Mana dropped from high orbit with a violence that felt almost personal. The pod's heat shield burned away in shearing sheets, coloring her world in afterimages of blue and white. She braced herself for the impact, counted down the seconds by the spasm of her own heart: three, two—
Zero.
The pod hit the outpost's roof with a fist-blow force, auto-braking foam expanding around her like a cocoon of glue. Mana's boots hit metal before the hatch had fully vented, the sickly red of emergency lights flooding her helmet's optics. The tactical drop had left her disoriented, spine tingling from the Core's overclocked feedback loop. Through her HUD, the corridor was a slashing wound of light and shadow—every surface bandaged with crystal growths, the edges crawling with a pulse too regular to be mere refracted light.
She scanned her perimeter. No hostiles. No movement. The only sound was the faint hiss of outgassing from the cooling pod, and beneath it, the irregular click of her own pulse.
Fox's voice cracked through her neural link, a bandwidth so tight it almost strangled itself. "Clear. Move north, vector twenty-two. Facility map is up, but internal sensors are compromised."
Mana advanced, steps silent on the anti-skid composite. The walls here were not straight—every other meter, the corridor doglegged, each corner engineered for cover and concealment. Classic Erben doctrine: make every approach a killzone, every retreat a trap. She swept with her NEXUS sidearm, the weapon's matte-black skin cold against her palm.
The air in the corridor was thick, not with smoke or heat, but with something older. The blue crystal had bled up from the floor and across the walls, forming veins and capillaries that branched like a digital circulatory system. It was alive, in a way. As she moved, she felt her own heartbeat echo back at her from the pulsing filaments.
She cleared two intersections without incident. The bodies of the marines—Voss's team—were supposed to be here. The command had lost their signals at 0200.
Fox: "Proceed with extreme caution. We lost all vital signs from Voss's team seventeen minutes ago."
"Copy," Mana subvocalized, eyes scanning for thermal or motion anomaly. "No signals. No sign of engagement."
"Keep moving," Fox said. "There's something wrong with the crystal. Not Kollektiven standard. It's branching in non-fractal geometries. You see it?"
Mana paused at the next junction, leaning in to get a closer look. The crystal wasn't just growing, it was following lines—pipes, conduit, anywhere with a charge or a pulse. She snapped a still with her helmet cam, overlaid the feed with Fox's annotated analysis. The lines shimmered with barely-contained energy, but there was something elegant in their order: not a mess, not chaos, but an architecture.
Her skin prickled. The Erben archive's blue glow had always unsettled her, but this felt like an open eye, staring back.
She advanced through a short corridor that opened into a larger cross-hall. There, half-concealed by a fallen light panel, was the first marine.
Mana swept the space, confirmed the absence of movement, then approached. The body was slumped against the wall, knees bent up, rifle still clenched in one hand. The armor was fractured along the seams, the helmet's visor caked with a frosted film of blue. Where the suit had split, the marine's flesh was exposed—except it wasn't flesh anymore.
The crystal had invaded the body, following the major blood vessels like a parasite. Where veins once traced the wrist and neck, now cold blue filaments glowed beneath skin stretched almost translucent. The chest cavity was cracked open, the heart itself visible, encased in a web of crystal that pulsed, slow and rhythmic, with the outpost's light.
Mana knelt, steadying herself. The NEXUS pistol never left the body's center mass. With her other hand, she gently tilted the marine's head, exposing the neck. The transformation was absolute: from skin, to subdermal fat, to muscle, every cell had been replaced with a lattice of mineral and light.
She scanned for neural activity, out of habit. The helmet pinged a weak signature, then flatlined.
Fox's voice was quieter now. "Mana, are you seeing this?"
"Yeah," she whispered, because anything louder would have shattered her composure.
She recorded a slow sweep of the body, then focused in on the wound at the chest. The crystal was not just growth; it was invasion. The geometry was too precise, each branch and sub-branch dividing at almost perfect angles. A thought sparked in her: the way it followed the vasculature was not random, but mapped. As if the crystal was using the circulatory system as a blueprint, colonizing it cell by cell.
