he was giving himself.

Runey, on the couch eventually succumbed to exhaustion, but even sleep offered no refuge. Tears traced fresh paths through the dried salt on her cheeks, her body hugging itself for a comfort that wasn't there.

Haze, in his armchair, felt the title of "anchor" like a mockery. He was supposed to be their voice of reason, but reason had no answer for this depth of loss. The rift between them felt wider than any chasm his barriers could span.

In the sunroom, a shift occurred. Julian, hearing Fulmer’s breathing even out into sleep, had quietly found a dusty blanket and draped it over her. The simple act of care seemed to finally break her wakeful turmoil. She slept, curled under the blanket, looking younger and far more vulnerable. Julian leaned against the doorframe, eyes open, bearing witness to the collective pain, his own heart heavy with the burden of what he knew and what he feared.

Juy stayed with Krabz in the nook, using the practical task of cleaning a minor scrape on her arm to distract from the abyss of unknown horrors they’d uncovered. But Krabz stared into the middle distance, the violet light in their eyes a grim lantern. This resurrection wasn’t a gift; it was a mockery. She had the power to animate bones, but not to restore a soul. It was the most useless kind of power in the world.

Dawn arrived not with hope, but with a pale gray light that exposed the dust and despair in the house. Rue looked like she hadn’t slept at all, her eyes shadowed, movements slow with a profound exhaustion. But there was a new determination in her posture.

Before the first peek of sun, she had forced herself to move. Phasing carefully through walls, she had foraged through the surrounding ruined houses, the terror of her new warping ability a constant gnawing companion. She focused on the simple physical act of finding canned food and bottled water, clamping down on any stray emotion that might make the world soften and bend. She filled a salvaged bag, her hands trembling, but her mission clear.

She returned and began her rounds, a silent caretaker in a house of ghosts.

She found Fritz in his icy garage. She wordlessly offered a can of beans. He took it without meeting her eyes, his fingers so cold the metal immediately frosted over. He said nothing.

She approached Zay’s room, leaving a bottle of water by his door. He opened it a crack, took it, and muttered a low, "Thanks," before retreating back into his solitary storm.

Juy, Rendo, Runey, and Con were more receptive. Juy helped her distribute the food, Con gave a grateful weary nod. Runey managed a small smile. Kari only acknowledged her with a silent tired acknowledgment from his spot on the couch.

She found Haze still in his armchair, looking older than his years. "You shouldn't have gone alone," he said, voice thick with a guilt that mirrored her own.

"Someone had to," Rue replied, her voice soft but unwavering. She knelt before him, placing a hand over his. "And someone has to keep us together, even when we're falling apart. You can't carry it all, Haze. Let me help."

The simple offer, the shared burden, was a balm he didn't know he needed. He nodded, unable to speak, squeezing her hand briefly.

After her duties were done, she returned to the breakfast nook where Krabz and Juy sat. The atmosphere was still heavy, but the shared secret between them created a fragile bubble.

"Krabz," Rue began, her voice low. "The vision you had... of our deaths. What exactly did you see?"

Krabz hesitated, their violet eyes flickering towards Juy, who gave an encouraging nod. "It's not just that," Juy spoke up, her voice barely a whisper. "We... we don't remember anything. Before the plane. Do you, Rue?"

Rue's blood ran cold. She searched her memories. The boarding. The panic. The bickering in the cockpit. But before that? A blank, white noise. "No," she admitted, a fresh wave of dread washing over her. "Nothing."

Emboldened by this shared amnesia, Krabz finally spoke the core of their fear. "Then it's true. This isn't just a wasteland. We're a part of this. I saw... more than death. I saw that we're being watched. That our powers... they're the point. This feels like a... a test. Or a cage. And I think we were put here."

The horrifying implication hung in the air, recontextualizing everything. Their powers, their crash, their forgotten pasts—it was all connected.

Unseen by the three, Julian stood just beyond the doorway to the sunroom. He had been listening to every hushed word. His face, usually open and concerned, was now set in a grim, unreadable mask. His eyes—sharp with a sudden painful understanding—darted toward the sleeping Fulmer, then back to the huddled group. There was a secret in his gaze, a burden he alone seemed to carry, and it was clear he now knew something that changed everything

Chapter Text

The decision was unanimous without a word being spoken. They would not move today. The safe zone felt like a mythical concept compared to the very real, leaden weight of their exhaustion and grief. The house—for all its oppressive silence—was at least a known variable.

Rue sat at the dusty kitchen table, mind racing. If Krabz was right—if their entire ordeal, from the plane crash to their powers to the braindead, was part of some orchestrated design—then every loss, every moment of fear, was a move in a game they never agreed to play. The thought coiled in her gut. Anger, potent and terrifying, flared from within. She clutched the half-empty water bottle in her hand, her knuckles turning white.

This isn't fate. This is a cage. We're just… experiments.

A subtle, shimmering wave of energy pulsed from her fingers into the plastic. There was no sound, but the bottle suddenly crumpled in on itself, not like crushed plastic, but like a piece of paper being wadded into a ball. Its molecular structure had been rewritten, its state of matter casually shifted. Rue stared at the bizarre object in her hand, her anger instantly doused by a wave of cold fear. She sighed a shaky, defeated sound. On top of everything, she now held a power that could unmake the world itself, and she had no idea how to control it.

She looked over at Juy and Krabz, who were watching her with worried eyes. Forcing her fear down, Rue offered them a small, determined smile. "We'll figure this out," she said, voice stronger than she felt. "All of it. Together. I'm not losing any more of you. I won’t." The promise was a vow to herself as much as to them.

Bolstered by Rue's resolve, Krabz felt a flicker of purpose. The big, terrifying news could wait. The group was fracturing, and if they broke completely, no revelation would matter. They had to mend the rifts, starting with the most volatile.

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The air hit Krabz like a physical wall, so cold it stole their breath. The garage was a cathedral of grief, sculpted from glittering, deadly ice. Spikes erupted from the floor and walls, and in the center hunched within a cocoon of frost, was Fritz. He was untouched by the cold, a stark contrast to the environment he had created, but his face was a mask of such utter desolation it was a wonder he hadn't frozen solid from the inside out.

"Fritz?" Krabz called out, their voice trembling from the chill.

Fritz's head snapped up. Seeing Krabz shivering violently in the doorway, a flicker of short panic crossed his face. He willed the cold to recede, to pull back, but his control was shattered and the temperature only seemed to drop further.

"Fritz, it's okay." Krabz said, their teeth chattering. She took a careful step forward, the ice crunching underfoot. "You need to calm down first. You can't control it like this."

"Control it?" Fritz's voice was a ragged broken thing, echoing in the icy space. "Why should I? It's this stupid power that killed them! My stupid, clumsy aim!" His voice rose to a shout. "I should have known! I should have pulled them back instead of firing! Crisis shouldn't have pushed me! He should have let me die instead!"

With every self-accusation, a fresh barrage of icy spikes erupted from the ground around him with sharp explosive cracks. Krabz yelped, stumbling back to avoid being impaled.

But as Fritz raged, Krabz looked down. A thin, crystalline layer of frost was crawling up their shoes, solidifying around their ankles. It was slow, deliberate, a physical manifestation of his despair seeking an anchor.

"Fritz," Krabz said, their voice firm despite the shivers wracking their body. She didn't scream or show fear. She stood her ground, the frost now creeping up to their calves—a cold, numbing prison. "Your ice... it's going to hurt someone."

He turned, gaze wild, and finally saw it. Saw the ice claiming Krabz, the person who had just cheated death. The sight was a bucket of freezing water on his rage. The panic in his eyes was now pure horror.

"I'm sorry! I'm—" he choked out, the anger dissolving into desperate guilt.

"It's okay," Krabz repeated, their voice softening. The cold was biting. A deep bone-ache but they kept their stance, a silent anchor in his storm. "I understand your grief. But your emotions are making your power dangerous. Just breathe, Fritz. It will be alright. Just breathe with me."

Her calm, her unwavering presence in the face of his self-destructive spiral, finally broke through. He took a shuddering breath, then another, mimicking her slow measured pace. As he did, the aggressive spread of the ice halted. The frost crawling up Krabz's legs stopped its advance then began to recede, cracking and falling away in small glittering shards.

Krabz stepped forward through the forest of ice spikes and wrapped their arms around him. For a moment, Fritz was rigid then he collapsed into the hug, his own arms coming up to clutch them back, his body shaking with silent relieved sobs.

The cemetery of ice did not melt. The spikes and jagged formations remained—a stark frozen monument to his pain. But it had stopped growing. The frantic, out-of-control surge was over. His grief hadn't vanished, but it had been contained. He couldn't change the past, but holding onto Krabz, he felt a grim resolve solidify within him: he would make sure such a failure would never, ever happen again.

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The dining room felt like a sepulcher. Con sat on the floor, back against the wall, eyes red-rimmed and hollow. The initial storm of tears had passed, leaving behind a vast numb emptiness. A few feet away, Rendo was a mirror image of quiet despair. His usual lively expression replaced by a profound stillness, lips pressed into a thin sealed line as if to keep any sound, any feeling, from escaping.

Juy approached slowly, the floorboards creaking under her weight. She didn't stand over them. Instead she knelt on the dusty floor, bringing herself to their level.

"Con," she began, her voice soft but clear in the heavy silence. He didn't look up but his shoulders tensed. "I was thinking about HD and Gon. Back in the jungle... I don't think we would have made it through those first nights without them. HD knew exactly how to structure the shelter, and Gon... he had an eye for finding the driest kindling, even in the damp." She spoke not of their deaths, but of their lives. Of their competence and their presence.

Con's head lifted slowly, his empty eyes meeting hers. He gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. The memory was a painful bruise, but it was also real. It was a piece of them he still held.

Juy then turned her gaze to Rendo. "And Syndi," she continued, her tone gentle. "She learned so fast. She had our resources sorted and organized before any of us even knew what we had." She paused, letting the image of the efficient, sharp-witted girl settle in the room. "And Noah... that door. He held it just long enough. He bought us our chance to run."

She took a deep steadying breath, inhaling the dust and despair of the room and exhaling a sliver of resolve. "The hard truth is..." she started.

Con flinched, a spark of anger flashing in his dull eyes. "Don't," he whispered, voice rough.

Rendo shook his head minutely, a plea in his eyes.

Juy pressed on, her gaze unwavering, holding both of theirs. "The hard truth is they aren't coming back." The words were brutal in their simplicity, and both boys recoiled as if struck. But Juy didn't relent. "They didn't die so they could watch us fall apart. They didn't give what they gave so we could shatter into pieces that can never be put back together."

Her voice grew firmer, layered with a conviction that came from a place of shared pain. "The living have to keep living. For their sake. We have to move forward, because if we don't, then their sacrifices… HD's, Gon's, Syndi's, Noah's… they become meaningless. They become a waste."

The room was silent, the weight of her words pressing down. Con stared at her, the numbness in his eyes cracking to reveal the raw agony beneath. Rendo had looked away, his jaw clenched tight.

"It's okay," Juy said, her voice softening back into a whisper. "It's okay to mourn them. It's okay to cry for them until you feel like there's nothing left. But we can't stay here, in this feeling, forever. Not when we can still do something. The best way to honor them… is to survive. To remember their names by pushing through this hell, together."

For a long moment, there was no response. Then, Con slowly wiped the heel of his hand across his face, smearing the tracks of old tears. He took a shaky breath and nodded, a real conscious agreement this time. It was a small motion, but it was a beginning.

Rendo—after another tense silence—let out a long slow exhale, his shoulders slumping in surrender not to despair but to the difficult path ahead. He gave a small resigned nod, his eyes meeting Juy's with a flicker of grateful understanding.

A small, weary, but genuine smile touched Juy's lips. "We stick together," she said, her promise encompassing the two boys in front of her and echoing through the silent house to all the other broken pieces of their friendship. "All of us. Through the end."

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The house was slowly, painfully, stitching itself back together. From the garage, the aggressive chill had receded to a mournful stillness. In the dining room, the silence was no longer brittle but contemplative. Rue felt the shift like a change in atmospheric pressure. It was time for her part.

She found Haze exactly where he'd been for hours, sunk deep into the worn armchair. His head was bowed, not in sleep, but in a posture of profound defeat. The mantle of "anchor" he'd worn so naturally now seemed to crush him.

Rue walked softly across the living room and placed a hand on his shoulder. He didn't look up, didn't acknowledge her. The memory of his barrier shattering, of his voice being lost in the storm of their argument, was a loop playing behind his eyes.

She didn't push. Instead, she let out a soft sigh, one not of impatience, but of shared burden. She then knelt on the floor in front of him, forcing him to meet her gaze. Her own exhaustion was etched into her face, but her eyes held a steady, gentle light.

"You kept us going when I couldn't," she said, voice low and sincere. "When I was lost in my own failure, you were the one trying to steer. You don't have to carry the load alone, Haze. None of us expected you to."

He finally looked at her, grief in his eyes a deep, weary ocean. "I was supposed to keep us together. Not just alive... together."

"And you will," Rue insisted. "But it's not a one-person job. And it's okay to mourn them. It's okay to feel the weight of what we've lost. You don't have to be strong for us every single second."

She reached out and placed her hand over his where it rested on the arm of the chair. Her touch was warm, a small human anchor in the bleakness of his thoughts. The gesture was simple but it was a connection he desperately needed.

A long slow sigh escaped Haze, and some of the terrible tension in his frame seemed to drain away. A small fragile smile touched his lips, and he turned his hand over to briefly squeeze hers. "Thank you, Rue," he murmured. "For being here. It can't be easy for you either, with... everything."

"It isn't," she admitted freely. "But someone has to keep us grounded. And I meant what I said. I will do whatever it takes to protect everyone. Even... even with this." She didn't need to elaborate. The warped water bottle on the table was evidence enough of the dangerous new tool she wielded.

The words and the fierce determination behind them, seemed to be the catalyst Haze needed. He took a deep breath and then another, posture straightening. He moved to stand, and as he did, he offered a hand to help Rue to her feet.

"Alright," he said, his voice regaining a fragment of its old steadiness. "Let's get this group back on its feet." He glanced toward the couch where Kari and Runey sat in their separate silences. "I'll talk to Kari and Runey. You should go to Zay. He... he'll listen to you."

Rue nodded, a wave of relief washing over her. The burden wasn't gone, but it was shared again. Haze was back in the fight, not as a solitary pillar, but as part of the foundation. As he walked toward the couch, Rue turned her gaze to the stairs, steeling herself for the next and likely most difficult conversation.

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Haze approached the large couch like one might approach a nest of wounded animals. Runey was curled into the far corner, knees tucked to her chest, her face puffy and stained with tears. Kari sat at the opposite end, his posture rigid, eyes squeezed shut with a force that suggested he was trying to block out the world. When Haze’s shadow fell over him, Kari’s eyes snapped open, the sudden light making him wince and blink rapidly.

Without a word, Haze settled into the generous space between them. The cushion dipped, a physical reminder of his presence. He took a deep audible breath, then let it out in a long sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the ruined city outside.

“Runey,” he began, his voice low and steady. “I wanted to thank you. Truly. For everything. Your help, your concern for everyone… you wear your heart on your sleeve, and that’s a strength. It reminds us what we’re fighting for.” He then turned his head slightly. “And Kari. Thank you for always being our eyes. For taking that burden, even when you’re exhausted. You’ve saved us more times than I can count.”

He paused, letting his words settle. “I know they’d appreciate it. Onions, Crisis… all of them. They’d see how hard you’re both still trying to keep us safe.”

Runey’s head, which had been buried, lifted slightly. Her voice was thick and wobbly. “If I’d just… helped more. Been faster. Made a bigger bubble, a stronger one… maybe we wouldn’t have lost anyone else.” The words were a well-worn path in her grief.

Kari’s jaw tightened. His sharpshooter’s gaze was fixed on the far wall, unseeing. “What good is seeing a threat if I’m too slow to stop it?” he bit out, the question aimed at himself. “My vision is useless if I can’t do anything with it.”

“They wouldn’t want this,” Haze said, his tone gentle but firm. “They wouldn’t want you to tear yourselves apart over their deaths. I know the pain of losing people. It’s a hollow, aching thing. But letting it fester into self-hatred… that’s not honoring them. That’s just adding more loss to the pile.”

Haze stood up from where he sat, and gave them space to think about his words. The gap between Kari and Runey returned on the couch, leaving the two to decide. Behind the doorway, Haze stood and watched, wanting to witness their reconciliation at the very least.

A tense silence followed. Runey uncurled slightly, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. She took a shaky breath, the fight going out of her. The raw, frantic edge of her grief was dulling into a heavy manageable sorrow. Her eyes drifted across the couch to Kari, who still sat like a statue, his fists clenched on his knees.

There was a long, awkward moment where she seemed to debate with herself. Then, moving slowly—as if pushing through water—she shifted across the cushion. She didn’t look at him directly, but focused on his white-knuckled hands.

“Kari…” she started, her voice barely a whisper. She hesitated, then carefully placed a hand over his clenched fist.

He flinched, but didn’t pull away.

“I’m… I’m sorry,” she forced out. “For what I said. During the fight. I didn’t mean it. I was just… hurting.”

Kari was silent for so long that Runey began to pull her hand back, thinking she’d misstepped. But then his fist loosened, just a fraction, beneath her touch.

“I’m sorry too,” he said, the words gruff and reluctant. “For snapping at you. You were right. Knowing how it happened… doesn’t change it.” He finally turned his head to look at her, his sharp eyes softened by a profound weariness. “We both saw it. We both… failed.”

It wasn’t a happy reconciliation. It was an acknowledgment of shared failure and shared pain. But in that acknowledgment, the wall between them crumbled. Runey’s hand remained on his, now a gesture of solidarity, not just an apology. Kari didn’t move away.

Haze watched them, the faintest hint of a smile touching his lips. It didn’t erase the grief, the fear, or the immense challenges ahead. But it was a start. A small fragile bud of hope pushing its way through the cracks in their broken world. They were far from healed, but they were no longer breaking

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Rue stood outside the master bedroom door, the wood cool against her knuckles as she knocked softly. There was no verbal answer, but a moment later, she heard a faint, almost imperceptible hum of energy from within—an acknowledgment.

Taking a breath, she phased through the solid oak, the transition smooth and silent. The room was dim, curtains drawn. Zay was slumped against the wall opposite the bed, knees drawn up. The air smelled of ozone. On the nightstand, the dead bulb in the lamp flickered erratically, a dying star mimicking the miniature lightning arcs that danced between his clenched fingers. He didn't look at her.

Rue didn't speak either. She simply walked over and sat on the floor against the same wall, leaving a careful inches of space between them. She matched his silence, letting the crackle of his power be the only sound for a long moment.

"It was my fault," he finally spoke, voice gravelly from disuse. "What I said to them. I told them fighting proved we were already dead. I... I made it worse."

Rue turned her head slightly. "You were in pain, Zay. We all were. Your grief... it lashes out. Like your lightning. It doesn't mean the core of you is storm."

She watched the dangerous sparks leaping from his hand to his knee and back. Slowly, carefully, she reached out and placed her hand over his. The energy crackled against her skin, a sharp stinging sensation, but she didn't pull away. She focused on the warmth of his hand beneath the storm—a silent anchor. Gradually, the wild arcs subsided, receding back into his skin until only a faint static tingle remained.

"If it weren't for you on the plane," she said softly, "we would have crashed someplace else. Somewhere much worse. You cleared a path in the jungle. You gave us a chance."

"And it was my flying that put us in the jungle to begin with," he countered, voice flat, devoid of its usual confident edge. "My stupid 'GTA license' arrogance. We're here because of me."

Rue shifted, turning her body to face his slumped figure more fully. "Zay, look at me." He didn't. "None of it was your fault," she insisted, her voice gaining a new harder certainty. "Not the crash, not their deaths. The only ones to blame are the ones who orchestrated this. All of it."

That made him still. The last vestiges of electricity around his fingers vanished. He finally lifted his head, his eyes, shadowed and weary, meeting hers. "Orchestrated?"

Rue sighed, the sound heavy with the weight of the secret. "Krabz saw more in their... vision. This isn't just a wasteland. It's a cage. We're being watched. Our powers, our crash... it's all connected. We were put here."

Zay held her gaze, the storm in his eyes replaced by a deep, calculating intensity. The silence that stretched between them was different now—no longer filled with self-recrimination, but with a dreadful dawning comprehension. He looked away, staring at the opposite wall as if he could see through it to the answers they lacked. Seconds ticked by, marked only by the slow, steady rhythm of their breathing.

Then he let out a long slow breath, tension in his shoulders easing from a desperate clench to a resolved set. "Brooding about it won't make anything better," he stated, his voice low but clear. "Sitting here blaming myself... it's a waste of energy. If this is a cage, then I'd rather spend my power trying to break us out of it." He pushed himself up from the floor, his movement deliberate. "I'll help figure this out." he said, a small weary smile curved on his lips.

Rue blinked, surprised by the sudden, decisive shift. She rose to her feet as well, studying him. "Zay, are—are you… feeling okay now?"