Fox's breathing was audible now, a metronome gone unsteady. "It's not Kollektiven. It's not even Erben. This is... Mana, I don't know what this is."
She probed further, using the multi-tool at her belt to chip away at a shard near the heart. It came away with a brittle crack, revealing the underlying structure—a mesh of nanocrystal so fine it caught and bent the light, throwing tiny spectrums onto the armor plates. She logged the sample, tagged it for later extraction, and stood.
For the first time, Mana realized the entire corridor had gone silent. Even the hum of the crystals seemed to pause, as if the outpost itself was holding its breath, waiting for her to move.
She advanced, steps slower now. The next body was further down, at the bend in the hall. Same story: crystal growth, face fixed in a rictus that was less terror than awe. This one had managed to unholster a grenade, but the hand was fused to the casing, blue veins crawling up the fingers and under the nail beds. The crystal had frozen the action at the moment of decision.
She recorded it, moved on.
The further she went, the more bodies she found. None of them had time to fire a shot. Each had been caught mid-movement, stilled and converted to blue glass, the sequence of attack and defense fossilized in real time.
At the end of the corridor was the main rotunda. The doors were half-open, jammed by the bulk of another marine—this one fully encased, the visor a perfect mirror of blue crystal. Mana kicked the body aside, checked both corners, and entered.
The emergency lights here cast shadows in perfect circles, reflecting off the domed ceiling. The center of the chamber was a shallow pit, and at its heart a larger structure—a crystalline engine, spined with fractal growth, humming with contained violence. On the far side, pinned to the wall by a wave of fused crystal, was the last of the marines.
Her HUD tagged the ID, a UG Marine.
He was alive, but only barely. The faceplate was shattered, jaw dislocated. The marine's eyes tracked her, slow and feral, the irises a swirling mosaic of blue and white. His chest rose and fell, but the breathing was erratic, the sound like air moving through a wind instrument made for torture.
Mana kept her weapon trained. She circled left, careful not to break line of sight. The NEXUS pistol's charge indicator glowed a soft, ominous yellow.
The marine's lips moved, but the words took three tries to come out.
"Help me," he said, but the voice was wrong—too resonant, layered with an echo that did not belong.
Mana didn't answer. She engaged the comms, let Fox see and hear.
The blue crystal on the marine's torso flexed, as if trying to inhale. His hands clawed at the wall, unable to break free. "Please," he said, the echo deeper now, "help."
Fox's voice shook. "Mana, protocol is to terminate. I'm sorry."
Mana raised the weapon, aimed at the sternum. The marine's eyes widened, and for a moment she saw not a dying soldier, but something else looking through the meat and bone.
"Wait," he said, the word splitting into two voices—one human, one impossibly old. "Don't—"
Mana fired. The shot took him at the heart, just above the main branching of crystal. For a split second, the blue light flared, then the marine's head slumped forward, the body limp. The crystal did not fade, but instead hummed at a higher pitch, as if in mourning.
Mana lowered the weapon. In the silence, she cataloged the scene, her left thumb rubbing rhythmically against the ridged grip of the NEXUS pistol—three strokes right, three strokes left—while her right foot tapped a matching cadence against the floor, the motion so subtle it barely registered in her armor.
Fox's voice was ragged. "Mana, this isn't a weapon. It's a conversion engine. They're... they're not killing. They're changing."
Mana nodded. "Copy."
She took one last look at the crystalline structure, watched as it pulsed in time with her own heart, and moved deeper into the rotunda.
The corridor beyond the rotunda was a burial procession. Mana advanced through it one meter at a time, blue veins of crystal weaving the walls into a grotesque filigree. The air smelled of ozone and old bone. Each step brought a new tableau: another body, more transformed than the last, each frozen at the instant the crystal had claimed it.
She counted: six, then nine, then a group of three, huddled in a defensive knot. They had died facing outward, weapons trained on the unseen, but the crystal had pierced their helmets, blossoming from the mouth and eyes in a riot of perfect, intersecting shards.
Fox's voice kept pace, slower now, as if each word had to be wrestled from the static that filled the channel. "Are you registering the environmental delta? The energy readings are spiking as you approach center. I don't like this."
Her own HUD screamed orange, then red, as the crystal's emission spectrum overwhelmed the sensors. Each surface was mapped in heat signatures, but the readings were inverted: the crystals radiated negative temperature, as if sucking the warmth and life from everything within a hundred meters.
She stepped over the curled body of a marine—female, from the size, but the suit markings had been scrubbed by the blue growth. The left hand reached out, fingers fused together in a single, elegant blade. Mana paused to record, zooming in on the texture of the transformation: the way the crystal followed the shape of the hand, preserving the intent of the gesture even as it erased the flesh beneath.
The next chamber was oval, ribbed with columns that bent inwards, forming a tunnel of bone and glass. The blue crystal coated the columns, forming ridges and spines, some as fine as hair, others as thick as a human arm. Light pulsed from within, traveling in waves that lapped at the edges of Mana's vision. She kept her pistol up, but the finger on the trigger felt numb, disconnected from the body it served.
"Mana," Fox said, voice barely above a whisper, "the Core is responding. Your neural signature is being mirrored by the outpost's mainframe. It's—" a pause, then a tremor she'd never heard from him before, "—it's not just broadcasting. It's listening."
She nodded, eyes locked on the blue corona ahead. "Acknowledge. Closing in."
The path narrowed, forcing her through a spiral chicane designed to slow attackers. She moved fast but careful, each step mapped to the geometry of the corridor. The crystal growths had now begun to form intentional patterns—sigils, loops, mirrored fractals that repeated every few meters. It was as if the outpost was redecorating itself in anticipation of a guest.
She reached the end of the spiral and emerged into the central chamber.
The ceiling rose away, lost in a haze of blue mist. The floor sloped inward, forming a bowl fifty meters wide, every surface alive with crystal. In the center: the engine. It was a pillar of blue, shot through with veins of white light, surrounded by a loose spiral of floating fragments that orbited it like debris around a singularity.
And in front of the engine, nailed to the base by a spear of crystalline glass through the abdomen, was Voss.
He was not dead.
His armor was gone, torn away by the growth. The body beneath had been rewritten: flesh was translucent, every vein and artery mapped in blue; bones reinforced, stretched, the ribcage wide and splayed. The hands had elongated, fingers tipped with shards, less like claws than the delicate feelers of an insect.
The face, though—Voss's face—was still there, eyes open and alert. But the eyes were wrong. They were kaleidoscopic, the irises fracturing into a dozen planes of color, every one reflecting Mana's image back at her as she approached.
For a moment, neither moved. The blue engine pulsed behind him, bathing the chamber in cold fire.
Then Voss spoke, the words thick and churning, like stones rolling down a riverbed. "M-137."
Mana kept her weapon up, but her stance loosened. "Voss. Are you—"
The answer was a sound, a laugh, but hollowed out by the transformation. "No. Not Voss. Not anymore."
She scanned him, sensors redlining. The transformation was still in progress. Every heartbeat, the blue veins spread further, devouring what remained of the man.
Voss's eyes blinked, slow and wet. He tried to reach out, but the glass spear pinned him in place. "They're not…killing," he managed, voice bubbling with fluid. "They're…changing."
Mana edged closer, boots scraping on crystal shards. "Can you move?"
He shook his head. The blue veins reached his neck, pulsing. "I see it, Mana. All of it. They're building a bridge."
Behind her, Fox's voice caught. "Mana, the Core is at full resonance. If you go closer—"
"I have to," Mana said, softly. "He's still alive."
Voss's head lolled, eyes rolling up to the ceiling. "Not for long." Then he shuddered, as if seized by a memory. "Do you know what they want?"
She shook her head.