He met her concerned look with a grim but steady expression. "No," he admitted honestly. "I still feel the weight of it," he continued, offering a hand to pull her up. "But I won't let it crush me. Not if I can do something about it."

A wave of relief washed over Rue, so potent it made her own knees feel weak. She reached out and patted his shoulder, a solid, affirming touch. "I'm proud of you," she said, her voice thick with emotion. "For trying."

He gave a single sharp nod. The storm had not passed but it had been harnessed, its chaotic energy channeled into a single, clear purpose. The path ahead was still shrouded in darkness but for the first time since the crash, they had a direction to aim their fury.

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The air in the living room was thick with a fragile tentative hope. They had gathered one by one, drawn by an unspoken understanding that the time for isolation was over. Rue stood near the fireplace, posture less burdened than it had been in days. She watched as Fulmer and Julian entered last.

All eyes turned to them. Fulmer, usually a figure of defiant flame, looked subdued. She stopped in the center of the room, her gaze sweeping over each face—lingering on Fritz, on Haze, on all of them. Then, with a humility that was startling, she bowed her head.

“I… I owe you all an apology,” she began, her voice quieter than they were used to. She bowed her head slightly, a gesture of deep contrition. “My anger… it’s a weapon I can’t always control. I said things I didn’t mean. I blamed people who didn’t deserve it. I’m sorry.” Her eyes finally found Fritz’s. “I’m sorry, Fritz. It wasn’t your fault. None of it was.”

The directness of her apology, so raw and honest, broke the dam.

Fritz looked up, the perpetual chill around him softening. “I’m sorry too,” he mumbled. “For losing control. For the… the ice.” He glanced at Krabz, who gave him a small, encouraging nod.

“I shouldn’t have said what I did,” Zay added, his voice low but clear. “I was drowning, and I tried to pull everyone down with me.”

One by one, the apologies came, not as a grand orchestrated event, but as a series of quiet admissions. Con apologized for his silent fury, Rendo for his withdrawal. Kari and Runey exchanged a look that said more than words could. The tension didn’t vanish, but it bled away, replaced by a weary shared understanding. They had hurt each other, but they were still here. They were still a family.

Rue watched it all, and the relief that washed over her was so profound she felt lightheaded. The rigid line of her shoulders softened, and a tired yet genuine smile touched her lips for the first time in what felt like years.

As the atmosphere relaxed, Haze steered them toward the practical. "We need to decide our next move. We can't stay here forever."

This was the moment. Rue nodded to Krabz who stepped forward, the faint violet light in their eyes seeming to intensify.

"What I saw when I died... wasn't just random," Krabz began, their voice gaining strength. "It was structured. Cold. I saw screens, glass tubes, heard murmuring voices. It felt like... a lab. And the braindead... they feel like a failed experiment. I think... I think we are too. Our memories had been… wiped, so to say. Does anyone remember anything before this? Your family, childhood memories, anything at all?”

The air in the living room grew heavy not with tension, but with a profound deepening dread. The theory hung in the air: they were experiments. The logical next step was a personal one, a frantic internal archaeology.

"It can't be true," Fritz muttered, more to himself than anyone. He squeezed his eyes shut, his knuckles white. "There has to be something. A face. A name." He opened them, frustration etched on his face. "Nothing. It's like trying to grab smoke."

Around the room, it was the same story. Kari’s sharp gaze turned inward, searching for a foundational memory—a childhood home, a parent's voice—and finding only a featureless void. His brow furrowed in concentration, then relaxed into a troubled frown. "It's not just hazy. It's absent. The airport is my first memory. Everything before that... doesn't exist."

Runey hugged herself, her voice small. "I don't remember learning to swim. I just... always knew I could breathe underwater. I don't remember who taught me."

Con and Rendo exchanged a look of shared helplessness. "It's all just... gone," Con confirmed, his voice hollow.

This collective amnesia, this shared void, was more terrifying than any monster. It was a theft of their very selves.

Then Fulmer spoke, her voice cutting through the communal despair. "I remember."

All eyes snapped to her. There was no accusation in their gazes, only a desperate, hungry curiosity.

"I remember my mother's face," she said, her words careful, as if walking on glass. "I remember my grandmother's hands. I remember the decontamination team... and what they made me do." The pain in her voice was raw and immediate, a stark contrast to the blankness the others described.

Julian who's beside her was silent, his expression unreadable but intense. He gave a single grim nod, confirming her account but offering no further detail.

The difference wasn't met with suspicion but with a sudden, clarifying focus. Runey, her mind latching onto a concrete fact, leaned forward. "Fulmer... you weren't on the plane with us. We found you after we crashed."

Kari's head jerked up, his analytical mind seizing the thread. "That's the variable. The rest of us were together from the airport onwards. Fulmer wasn't. So the memory wipe... it must have happened to us during the flight. Sometime between takeoff and the engines failing."

A chilling timeline was forming. They had boarded a plane, their memories intact. Somewhere over the Atlantic, those memories were systematically erased. Then, the plane was brought down, depositing them here, in this manufactured hellscape.

It was Krabz who voiced the question that made the conspiracy feel infinitely deeper. "But why?" they asked, their voice raspy. "We know we were flying to Russia. Fritz said it was a stronghold, a sanctuary. But why Russia? That's a 26-hour flight from almost anywhere. Why would we choose to go somewhere so far, so logistically insane, when there had to be closer safe zones? Who were we before we boarded that plane that made Russia the destination?"

The question landed like a stone in a pond, its ripples spreading out into an abyss of unknowns. They had been focusing on the how their predicament—the crash, the powers, the braindead. Now, Krabz was asking who they were, and why they were chosen for this. The destination itself was a clue that led nowhere, only to more profound and unsettling questions.

No one had an answer. The mystery had just deepened, and Fulmer's intact memories suggested they weren't all blank slates—some threads of the past remained, waiting to be pulled.

"Regardless," Zay said, his voice a low rumble, cutting through the speculative dread. "The only lead we have is the safe zone. If this is a lab, then that's the most likely place to find answers. Even if it's a trap."

A grim determination settled over the group. They were done being victims. If it was a trap, they would spring it on their own terms.

They left the house as a unit, their steps more synchronized than before. The ruined street stretched before them, a graveyard of the old world.

"Five kilometers is doable, but risky on foot," Rendo observed, his practical mind kicking in. He pointed to a side alley. "What about that?"

Tucked between two collapsed buildings was a vehicle, coated in grime but seemingly intact. It was a rugged, military-style Jeep Gladiator, its tires still firm.

"Perfect," Zay said, striding forward. He placed his hands on the hood, and with a focused hum, a controlled surge of electricity jumped from his fingers into the engine bay. There was a click, a sputter, and then the deep, satisfying roar of the engine coming to life.

Runey slid into the driver's seat, her hands resting comfortably on the wheel. Haze took the passenger seat, his gaze already scanning the environment, ready to throw a barrier at a moment's notice. Kari perched behind him, his sharp eyes constantly moving, scanning rooftops and windows for the slightest flicker of movement.

The others piled into the back, finding handholds on the roll bars. As Runey put the Jeep in gear and began navigating the debris-choked road, a quiet, determined energy filled the vehicle. There were no grand speeches, only the shared understanding of their mission. Soft chatter began to break out—Con pointing out a relatively clear path, Juy identifying a potentially useful plant growing through the cracks.

In the back, Fulmer watched them all, a fond, sad smile on her face. This was her family now. She would burn the world to protect them. But beside her, Julian was silent. His knuckles were white where he clutched the edge of the seat, his jaw tight. His anxiety was a palpable force, his eyes darting ahead down the road leading to the safe zone, as if he could already see the jaws of the trap waiting to close.

Chapter Text

The five-kilometer journey in the Jeep felt both too short and impossibly long. The silence of the dead city gave way to an even deeper silence as they approached the coordinates Onions had deduced from his map. The "safe zone" came into view, and the last vestiges of hope curdled in their chests.

When they finally arrived, the sight that greeted them was a punch to the gut.

The "safe zone" was a graveyard. The reinforced main gates hung from their hinges, twisted and scarred by what looked like concentrated artillery fire. The high perimeter fence was trampled and torn in multiple sections. The central building, a once-sturdy concrete structure, was pockmarked with blast holes, its windows gaping, dark voids. There were no lights, no movement, no signs of life—only the oppressive, crushing silence of absolute defeat.

A collective, cold dread slithered down their spines. This was it? This was the hope they had been clinging to?

Kari was the first to move, his sharpshooter's instincts overriding the despair. Without a word, he slipped from the jeep, his body dissolving into a shimmering cloud of particles that flowed silently through a crack in the main gate. He was their ghost, their unseen scout.

"Eyes from above," Fulmer muttered, her voice tight. With a controlled burst of flame from her hand and a jump stance, she propelled herself upwards, landing lightly on the skeletal remains of the watchtower. Her eyes, narrowed against the wind, scanned the compound's interior.

Julian was already at the broken gate, his head cocked, eyes closed in deep concentration. He was listening for the one thing they all desperately hoped to hear: a heartbeat, a whisper, the scuff of a living footstep.

Haze looked at Rue, who gave a tense nod. With a surge of effort, he lifted himself into the air, his flight unsteady but functional. He rose above the compound, getting a bird's-eye view of the devastation—the overturned barricades, the abandoned medical tents, the utter and complete emptiness.

Below, Rue clenched her hands, taking slow, deliberate breaths. The desire to scream, to let the reality-warping power within her lash out at this cruel joke, was a physical pressure in her chest. But she held it, focusing on the feel of her own lungs filling and emptying. She couldn't break. Not now.

Zay moved to stand beside her, his gaze sweeping the ruined entrance. "This feels wrong," he said, his voice low enough for only their small group to hear. "It's too quiet. Too... staged. It's like we're the only living things for miles."

Rendo hugged himself, a nervous tremor in his hands. "He's right. It's like we're in one big maze, and someone's watching from the walls."

Runey nodded, her brow furrowed. "And we haven't seen a single braindead since we got close. Where did they all go?"

Juy, her knowledge of biology and patterns surfacing, added a terrifying layer. "They move with purpose, not random hunger. If they're not here... it's because they were called elsewhere. Or someone doesn't want them here, interfering with us."

The implications hung in the air, more frightening than any horde.

Though their speculation was cut short as their scouts returned. One by one, they regrouped by the Jeep, their expressions saying everything.

"Nothing," Kari reported, rematerializing fully, voice hollow. "No bodies, no signs of recent life. It's been picked clean."

"From above, it's the same," Haze said, landing softly beside them. "The damage is old. There's no one here."

Fulmer dropped down from the tower, the flames at her feet extinguishing as she landed. "It's a tomb," she stated bluntly.

Julian was the last to speak, his face ashen. "The silence... it's absolute. There's no one here but us."

The devastating truth settled over them. They had risked everything, fought their way through grief and hell, to reach a sanctuary that was nothing but a hollowed-out shell. They were alone.

As they stood there, united in their despair, none of them noticed the shifting darkness deep within the shadowed mouth of the main building's entrance. None of them saw the pair of intelligent, predatory eyes that had been observing their every move since the moment they arrived, watching from the ruins with a patience that was far more terrifying than any mindless hunger.

The devastating realization that they were utterly alone was shattered by a flicker of movement in the deep shadows of the main building’s entrance. It was a shift in the darkness, a coalescing of form that was both fluid and horrifyingly solid.

Rendo, turning to grab Con’s arm and pull him back toward the group, saw it first. His eyes widened in pure, undiluted terror. "CON!" he screamed, not in warning, but in a raw, reflexive act of survival. He yanked his friend backward with all his strength.

Con stumbled and fell, just as the thing emerged.

The thing that lunged from the shadows was a nightmare of fused anatomy. It stood on two powerful, mismatched legs, but its torso was a grotesque cluster of human parts—three sets of milky, unblinking eyes arranged haphazardly, two pairs of arms of different sizes and skin tones, one ending in blunt fists, the other in claw-like fingers. Its head was a pulsating, swollen mass, and its mouth was a wide, convex slit lined with row upon row of needle-sharp teeth. From the waist down, its form dissolved into a shifting, silent pool of pure black tar that allowed it to move with an eerie, silent speed. it unleashed a roar that was less sound and more a physical pressure wave, vibrating in their bones.

"Barrier!" Haze bellowed, his voice cutting through the terror. A dome of brilliant blue energy snapped into existence, encasing Juy, Rendo, Con, and Julian just as the monster's primary set of claws swiped through the space where Con had been standing. The impact rang against the barrier like a gong, but it held.

The fight was on.

Zay didn't summon a storm; he focused his rage into a single, searing bolt of lightning that lanced down from the clear sky directly onto the monster's shoulder. There was a crack of thunder and the smell of ozone, but the creature only staggered, the electricity grounding itself harmlessly through the conductive tar that comprised half its body, leaving behind only a smoldering, blackened patch.

Fritz followed, slamming his hands on the ground. Jagged spikes of ice erupted from the asphalt, racing toward the monster and impaling its tar-embalmed torso. But the tar simply flowed around the ice, absorbing it, the spikes becoming trapped like insects in amber before slowly being dissolved.

Crack! Crack! Crack! Kari’s shots were perfectly aimed, each one targeting a different milky eye. The bullets struck, but they didn't pierce; they flattened against the resilient, leathery skin around the sockets, merely angering the beast.

Krabz, their violet eyes burning, summoned their skeletal army. A dozen bony forms clawed their way from the earth, swarming the creature's legs. With a contemptuous, sweeping motion of its lower arms, the monster smashed them to pieces. The bones didn't even clatter to the ground; they were absorbed into the shifting black tar, adding to its mass.

Only Fulmer's attack had a visible effect. A barrage of her fireballs slammed into the creature's back, and the tar sizzled and smoked, recoiling from the intense heat. The monster roared in genuine pain and fury, its attention snapping to her.

It swung a massive, tar-coated fist at Fulmer, who dove aside. The blow cratered the ground where she'd been standing.

"Runey, Rue, get them farther back!" Haze shouted, his barrier flickering under the monster's relentless assault.

Rue didn't need telling twice. She phased through Haze's barrier, grabbing a stunned Juy and Julian. "This way! Now!" She herded them and a shell-shocked Con toward a half-collapsed storage shed, her heart hammering. She could feel the warping power itching under her skin, begging to be unleashed, but the fear of what she might accidentally do to her friends was a stronger chains.

Runey, however, didn't follow. She stood frozen, watching the ineffectual attacks of her friends. The frustration and fear boiled inside her, a pressure cooker with no release valve. She was a liability. Her air bubbles were for saving, not fighting. The feeling of uselessness was a physical ache. Her breath hitched, coming in short, panicked gasps. She felt a scream building in her throat, a silent scream of pure, distilled fury.

She opened her mouth to scream her frustration, but no sound came out. Instead, a torrent of shimmering, hyper-compressed air bubbles shot forth, each one emitting a high-pitched, keening whine. They shot towards the monster and, upon impact with its tar-like flesh, they didn't just pop.

They imploded.

Each pop released a concussive blast of sonic force, a silent scream given devastating physical form. The monster reeled, the vibrations visibly disrupting the liquid cohesion of its tar body. It roared, not in pain, but in disoriented rage, and turned its multitude of eyes toward Runey.

"Barrier! Now!" Fritz yelled, slamming his hands together. A thick wall of ice erupted in front of Runey, reinforced a split second later by Haze's shimmering blue dome.

The monster charged, slamming into the dual defenses. The ice wall shattered into a million glittering shards, and Haze's barrier cracked under the strain, the psychic feedback making him cry out.

Runey stood shaking, staring at her hands. Krabz stumbled to her side, a grim, understanding smile on their face. "A silent scream," they rasped. "Your power heard you."

"The fire works!" Zay shouted, reassessing the situation with cold clarity. "Fulmer, you're the main attack! We'll support you! Distract it!"

The plan formed in an instant. As the dust from the shattered ice wall bloomed around them, providing cover, the group scattered.

Zay, instead of aiming for the monster, called down a lightning strike on a wrecked car near it, flipping the vehicle onto its side to create a new obstacle. Fritz began flash-freezing puddles of the monster's own discarded tar, trying to root it in place. Kari started firing at its tar-coated limbs, not to damage but to annoy and distract, forcing it to constantly shift its attention.

"Come on, you ugly bastard!" And Fulmer, hands glowing like twin suns, gathered her power, ready to unleash an inferno. "Let's see you try and absorb this!"

The monster, confused and enraged by the pinprick attacks, focused its fury on the biggest threat: the pyromancer who burned it. It ignored the others and charged, a tidal wave of flesh and tar, its grotesque mouth gaping wide.

There was no way out of this but to fight.

‎

‎

Rue took the four normals behind the relative safety of a collapsed concrete wall, its jagged edges a stark reminder of the violence that had consumed this place. Her breath came in short, panicked pants, her eyes darting back toward the sounds of the fight—the roar of the monster, the crackle of lightning, the concussive pop of Runey's sonic bubbles.

"Stay here," she commanded, her voice tight. "Don't move. Don't make a sound."

Julian was the first to object. He didn't shout, but his voice was firm, his gaze steady. "Rue, we're not children. We can't just hide while they fight for their lives. Hiding is what got HD and Gon killed."

The names hung in the air, a painful blow. Rue flinched, but Juy placed a gentle hand on her arm. "He's right, in a way," Juy said, her tone soothing but resolute. "You can't carry us forever. You have to trust that we can handle ourselves a little."

Rue looked at their faces—Con’s grim determination, Rendo’s nervous but unwavering expression, Julian’s fierce resolve, Juy’s calm logic. The weight of her self-imposed responsibility felt suddenly, crushing. She sank against the wall, a sigh of defeat and exhaustion escaping her. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I just... I can't lose any more of you. I can't."

Con offered a small, understanding nod. "We know. Your protectiveness comes from a good place, Rue. From love."

"Doesn't make it any less suffocating sometimes," Rendo added with a weak attempt at his usual humor, though his eyes were serious.

It was then that Rue decided to voice the fear that had been gnawing at her since her reality-warping episode. "It's not just that," she admitted, her voice barely audible over the distant battle. "I... I think I lost my object manifestation. I can't materialize anything anymore."

The revelation landed with a profound silence. Her ability to retrieve anything she'd ever touched from nowhere had been one of their most invaluable, versatile tools.

"What?" Juy breathed. "When?"

"I don't know," Rue said, staring at her hands. "After the... the warping. Maybe it was replaced. Or maybe that is the full extent of my manifestation power, and I just never knew it. Maybe I was always bending reality, just on a smaller, safer scale."

Julian, ever pragmatic, leaned forward. "Can you try? Right now? We're safe enough here. Just try to manifest something small."

Rue shook her head, a spike of fear lancing through her. "No. What if I lose control again? What if I turn this wall into glass, or worse, turn one of you inside out?"

Rendo let out a strained chuckle. "Honestly? After waking up to a multi-eyed tar monster trying to eat my face, 'inside out' sounds like a pretty creative way to go. Couldn't be much worse."

The absurdity of the statement, delivered with Rendo's trademark gallows humor, broke the tension just enough. Rue looked at him, then at the others, seeing their encouraging, if anxious, faces. They trusted her. Maybe she needed to trust herself.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she closed her eyes. She focused not on her fear, but on the memory of the gun she had held a thousand times. Its weight. Its cool, metallic texture. She pushed away the image of crumpled cars and warped pavement, and instead pictured the weapon materializing from nothing.

The air in front of her began to ripple. It wasn't a violent distortion, but a gentle undulation, like heat haze over a desert road. A faint, golden light emanated from the center of the distortion. Tentatively, Rue reached her hand into the ripple. It felt like dipping her fingers into warm, thick water. Her fingers closed around a familiar, solid shape. She pulled.

In her hand was the gun, perfect in every detail.

A collective, relieved breath escaped the group. Juy’s face broke into a warm, proud smile. "You see? You just needed to trust yourself. To stay calm."

Rue stared at the weapon, a wave of dizzying relief washing over her. It was still there. She could still control it. She hadn't broken herself completely.

"Alright," Con said, his voice all business. He moved quickly to the parked Jeep, popping open compartments. "If we're going to be in this, we do it smart." He began pulling out boxes of ammunition, stuffing magazines into his pockets and handing them out to the others. "No heroics. We provide covering fire from a distance. We draw its attention when we can. We support them, we don't replace them."

Rue handed the manifested gun to Julian, then focused again, rippling the air twice more to create two additional firearms for Juy and Rendo. The process was smoother each time, her confidence growing.

"Thank you," she said to all of them, her voice firm once more. "But my condition stands. If that thing so much as looks your way, you fall back. Understood?"

This time, they all nodded, a unified front. They were no longer just people to be protected. They were part of the team, armed, determined, and ready to fight for their family. As they checked their weapons, the normals stood a little taller, the burden of helplessness replaced by the grim purpose of a shared fight.

‎

‎

The scene they returned to was one of controlled chaos and mounting desperation. Fulmer was a whirlwind of flame, riding platforms of Fritz’s ice that erupted from the ground, allowing her to launch volley after volley of searing fireballs. Each impact sizzled against the monster's tar-like flesh, making it recoil and roar in frustration. Haze’s barriers flickered around her, deflecting the creature's wild, sweeping blows, allowing her to focus solely on the attack. Runey’s newfound sonic screams, sharp concussive waves from her popping bubbles, disoriented its multiple eyes, while Krabz’s skeletal minions, brittle and swift, scrambled over its form like ants, searching for a vulnerable point. Zay’s lightning and Kari’s precisely aimed shots harried it, a constant, stinging annoyance.

But it wasn't enough. The monster, though pained by the fire, was adapting. With a furious bellow, it swatted a massive ice platform from under Fulmer’s feet, forcing her to leap to safety on a hastily-erected one from Fritz. Then, its six eyes swiveled, ignoring its primary tormentors, and fixed on the new arrivals—Rue and the normals, who had just begun to provide covering fire.

"Open fire!" Con yelled. He, Rendo, and Julian stood their ground, the crack of their gunfire joining the cacophony. Bullets peppered the creature's torso, but they might as well have been throwing pebbles. It didn't flinch, its focus absolute.

"Spread out!" Rendo shouted, and they dove in different directions as a massive, conglomerate fist smashed down where they'd been standing.

The monster’s tar-body slithered with shocking speed, its attention locking onto Con. It lunged.

"BACK OFF!" Haze screamed, throwing a wall of blue light in front of Con. The monster didn't slow. It crashed through the barrier as if it were made of sugar glass, the magical construct exploding into shimmering fragments that whipped through the air. Haze cried out, staggering from the feedback.

"Nuh uh uh!" Fritz growled, slamming his palms to the ground. A jagged, serrated wall of ice erupted directly in the monster's path. This time, the creature couldn't simply absorb it; the sharp edges dug deep into its tar, slowing it for a crucial moment as it had to tear itself free.

The fading daylight was becoming a critical threat. The creature’s inky form began to blend with the lengthening shadows, its movements becoming even more fluid and difficult to track.

It was this, the realization that they were losing their visual advantage, that finally broke something in Fulmer.

"ENOUGH!" Her voice wasn't a shout, but a low, resonant snarl that cut through the din of battle. The orange and red flames that wreathed her body condensed, intensified, and then *shifted*. The color bled away, replaced by a searing, brilliant, unnatural blue. The heat radiating from her intensified exponentially, warping the air around her in a visible haze.

Rue, who had regrouped with the others, stared up, stunned. The blue energy around Fulmer was intensifying, the flames now a steady, roaring azure corona that lit the entire compound with an eerie, cold light.

"Fulmer, what are you doing?!" Zay yelled up, his own lightning sputtering out as he watched, aghast.

Julian reached the base of the tower and began to climb, his heart hammering against his ribs. "Fulmer, stop! You'll burn yourself out! Come down!"

He was halfway up when she looked down, her eyes glowing with the same fierce blue energy. She didn't speak. She simply flicked her wrist. A single, compact ball of blue flame shot down, not at him, but at the metal girder beside his hand. It struck with a searing *hiss*, melting a fist-sized hole in the steel and spraying molten droplets that forced him to let go and drop back to the ground, landing in a roll.

The message was clear: Stay back.

She stood silhouetted against the darkening sky, a goddess of blue fire, the power radiating from her so immense it was a physical pressure on them all. The monster below seemed to sense the shift, ceasing its pursuit of Con to look up at this new, overwhelming threat. Fulmer stood atop the tower, a vengeful sun against the darkening sky, gathering her power for an attack that none of them could predict, and that some of them feared might consume her, and everything else, along with the monster.

The fight had just entered its final, terrifying phase.

The monster, drawn by the brilliant, terrifying beacon of Fulmer's power, forgot all other prey. It turned its multitude of eyes upward and let out a ground-shaking roar, its tar-like body flowing toward the watchtower like a black tide.

"Fulmer, we're coming!" Haze yelled, preparing to launch himself into the air.

"I SAID STAY BACK!" Fulmer's voice was a whip-crack of absolute command. To emphasize her point, she swept a hand in a wide arc, and a ring of searing blue flame erupted from nothing, encircling the entire group with a wall of fire ten feet high. The heat was immense, forcing them back a step.

Fritz, gritting his teeth, threw a wave of frost at the base of the flames. The ice didn't just melt; it vanished into steam upon contact, not even causing the blue fire to flicker. "Damn it, Fulmer! We're a team!" he shouted, frustration boiling over.

Haze, realizing the danger, quickly threw up a dome barrier inside the circle of fire, protecting them from the immediate radiant heat. They were trapped in a protective bubble within a prison of her making.

Fulmer’s flame grew brighter, hotter, as the last vestiges of daylight vanished, painting the scene in stark contrasts of absolute night and blinding blue light. She was a star going supernova.

“Fulmer, come back!” Rue screamed, her voice raw.

“Don’t be a hero!” Zay shouted.

“We can still fight it together!” Juy yelled over the roar of the flames.

Runey voiced the terrible truth they all knew. “She’s… she’s saying goodbye.”

Rue felt the world tilt, her stomach lurching. The fear and grief threatened to trigger the unstable power within her, the air around her beginning to shimmer dangerously.

Zay’s hand landed firmly on her shoulder. “Don’t,” he said, his voice low and intense. “Don’t let it take you. Not now. She’s doing this so we don’t have to.”

Rue shuddered, forcing a breath, fighting to keep the reality-warping terror at bay. They were prisoners in a cage of fire, forced to be spectators.

Julian, still at the base of the tower, looked up, his face a mask of anguish. "Fulmer, don't do this! This isn't the way!" he pleaded, his voice raw.

Kari's sharp eyes darted between Julian's desperate figure and the pyre of the watchtower. "He's always with her," he muttered, a seed of suspicion taking root amidst the chaos. "Sticks to her like a shadow."

Krabz said nothing, their violet eyes wide, a cold dread settling in their stomach that had nothing to do with Fritz's ice. This felt final.

"We have to get Julian inside the barrier!" Con urged, but Kari grabbed his arm.

"You can't cross that fire," Kari said grimly. "You'll be ash before you take two steps."

Above them, the battle reached its crescendo. As the monster swiped at her, Fulmer's power surged again. The orange and red were completely gone now. Her entire body was wreathed in the beautiful, deadly blue inferno. Her hair vanished, replaced by a dancing corona of sapphire flame that cast long, dramatic shadows across the ruins. She launched another barrage, and this time the fireballs struck with the force of small explosives, tearing chunks of sizzling tar from the creature's body. It stumbled, roaring in a mix of pain and rage, and lashed out with inky black tendrils, trying to snuff out her attacks, but they too burned away to nothing.

Her flame grew brighter, hotter, as the last rays of the sun vanished, turning the sky a deep indigo. She was the only source of light, a blue star going supernova in the heart of the dead safe zone. The others could only watch, prisoners behind her wall of benevolent fire, utterly helpless.

She was winning, searing the monster down piece by piece, but they all saw the cost. The flames weren't just around her; they were consuming her. Fulmer knew it too. She knew this was the only way.

"FULMER, NO!" Julian's cry was joined by a chorus of others—Rue, Zay, Haze, all of them screaming her name, begging her to stop.

Their pleas merged into a chorus of desperation. Fulmer heard them. For a split second, she turned her head, her fiery gaze sweeping over them all. And she smiled. It was a small, sad, heartbreakingly fond smile, full of love and finality. Then, she turned and propelled herself away from the watchtower, a blazing blue comet leading the enraged monster away from her family.

Then she turned back, and with a final, deafening scream of raw power, she unleashed everything. The blue fire swelled, not from her hands, but from her very core, expanding into a colossal sphere of incandescent destruction twice the size of the monster. It was terrifyingly silent, a vacuum of sound before the storm.

Julian ran forward, but the sheer radiant heat blistered his skin and forced him back, his arm thrown up to shield his face. He could only watch, helpless, his other hand clutching something small and metallic hidden in his fist.

The blue star crashed into the monster.

There was no explosion in the traditional sense. There was a silent, expanding wave of absolute light that whited out their vision, followed by a pressure wave of pure heat that hit Haze's barrier like a physical hammer. The barrier held, but the sound that followed was the roar of the earth itself being scoured. Debris—stone, metal, and vaporized monster—was hurled outward in a storm of shrapnel that shrieked against Haze's dome.

When the light finally faded and the deafening roar subsided, Haze’s barrier shattered, and he collapsed to his knees, utterly spent. Silence descended, deeper and more profound than any they had ever known. The circle of blue fire around them flickered once, twice, and died, its purpose fulfilled.

The monster was gone. Vaporized.

And so was Fulmer.

‎

‎

The only sound was the faint crackle of cooling stone and Julian’s ragged, silent sobs as he stared at the scorched, empty ground where the brilliant blue star had burned its last, his hand still clenched tightly around the secret in his pocket.

The silence after the cataclysm was a physical weight. The circle of blue flame that had imprisoned them flickered and died, its purpose extinguished along with its caster. Before them lay a scene of utter devastation. A massive, smoldering crater marred the earth, its edges glowing with residual heat, patches of molten rock cooling into black glass. There was no sign of the monster. There was no sign of Fulmer. Only scorched earth and the smell of ozone and vaporized tar.

Julian was the first to move. A broken sound tore from his throat as he stumbled toward the crater’s edge. "Fulmer..."

"Julian, stop!" Fritz snapped, grabbing his arm. "The ground is still magma. You'll burn your feet off!"

"LET GO OF ME!" Julian roared, wrenching himself free with a strength born of utter despair. His eyes were wild, unseeing. "She's gone! Don't you get it? I lost her!"

Runey, her face streaked with soot and tears, placed a gentle hand on Fritz’s arm. "Let him go," she whispered, her voice hollow.

Fritz reluctantly released him, and Julian sank to his knees at the very edge of the scorched earth, close enough that the heat blistered his skin. He didn't seem to feel it. He clutched something in his hand—a simple, polished metal brooch. "She gave this to me," he choked out, not looking at them. "That night in the house. She said... she wanted me to have something to remember her by. She knew. She always knew."

The group stood behind him, a tableau of fresh grief. Rue felt the loss like a physical blow, another name carved into the monument of her failures. Zay’s hands crackled with helpless energy. Haze looked from the brooch to the crater, the logic he clung to failing in the face of such absolute sacrifice. Krabz watched, their violet eyes deep with a sorrow that seemed to span more than one lifetime.

Tears tracked clean lines through the grime on his cheeks as he looked from the brooch to the group, his eyes holding a terrifying, profound knowledge. The others stood in a stunned, grieving semicircle, another loss carving a fresh hollow in their already ravaged hearts.

"She wasn't supposed to last this long," he said, his gaze sweeping over each of them. "She told me. Her will to protect you—the only family she had left—was the only thing keeping her going. Her death was a debt that was always going to be called in. She just chose how to pay it."

He took a step closer, his eyes lingering on Juy, Con, and Rendo. "And you three... you shouldn't even be here. None of us should."

Rue felt a cold dread, different from any they had felt before, trickle down her spine. "Julian, what are you talking about?"

"This," he said, gesturing to the ruined safe zone, the jungle beyond, the very sky above. "It's not real. Not the way you think it is. It's a nightmare. A beautiful, terrible, induced reality. And the only way out... is to open your eyes."

Before anyone could process his words, before Haze could raise a barrier or Kari could dissolve into particles, Julian moved with the swift, precise finality of a man executing a long-dreaded command.

He raised the gun Rue had manifested for him.

BANG.

Juy’s eyes widened in surprise, a single, small hole appearing in her forehead. She crumpled without a sound.

BANG.

Con, who had been reaching for his own weapon, was thrown backward, his expression one of betrayed confusion.

BANG.

Rendo, who had stood as their steadfast joker, met the shot with a look of profound, weary acceptance, as if he had always suspected the punchline would be this cruel.

Time seemed to stretch, then snap back. The reactions were instantaneous, a symphony of horror.

Zay was a thunderclap. "YOU TRAITOROUS BASTARD!" A bolt of lightning, wild and untamed, lanced from the darkening sky, not at Julian, but at the ground between them, exploding dirt and rock. It was a pure, uncontrolled expression of rage.

Haze stared, his face ashen. His barrier flickered into existence for a split second—a useless, instinctual act—before sputtering out. He had failed. Again. He watched the bodies of the three people he had just protected with his life bleed into the dirt, and the rational part of his mind simply shut down.

Fritz let out a wordless roar of pure, icy fury. A glacier of rage erupted from him, a wave of jagged ice that shot across the ground toward Julian, not to capture, but to impale.

Kari had his own gun up in an instant, his sharpshooter's eye lining up the shot with deadly precision. But his hand was trembling. He saw Juy's fallen form, the botanist who had kept them alive, and his finger froze on the trigger.

Runey screamed, but no sound came out. Instead, a torrent of her sonic bubbles shot forth, popping against the ground and air around Julian in a frantic, concussive storm of grief and rage.

Krabz didn't move. They simply stared at the three fresh bodies, then at Julian, their violet eyes wide. The necromancer who communed with death was faced with a new, intimate horror. They could feel the fragile threads of their friends' lives severing, and the void it left was deafening. "Why?" was the only word they could rasp out, a sound of utter devastation.

Julian stood amid the onslaught, not even flinching as Fritz's ice shattered at his feet and Runey's sonic blasts vibrated the air around him. He looked at them all, eyes filled with an apology that would never be spoken. "Open your eyes," he whispered.

He put the barrel under his chin and pulled the trigger.

BANG.

His body joined the others on the ground.

‎

‎

For a heartbeat, there was only the shocking stillness of the four bodies, blood pooling on the dusty ground.

Hum.

Then, their reality glitched.

It was a subtle, digital distortion. The edges of the bodies flickered, like a corrupted video file. The bloodstains wavered, their color shifting unnaturally. Then, one by one, the bodies of Juy, Con, Rendo, and Julian dissolved not into light, but into a shower of static and fragmented pixels, vanishing from existence as if they had never been there at all.

Hum.

The shock was absolute, a vacuum of sound and sense. They stood paralyzed, staring at the empty ground where their friends’ bodies had glitched into nothingness.

Hum.

Then, the world began to scream with Rue.

A raw, guttural cry of horror tore from her throat, and the air in front of her ripped. It wasn't a gentle warp this time. It was a violent, jagged tear in the fabric of everything, like cloth being shredded. Through the gash, there was no void, only a blurred, indistinct vision of muted colors and the muffled, echoing sound of voices they couldn't quite make out. A distant, sterile white light flickered from within.

"Rue, stop!" Zay yelled, lurching forward. He didn't dare grab her, fearing his touch might destabilize her further. Instead he positioned himself between her and the worst of the distortion, his own lightning sparking defensively. "You have to breathe!"

Runey was at her side in an instant, her own panic forgotten in the face of Rue's total meltdown. "Rue, listen to me! Look at me!" she pleaded, her voice competing with the unnerving sound of reality tearing. She tried to project calm, but the air around her buzzed with the precursor to her sonic screams, a testament to her own fraying control.

But Rue was beyond hearing. Another scream was ripped from her, and another brutal slash opened in the world, this one slicing through the husk of a nearby building. The rubble didn't fall; it twisted, its geometry becoming unnerving, angles bending into impossible shapes.

"Look!" Krabz shouted, their violet eyes fixed not on the chaos, but on the tears themselves. They pointed a trembling finger at the flickering white light. "Through the gaps! Do you hear that? See that?"

Haze, his face ashen, followed Krabz's gaze. His analytical mind, trained to assess threats, tried to process this new revelation. "There's... something else. Another layer." The revelation was drowned out by the cacophony.

"Rue, you're destroying everything!" Fritz shouted, bracing himself as the very laws of physics seemed to waver. He instinctively threw up walls of ice, not as attack, but as futile barricades against the spreading unreality. The ice itself began to curl and melt in ways that defied physics. Kari had his gun raised, but there was no target to shoot. His sharpshooter's vision was useless against an enemy that was the universe itself.

Rue’s power, a feedback loop of trauma and terror, was now the dominant force. The very ground beneath them softened, the colors of the world bleeding together like wet paint. The sky swirled into a vortex of bruised purples and angry reds. With one final, soul-rending scream, she didn't just tear another hole—she shattered the lens.

The world didn't go dark. It was flooded with a surge of blinding, absolute white light. It was silent and overwhelming, consuming sound, sight, and thought. There was no heat, no cold, no sensation of falling. Just the white and the silence, an endless, featureless expanse that pressed in on their consciousness until, one by one, their minds could no longer hold on. Their eyes fluttered shut, not in sleep, but in a total, forced bodily shutdown, the seven of them adrift in a void of someone else's making.

Chapter Text

The white was not an emptiness. It was a presence. A silence so absolute it had weight, pressing in on all sides, stifling thought, muffering the very concept of sound. There was no up or down, no before or after. There was only the Now, and the Now was a featureless, eternal bleach of non-color. It was the silence after a scream, the blankness after a catastrophe, the waiting room of the soul.

In this void, seven points of consciousness drifted, untethered from their bodies, their memories, their names. They were raw awareness, adrift in a sea of forgotten purpose. The void was a scrubbed slate of deliberate erasure.

But even in nothingness, seeds stir.

The void began to pulse. A slow, deep, resonant thrum that was felt rather than heard, vibration that disturbed the perfect stillness. It was a signal, the catalyst searching for a receiver.

That pulse found Haze first.

The void was not erasing them; it was an anvil, and the returning hammer of their pasts was about to strike. The first memory was breaking through. This space was not a prison. It was a trigger. And the chain reaction of awakening had just begun.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

The white was a presence—heavy, silent and absolute. It pressed against Haze’s eyelids, a seamless featureless canvas that offered no escape. In this void where thought and sensation bled away, a spark ignited deep within his memory—fossil from a life he’d been made to forget.

A slow dissolve to the sterile white light bled into the harsh yellow glow of a desert sun fades through. The silence was replaced by the roar of a military transport helicopter, the thrumming vibration a physical thing through the seat of his pants. The smell of dust, fuel, and sweat filled his nostrils.

The air was thick with dust and the coppery tang of fear. The recon team—Haze, Miller, Choi, and the rookie, Davis—were pinned down in the skeleton of a bombed-out textile factory. Sunset bled orange through bullet holes in the corrugated iron walls.

“Contact rear!” Miller yelled, his voice cracking as a burst of automatic rifle fire chewed up the concrete floor near their position.

They were surrounded. Intel had been wrong. This wasn’t a small insurgent cell; it was a fortified nest. Their exit was cut off.

“Flashbang out!” Choi shouted, tossing the canister. The concussive whump and blinding light gave them a three-second window. They scrambled, firing controlled bursts, moving from cover to cover towards a collapsed section of the floor that led to a lower level.

They almost made it.

From a shadowed gantry above, a figure emerged. A terrorist, face obscured by a scarf, held not a rifle but a cylindrical object. A grenade.

“Grenade!” Davis screamed, his voice shrill with panic.

Time didn’t slow. It crystallized. Haze saw the arc of the throw, the lazy end-over-end spin of the metal canister. He saw Miller shoving Davis down, saw Choi bringing his rifle up to aim at a target he’d never hit in time. He saw the grenade land with a dull, final clink, right in the center of their huddled group.

There was no time for a heroic leap. No time to even think. There was only a primal, screaming instinct from the very core of his being: NO.

It wasn’t a sound. It was a force. A shimmering, translucent dome of blue energy erupted from him, not from his hands but from his entire body. It was instinctive—a final desperate convulsion of a spirit refusing to let its tribe die.

The grenade detonated.

The world outside the dome vanished in a storm of shrapnel and fire. The sound was a physical hammer blow against the blue light, but the dome held. Inside, the air was perfectly still, save for the ragged gasps of his team. Dust motes hung suspended in the eerie blue glow. The concussive force washed over the barrier and dissipated.

As quickly as it appeared, the dome vanished.

Silence. The acrid smell of cordite and burnt metal filled the air. Miller was the first to move, slapping a fresh magazine into his rifle with trembling hands, his eyes wide as he stared at Haze.

“What… what the hell was that, Sergeant?” Davis whispered, staring at the scorched circular patch of floor where the grenade had blown. A perfect untouched oasis in the center of the destruction.

Haze didn’t answer. He looked at his own hands, then at his team—all alive, all unharmed, not a single scratch or singe. He felt the profound, gut-wrenching understanding that he was no longer just a soldier. He was something else. Something he had no name for.

“I… don’t know,” he finally breathed, the truth of it terrifying him more than the ambush had.

The memory shattered, receding back into the white nothingness as quickly as it had come. Haze’s consciousness snapped back to the present void, but he was no longer just adrift. He was armed with a truth. His power was born in a moment of ultimate pressure, a soldier's last-ditch effort to save his team.

The blinding white void rushed back, but it was different now. It was no longer empty. It was filled with the ghost of cordite, the echo of rotor blades, and the terrifying, awakening hum of a power he had carried all along. He had his answer. He knew his trigger. And the knowledge was a heavier burden than any he had ever carried.

‎

‎

The blinding white was filled with ghosts. The echo of rotor blades faded, replaced by the sterile silence of the void. But the silence was not empty. It was a catalyst. As Haze’s memory solidified and then began to recede, the white nothingness seemed to pulse—reaching for another mind, another locked door in another forgotten past. The focus shifted where the spotlight of painful remembrance moved, from the soldier to the necromancer.