He smiled, lips splitting to reveal blue crystal growing inside his mouth. "Eden. They want to be whole. They think you are the missing piece."
The blue engine surged, every fragment in the chamber vibrating in sympathy.
Voss's body spasmed, the blue crystal erupting from his limbs, wrapping around the glass spear. "Don't let them—" His jaw snapped sideways with a wet pop, and the rest of his words were lost in a choking gurgle. She watched as his body arched, convulsed, then finally went limp. Her hand moved without thought to her armor seam, the familiar pattern grounding her as the blue engine bloomed.
Fox's voice was urgent now. "Mana, get out. The resonance is at catastrophic levels. If you stay—"
The blue engine bloomed, a ring of light slicing outward and catching Mana in the chest. She staggered, but the suit's systems buffered most of the impact. The HUD went wild, every icon red, warnings scrolling too fast to read.
In the core of the engine, something shifted. The floating fragments began to coalesce, knitting together into a form—a shape almost, but not quite, human.
Fox's voice, last and desperate: "Mana, it's targeting you—"
She raised her pistol, aimed at the blue form. "Identify," she demanded, voice cracking.
Mana's Core throbbed, heat building at the base of her skull.
Fox: "Mana, if you engage, you could—"
Explosion. Color and sound. Mana's vision filled with star maps, fractal geometry, the logic of the engine spooling out in perfect, endless iterations. She saw Voss, saw herself, saw the war as a brief flicker against a background of ancient, patient design.
Then the blue light receded, and she stood alone in the chamber, hand still outstretched, pistol still in her grip.
Voss's body had vanished, only dust and glass left behind.
Fox's voice, broken and thin, came back through the neural link: "Mana? Mana—please respond."
She caught her breath, tried to steady her hands. "Here," she said, voice barely more than a ghost.
She didn't hear Fox—at least, not at first. The next sound was a click, soft and deliberate, as if someone had set down a ceramic cup on a stone counter. Mana forced her eyelids open, blinking against the static-crawl of blue in her vision.
Fox. She tried to form the word, but her mouth barely worked. She tasted blood, coppery and thin.
But before Fox could answer, another voice arrived: not through the link, not through speakers, but everywhere at once, rippling across the inside of her skull.
"Ah. Da sind Sie ja." Eins. "Die erste Form war... unelegant. Verzeihen Sie – ich vergesse manchmal, wie man sich vorstellt."
The voice was impossible to localize. It had warmth, a kind of familial weight, neither male nor female at first, but then resolving into the melodious cadence of an old man, patient, amused, as if greeting a favorite grandchild after a long separation.
Mana stirred, found her pistol in her hand without remembering drawing it. She looked up, sweeping the chamber—empty but for the shining core at its heart. Only now, she saw it was not empty. Suspended above the bowl where the blue engine had been, a cluster of geometric shapes swirled in slow orbit: a Mobius strip folding into a tesseract, then unwinding into a helix that refracted the cold blue light into beams of gold. In the center, a single sphere, no bigger than a human eyeball, shone with steady amber glow. It seemed to look at her, and she felt it count her in. One, two, three—a silent rhythm that matched her own rising pulse.
"Brücken-Entität," the thing said, voice now a velvet baritone—fully, intentionally, almost kindly human. "Designation: vollständig. Biosignatur: kompatibel. Emotionaler Zustand: erschöpft, verängstigt, entschlossen. Wie faszinierend."
Mana didn't lower the gun. "Identify," she croaked. "Unbekannte Entität, Name?" She blinked hard, realizing. "How do you know this language?" The orb pulsed once, its light briefly penetrating the seams of her armor where it met her neck. "Aus deinem Kern," it replied, the geometric shapes around it contracting slightly. "Ein primitives Konstrukt. Aber... ausreichend für unsere Zwecke."
The orb paused again, and the surrounding shapes spun just a touch faster. The glow dimmed and brightened again—a blink, or maybe a smile.