For Krabz, the white bursted into the vibrant, overwhelming sensory overload of a county fair. The transition was a nauseating lurch. The sterile silence was violently replaced by the cacophony of jolly music, the shrieks of laughter from thrill rides, and the thick greasy smell of fried dough and popcorn.

“Come on, Florian! It’s about to start!” Krabz shouted, pulling her friend by the hand through the crowd. Her best friend. The memory was so vivid Krabz could feel the warmth of Florian's hand and the cheap, silky texture of her friend’s cotton sweater.

“I still think this is a stupid way to spend a Saturday,” Florian grumbled, but she was smiling. The sun was warm on her skin. “Planes are for getting from A to B, not for doing loop-de-loops over a fairground.”

“It’s a show! It’s history!” Krabz insisted, her eyes sparkling. “It’s a vintage Stearman. It’s beautiful!”

They found a spot on the grassy knoll, surrounded by families on picnic blankets. The biplane—a beautiful, old-fashioned thing painted in a bright yellow scheme—buzzed overhead like a giant graceful insect. The pilot, a tiny figure in the cockpit, waved. The crowd oohed and aahed.

Krabz remembered feeling a strange unaccountable sense of dread that she’d shrugged off as vertigo, then squeezing Florian’s hand, “Look! He’s going to do a barrel roll!”

The plane climbed, engine straining, then tipped into its maneuver. It was at the apex of its climb, a perfect silhouette against the bright blue sky, when the sound changed.

The steady drone of the engine coughed. Once. Twice. Then it cut out completely.

For a heart-stopping second, there was silence, broken only by the gasp of the crowd. Then the silence was filled by a new, terrifying sound: the shriek of the wind over wings as the plane began to fall, not in a spin, but in a nosedive, a yellow arrow aimed directly at the field beside the knoll.

Time didn’t slow. It accelerated into a blur of screaming and panic. Krabz remembered shoving her friend backward in a futile instinctual act. She remembered the shadow of the plane consuming the sun, the smell of gasoline, and the deafening final roar of impact.

The memory didn’t show the impact from her perspective. It shattered then reassembled from a point above.

She saw the wreckage. The yellow wings were splintered kindling. The fuselage was a crushed tin can. And there, on the torn grass, lay a body. Her body. A white sheet was being drawn over it by a paramedic whose face was a mask of professional grimness. She saw Florian held back by two men, face a contorted mask of grief, screams soundless in the memory.

The perspective shifted again. It was her funeral. An open casket. She saw herself made up with waxy unreal makeup, lying on satin cushions. She saw her parents, their faces hollowed out by loss. She heard the muffled sobs, the platitudes, the drone of a priest’s voice.

This was the memory that had been buried. Not her death, but her funeral.

Now, she watched her grandmother sob into a handkerchief, her father’s face a mask of stone-like grief. Her friends from the aviation club stood in a stunned, miserable cluster.

“She loved the sky so much,” one of them whispered, his voice breaking.

The memory-view shifted. The funeral home was empty now. The casket was closed. She felt a profound, chilling cold—a numbness that had nothing to do with temperature. Then stillness. Absolute, dark, cold stillness.

Time lost all meaning.

Then, a spark.

It wasn't a thought. It was an instinct, deep and primal, a refusal of the silence. In the absolute blackness, a violet energy—the same that would later course through her veins in the jungle—stirred. It was a command given not to the dead, but to death itself: Not me.

Sensation returned with a violent, nauseating rush. The press of satin against her cheeks. The stifling, airless confinement. Panic, pure and undiluted, flooded her nervous system. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. A scream built in her lungs, but her throat was paralyzed.

She slammed her fists against the lid above her. A weak, thudding sound in the overwhelming silence. She kicked, her legs weak and uncoordinated. The scream finally broke free, a raw, ragged sound of pure terror, muffled by the wood and the satin.

On the other side, a janitor, mopping the floors of the funeral home’s viewing room, dropped his bucket with a clatter. The sound that came from the cold storage room was not of this world. He ran, fetching the director.

When they pried the casket open, the scene was one of not joy but horror. Krabz was clawing at the air, her eyes wide with a madness only the truly lost could know, her screams echoing in the tiled room. The makeup was streaked with tears and sweat, her formal dress torn. The funeral director stumbled back, crossing himself.

Her family was called. Their arrival was not a celebration. Her grandmother fainted. Her father, the stoic man, recoiled—face a whirlwind of confusion, fear, and a dawning terrible hope. They had almost buried their daughter. They had grieved. Her return was an abomination against the natural order, a miracle that felt like a curse.

Krabz, in the days that followed , said little. She would sit for hours, staring at her hands, feeling the cold of the casket still in her bones. The doctors had no explanation. "Lazarus Syndrome," they called it, a rare but documented phenomenon. But she knew. She had felt the violet energy. She had felt the line between life and death not as a wall, but as a curtain and she pulled herself back through it. Her fascination with planes, with the mechanics of life and the finality of death, had been a precursor. The crash was the key. She had died, and her own latent power had simply… refused the verdict.

The memory dissolved, the screams of her past family fading into the silent white present. The void now held two truths: a soldier who could stop death, and a girl who could reverse her own. The white light seemed to thrum, pregnant with more secrets, waiting for the next mind to break.

‎‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎

‎ As the ghost of the past faded, nothingness pulsed again, its searchlight of memory moving on, finding the next locked box: the sharpshooter.

The transition was not into heat or cold, but into a world of sterile controlled chaos. White dissolved into the sharp fluorescent glare of an advanced manufacturing room. The silence was replaced by the constant, low hum of climate control and the high-pitched whine of precision tools. The air smelled of ozone, soldering flux, and static discharge.

He was at his workstation, a "molecular assembler" as his company grandly called it. Before him, under the glare of a powerful ring light, was the inner chassis of a next-generation neural interface, a labyrinth of gold filaments and quantum processors smaller than a thumbnail.

"Kari, you got a sec? Scope Three is on the loose again," a colleague named Theo said, rolling a massive electron microscope toward his station. "You'll need this for the synaptic alignment on the F-42 project."

Kari didn't look up from his work, his hands already moving with a tranquil, impossible steadiness. "Don't need it," he said, voice calm and focused.

"Come on man," Theo insisted, peering at the tiny components. "The tolerance is +/- 5 nanometers. Human eyes can't even see that, let alone align it."

"I can see just fine," Kari replied, a phrase his team had heard a hundred times. It was a joke to them, a quirk. But to him it was simply the truth.

He picked up a micro-soldering iron in one hand and a filament spool in the other. Theo watched, his skepticism turning to awe as Kari's hands began to work. There was no hesitation, no squinting. His movements were a fluid perfect dance. He wasn't just seeing the components; he was seeing the spaces between molecules. The gold wire fused to the processor in a flawless invisible seam.

"That's... impossible," Theo whispered.

But that was only half of it. The memory shifted, propelled by the void's insistence. It was late past midnight. The clean room was empty, lit only by the emergency lights and the glow of Kari's workstation. A critical component for a prototype had failed and a fix was needed before the 6:00AM demo for investors. He was alone, racing against the clock.

He needed a specific calibration tool from the storage locker on the far side of the vast dimly lit lab—a 30-second walk for anyone else. Kari however, was fueled by a potent mix of caffeine and desperation. He looked at the distant locker, his target acquired. He took a step, and then—

—the world shimmered.

It wasn't a blur of speed. It was a dissolution. His body broke apart into a cloud of golden dust-like particles—a sensation that was neither painful nor pleasant but profoundly other. His consciousness flowed with the particles, a swift silent current across the room. In the space of a single heartbeat the particles reformed, solidifying back into his body, hand already closing around the handle of the storage locker.

He stood there for a moment, breathing steadily, the tool in his hand. It felt as natural as walking. He’d always been able to do this, to simply… slip through the cracks in space when he needed to. He never questioned it; it was just another tool, like his steady hands.

From the security office downstairs, the night watchman, reviewing the evening's time-lapse CCTV, would later remark on the "glitch" in the clean room feed—a brief, golden shimmer in one spot that instantly reappeared twenty meters away. A ghost in the machine.

Back at his workstation, the memory focused on the final crucial moment. The repair was almost complete, but the central processor was refusing to align. The microscopic legs were bent, a catastrophic error. Using tweezers was out of the question; they were too large. He had one chance.

He took a deep breath and his perception narrowed. The world fell away—the hum of the vents, the time pressure, Theo's doubt—everything vanished. All that existed was the misaligned chip. His vision seemed to zoom not like a lens, but like a fundamental recalibration of reality itself. The chip became a mountain range, each leg a canyon he had to navigate. He could see the precise angle of the bend, the stress point in the metallic lattice.

He willed his index finger to change. The tip of it dissolved into the familiar golden particles. The shimmering cloud flowed not across the room, but into the impossibly small gap between the chip and the board. Inside that microscopic space, the particles reformed into a needle-sharp, impossibly precise tool, nudging the bent leg with atomic accuracy. It clicked into place.

He pulled his hand back whole. The assembler hummed, sealing the work. The diagnostic light on the unit blinked from red to a steady triumphant green.

The memory held on that green light, and then it too was extinguished.

The white void rushed back, but it was now filled with the phantom scent of ozone and the memory of a body unbound by physics. Kari understood. His "precise vision" wasn't just for aiming bullets. It was the focused manifestation of a perception that could operate on a microscopic scale. His disintegration wasn't for escape; it was the ultimate tool for precision. His powers weren't awakened in a moment of trauma, but had always been there integrated into his very profession, waiting for the context of this nightmare to give them a violent purpose. The knowledge settled in him, cold and sharp and ready.

‎

‎

The sharp, electric scent of Kari's clean room had barely faded when the relentless spotlight of remembrance shifted again. This time, it found the one whose power was born not of fire or force, but of the deep crushing dark.

Runey’s memory was a plunge deepened into an oppressive navy blue. The silence was filled not with noise, but with a heavy resonant quiet broken only by the rhythmic mechanical sound of her own breathing through a regulator. The memory was visceral, immediate. The pressure of the abyss was a physical weight on her shoulders and the water was frigid even through her advanced wetsuit.

She was suspended in the eternal night of the bathypelagic zone over a thousand meters down. The only light came from the beams of their submersible, the Abyssal Archer, and the mounted lights on her dive suit. The dark water swallowed the light just meters ahead.

"Runey, you're approaching your max bottom time. Time to head back to the basket." The voice of Dr. Aris, the mission commander, crackled in her comms, laced with static.

"Copy. I've just secured the last sediment sample," Runey replied, her voice calm and professional. She loved this. The silence, the isolation, the feeling of being a tiny speck in an immense unknown world. She placed the sample tube into the reinforced basket attached to her suit. "The hydrothermal vent activity here is incredible. The ecosystem is thriving."

"Noted. Now get back in. We're picking up some unusual currents on the sonar."

Runey gave the alien landscape one last look—the ghostly white tubeworms, the skittering, blind crustaceans—and turned to follow her tether line back to the submersible's robotic arm, which would guide her into the entry lock.

It happened in a heart-stopping instant. A sharp, grinding CLANG echoed through the water, transmitted through her suit. A jagged outcropping of rock hidden in the gloom had snagged her oxygen line. Before she could react, a powerful unseen current—the one Aris had warned about—slammed into her, yanking her sideways. She heard a sickening hiss, saw a torrent of silvery bubbles erupt from her tank.

"Aris, I've got a problem!" she said, her voice tight, fighting to stay calm. "My primary O2 line is severed! I'm losing air, fast!"

"What?! Runey, get to the basket now! Use your emergency reserve!" Aris's voice was sharp with alarm.

She fumbled for the valve, her thick gloves clumsy. The hissing was dwindling. The tank was nearly empty. Panic began to prick at the edges of her mind. This was how it happened. This was the deep's price for its secrets.

Her vision began to spot. The regulator in her mouth gave one last weak gasp and fell silent. Empty.

This was it. She was going to drown in the dark.

Instinct took over. Her body, starved of oxygen, convulsed. She involuntarily opened her mouth—a final desperate act, expecting the cold salty burn of the sea flooding her lungs.

But it didn't burn.

It felt… easy.

The water flowed in and somehow her body processed it. Her lungs, which should have been screaming in agony, felt a strange cool relief. She took another involuntary "breath," and then another. She was breathing. Not air, but the cold mineral-rich water of the deep ocean. It was as natural as walking.

"Runey? Runey, report! Your vitals are… they're stabilizing? What's happening?" Aris's voice was a mixture of confusion and dawning hope.

Runey couldn't answer. She was too busy experiencing the impossible. She felt a connection to the water she never had before. It wasn't just a medium she moved through; it was a part of her. She felt a newfound agility, a potential for speed that made her previous movements seem sluggish.

And then she saw them on her sonar display. A massive, dense school of deep-sea grenadiers, spooked by the same current that had damaged her line was moving toward her position. A thousand fish, a living wall of scales and flesh. In these numbers, at this depth, they could batter her against the rocks, damage the submersible.

A new spike of fear—not for herself, but for the Archer and her crew—shot through her.

"Aris, school of grenadiers, bearing directly on your position! Get the thrusters ready!"

"We see them! Runey, get clear!"

But there was no time. They were upon her. The first fish began to zip past her, a silvery blur in the headlights. In a moment of pure unthinking panic, she screamed.

But the scream was not sound. It was force.

A torrent of compact, shimmering air bubbles erupted from her mouth, a turbulent stream that shot into the heart of the oncoming school. The bubbles didn't just float; they popped with sharp concussive reports that vibrated through the water. The effect was instantaneous. The fish, their lateral lines overwhelmed by the sudden violent disturbance in pressure, scattered in a chaotic frenzy, altering their course away from the submersible.

The memory held on that image: the retreating silver cloud, the fading concussive pops, and Runey suspended in the infinite dark, breathing water, having just shouted a silent scream that bent the deep to her will.

Then, the crushing pressure of the abyss released its grip.

The white void returned, but it was now saturated with the memory of salt and the crushing quiet of the deep. Runey understood. Her agility, her water-breathing, her bubbles—they weren't separate tricks. They were the manifestations of a profound symbiosis with the ocean itself, awakened not by a desire for power but by the deep's cold kiss of death which she had simply refused to accept. Her trigger was the moment the sea tried to claim her and she had instead made it her home.

‎

‎

The collective unconscious of the group, stirred by trauma and revelation, sought out the next locked memory. The searchlight of the past shifted, its cold glare finding the one whose essence was winter.

Rush of exhilarating cold welcomed Fritz’s memories. The sterile white dissolved into the brilliant reflected light of a sun-drenched alpine slope. The silence was shattered by the crisp shush of a snowboard carving through fresh powder and the distant laughter of other enthusiasts. The air was thin clean and so cold it burned the lungs in the best way possible.

"Fresh tracks! This is perfect!" he yelled over his shoulder to his friends, Leo and Mia, their brightly colored jackets dots against the vast expanse of white. He loved this. The speed, the freedom, the absolute mastery over the mountain. He was in his element, the cold not an enemy but an old friend.

"Try and keep up Fritz!" Mia shouted back, her voice echoing in the crystalline air.

They were on a backcountry run, a steep unkept chute known for its deep challenging terrain. Fritz led the way, his movements fluid and confident with each turn spraying a plume of diamond-dust snow into the air. He felt invincible.

The first sign was a low rumble, deeper than any snowmobile, a vibration that traveled up through the snow and into the bones of the mountain.

"What was that?" Leo called out, his voice tinged with unease.

Fritz slowed, looking up. The sun was still shining, the sky a perfect blue. But the rumble grew, evolving into a deep, rolling thunder. At the very top of the chute, a massive fracture line appeared in the snowpack. It looked like a zipper being pulled open across the width of the mountain.

"AVALANCHE!" Mia screamed.

The world turned white and loud. The slab of snow, the size of a city block, broke free and began its terrible slow-motion descent, accelerating into a churning tidal wave of snow and ice. There was no outrunning it. No hiding.

The memory wasn't of fear, but of a profound, deafening roar. The air was ripped from his lungs. He was tumbled, thrown, disoriented, a doll in a washing machine of frozen concrete. The world was a violent blinding white chaos. He felt a brutal impact against his back, then another. Darkness nibbled at the edges of his vision.

This was it. He was going to be buried, crushed, suffocated.

His mind stripped of coherent thought, screamed a single primal command: SAVE ME!

It wasn't a wish. It was a demand issued from every cell in his body, a final defiant order to the universe.

He didn't raise his hands. He didn't utter a word. There was only the will and the answer.

A wave of intense cold, far deeper than the mountain's chill, erupted from him. It was not the cold of death but of absolute stasis.

The churning snow around him crystallized.

There was no slow freeze. It was instantaneous. Jagged, brutal spikes of blue-tinted ice shot out in every direction, forming a chaotic, protective cage around his body. The avalanche, millions of tons of moving snow, slammed into this sudden, impossible fortress. The ice spikes shuddered but held, diverting the crushing flow around him, creating a pocket of still, frozen air.

Inside his cocoon of ice, Fritz lost consciousness.

The memory shifted. Sounds were muffled and distant. The roar was gone and was replaced by the whine of a Sno-Cat engine and the frantic shouts of the ski patrol.

"Over here! I've got a signal!"

"Holy... what is this?"

Light. Blinding shocking light as a shovel broke through the ice wall above him. A rescuer's face, goggled and covered in frost peered down, their eyes wide with disbelief.

"We've got a live one! He's... he's inside some kind of ice structure!"

They carefully chipped away at the spikes that had saved him. Fritz coughed, spitting out snow, his body trembling violently, not from the cold but from the shock of being alive. As they pulled him from his frozen cradle, he looked back at it. It was grotesque and beautiful—a eruption of savage ice flowers in the middle of a smooth settled avalanche field. A tomb he had built for himself that instead become a cavern of protection.

They found Leo and Mia later that day. They hadn't been so lucky.

Fritz sat wrapped in a foil blanket in the back of the Sno-Cat, staring at his hands. The rescuers kept calling it a miracle, a freak occurrence of compressed air and ice. But he knew. He felt the echo of that absolute cold still in his bones. He had looked death in its white featureless face and his very blood had answered with winter.

The memory ended, the image of those protective brutal ice spikes seared into his mind.

The white void welcomed him back, but it was now filled with the phantom bite of alpine wind and the crushing silence of snow. Fritz understood. His power wasn't about creating pretty frost. It was about survival. It was the manifestation of a will so fierce it could command the very concept of cold to defend itself. His trigger was the mountain's betrayal and his answer had been to become something colder and harder than the mountain itself. The knowledge settled in him, a core of perpetual frost waiting for the next threat to unleash its winter.

‎

‎

As the memory of savage ice faded, the relentless spotlight of remembrance moved once more, drawn to the most volatile of them, the one whose soul was a tempest waiting to be unchained.

For Zay, the transition was not a gentle shift but a violent crackle. The sterile white shattered into the warm intimate gloom of a writer’s study, late at night. That silence was broken by the frantic rhythmic clatter of mechanical keys and the occasional rustle of parchment. The air scented of old books, fresh tea, and ozone from an approaching storm.

He was hunched over a heavy oak desk surrounded by towers of books on maritime history and meteorology. A single green-shaded lamp cast a pool of light over his manuscript, the words *“*Weathered Hopes*”* scrawled at the top. He was deep in the zone, mind lost in a world of historical fantasy, of ships tossed on gale-wracked seas and kings who whispered to the clouds.

“No, that’s not right,” he muttered to himself, scratching out a line with a furious pen stroke. “The convergence has to feel inevitable. Not just a plot device...”

He’d been at it for eighteen hours straight, fueled by the manic obsession to get the storm scene perfect. Outside his high apartment window, the real world obliged his mood. The sky, which had been clear all day, had begun to bruise. A distant rumble of thunder rolled over the city like a promise of the coming fury. He barely noticed it, his own internal storm raging louder.

His eyes gritty with exhaustion, fluttered shut for just a moment. The clatter of the keys stopped. The only sound was the rising wind whining at the window pane and the first drops of rain beginning to tap against the glass.

He fell asleep at his desk, head resting on a open lexicon of archaic weather patterns.

The storm arrived in earnest. The wind howled. The rain became a torrent, lashing the window. The world outside flashed white, then plunged into darkness again. The city’s lights flickered.

Then, the world turned inside out.

A simultaneous deafening CRACK and a blinding magnesium-white flash. The lightning strike was immediate, direct and brutal. It didn’t hit a nearby pole or tree. It struck the old, cast-iron lightning rod attached to the corner of his building with the force of a god’s hammer.

The shockwave traveled through the structure. The window in Zay’s study shattered inwards. The lightbulb in his desk lamp exploded. Every electrical device in the room died with a popping sound and the acrid smell of burnt plastic.

Zay was thrown from his chair, his body convulsing as a residual surge of raw atmospheric power earth-grounded through his apartment. He should have been killed. Charred.

Instead, he woke up.

His eyes snapped open. He was on the floor surrounded by glittering shards of glass and raining pages of his manuscript. His body thrummed with a strange vibrant energy. He pushed himself up, his movements jerky then looked at his hands.

Small sizzling blue arcs of electricity were dancing between his fingertips. They crackled and spat, weaving around his knuckles like living filigree. They didn’t hurt. They felt… familiar. Like a limb he never knew he had.

“What…?” he breathed, his voice a hoarse whisper.

He stumbled to his feet, drawn to the shattered window. The storm was at its peak, a raging, magnificent spectacle. Lightning forks tore the sky apart, each one followed by a world-shaking boom.

And then he felt it. A pull. A deep, resonant hum in his bones that synchronized with the flashes outside. The lightning wasn’t just random chaos. It felt like a conversation. And it was calling to him.

A hesitant fear and a wild inexplicable hope bloomed within his chest. He reached his hand out through the broken window and into the lashing rain.

Another bolt of lightning streaked down from the heavens. But this one didn’t strike a building or the street. It changed course, arcing through the raging air with impossible precision, drawn to the outstretched hand of the writer who had always dreamed of storms.

It didn’t incinerate him.

The bolt, a living river of pure plasma connected with his palm with a sound like a thousand sheets of silk tearing at once. The force of it should have vaporized his arm. Instead the energy coiled around his hand and wrist, solidifying, cooling from white-hot plasma into a shimmering, tangible form. When the light faded, he was holding a shape—a jagged, crystalline shard of solidified lightning, cool to the touch and humming with dormant power. It was the perfect focus, the symbol of the Tempest he had only ever written about.

He stood there soaked and trembling, clutching the impossible artifact, the storm still raging around him but now feeling like an extension of his own heartbeat. The world was no longer something to be observed from a safe distance. It was something to be commanded.

The memory ended there, with the feel of the lightning-shard in his hand and the taste of ozone on his tongue.

The white void reclaimed him, but it was now charged with the static of the tempest. Zay understood. His power was a kinship with the raw untamed forces of the atmosphere, awakened when the line between his art and his reality was vaporized by a bolt from the blue. His trigger was the moment the story he was telling reached out from the page and chose him, rewriting him as its protagonist. The knowledge was a storm front in his soul, vast, powerful, and waiting for his command to break.

‎

‎

There was one memory left, the first among them, the one whose fracture had begun to tear their false reality apart. The void, having circled its occupants, finally turned its full unbearable focus onto its architect.

The white dissolved not into a image, but into a profound, sensory deprivation silence, followed by a rising, metallic hum. The air itself seemed to vibrate with impossible energy. She was standing in a vast circular chamber of brushed metal and polished glass, dominated by a colossal ring-shaped structure that filled the center of the room. The Aetherius Collider.

She was Dr. Rue Tziu, astrophysicist, lead theorist on the Quantum Coherence Project. The memory was crisp, professional, and charged with a terrifying anticipation.

“Initializing field stability sequence,” a technician’s voice rang out over the intercom. “T-minus sixty seconds to dark energy injection.”

“All systems are nominal, Dr. Tziu,” her colleague, Dr. Keith, said from the control room beyond the thick glass viewport. He gave her a thumbs-up. She stood on the main floor in her lab coat, a data slate in her hand, wanting to feel the experiment in her bones.

“This is it, Keith,” she said, her voice calm but her heart hammering against her ribs. “The first empirical test of cross-dimensional baryonic leakage. We’re either about to make history, or we’re about to be very, very wrong.”

“Your math is never wrong, Rue,” he replied with a confident smile.

The hum intensified, rising in pitch until it was a physical pressure in the ears. The air within the giant ring began to shimmer, like heat haze over asphalt. At its center, a point of absolute blackness began to form. It wasn't a color; it was an absence, a hole punched through reality.

“We have a coherent singularity!” Keith shouted, his voice ecstatic. “It’s stable! Rue, you’ve done it!”

But Rue’s smile froze. Her data slate was flashing red. Warnings she had theorized about but never believed she’d witness, scrolled across the screen.

“Keith, shut it down! Now!” she yelled, her professional calm shattering. “The containment field is fluctuating! The baryonic shear is off the charts!”

“What? I’m reading nominal—”

The point of blackness pulsed.

It wasn’t an explosion. It was an implosion of physics. The air in the chamber was ripped toward the singularity. Alarms blared a deafening, unified shriek. The lights flickered and died, replaced by the hellish red pulse of emergency beacons.

“Containment breach! Total field collapse!” a panicked voice screamed over the intercom.

The singularity expanded from a point to a basketball-sized sphere of perfect, light-eating black. The gravitational pull became immense. Metal groaned and tools flew from the walls, vanishing into the void.

“Rue, get out of there!” Keith screamed, his face pressed against the control room glass, horror-struck.

But it was too late. The emergency bulkhead doors began to slam down, sealing the chamber. One door, directly between her and the exit, jammed halfway.

The singularity was drifting, uncontrolled, and it was moving toward the jammed door. Toward her.

The team fled but Rue’s eyes were locked on the anomaly. This was her project, her math, her life’s work. She couldn't just leave it. She took a step forward, her mind racing through containment protocols that no longer applied.

The black sphere pulsed. The gravitational pull intensified exponentially. The carbon-nanotube sphere shattered and the singularity, now uncontained, yawned open.

It didn't suck her in. It enveloped her.

One moment she was in the lab, the next she was… nowhere. And everywhere. There was no light, no sound, no sensation of up or down. There was only the crushing, infinite pressure of folded dimensions and the relentless tide of paradox. Time was not a river here; it was a stormy ocean, and she was drowning in every moment at once.

The bulkhead sealed with a final thunderous crash. She collapsed on the other side, breathing in ragged gasps. She was safe. But the memory did not end there.

Her awakening was not a single moment, but a slow, agonizing reassembly of her consciousness around this new, terrifying truth. She didn't gain a power; she shed an illusion. The prison wasn't the black hole; the prison was believing reality was fixed.

The "escape" was as simple and as complex, as deciding to be elsewhere.

There was no struggle, no burst of energy. One moment, she was in the infinite. The next, she was standing in the wreckage of the laboratory, which had been sealed as a tomb for over a year.

She was thin, pale, and dressed in the same lab coat. Her hair had not grown. She looked exactly as she had the day she vanished.

A security guard making his rounds dropped his flashlight. His mouth worked, but no sound came out.

“I… I’d like to go home now,” Rue said, her voice hoarse from disuse, yet eerily calm.

It fast-forwarded through a blur of debriefings, of grim-faced officials, of Keith looking at her with a mixture of awe and fear. The official report stated a catastrophic failure, a contained energy discharge. No singularity. No breach.

But she knew.

The memory then plunged into a deeper, more personal horror. Eighteen months of silence. Official custody. A quiet, sterile room. They asked her the same questions, over and over. How did you survive? What did you see? She couldn't answer. She didn't know. All she knew was that sometimes, in her isolation, the walls would… breathe. Sometimes a glass of water would be a solid cube when she reached for it. She was unstable, a walking paradox, her very presence subtly warping the world around her.

Then, one day, she was just… released. The media circus began. The woman who vanished for eighteen months and reappeared without a scratch. Conspiracies swirled. Was it a cover-up? An alien encounter? Had she even been in the lab at all?

She saw the headlines on a newsstand: “QUANTUM GHOST: The Tziu Enigma.” She looked at her own haunted reflection in the screen of a parked car, and for a split second, the car’s surface rippled like water.

The memory ended there, with the terrifying, unspoken truth: she hadn't just escaped the black hole. She had, in some way she could never articulate, rewritten her escape. Her phasing, the object manifestation—they were the controlled, subconscious expressions of a power that had been forged in the heart of a reality-ending anomaly. Her trigger was not a moment of wanting to move through walls but a moment of needing to convince the universe that a hole in its fabric simply did not exist.

The white void welcomed her back but it was different now. It was no longer an empty prison. It was a blank canvas. Rue understood everything. Her "reality warping" wasn't a new power unlocked by trauma. It was the core of her being, fully realized in the belly of a starless eternity. Her trigger was the total annihilation of her reality and her awakening was the realization that she could build a new one from the pieces.

The seven of them now floated in the void, their pasts laid bare, their origins clear. They were not random victims. They were individuals who had already, in their old lives, touched the impossible and been forever changed by it. They had been selected. And as the last memory settled, the featureless white around them began to subtly shift, the first sign that their shared awakening was about to change the nature of the game.

‎

‎

‎

The return to consciousness was not a gentle awakening, but a violent expulsion from the white void. For Fritz, it was a sudden, gut-wrenching lurch into sensation. The first thing he felt was a profound, unnatural weightlessness, followed immediately by a biting cold that seeped into his bones.

His eyes snapped open.

He was suspended upright inside a clear cylindrical tube, his body floating in a field of nullified gravity. He wore thin, greyish-white scrubs that felt sterile and alien against his skin. Panic, cold and sharp, clawed at his throat. He tried to move his arms, but the fluid, weightless environment made it difficult.

Where…?

His eyes darted around, taking in the nightmare. A row of identical glass tubes stood beside his, each containing a floating, unconscious friend. Krabz, Runey, Zay, Kari, Haze, Rue. Their faces were peaceful, a stark contrast to the horror of their situation. They looked like specimens. Archives of forgotten lives.
Beyond the tubes was a vast, dimly lit laboratory. The air hummed with the low thrum of powerful machinery. Walls of monitors flickered with cascading streams of data and biometric readouts. Gleaming steel tables were littered with complex devices, microscopes, and rows of test tubes filled with liquids that glowed with faint, eerie colors.

The questions came in a dizzying wave but Fritz shoved them down. Answers could wait. Freedom couldn't. He focused on the glass in front of him.

With a grunt of effort, he forced his will through the disorientation. He didn't need to move his hands; the cold was an extension of his being. A spiderweb of frost bloomed from his fingertips, spreading across the interior of the tube with a sharp, crystalline crackle. The molecular structure of the glass grew brittle, stressed to its breaking point.

With a final silent command, he pushed.

The tube didn't just break; it shattered, exploding outward in a cloud of glittering, frozen shards. The anti-gravity field collapsed, and he dropped two feet to the cold, metal floor, stumbling on unsteady legs. The impact was jarring, a brutal confirmation that this was real.
He didn't pause. His friends were still trapped.

He turned to the tube holding Krabz. Repeating the process, he laid his palms against the cool surface. Frost radiated outwards, and with a sharp crack, the glass fractured into a thousand pieces. He lunged forward, his arms shooting out to catch Krabz’s limp body as it slumped from the suspension, absorbing the fall and carefully lowering them to the floor away from the dangerous shards.

One down.

He moved to Runey’s tube.

Crack. Catch. Lower.

Zay’s tube. Crack. The unconscious storm-wielder was quite heavy, but Fritz managed, laying him gently beside Krabz.

Kari. Crack. Catch. Lower.

Haze. Crack. The soldier’s frame was solid, but Fritz’s adrenaline gave him strength.

Finally, Rue. Crack. He caught her with the utmost care, the memory of her reality-shattering screams fresh in his mind.

In less than a minute, the row of pristine tubes was a jagged ruin, the floor around them carpeted in ice-coated glass. His friends lay in a haphazard row on the cold, hard floor, still and silent. The only sound was Fritz’s ragged breathing and the relentless hum of the lab.

He dropped to his knees beside Krabz, his hands trembling as he shook their shoulder. "Krabz. Hey. Krabz, wake up." His voice was a hoarse, desperate whisper. "Come on. Please."
He patted her cheek, a little harder. "Wake up."

A shudder ran through Krabz’s body. Their eyelids fluttered, and the faint, familiar violet light glowed beneath the lids before they slowly opened. They blinked, disoriented, their gaze unfocused before it landed on Fritz’s frantic face.

A wave of sheer, unadulterated relief washed over Fritz, so potent it made him lightheaded. He wasn't alone.

"Fritz…?" Krabz rasped, their voice weak and confused. "What… where is this?"
Fritz could only shake his head, his own confusion and fear reflected in his eyes. "I don't know," he breathed. "But we're out. We're all here."

The first thread of their new reality had been pulled. The rest of the tapestry—and the fight to unravel it—was just beginning.

‎

Krabz’s violet eyes swept the sterile, fortified room, the humming servers, the shattered tubes. A grim understanding settled on their face. "The screens... the tubes," they whispered. "It's exactly what I saw."

"Questions later," Fritz cut in, his voice low and urgent. "We need to get everyone awake and find a way out of this cage."

They moved quickly, shaking shoulders, calling names. One by one, their friends stirred back to consciousness. Zay’s eyes snapped open, lightning crackling in his palms for a split second before he wrestled it under control. Kari was on his feet in a fluid motion, his gaze already sharp and assessing. Haze and Runey came to with gasps, the soldier and the marine biologist instantly shifting into survival mode.

But Rue remained still. No amount of shaking or calling her name elicited a response. She lay pale and silent, a stark contrast to the reality-warping power she contained.

"She's not waking up," Fritz said, a note of panic edging his voice.

Krabz pressed two fingers to Rue’s neck, their own strange vitality sensing the thread of life within her. "Her heartbeat is strong. She's just... deep. Maybe her mind is still somewhere else." The implications were terrifying.

As the others got their bearings, a quiet, frantic energy took over. Kari immediately went to the bank of flickering monitors, his eyes darting across the data streams. "Our names. Biometrics. It's all here. They were monitoring everything."

Haze and Runey moved to a steel desk, finding a stack of physical files. Each was labeled with a name: HAZE, RUNEY, KARI... They flipped one open to see photographs—not from the simulation, but from their old lives—along with complex neurological charts and notes on "Z-XV-09 Activation Thresholds."

At the far end of the room, Fritz and Krabz examined the tables of glowing formulas. "What is all this?" Fritz muttered, looking at a vial of luminescent blue liquid that seemed to pulse with a cold light similar to his own ice.

Zay didn't move from Rue's side, a silent guardian, his body tense and ready to unleash a storm. The air grew thick with unspoken questions. Their memories were back, but they only deepened the mystery. Why were they here? Who had done this?

The slow, deliberate sound of clapping cut through the hum of machinery, each sharp report echoing like a gunshot in the vast, sterile space.

Every one of them froze.

A seamless section of the wall hissed open, a hidden door revealed. Backlit by the harsh, white light of the corridor beyond, three figures stood silhouetted. The door slid shut, plunging the lab back into the dim, screen-lit gloom, but the air had become thick enough to choke on.

The gifted ones shifted as one, forming a ragged defensive line. Zay didn't move from Rue's side, his body a conduit waiting to be grounded. Kari’s hand, hidden behind his back, now held a scalpel snatched from a tray, its edge glinting. Fritz and Krabz turned from the tables, frost and a faint violet energy already gathering at their fingertips. Haze and Runey stepped away from the files, their stances wide and ready.

The three figures stepped forward, their forms resolving in the low light.

The man in the center wore a stark white lab coat, so pristine it seemed to glow. His hair was perfectly silvered, his face unlined, caught in an ageless calm that was more unsettling than any scowl. His eyes, wide and bright with a terrifying kind of awe, swept over them as if observing a miraculous, newly discovered species.

To his right stood a man of average height and build, encased in form-fitting, matte-black combat gear. There was no excessive muscle, no intimidating bulk. His hands rested loosely at his sides, utterly still. It was his gaze that held the threat—flat, impersonal, and moving over each of them with the cold efficiency of a scanner assessing structural weaknesses.

To the lab coat's left was a younger man, perhaps no older than they were, with tousled hair and dressed in loose, dark sweats and a hoodie. His hands were shoved deep into his pockets yet he radiated a coiled intensity. His eyes—sharp and analytical—darted from face to face, cataloging every twitch, every micro-expression, his silence more imposing than any boast.

The man in the lab coat finished his slow, mocking applause, bringing his hands together in a final, soft clap.

"Magnificent," he breathed, his voice a smooth, reverent baritone that slithered through the room. "Truly. The data we recovered from the stress-test simulation was beyond our wildest projections. The physiological and psionic readouts during the terminal stress event... the data is sublime.” His smile was a thin, professional curve, but his eyes burned with a zealot's fire. "Welcome back to the world, my dear subjects. The preliminary observation is complete. Now, we can truly begin."

The young man in the hoodie continued his silent, piercing assessment, while the soldier in black remained a statue of promised violence. The trio stood there, a perfect trinity of madness, logic, and lethal intent, blocking the only exit.

The reality of their situation crashed down with the weight of a collapsing star. This was no simulation. Their lives, their trauma, their very beings had been stripped away and used as fodder for someone else's twisted experiment. The rage that had been simmering since the first death in the jungle now boiled over, a geyser of pure, uncontained fury.

But before a single bolt of lightning could fly or a wall of ice could erupt, the man in the lab coat—the Scientist—merely raised a hand, his fingers outstretched in a casual, almost lazy gesture.

On the floor, Rue’s unconscious body levitated into the air, pulled by an invisible force directly toward him.

"NO!" Zay roared, a fork of lightning crackling to life in his palm. He lunged for her, but a metallic shing cut through the air. The Combatant didn't even move his feet; he simply flicked his wrist. A segmented metal whip, previously coiled at his hip, snapped forward like a viper, its tip deflecting Zay's lightning with a shower of sparks and forcing him to stagger back.

Haze didn't hesitate. He threw his hands forward, and a solid, shimmering barrier of blue energy materialized in the space between the floating Rue and the Scientist. The telekinetic pull strained against it for a split second, and in that opening, Runey darted forward, grabbing Rue out of the air and pulling her back into the safety of their huddled group.

"They're gifted too," Kari hissed, his sharpshooter's eyes missing nothing. "The fighter—metal manipulation. Watch his hands. The scientist is telekinetic. The one in the hoodie... unknown."

"Plan?" Haze barked, his barrier still holding, though it flickered under the Scientist's relentless mental pressure.

"Distraction, then we hit the main one hard," Fritz said, his breath already frosting the air. "I'll blind them."

"Good. Zay, you're with me. We target the Scientist. Kari, Krabz, keep the Hoodie busy. Runey, protect Rue," Haze commanded, the soldier in him taking over.

The Scientist merely chuckled, a dry, academic sound that dripped with condescension. "Oh, this is truly fascinating. The emergent pack dynamics. The futile, beautiful attempt at tactical planning within a controlled environment."

As he spoke, the door behind them hissed open again, flooding the room with blinding white light that silhouetted the three figures, obscuring their features completely. They were still just the Hoodie, the Fighter, and the Scientist. Faceless architects of their pain.

"Now!" Fritz yelled.

He slammed his palms onto the cold floor. A thick, chilling mist erupted from the point of impact, billowing out in an instant wave that filled the room with an opaque, freezing fog, swallowing the three figures.

In the cover of the mist, the group split.

Runey, clutching Rue tightly, used her aquatic agility to slip silently between lab tables, seeking temporary cover.

Zay and Haze moved as one, Zay's body crackling with pent-up energy, Haze maintaining a forward barrier. They headed straight for where the Scientist had been standing.

Kari and Krabz flanked to the right, aiming for the Hoodie. Kari's arm snapped forward, a precision knife flying through the mist with unerring accuracy aimed for the young man's shoulder. At the same time, Krabz slammed a fist onto the tiled floor. The concrete cracked, and a wave of necrotic energy pulsed outward. A dozen skeletal hands, then full torsos, clawed their way up from the broken tiles, shambling toward their target.

The Hoodie guy, who had been silently observing until now, simply sighed, as if annoyed by a minor inconvenience. He lifted his head, and from within the shadow of his hood, his eyes glowed with a sudden, malevolent red.

He didn't move, didn't speak. He just glared.

And the world turned red.

A thick, crimson smoke erupted from him, not a cloud, but a solid wall of hazy, blood-colored light that engulfed Kari, Krabz, and their skeletal army. It didn't smell of anything, but it felt... heavy. It pressed on their minds, distorting their senses. The shambling skeletons froze, disoriented, their bony forms flickering within the red haze. Kari's next knife wavered in his hand, his perfect vision suddenly swimming, the clear lines of the world blurring into a nauseating crimson fog.

The fight dissolved from a coordinated assault into a desperate, fractured struggle. The real battle for their freedom had just begun, and they were already at the dead end.

The Scientist’s sigh was a blade of condescension that cut through the chaos. “Varuna, Priest. A modicum of care, if you please. I need them functional, not flatlined.”

The names landed with the weight of tombstones. Varuna. Priest.

Varuna, the Combatant, became a whirlwind of controlled lethal motion. Fritz’s jagged ice shards, meant to impale, were deflected with sharp clangs from the segmented metal whip that seemed to have a life of its own. Zay’s lightning strikes, which should have been blindingly fast, were anticipated and met with a flash of manipulated metal, grounding the bolts harmlessly into the floor with a sizzle. Haze, attempting to close the distance for a physical strike, found the whip lashing at his ankles, forcing him into a relentless, draining dance of erecting and reinforcing small, personal barriers. They weren't fighting a man; they were fighting a perfectly calibrated defense system.

Meanwhile, within the blood-red haze conjured by Priest, Kari and Krabz were fighting phantoms. The smoke twisted their perceptions, turning Kari’s own reflected image into a snarling doppelgänger that moved with his speed and precision, forcing him into a paralyzing game of lethal chess against himself. Krabz’s skeletal minions, their connection to their master frayed by the illusory field, turned on each other in a mindless orgy of destruction, bones shattering against bones. They were panting, disoriented, and losing ground by the second.

All the while, the Scientist—the Doctor—walked. His steps were measured, unhurried, as if strolling through a park. He moved directly toward Runey, who had laid Rue behind a large server rack.

Runey rose, drew a deep breath to unleash a concussive scream, but the Doctor merely flicked his wrist. An invisible force like a giant open palm, swatted her aside. She crashed into a reinforced wall twenty feet away with a sickening thud, the impact leaving a web of cracks in the concrete before she slumped to the floor motionless.

“Runey!” Haze’s shout was strangled. His momentary distraction was all Varuna needed. The metal whip, impossibly fast, wrapped around Haze’s ankle and yanked, sending him crashing hard onto the cold floor, the breath driven from his lungs.

Fritz, seeing Haze fall, roared and summoned a massive, thick wall of ice between them and Varuna. It was a desperate, defensive move.

Varuna didn't even break stride. His whip retracted and then shot forward, not at the wall, but at its center point. The metal tips glowed white-hot for a fraction of a second before impact, and the entire ice structure exploded inward, as if hit by a high-caliber round, showering Fritz with frozen shrapnel.

“Enough of this,” Zay snarled, his voice cracking with the strain of containing his power. He raised both hands, and the chaotic lightning in the air coalesced, swirling into his grasp. With a grunt of effort, he willed it into form. A blade of pure, crackling white plasma solidified in his hands, humming with destructive energy. “Haze, Fritz! Get Rue! I’ll hold him!”

As Haze scrambled to his feet and Fritz moved to flank, they charged toward the Doctor, who was now calmly hoisting the unconscious Rue over his shoulder.

The Doctor didn't look back. He simply flicked his free hand upward.

Fritz’s forward momentum ceased instantly. He was suspended three feet in the air, trapped in the same kind of null-gravity field they had escaped from. He strained, his face turning red, trying to summon his ice, but the field seemed to disrupt his focus. Frost formed and shattered around his trembling hands without direction. He was utterly, infuriatingly neutralized.

Haze skidded to a halt, his eyes darting from the suspended Fritz to the dissipating red smoke across the room. The crimson haze vanished, revealing a grim scene. Kari was on one knee, bleeding from a cut on his brow, his knives scattered around him. Krabz was heaving, leaning against a broken console, their skeletal army reduced to dust. Standing over them was Priest, his hoodie still pristine, his lips pressed into a thin, unimpressed line. His red eyes glowed with a cold, analytical light, having subdued two of their most capable without appearing to have broken a sweat.

The Doctor adjusted Rue on his shoulder and let out another, weary sigh, as if dealing with particularly unruly children.

“You see?” he said, his voice echoing in the sudden quiet of the lab, broken only by the hum of machines and Zay’s crackling lightning sword. “The data is always the same. Aggression, followed by systemic collapse. The variables are unique, but the outcome is predictably… human.”

He stood there, their captured friend slung over his shoulder, his two attendants having effortlessly dismantled their best efforts. The fight was over. They had lost.

Chapter Text

The sounds were the first thing to pierce the stillness. They were distant, muffled, as if heard from the bottom of a deep well. The crackle of lightning—Zay. The shatter of ice—Fritz. A body hitting a wall—Runey. Haze’s shouted commands, sharp with desperation. Kari’s pained grunt. Krabz’s rushing footsteps.

She could hear them. Her friends. Fighting. Losing.

The white void around her was no longer sterile or empty. It pulsed with a low, thunderous energy, a dark mirror of the storm she knew raged outside her mind. It was a prison of her own consciousness, walls built from the terrifying knowledge she had gained in the belly of that man-made singularity. For eighteen months, she’d seen the code of the universe and understood that reality was a fragile consensus, easily broken.

And she was the breaking point.

Every catastrophe since the crash was a ripple from the stone she had dropped. The warped cars, the unstable bridges, the friends lost—not to a random apocalypse, but to her. She was the variable that destabilized the equation. A scientist who had become a natural disaster.

Young yet old. A woman in her prime who had felt galaxies die.

Knew everything yet nothing. She understood the fabric of spacetime but didn't know how to save her friends from the monsters her existence had attracted.

This wasn't right. This laboratory, this torment, this reduction of their lives to data points… it was the ultimate perversion of the truth she carried. They were manipulating the fundamental forces of existence, and they were using her family as their test subjects.

The void around her shuddered. The pulsing energy condensed, drawn by the gravity of her will. The screams of her friends were no longer distant echoes; they were cords, tethering her to them, pulling her back.

‎

‎

‎

The laboratory was a tableau of defeat. Haze scrambled over to where Kari and Krabz lay battered and gasping on the cold floor, their fight against Priest's illusions having left them with psychic wounds that bled more than any physical injury. Priest himself stood over them, a silent, hooded sentinel, his hands stuffed in his pockets as if he'd just finished a casual stroll, not a brutal psychological dismantling.

Across the room, Varuna gave a slight, almost imperceptible flick of his wrist. His segmented whip, which had been a blur of defensive and offensive motion against Zay, retracted smoothly, coiling back at his hip with a series of soft, metallic clicks. Zay stood panting, the lightning sword in his hand sputtering and dying. Sweat dripped into his eyes, his body trembling from the strain of manifesting and maintaining such a concentrated form of raw energy.

A low groan drew Haze's attention. Runey was pushing herself up from the rubble of the crater her body had made in the wall. She staggered, one hand pressed to her ribs, the other braced against the cracked concrete for balance.

The Doctor adjusted his grip on the unconscious Rue slung over his shoulder. He surveyed the scene—his gifted subjects, broken and exhausted; his attendants, poised and victorious. He shook his head, a disappointed mentor reviewing a failed test.

"Predictable. The emotional response always overrides tactical—" he began, his lecture cut short as he casually released his telekinetic hold on Fritz.

Fritz dropped like a stone, hitting the floor with a painful thud. He gasped, the air forced from his lungs, his body aching from the sudden return of gravity.

In that exact moment, Priest moved.

His head turned slightly, his glowing red eyes meeting Varuna's for a fraction of a second—a silent, pre-arranged signal.

The Doctor's eyes widened, his professional composure cracking. "What are you—?"

It was too late. Priest's eyes blazed, and a thick, crimson smoke erupted from him once more. But this time, it did not target the gifted. It flooded the entire laboratory, a tidal wave of hazy red light that swallowed consoles, tables, and people alike.

The Doctor froze, his sentence dying in his throat as the smoke enveloped him. A strangled gasp escaped his lips, his eyes going wide with a horror that was not physical, but profoundly internal. The telekinetic grip on Rue vanished as he was violently plunged into the deepest, most personal chambers of his own psyche, trapped in an illusion crafted from his own darkest fears and failures.

"Treachery..." he managed to whisper, his voice a hollow echo before the red smoke consumed him completely.

While Priest focused his entire will on immobilizing the Doctor, Varuna was already in motion. With the same effortless precision he'd used in defense, his whip snapped forward. But it didn't strike a person. The metallic segments wrapped gently, almost tenderly, around Rue's torso, and with a careful pull, she was lifted from the Doctor's shoulder and drawn smoothly through the crimson haze into Varuna's waiting arms. He caught her, adjusting her weight over his own shoulder with the efficiency of a soldier securing vital equipment.

The other gifted ones could only watch, stunned and disoriented. The red smoke was not hostile to them this time; it was merely an environment, a bloody fog obscuring their vision and muffling sound. They saw the Doctor, statue-still, his face a mask of silent torment. They saw Varuna, now holding Rue, standing beside Priest, whose brow was furrowed in concentration, maintaining the overwhelming psychic assault on their former master. The command from Priest cut through the disorienting red haze, sharp and undeniable. "Go!"

It was Varuna who translated the order into action, his metal whip cracking against the laboratory floor like a gunshot, the sound a violent punctuation to their stunned hesitation. The message was clear: Move. Now.

Confusion warred with the base instinct for survival. These were the men who had just systematically dismantled them. Yet, the sight of the Doctor, frozen in a private hell of Priest's making, was a convincing argument. This was no trick.

Driven by a fresh surge of adrenaline, the gifted staggered into motion. Haze hauled Kari to his feet, supporting the unsteady sharpshooter while Krabz, leaning on a console, helped a wincing Runey. Fritz scrambled up, his body aching from the telekinetic suspension.

Varuna didn't wait for a consensus. He moved to Zay and, with a surprising gentleness, transferred the unconscious Rue into his arms. "We don't have much time," Varuna stated, his voice a low, urgent rumble. "This way."

He turned and led them at a run out of the shattered laboratory and into a stark, fluorescent-lit hallway. Their hurried footsteps echoed off the sterile walls, a frantic drumbeat in the unnerving silence of the facility.

Fritz, his breath misting in the cold air, was the first to voice the question burning in all of them. "Why!?" he gasped, running alongside Varuna. "You just tried to kill us! Why help us now?"

Varuna didn't break stride, but he glanced back, his gaze sweeping over their battered forms. "We were following orders. His orders." He gestured vaguely back towards the lab. "We are as much his captives as you are." As he ran, he tilted his head forward, pulling down the high collar of his combat suit to reveal the nape of his neck. There, stark against his skin, was a fresh, brutal stitch line, the flesh around it still angry and red. "He implants chips. For control. Priest and I removed ours. You don't have them. He didn't need to chip you. You are the final stage of this entire project. The reason for all of it."

The revelation landed like a physical blow, adding a new layer of horror to their predicament. They weren't just subjects; they were the culmination.

"Final stage for what?" Haze demanded, his voice tight as he supported Kari.

"Later," Varuna insisted, veering around a corner. "The Central Room. All the data is there. Everything. We need to reach it before Priest's hold breaks."

Zay adjusted his grip on Rue, her dead weight a constant terrifying reminder of their most vulnerable member. In the frantic rush, he barely registered the slight, shallow quality of her breathing, the distress signal from her body drowned out by the pounding of feet and the hammering of their own hearts. They ran, following a former enemy through a maze of their own imprisonment, chasing answers that promised to be worse than the questions.

The facility was a labyrinth of sterile white corridors and identical, heavy doors, a mind-numbing maze designed to disorient and imprison. Varuna led them with a soldier’s certainty, his movements economical and swift. The only sounds were their ragged breathing, the slap of their feet on the polished floor, and the occasional, hair-raising blare of a distant alarm that Priest must have triggered.

Zay’s arms burned with the strain of carrying Rue. It was only then, in the relative quiet of the run, that he noticed the alarming change. Her breathing was no longer just shallow; it was rapid and faint, a desperate, fluttering rhythm against his chest. Her skin was pale and clammy.

“She’s getting worse,” Zay gritted out, not breaking his stride.

Varuna glanced back, his expression unreadable. “The Doctor’s telekinesis was a suppression field. It doesn’t just hold the body. It stifles active neural patterns, especially psionic ones. For her… it’s like suffocating her soul.”

The explanation was cold, clinical, and terrifying. They pushed harder.

After what felt like an eternity of turns, Varuna skidded to a halt before a massive, circular door made of reinforced steel. It was unlike any other they had seen. A keypad and a retinal scanner were set beside it.

“The Central Room,” Varuna stated. He placed his eye against the scanner. A red laser swept his retina. He input a long, complex code. With a deep, hydraulic hiss, the massive door recessed and slid sideways, revealing the heart of the nightmare.

The room was vast and circular, its walls comprised entirely of seamless, glowing screens. A galaxy of data swirled across them: live biometric feeds, complex genetic sequences, brainwave activity maps, and video logs of their every moment in the simulation—from the plane crash to Fulmer’s sacrifice. In the center of the room was a raised dais holding a single, sleek console.

“Get her on the platform,” Varuna ordered, already moving to the console. “The central node has a medical stabilizer. It might counteract the suppression.”

Zay didn’t need telling twice. He laid Rue gently on the cool, illuminated surface of the platform. A soft, blue light emanated from it, enveloping her body. Almost immediately, the terrifying shallowness of her breath evened out slightly, though she remained unconscious.

As the others staggered in, their eyes were drawn to the walls. They saw themselves, over and over. Haze creating his first barrier against the grenade. Krabz waking in the morgue. Fritz being dug out of the ice. Runey breathing water in the deep. Zay catching the lightning. Fulmer swallowing the forest fire. And Rue, phasing through the plane’s cockpit door.

“What is all this?” Runey whispered, her voice hushed with a kind of reverent horror.

“Project Chimera,” Varuna said, his fingers flying across the central console. Schematics of their own brains highlighted with strange glowing nodes, replaced the video logs on the main screen. “The Doctor’s life work. The synthesis of latent psionic potential awakened through extreme trauma.”

He pulled up a file simply labeled: SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION.

HAZE - TK-Type: Barrier Genesis. Trigger: Proximity Death of Comrades.
KRABZ - NECRO-Type: Thanatic Rejection. Trigger: Clinical Death.
KARI - META-Type: Particulate Transmigration & Ocular Hyper-Precision. Trigger: Constant High-Stress Precision Work.
RUNEY - AQUA-Type: Abyssal Symbiosis & Sonic Compression. Trigger: Drowning.
FRITZ - CRYO-Type: Absolute Zero Stasis. Trigger: Avalanche Burial.
ZAY - ATMOS-Type: Electrokinesis & Atmospheric Manipulation. Trigger: Direct Lightning Strike.
RUE - REAL-Type: Reality Weaving & Conceptual Manifestation. Trigger: Spacetime Anomaly Containment.

“He didn’t give you your powers,” Varuna said, his voice flat. “He found you. He identified the moment each of you awakened on your own, out in the world. Then he harvested you. This…” He gestured at the screens showing the jungle, the city, the braindead. “…was the crucible. A high-stress simulation to force your abilities to evolve, to break their limits.”

The truth was a cold knife twisting in their guts. Their entire shared hell had been a lab experiment.

“And you?” Haze asked, his eyes fixed on Varuna.

“We are Phase Two,” a new voice said from the doorway.

They all spun. Priest stood there, leaning heavily against the frame. He looked exhausted, a trickle of blood seeping from his nose. The red glow in his eyes was dim. “The Doctor’s… personal guard. Psychically grafted soldiers, chipped for obedience. I am an EMP-Type. Emotional and Sensory Manipulation. Varuna is a FERRO-Type. Magnetic Metalokinesis.”

“The Doctor?” Fritz asked, his hand instinctively forming a shard of ice.

“Buying us minutes. No more,” Priest panted. “His will is… formidable.”

As if on cue, the lights in the Central Room flickered. A low, resonant hum began to build in the walls, a sound of immense power stirring.

“He’s breaking free,” Varuna said, his calm finally cracking. “We have to move. Now.”

In the absolute quiet of her own mind, Rue began the meticulous work of correction.

The white void was no longer a prison of chaotic energy, but a clean, dark slate. Here, the screams of her friends were not triggers for disaster, but data points. The Doctor’s condescending voice was not a taunt, but a variable in a flawed equation. Her own guilt, that crushing, singular weight, was compartmentalized, analyzed, and filed away. It was a symptom, not the cause. The cause was a fundamental misalignment between her will and her power.

No more, she thought, and the thought had the force of a universal constant. No more destruction born from my fear. No more friends sacrificed for my instability. This ends now.

She began rewriting the code of her own being. Line by line, she replaced panic with precision, terror with focus. The catastrophic potential of her power wasn't locked away; it was simply waiting for a programmer who wasn't afraid of the terminal. She was that programmer.

Consciousness returned not as a jolt, but as a slow, deliberate boot-up sequence.

The first thing she felt was the cold of the dais against her back. The second was the hum of the stabilizer field, a crude but effective program keeping her systems from crashing. She opened her eyes.

And the world slowed to a crawl.

The air in the Central Room thickened, light bending and warping around her in a gentle, visible haze. It wasn't the violent tearing of before; it was a deliberate, localized alteration of physical laws. With a she had never known, Rue sat up.

As she pushed herself up, time within the bubble seemed to stretch and slow. Sound became a distant, drawn-out hum. The frantic movements of her friends, Varuna’s shout, the Doctor’s entrance at the doorway—all became a slow-motion tableau.

When her bare feet made contact with the cold, tiled floor, the solid surface did not crack. Instead, it yielded, a perfect, concentric ripple spreading out from the point of contact as if the floor were the surface of a still pond.

She stood.

Each step she took towards the center of the room was a silent proclamation of control. With every footfall, another set of ripples shimmered across the floor, the very matter of the world acknowledging her passage. Time itself seemed to hold its breath, the frantic shouts of her friends and the hum of the machines stretched into a low, drawn-out drone.

She exhaled a slow measured breath. In that exhale, the slowed-time bubble collapsed.

Sound and motion rushed back in a gasp.

They all saw her at once. Standing calmly in the middle of the room where there had been nothing a second before. Her posture was different—not the brittle tension of before, but a poised unnerving stillness. Her eyes  held a depth that had not been there before, seeing the world not just as it was, but as it could be.

Shock rendered the room silent.

Krabz’s hands were raised, necrotic energy swirling. Fritz had a jagged spire of ice forming in his palm. Kari’s arm was cocked back, a precision knife poised to fly.

Rue broke a small, reassuring smile. It was a tired smile, but it was genuine. She raised a single hand, palm out, in a clear, gentle command to stop. Not a flicker of power accompanied the gesture, only a profound and certain authority.

Her gaze swept over them, acknowledging their protectiveness, their rage, their confusion. Then, it landed on the Doctor, who had just forced his way into the Central Room, his hair disheveled, his lab coat askew.

But his eyes… his eyes held no anger at his attendants' betrayal, no frustration at their escape. They were wide, blazing with a manic, rapturous awe fixed solely on Rue. He looked like a pilgrim who had finally witnessed a miracle.

Rue held his gaze, her own expression unreadable. She knew what he was. Another anomaly. A variable of immense power and twisted intent.

The Doctor took a staggering step forward, his voice a whisper of pure, religious fervor.

"You… you've achieved localized temporal manipulation. Not as a side effect… but with full control." He was trembling. "You've stabilized the field. You're… you're perfect."

“Enough,” she said, her voice not a shout but a statement that seemed to still the very air.

With a flick of her wrist, so slight it was almost casual, she began to rewrite him.

The Doctor’s scream was cut short, not by silence, but by a sound that should not exist—a wet, unraveling tear of reality itself. His body didn’t bleed or break. It distorted. His limbs stretched like taffy, torso compressing and twisting, face a melting canvas of horror. Matter itself ceased to obey its own laws around him, undergoing a horrendous incomprehensible spaghettification, as if an invisible localized singularity had chosen him alone. He was a painting being wiped away with a solvent that dissolved the very canvas. One moment he was a shrieking knot of unraveling physics, the next, he was simply… absent. Ceased.

The silence he left behind was heavier than any sound.

For a long moment, no one moved. The only evidence that he had ever existed was the lingering psychic imprint of his final, silent scream.

Then, the collective tension that had been holding them all upright shattered.

A shuddering disbelieving breath escaped Haze first. He didn’t cheer or collapse. He simply bent forward bracing his hands on his knees, head bowed as the full weight of their ordeal, and its sudden violent end crashed down on him. The soldier, finally off duty.

Zay let out a sharp explosive breath, the static charge that had been clinging to him dissipating into the air. He looked from the empty space where the Doctor had been to Rue, his expression a complex mix of awe, fear, and a profound weary gratitude.

Fritz’s clenched fists uncurled, the frost receding from his fingers. He blinked as if waking from a nightmare, his body slumping against a console. The relentless cold inside him seemed to momentarily still.

Runey, still leaning against the wall for support, let her head fall back with a soft thud. A single clean tear traced a path through the grime on her cheek, not of sadness but of sheer overwhelming release.

Kari slowly, deliberately, lowered his throwing arm. The precision knife clattered to the floor, the sound unnaturally loud in the quiet. He stared at it, then at Rue, his sharpshooter’s mind trying and failing to calculate the trajectory of what had just happened.

Krabz let their hands fall, the violet light in their eyes dimming to a soft glow. They looked at the spot of the Doctor’s erasure not with their usual necromantic understanding but with a deep quiet shock. This was a death beyond their jurisdiction.

Varuna and Priest exchanged a single, loaded glance. They, who had lived under the Doctor’s thumb for who knows how long, simply stood in stunned silence. The puppet strings had been vaporized.

Rue took a deep, steadying breath, the first that felt truly her own in a long time. She met the stunned gazes of her friends and their unlikely allies.

“It’s over,” she said, her voice soft but clear, carrying an undeniable finality. “He’s gone. Forever.”

A collective sigh of relief, palpable and warm, filled the cold, sterile room. Shoulders slumped. Jaws unclenched. It was not a celebration, but a decompression. The immediate, monstrous threat had been erased from existence.

But as the adrenaline faded, it left behind only the hollow echo of the laboratory and the vast, unsettling silence of a future they had never dared to imagine. The fight was over. What came next was a blank page, and they were all standing in a room full of ghosts, both digital and very, very real.

"I will explain everything," she began, her voice low but clear, cutting through the static of their shock. "This... all of this... I am the pivot."

She drew a slow breath as if steadying herself against the weight of the truth. "When I was trapped in the singularity for those eighteen months, the reality I came from—my original reality—was destroyed. Erased. I was supposed to be erased with it. But I... I escaped." Her gaze was distant, seeing a horror they could barely conceive. "In doing so, I broke a fundamental rule. I am an anomaly. A ghost from a deleted timeline, existing where I shouldn't. And the course of nature... it corrects for anomalies."

The whiplash of the revelation was physical. Haze’s jaw tightened. Runey’s hand went to her mouth.

Kari, ever analytical, was the first to find his voice. "How are we related to any of this? What does this have to do with us?"

"This," Rue said, gesturing to the laboratory around them, "is yourversion of reality. A world where gifted individuals like you were identified and... collected. For human advancement. The Doctor and his project were a part of your world's natural progression, however twisted." She paused, her brow furrowing. "But he wasn't supposed to be this powerful, this obsessed. My presence here, a foreign variable in the code of this universe and caused distortions. It amplified his ambitions, corrupted the project's parameters. Things don't add up because I'm here, making everything unstable."

Krabz’s violet eyes narrowed. "The memories we saw in the void... our awakenings. Were they real?"

"They were," Rue confirmed, her tone firm yet compassionate. "He stripped you from your lives. Your trauma, your power—it was all real. He was just a thief, capitalizing on your suffering for his own obsession."

Zay’s voice was a low rumble. "If you weren't supposed to be in our reality... then who was?"

Rue’s gaze drifted across the room, landing with a soft, sad finality on Varuna who was supporting a weary Priest. A silent understanding passed between them.

Priest, catching her look, answered for them, voice raspy. "The people who died in the simulation... HD, Gon, Onions, Crisis, Syndi, Noah... they were part of the previous 'stage'. Disposable variables, used to apply the right kind of pressure, to trigger your final breakthrough."

The cold, clinical explanation of their friends' deaths was a fresh blow.

But Fritz wasn't finished. "Julian," he interjected. "He knew what was going on. He tried to tell us."

At the name, Varuna’s head snapped up, his eyes widening for a fraction of a second before his mask of control slid back into place. Priest’s lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line.

"Julian was a gifted," Varuna said, the words clipped. "An ONIRO-Type. He could jump into minds, control memories, destroy them or fabricate new ones. The Doctor used him as a battery—a central processor for the final stage simulation. He... overextended. The strain, the constant rewriting... we assume it killed him."

"That explains how he knew so much," Fritz muttered, piecing it together. "But why was he always with Fulmer?"

Rue cut in, her voice heavy with a grim cosmic irony. "Because Fulmer was supposed to be in my stead." She looked at the faces of her friends, letting the awful truth settle. "In the original timeline of this reality—the one without me—Fulmer was the final piece. The catalyst. My existence here forced a substitution. She was subtracted from her intended role and inserted as just another variable in our journey. My presence is causing catastrophic miscalculations in the fabric of this world."

Haze finally voiced the question hanging over them all, the soldier assessing the ultimate threat. "Rue... if you stay here with us, will these... corrections... keep happening? Will this world keep trying to kill you?” A final breath followed as he spoke the final phrase, “And will we be caught in the crossfire?"

A shuddering breath escaped from Rue’s lips and met his gaze. Slowly, she nodded. "The instability is inherent to my existence here. It's a law of the universe. It will not stop."

A profound silence filled the room. The relief of the Doctor's death was instantly overshadowed by the terrifying, infinite scope of their new problem. They had escaped a cage only to find themselves on a raft in a reality that was fundamentally hostile to one of their own.

"But," Rue said, her voice firming, pulling them back from the brink of despair. "We cannot solve that here." She looked toward the doorway of the central room and the halls outside, her senses now fully awake, picking up the distant escalating whine of facility security systems. "Our first priority is to get out of this facility. Now."

They stood before the massive, reinforced door, the final barrier between the sterile hell of the facility and the world they had been stolen from. The air was thick with the metallic taste of ozone and the sharp scent of their own fear. Fritz supported Krabz, whose steps were still unsteady. Zay had an arm around Kari, the sharpshooter leaning heavily on him. Varuna and Priest stood shoulder-to-shoulder, a united front forged in rebellion. Haze carefully held Runey, her face pale with pain from her injured ribs.

It was then that Rue gently extracted herself from Runey’s side, guiding the marine biologist’s arm fully into Haze’s care.

Haze looked at her, confused. “Rue?”

She took several slow steps backward, creating a space between herself and the group. The air around her seemed to grow still, charged with a terrible finality.

“I can’t go with you,” she said, voice quiet but absolute.

A wave of disbelief and protest broke over them. “What are you talking about?” Zay demanded, his voice cracking.

“If I come with you, the disasters will only follow,” Rue explained, her gaze sweeping over each of their faces, memorizing them. “I’m a paradox here. The universe will keep trying to correct itself, and you… will always be in the crossfire. I lost my reality. I won’t be the reason you lose yours.”

Haze recognized the look in her eyes—the same resolute acceptance he’d seen in the faces of soldiers making a last stand. “Rue, don’t,” he said, his voice low and strained. “There has to be another way.”

“This is the only way,” she replied, offering a small, sad smile. “It’s okay. Maybe… maybe one day you’ll meet the version of me that belongs here.”

She took another step back, and then another. Their calls became desperate, a chorus of her name—Rue!—filled with anguish and denial.

Behind her, the air tore open. Not with a violent scream but with a silent, profound rip in the fabric of everything. It was a window into the featureless hungry void from which she had once escaped. The pull was immediate and gentle, but inexorable.

“Live your lives,” she whispered with the most gentle smile amidst the disasters they’ve faced, her voice the last solid thing in the dissolving space between them.

The void drew her in, her form stretching and fading into the absolute nothingness. The rip sealed itself with a final silent stitch, leaving no trace she had ever been there.

For a moment there was only stunned silence, broken by Runey’s quiet sob against Haze’s shoulder. Haze stared at the empty space, head bowed in defeat. Zay clenched his fists, lightning dancing uselessly between his fingers. Kari turned away, his sharp eyes unable to bear the void she had left behind. Frost spread uncontrollably from Fritz’s trembling hands, while Krabz bit their lip hard enough to draw blood, their violet eyes glistening.

Into the grief, Priest’s voice was a calm cold anchor. “She did what was necessary to preserve your reality.”

Varuna nodded, his gaze fixed on the door. “The path is clear. Beyond this, you can reclaim what was taken from you.”

The grief was a physical weight but the instinct to survive was stronger. With a heavy hydraulic hiss, the final door slid open. A wave of blinding natural daylight rushed in, so bright it made them flinch after the artificial gloom of the facility. It was the light of a world they had thought lost forever. Through the losses and the heavy, universe-shattering truth, they stepped forward together, into the uncertain promise of their own stolen lives.

‎

‎

‎

‎

‎

Deep within the labyrinthine halls of the abandoned facility, in a sub-level sealed off from the main escape route, a single persistent beep echoed in the dark.

Beep… Beep… Beep…

It came from a solitary immersion tube, illuminated from within by a soft aquatic glow. The tube was filled with a clear oxygenated fluid and suspended within it was a figure—a young man with dark hair floating around his still face. The glossy refracted light from the water danced across the walls of the otherwise dark room.

His eyes snapped open.

There was no disorientation, no slow awakening. Only a sharp immediate consciousness. He brought a hand forward, palm flat against the reinforced glass. With a single effortless push, the entire tube shattered.

Water and shards of glass exploded outward, crashing onto the cold tile floor in a great wave. He landed in the center of the wreckage with a sluggish yet deliberate grace, his body adjusting to gravity and open air after an immeasurable time in suspension.

Water dripped from his hair and simple grey scrubs as he walked, his bare feet sloshing through the puddle. He stopped before a dead control screen. With a tap of his finger, the monitor flickered to life casting a pale blue light on his face.

It displayed a file, simple and stark.

SUBJECT: JULIAN
STATUS: TERMINATED
ABILITY: ONIRO-TYPE (DORMANT)

Chapter Text

Three Years Later

The world softened into something resembling normalcy.

Haze stood a little straighter, the weight of his military honors a tangible counterbalance to the ghosts he carried. The discipline remained but the constant tension in his shoulders had eased. Runey’s world was once again the crush of the deep and the silence of research vessels, her connection to the water now a source of peace rather than trauma. Kari’s hands which could disassemble reality at a molecular level, now designed the future in a pristine engineering firm, his precision earning him a corner office and quiet respect. Zay’s storms were confined to the page and the silver screen, his bestselling novels and their film adaptations channeling the tempest within into art. Krabz found solace in the roar of jet engines, working in aviation logistics, forever close to the machines that represented both her crash and her freedom. Fritz rode powder-white slopes, the cold now a companion rather than a weapon, his name featured in extreme sports magazines.

Varuna had traded a metal whip for a stylus and welding torch, his innate understanding of form and structure making him a sought-after graphic designer and metalwork artist. Priest, in the quiet hush of a library, found a different kind of order, his sharp mind categorizing knowledge instead of manipulating perceptions.

The idea came to Runey on a sunny afternoon. A reunion. A chance to see the faces that had shared her nightmare as free people. She sent out the invitations, and one by one the replies trickled in—a hesitant yes from Zay, a warm confirmation from Haze, a noncommittal but promising "I'll try" from Krabz.

The day arrived at a small, sun-drenched cafe with warm brick walls and the rich aroma of coffee. Runey was the first, choosing a large table. Haze arrived next, his smile genuine as he hugged her, a quiet understanding passing between them. Kari and Zay came together, their dynamic still that of the strategist and the storm, but now tempered by an easy camaraderie. They were followed by Varuna, who looked years younger without the weight of servitude, and then Priest, who took the seat beside him, a rare small smile gracing his lips.

The last to arrive were Fritz and Krabz, their fingers intertwined. Kari spotted it first, raising an eyebrow with a teasing grin that soon spread around the table, erupting into warm laughter and the comfortable chatter of old friends who had seen the worst of each other and chosen to remember the best.

For a beautiful fleeting hour, it was just that: friends catching up. The nightmare was a closed book.

Then the cafe staff approached with their drink order.

She moved between the tables with a easy grace, a tray balanced on her palm. It was when she reached their table that the world seemed to hold its breath. One by one, their conversations died mid-sentence. Eyes widened. Stares locked.

It was Rue.

Or rather, a woman who looked exactly like her. The same face, the same eyes, the same hair. But this woman’s expression was lighter, unburdened by cosmic dread or the weight of reality itself. She hummed softly as she carefully placed each drink on the table, oblivious to the stunned silence she had created.

Krabz let out a soft, sharp gasp.

Only when the last cup was down did the woman—the Rue lookalike—notice their frozen attention. She blinked, a faint, friendly confusion on her face. "Is everything alright?" she asked, her voice a familiar melody without the haunting echo. "Can I get you anything else?"

The table was speechless. It was Varuna who found his voice first, his tone carefully neutral. "No, thank you. It's just... you look like someone we used to know."

The woman’s face broke into a bright, easy chuckle. "Oh, I get that sometimes! Well, enjoy your drinks." She gave them a final polite smile and moved away, weaving through the other tables without a glance back.

Their gazes followed her until she disappeared into the back. Zay cleared his throat, pulling everyone's attention back to the table. "That must be her," he said quietly. "The one from our reality. The one who belonged here all along."

Runey nodded, a bittersweet smile touching her lips. "She seems... happy. Lighter. I'm glad for her."

Fritz, ever the one to break tension with action, grinned. "So, do we try to befriend her?"

Haze considered it, his soldier's eyes tracking the path the waitress had taken. He took a slow sip of his coffee. "You know," he said, a thoughtful look on his face. "That might not be a bad idea at all."

The warm comfortable chatter around the table had just begun to flow again when it happened. A voice, cold and clear as shattering glass, echoed directly inside their minds, bypassing their ears entirely.

“Look outside.”

The command was impossible to ignore. As one, their heads turned toward the large glass window of the cafe, eyes drawn across the busy street to the opposite sidewalk.

There standing perfectly still amidst the flowing crowd, was a young man with dark unruly hair and an unnervingly calm expression. He met their collective gaze without blinking.

Priest was the first to speak aloud, his voice a low whisper. “Julian.”

A ripple of shock went through the group. Varuna’s hand tightened around his coffee cup. “That’s not possible. The simulation broke him. We saw it. The feedback… it should have burned out his mind.”

As if in answer, Julian’s voice coiled through their thoughts once more. “If you want to survive what is coming, you will come to find me.” Then, he simply turned and stepped off the curb, vanishing into a sudden surge of pedestrians as a tour bus rolled past.

The cozy reunion was shattered. Priest and Varuna were on their feet in an instant, moving with their old lethal coordination. They were out the cafe door and across the street in seconds, but by the time they pushed through the crowd, the sidewalk was empty. Julian was gone.

The chase was short therefore they returned inside, to the table, their expressions grim. “He’s a ghost,” Varuna stated, sinking back into his chair.

Haze was already analyzing the threat. “This ‘catastrophe’ he mentioned… it must be the final correction Rue warned us about. The timeline trying to fully right itself.”

Fritz and Zay exchanged a weary look. “So we’re back in the game,” Zay sighed, the familiar crackle of energy faint in the air around him. “Chasing ghosts for the truth.”

While the others were frozen by Julian’s apparition, Runey’s gaze had drifted back to the counter, to the young woman who looked like Rue, who was still blissfully unaware, wiping down an espresso machine. A determination settled on Runey’s face. She stood, and Krabz who sensed her intent, rose with her. They walked to the counter, engaging the lookalike in a soft brief conversation. A moment later they returned, Runey holding a small slip of paper with a phone number written on it.

Meanwhile at the table, Priest’s mind was racing, his analytical abilities kicking in. “If Julian is alive—preserved or resurrected somehow—then the principle of reversal might apply to others.”

The implication hung in the air for a moment before it clicked for Haze. His eyes widened. “Fulmer,” he breathed. “If the anomaly is gone… if the timeline is reasserting itself… then she should be here. She has to be.”

Runey and Krabz rejoined the group, placing the slip of paper with the Rue lookalike’s number in the center of the table. It was a tangible connection to a normal world that was once again slipping away from them.

They looked at each other—the soldier, the engineer, the storm-wielder, the necromancer, the snowboarder, the marine biologist, and the two reformed wardens. The simple joy of their reunion was gone, now replaced by the heavy mantle of a shared destiny. The choice was before them: ignore the warning and risk an unknown doom, or step back into the shadows and chase a ghost for answers.

A collective resigned breath was drawn and released. The decision was made without a word being spoken. Whatever this was, whatever doom Julian prophesied, they would face it together. The hunt was on.

Chapter Text

The thawing of Fritz’s perpetual winter began, unexpectedly, with a single chattering skeleton.

It was about six months after their escape. Fritz was living in a small minimalist apartment, the thermostat set to a temperature that would make most people wear another layer of sweater. He was trying to live a normal life, to channel the cold within him into the controlled environment of a professional snowboarder's training. But the silence of the apartment was deafening, and the memories of the simulation were like ice shards in his veins.

A soft, almost timid knock sounded at his door. He opened it to find Krabz, shifting nervously from foot to foot, hands hidden in the pockets of a oversized hoodie. It’s been a while since he had a visitor, and from Krabz no less.

“Hey,” she said, voice raspy. “I, uh… I tried to make a squirrel. To keep me company. It… went wrong.”

They held out their hand. In their palm sat a tiny skeletal bird, its bones intricately detailed but utterly incorrect. It twitched, its beak opening and closing with a faint click-clack sound, a pathetic chattering shiver running through its ribcage.

Fritz stared at the shivering skeleton. Then, a sound escaped him that he hadn’t heard in a year—a short, sharp burst of laughter.

Krabz’s worried expression melted into a relieved smile. “It’s not funny! It thinks it’s cold!”

“Everything is cold to you,” Fritz retorted but he stepped aside, gesturing for her to enter. The tiny, faulty skeleton became a permanent chattering fixture on his windowsill, a silent testament to the day the ice around his heart first cracked.

Their friendship was built on a foundation of shared impossible survival. They didn’t need to talk about the avalanche or the morgue; the knowledge was in the quiet spaces between their words. Krabz would come over and Fritz would make them coffee, deliberately letting a little frost creep up the side of the mug just to see them roll their glowing violet eyes. In return, Krabz would listen, truly listen, when Fritz talked about the pressure of competitions, the ghost of the past sometimes echoing in the roar of a crowd.

The shift started during their second winter. Fritz had a big qualifying event in the Alps. He’d mentioned it offhandedly; Krabz showed up at the airport, a duffel bag slung over their shoulder.

“You shouldn’t be alone out there,” she said simply yet a smile formed in their lips.

In the mountains, something changed. Watching Fritz fly down the slopes; a master of the very element that had once tried to kill him, Krabz felt a surge of something more than camaraderie. He was beautiful in his element, a poem of motion and cold. And Fritz, seeing Krabz waiting for him at the bottom of the run, her face bright and unburdened in the crisp mountain air, felt the defensive chill within him warm by several degrees.

That night, in a quiet lodge, they sat by a roaring fire. The heat was oppressive for Fritz, comforting for Krabz.

“Does it ever bother you?” Krabz asked quietly, staring into the flames. “What we can do? That we’re… different?”

Fritz looked at his hands. “It used to. The cold… it used to feel like a curse. A reminder of everyone I couldn’t save.” He flexed his fingers, a tiny perfect snowflake crystallizing in his palm before melting away. “But now… it’s just a part of me. Like your… well, everything about you.”

Krabz met his gaze, and the usual violet light in her eyes seemed softer and warmer. “I like this part of you,” she said with a tone that seemed endearing.

The third year brought a new intimacy. Fritz found himself seeking out Krabz’s calm, grounded presence after a stressful day. Krabz, in turn, started dragging Fritz out of his icy apartment and into the world—to noisy markets, to quiet parks, to an aviation museum where they spent hours with Krabz pointing out plane models with a passionate nerdy glee that Fritz found utterly endearing.

The final barrier fell on a rainy autumn evening. They were at Fritz’s place watching a movie. A tense scene came on and without thinking, Krabz reached over and took his hand.

Fritz froze. Not from the cold, but from the sudden shocking warmth of the contact. He looked down at their intertwined fingers, then at Krabz who was looking at the screen, a faint blush on their cheeks.

Slowly, carefully, he turned his hand and laced his fingers through theirs.

They sat like that for the rest of the movie, not saying a word. The chattering of the tiny skeletal bird on the windowsill was the only sound, a familiar comforting rhythm in the warm quiet room. When the credits rolled, Fritz turned to Krabz.

“Stay?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper.

Krabz simply nodded, a small sure smile on their lips.

⠀⠀⠀

⠀⠀⠀

It wasn’t a dramatic confession or a grand gesture. It was simply a quiet understanding, a natural progression from two shattered people finding their broken edges fit perfectly together. Their love was a silent pact forged in grief and nurtured in the peaceful ordinary moments they had fought so hard to win. It was the warmth that finally, completely melted the last of Fritz’s ice and the life that confirmed Krabz’s second chance was truly worth living.

The quiet understanding that began on the couch deepened over the following weeks into something deliberate. They started calling it "dating" with a sense of shared amused wonder. Their first official date was a testament to their unique bond: a visit to a secluded, frozen lake at dusk.

"For you," Fritz said, gesturing to the vast expanse of ice, a landscape that was his sanctuary.

"And for you," Krabz replied with a soft smile. She knelt, placing a hand on the ice. A moment later a dozen skeletal squirrels, perfectly articulated this time, erupted from the snow, performing a silent playful ballet under the rising moon. Fritz watched, not the macabre spectacle, but the joy on Krabz's face and felt a warmth that had nothing to do with temperature.

The competition came a month later. It was the national finals; a whirlwind of noise, sponsors, and crushing pressure. Fritz stood at the top of the half-pipe, the world a dizzying drop below him. The ghosts of the simulation whispered in the wind—clumsy aim, useless power. He closed his eyes, and instead of the haunting voices of the past, he heard Krabz's from just that morning: "Your ice isn't a weapon today. It's your canvas. Paint something beautiful."

He dropped in.

His run was not just technically flawless; it was art. He carved through the air and where another rider might have simply landed a trick, Fritz left behind delicate transient sculptures of ice—a blooming frost flower at the apex of a jump, a glittering bridge of ice connecting two spins, dancing with the cold. When he crossed the finish line, the roar of the crowd was deafening. The gold medal was placed around his neck, but his eyes were scanning the crowd until he found Krabz, standing by the fence, her hands clasped over their mouth, tears of pride glistening in their violet eyes. He pushed through the reporters and swept them into a hug, the cold of his suit seeping into their jacket, neither of them caring.

Krabz's triumph followed soon after. Their work in aviation logistics had earned them a spot as an observer on the first test flight of a new more efficient engine they had helped streamline. Fritz was there, a nervous knot in his stomach that had nothing to do with flying. He watched Krabz, clad in a professional headset, their focus absolute as the plane taxied and then roared down the runway. As it lifted gracefully into the sky, Krabz turned from the window, her professional composure breaking into a radiant, unrestrained grin. That evening, to celebrate, Fritz took them to a quiet upscale restaurant—their first "fancy" date. He fumbled with the beverage list; they laughed over his confusion between "turbofan" and "turboprop." It was normal, wonderfully, blissfully normal.

⠀⠀⠀

⠀⠀⠀

⠀⠀⠀

The air in Fritz’s apartment was, as always, crisply cool. But today it felt different. It was a quiet expectant chill, like the dawn of a winter morning. It was his birthday, a day he’d long treated as any other, a marker on a calendar that held no particular joy.

When Krabz arrived, she brought the scent of the outside world with them—cold air and a hint of distant rain. She shrugged off their coat, their movements familiar and easy in his space. Fritz had mentioned the date offhandedly weeks ago, a simple "I'm not around that day," and had been quietly touched when Krabz had simply noted it without fuss.

"Happy birthday," she said, voice soft. In their hands was a single carefully wrapped box, not large but weighty with intention.

Fritz took it, his fingers which were usually so sure and steady, fumbling slightly with the simple ribbon. He’d expected maybe a book, a new piece of gear for his board, or something practical. As the paper fell away, he found himself holding a box of dense dark felt. He lifted the lid.

And the breath caught in his throat.

Nestled inside was a sculpture, a piece of hand-blown glass of breathtaking clarity and craftsmanship. It was a perfect life-sized replica of the tiny chattering skeletal bird that still sat on his windowsill. Every delicate bone was captured, from the fragile skull to the intricate feet. The artist had even caught the faint comical tilt of its head and the slightly parted beak, forever frozen in its silent chattering shiver. It was suspended in a moment of eternal endearing failure, transformed from a necromantic mishap into a work of art.

He was speechless. He could only stare, his thumb gently tracing the smooth, cool curve of the glass spine.

"It's the most important part of our story," Krabz said, their voice barely above a whisper, thick with an emotion that made Fritz’s own chest feel tight. "The day I… the day I walked back into your life. I was so nervous. I thought I’d messed everything up. But you laughed. You let me in."

Fritz finally looked up from the glass bird, his vision blurring. He didn’t just see the sculpture but also the profound understanding behind it. Krabz hadn’t given him a gift; they had given him a memory sanctified. They had taken a moment of shared vulnerability, a symbol of his own thawing heart and made it permanent—beautiful.

He set the box down with a reverence usually reserved for sacred things. The words "thank you" felt pitifully inadequate, a thimble trying to hold an ocean.

He reached for them instead, pulling them into an embrace that was fierce and tender all at once. He buried his face in their hair, inhaling the familiar scent that had become his definition of home. He felt the solid real warmth of them against his chest—a warmth that had, over three years, seeped into the frozen corners of his soul.

"No one," he choked out, voice rough with unshed tears, "No one has ever seen me like you do."

He felt Krabz’s arms tighten around him. "I see you Fritz," they whispered into his shoulder. "All of you. The ice and beyond it."

They stood like that for a long time, in the cool quiet of the apartment with the original chattering skeleton clicking softly on the sill and its beautiful silent twin gleaming on the table. When they finally pulled apart, Fritz’s eyes were glistening, the ice within him melting into something pure and clear.

He cradled their face in his hands, his touch surprisingly gentle. "I love you," he said. The words, once locked in a glacier of grief and guilt, flowed now with the ease of a spring thaw. They were simple, direct, and utterly true.

Krabz’s violet eyes shone, her own tears finally escaping to trace paths down their cheeks. A radiant smile broke across their face. "I love you too."

That night, the cold apartment was filled with a new kind of warmth. It was the warmth of a shared history, of a love forged in the aftermath of catastrophe and of a future that they would now walk into together hand in hand. The glass bird sat on the mantelpiece, no longer a reminder of a past failure, but a beacon of the fragile beautiful beginning that had grown from it.

Months later, the invitation from Runey arrived and decided to go together. As they walked into the sun-drenched cafe, Fritz's hand found Krabz's, fingers intertwining out of simple comfortable habit. They were too caught up in the joy of seeing Haze's smile and Zay's familiar scowl to notice Kari's sharp eyes tracking their joined hands. When Kari’s teasing grin broke out, followed by the warm laughter of their found family, Fritz just squeezed Krabz's hand tighter. The gesture was met with a soft, answering pressure—a silent language all their own. In that moment, surrounded by the people who understood their scars, holding the hand of the person who loved him because of them, Fritz felt a peace he had once believed was impossible. The winter was finally, completely, over.

Chapter Text

The first year was silence.

Not the peaceful kind, but the heavy ringing kind that follows an explosion. Zay rented a small sparse cabin in the remote high desert, a landscape of scrub and stone that mirrored the desolation inside him. The constant low-grade hum of electricity that had lived in his bones since the lightning strike was gone, replaced by a deafening internal quiet. He’d sit for hours on the porch, watching distant heat lightning dance over the mesas, feeling nothing but a hollow ache where the storm used to be.

He tried to write. The words that had once flowed so easily, building worlds of historical fantasy, were ash in his mouth. His protagonist felt like a ridiculous parody. How could he write about commanding tempests when he could barely summon a static spark? The entire fiasco had taken his power, but Rue’s sacrifice had taken something else: his identity as the one who could fight back.

Months in, during a rare genuine desert downpour, he found himself standing in the middle of the dirt track, rain plastering his hair to his skull. He raised his hands, not to summon but to feel. The cold drops hit his palms and for a fleeting second, he felt a ghost of a connection, a faint resonance with the charged air. It wasn't power. It was memory. It was grief.

He went back inside, soaked and shivering, and opened a new document. He wrote about a man who had lost his voice in a terrible accident, who could only speak through the shudder of a telegraph key, tapping out messages no one could understand. He wrote about the silence, the frustration, the profound isolation of holding a truth that could not be spoken. He called it The Static Sea.

He published it independently under a pseudonym, a barely-edited torrent of raw emotion. He expected nothing.

The emails started trickling in. Not many, but enough. A woman who felt unseen after a traumatic injury. A veteran who understood the language of silent trauma. They wrote to say, "This. This is how it feels."

It was the barest flicker of lightning on a far horizon. But it was light.

⠀⠀

The second year was the channel.

He moved to a small city apartment, the noise of traffic a welcome replacement for the desert's silence. The Static Sea had found a small fervent audience. Encouraged, he began a new project. This time his protagonist was a climatologist, a woman who discovered weather patterns were a language—a desperate, screaming warning from the planet itself. She couldn't control the weather; she could only listen, interpret, and try to make others understand the coming storm.

The book, Whispers of The Skies, was again published independently but it caught a current. Book bloggers and niche literary critics championed it. They praised its "visceral atmospheric prose" and the "palpable sense of awe and dread." Zay would read these reviews and give a thin wry smile. They had no idea how palpable it was.

A small reputable indie press picked up the paperback rights. For the first time, he held a physical copy of his book with a publisher's logo on the spine. It felt solid. Real. A anchor in a world that had felt like smoke for so long.

⠀⠀

The third year was the storm.

His third book, The Calibration of Storms, merged the themes of his first two. It followed a disgraced astrophysicist who discovers that solar flares are not random but a precise, if violent, form of cosmic communication. The climax wasn't a battle; it was a moment of terrifying, sublime acceptance, where the protagonist had to stand in the path of a coronal mass ejection and simply listen, allowing the energy to rewrite him.

It became a runaway bestseller. The lightning, once a destructive force he’d struggled to control, was now a metaphor he wielded with masterful precision. His prose didn't describe storms; it became one, all crashing sentences and luminous, startling insights.

The film rights were optioned by a major studio. When the director, a visionary known for her visually stunning epics called him to discuss the adaptation, she asked him one question: "The energy, the lightning in the prose… it feels so authentic. How did you capture it?"

Zay looked out his window at a gathering thunderhead over the city skyline. He felt the old familiar hum as a companion—a deep resonant knowledge in his blood.

"I did my research," he said, his voice even.

He was no longer the man who had crashed a plane or fought a monster with a sword of lightning. He was Zay, the acclaimed author. He gave interviews, spoke at literary festivals and signed copies of his books for long patient lines of readers. The chaos was now channeled, the tempest bound within the margins of a page. He had built a new life, brick by brick, word by word, from the wreckage of the old.

But sometimes, in the dead of night, when a real storm would break over the city, he would stand by his window, watching the sky tear itself apart. And in those moments, he wasn't a bestselling author. He was just a man who had once held a piece of the storm in his hands, remembering the friends who knew what it had cost him and wondering, with a quiet enduring tension, if the calm would ever last.

⠀⠀

⠀⠀

The third year of peace was the hardest. The accolades and deadlines built a comfortable cage but the ghost of the tempest still rattled the bars. The film adaptation of The Calibration of Storms was entering pre-production and the studio flew Zay out to Los Angeles for meetings. He sat in a sleek, air-conditioned conference room surrounded by producers and a concept artist who showed storyboards of the climactic solar storm.

"It needs to feel more... violent," a producer said, steepling his fingers. "More lightning. Bigger. The audience wants a spectacle."

Zay looked at the artist's rendering—a man screaming against a maelstrom of generic computer-generated lightning. It was everything his book was not. His book was about listening. About acceptance. This was about noise.

He felt the old familiar prickle under his skin, a static charge rising with his irritation. For a heart-stopping second, he thought he saw the fluorescent lights above the table flicker. He closed his eyes, took a slow deliberate breath, and pushed the feeling down. Not here. Not anymore.

"That's not the point," he said, voice calm that cut through the chatter. "The violence is external. The real transformation is internal. It's in the silence that follows the first thunderclap."

He spent the rest of the meeting patiently and almost clinically dissecting the theme of his own work. He was no longer the storm; he was the meteorologist explaining its patterns. The producers were reluctantly convinced. As he left the building, the California sun beating down on him, he felt a profound exhaustion. The world wanted the spectacle but he had learned that true power was in the quiet afterward.

A few weeks later, a package arrived at his apartment. It was from Runey. No return address, just his name and a postmark from a coastal research station. Inside was a simple smooth river stone, dark and wet-looking, and a note.

Found this at 300 meters. Thought you'd appreciate something that knows how to hold its pressure. We should all meet. - R

He held the stone in his palm. It was cool and incredibly dense. He thought of Runey in the crushing silent dark, of Haze standing firm, of Krabz's quiet resilience. They had all learned to hold their pressure. They had all found their own kind of calm after the catastrophe.

It was the final piece of his own calibration.

The morning of the reunion, he dressed himself in simple comfortable clothes. He looked at the mirror and saw not a weapon or a writer, but just a man. The turbulent tempest in his mind had settled into a deep still reservoir of memory. The power was still there—he could feel it like a latent current in the wires of the city—but it was integrated. It was a part of his history, not his identity.

Walking to the cafe, he felt a simple uncomplicated anticipation. He wasn't anxious about seeing them, about the memories it might stir. He was just looking forward to seeing his friends.

When he arrived with Kari, the sight of Runey and Haze sparked a genuine easy smile. The hugs were firm, the greetings warm. He took a seat, listening to the chatter, adding a dry comment here and there. He watched Fritz and Krabz arrive hand-in-hand, and his teasing grin was real, devoid of any painful nostalgia.

When the Rue lookalike appeared, the shock was a collective, sharp intake of breath. Zay felt it too—a jolt, like touching a faulty socket. But as the others stared, frozen in a past he had meticulously made peace with, he observed her. He saw the lightness in her step, the unburdened ease of her smile. This was their reality's Rue. A Rue who had never been torn apart and reassembled by a singularity. A Rue who was whole.

And he found he was happy for her. For this version of her. The serenity he had fought so hard to build held firm.

Later, after Julian's psychic intrusion and the frantic chase, as the group sat shell-shocked, Zay was the one who cleared his throat, pulling them back from the brink of panic. His voice was steady anchor in the new sudden chaos.

He saw the uncertainty in their eyes but also the dawning resolve. They had built lives. They had found peace. And as Runey placed the slip of paper with the waitress's number on the table, a tangible thread to a normal world, Zay knew they would protect it. The storm was gathering again but this time, he was no longer afraid of the rain. He was the calm at its center and he was ready.

Chapter Text

The silence after the facility was a physical thing. For Varuna and Priest, it was not the peaceful quiet of freedom but the unnerving void left by the absence of a controlling will. They had removed their chips yet the ghost of the Doctor’s commands still echoed in the muscle memory of compliance. Their first challenge was to remember how to want anything at all.

Varuna found his way to a rented warehouse space on the industrial edge of the city. It was loud, cavernous, and smelled of oil and ozone. He didn't choose it for its isolation. In the center stood a pile of scrap metal—discarded rebar, twisted car parts, rusted sheets of steel. For the first month, he did nothing but look at it, his hands which was once extensions of a lethal whip, hung uselessly at his sides.

The breakthrough came on a rain-lashed afternoon. Frustration—a feeling he was finally learning to name—boiled over. He didn't summon his power with the focused intent of a warrior but with a raw unfiltered surge of emotion. The pile of scrap shuddered then began to twist and writhe, into a chaotic spiked tangle. It was ugly. It was violent. It was his.

He spent the next week taking it apart, the process slower and more deliberate. He learned to feel the metal not as a tool to be wielded but as a material with its own grain, its own resistance. He discovered that his Ferro-kinesis wasn't just about force; it was also about sensing microscopic fractures, understanding magnetic fields on an intuitive level and persuading molecules to align.

He started small. A simple elegant bookmark fashioned from a thin strip of steel. A set of cutlery where the balance in the hand was perfect. Then, larger pieces began to emerge from the chaos of the warehouse. A sculpture of interlocking gears that turned soundlessly, forever a monument to precision. A twisting ribbon of polished aluminum that captured and refracted the dusty light from the high windows, a representation of a path away from darkness.

He began posting his work online under the pseudonym "V. Forge." The orders started trickling in. A custom gate for a boutique hotel. A sculptural centerpiece for a corporate lobby. With each commission, he was not following an order; he was fulfilling a request, collaborating. The weight of the metal in his hands no longer felt like the weight of a weapon but the potential of an idea.

⠀

⠀

Priest walked into the city’s central library and applied for a shelving position. The woman at the desk noting his unnerving calm and piercing gaze, almost rejected him. But he needed the silence. He needed the order. The Dewey Decimal System was a logic he could understand, a system of control that harmed no one.

He worked the night shift, his footsteps the only sound in the vast darkened rows. He would run his fingers over the spines of books, not reading them but absorbing the faint psychic residue of the thousands of readers who had come before—not the specific thoughts but the general hum of curiosity, of solace, of escape. It was a balm on his own scarred psyche, a gentle chorus to replace the screaming silence of his own abilities.

His empathy, once a weapon to twist emotions, began to recalibrate. He could sense a patron's frustration at not finding a book and would wordlessly guide them to the right section. He could feel the quiet desperation of a student at 2 a.m. and leave a cup of hot tea near their carrel. He never spoke of it; he simply acted.

His encyclopedic knowledge and preternatural calm did not go unnoticed. He was offered a part-time position as an adjunct literature professor at a local community college. He accepted, for the challenge of structure.

In the classroom, he was a strange captivating figure. He never raised his voice. He didn't need to. He could feel the room's attention waver and would simply pause, his red-tinged gaze sweeping over them until the silence itself pulled them back. He taught them about the brutal logic of Greek tragedies, the bleak landscapes of Kafka as maps of the human psyche under pressure. Students found his classes strangely cathartic. He wasn't teaching them what to think; he was giving them the tools to understand the turbulence inside themselves, because he had weathered his own.

⠀

Once every few months, a text would appear on Priest’s phone. No words, only a time and the name of a quiet unassuming coffee shop.

Today was such a day. Varuna was already there, sitting at a corner table with a mug of black coffee, a fine dusting of metal shavings still visible on his work boots. He looked more settled in his body, the perpetual readiness for combat having eased into the solid patience of a craftsman.

Priest arrived precisely on time, sliding into the seat opposite him. He placed a worn copy of "The Man in the High Castle" on the table, a bookmark peeking from its pages.

"New project?" Priest asked, his voice as measured as ever though a hint of genuine curiosity colored it.

Varuna grunted in affirmation, pulling out his phone to show a few photos. "A commission. For a law firm's lobby. A series of interlocking rings, representing the scales of justice, but… fluid. Like water." He zoomed in on a detail. "Stainless steel. It’s a nightmare to polish."

Priest examined the photos with a critical eye. "The symbolism is a little on the nose. But the execution is… clean. It has integrity."

It was high praise. Varuna gave a single slow nod.

"And you?" Varuna asked, taking a sip of his coffee. "Still herding undergraduates through the wilderness of theory?"

"A few are starting to see the trail," Priest replied, a ghost of a smile touching his lips. "We're discussing Baudrillard this week. Hyperreality. They find it depressing." He didn't need to elaborate on the irony.

They sat in a comfortable silence for a few minutes, watching the ordinary world go by outside the window. There was no need to speak of the facility, the Doctor or the gifted they had helped free. That shared history was the foundation upon which this fragile normal life was built; it was the load-bearing wall that never needed to be inspected.

Finally Priest spoke, his gaze still on the street. "Do you ever… feel it? The pull?"

Varuna’s knuckles tightened slightly around his mug. He knew Priest wasn't talking about the Doctor but the ability itself. The siren call of the old easy power.

"Sometimes," Varuna admitted, his voice low. "When I'm working with a particularly stubborn piece of steel. The old way would be faster." He looked at his hands, the hands that could now create as easily as they once destroyed. "But this is better."

Priest nodded slowly. "Yes. This is better."

They finished their coffee. The conversation drifted to a new film adaptation Zay had written, a gallery showing Runey had mentioned in a group text. When they rose to leave, there was no dramatic farewell. Just a brief solid clasp of hands, a look that conveyed more than words ever could and then they turned walking away in opposite directions, back to their carefully built and peacefully ordinary lives. They were two former instruments of control who had found how to be still.

⠀

⠀

The invitation from Runey arrived on a Tuesday. For Varuna, it chimed on his phone while he was elbow-deep in a new piece—the air in his studio thick with the tang of plasma-cut steel. He wiped his hands on a grimy rag, leaving dark smudges on the screen as he read the simple text about a reunion at a cafe called "The Haven." His first instinct was a sharp, visceral no. It felt like stepping back towards a past he’d spent three years building a wall against.

He set the phone down and went back to work, the grinder throwing a cascade of orange sparks. But his focus was broken. The rhythmic scream of the tool felt hollow. He found himself thinking not of the Doctor or the facility, but of Haze’s steadying presence, of Fritz’s stubborn loyalty. They weren’t just ghosts; they were people who had chosen to see something in him beyond a weapon. After an hour of unproductive work, he put the grinder down, picked up his phone and typed a single simple reply: I’ll be there.

On the day of the meet-up he arrived on his motorcycle, a few minutes early. He stood outside The Haven for a moment, watching the others through the glass. He saw Runey’s easy smile, Haze’s calm posture. Taking a steadying breath, he pushed the door open. The bell jingled. Runey spotted him first, her face lighting up with a warmth that felt alien and welcome. "Varuna! You made it!" Haze gave him a firm, respectful nod. Varuna simply nodded back, a small and almost imperceptible relaxation in his shoulders as he took a seat. It was quieter than his studio but the noise felt different. It felt alive.

For Priest, the invitation arrived as an email which he saw while sitting at his reference desk in the library during a slow afternoon. He read it with the same detached analysis he would apply to a complex philosophical text. The variables were clear: a social gathering, high emotional potential, the reactivation of dormant relational dynamics. The logical conclusion was to decline, to maintain the controlled environment of his present life.

Yet, he found himself opening his personal calendar. The proposed date was clear. He thought of Varuna, their last quiet coffee, the unspoken understanding that they were both navigating the same strange peace. He thought of Kari’s sharp intellect, which he’d always respected. The decision wasn't logical; it was—he realized with a slight frown—sentimental. He typed a concise reply: I will attend.

He arrived precisely on time, walking from the university. He saw the group through the window, saw Varuna already seated among them. The sight was… not unpleasant. As he entered, the chatter softened for a beat. Runey greeted him with a gentle, "I'm so glad you came, Priest." He offered her the small practiced smile he used with graduating students. His eyes met Varuna’s across the table, and the barest hint of a nod passed between them—an acknowledgment of their shared unspoken decision to be here. He took the seat beside Varuna, the familiar presence a silent anchor in the room full of once-strangers, now something more.

When Fritz and Krabz arrived hand-in-hand, it was Kari who noticed first, his sharp eyes catching the linked fingers. He didn't say anything but simply raised his coffee cup in a subtle teasing salute, a knowing look in his eye. The table erupted not in a warm understanding laughter that made Krabz blush and Fritz grin, uncharacteristically sheepish. It was a normal human moment. For a beautiful suspended hour, the cafe was just a cafe and they were just friends. The shared laughter and easy conversation built a new kind of structure around them, one made not of survival but of choice.

Then the world shifted again with the approach of a waitress who wore a familiar face and the telepathic voice of a ghost from their past. But in the moments before that, they had this: a table full of people who had chosen to come back together, proving that the bonds forged in hell could, against all odds, be used to build a heaven in the ordinary world.