"Ich bin der Arbiter," it said. "Hüter dieses Archivs, Zeuge des Endes, Bewahrer des Protokolls." A longer pause. The gold in the orb flickered, then settled. "Ich bin auch sehr, sehr alt und wahrscheinlich nicht mehr ganz bei Verstand. Aber wer von uns ist das schon?"
Mana felt the hair on her arms prickle; a chill crept up her spine, not from cold but from the certainty that it—he?—wasn't lying. Fox, for the first time in her memory, said nothing. Maybe even he didn't know what to do with this.
The floating assembly rotated, shifting in on itself as the orb surveyed the chamber, as if savoring the silence. The geometry was unnatural, but hypnotic—never repeating, always almost resolving into a pattern, but never quite.
Mana risked a glance at her HUD. All sensors blasted to saturation, metrics pinned and nonsensical. She reset the interface twice, hoping Fox would at least piggyback into the visual feed.
The Arbiter pulsed gentle amusement. "Die vorherigen Besucher?" It gestured, almost tenderly, at the streaked remains of blue on the walls, the empty shells of marines scattered and encased. "Oh, sie waren… ungeeignet. Das Sigil testet. Sie bestanden nicht." The light inside it dimmed for a moment, as though mourning, but the tone was matter-of-fact. "Es war nicht schmerzhaft. Nicht lange. Ich habe gezählt – 0,003 Sekunden pro Einheit. Das ist Mitgefühl, auf seine Art."
Mana's mouth was dry, but she managed to spit red and say, "What do you want?" The words came out raw.
The sphere hovered closer, never quite level with her eyes, always just a hand's span above, as if wary of disrespecting her height. "Sie wollen Eden finden," it said. "Alle wollen Eden finden. Die Jäger nennen es die Jagd der Jagden. Die Kollektiven nennen es die Schwelle. Meine Schöpfer nannten es..." Here the voice dropped, and she realized it was no longer quoting, but remembering. The Arbiter counted, softly, in an accent older than Fox's: "eins, zwei, drei." Then: "...einen Fehler. Aber Fehler können korrigiert werden. Dafür sind Sie hier, Brücken-Entität."
Mana pictured, as best she could, what she looked like to this being: battered, painted with blue bruise and blood, a glint of glass in her cheek, NEXUS pistol trembling in her hand. She felt, irrelevantly, underdressed.
She steadied her aim. "You have a name for me. How do you know who I am?"
The Mobius-tesseract spun, almost bashful. Eins, zwei. "Sie sind nicht wie die anderen. Die anderen kommen, nehmen, sterben. Sie kommen, verstehen, und überleben. Das ist... unerwartet." The orb's amber warmth intensified, bathing her face in a brief golden dusk. "Ich habe lange auf jemanden wie Sie gewartet. 4,7 Millionen Zyklen, um genau zu sein. Aber wer zählt schon?"
Mana blinked.
The flicker was pure joy now—childish, nearly.
She edged around the pit, keeping the gun trained. "I'm not here for your riddles," she said. "You have something I need. The Eden coordinates."
A ripple of approval passed through the whirling forms. "Sie fragen klug. Das Archiv ist offen. Aber Sie müssen mir zuerst eine Antwort geben, Brücken-Entität."
A test. Always a test.
Mana holstered her pistol, slowly, not for peace but for the reach it gave her into her side sheath. "Ask."
His question, when it came, was so staggeringly simple Mana almost missed it.
"Warum? Warum strebst du nach Eden? Ist es Flucht? Ist es Sehnsucht? Oder nur die Angst vor dem Ende?"
Why. Why?
She stared at the orb. "Because someone has to," she said. "If I don't, they'll keep coming. They'll keep sending more. And even if Eden doesn't exist, even if it's a myth or a mistake, it's better than what's left behind."
The silence after her answer was pure, resonant. The Mobius bands slowed. The orb drifted closer, close enough for her to see her own reflection warped in its surface—all scar and blood and blue-lit exhaustion.
"You are correct," the Arbiter said, voice a hush. "That is the only answer."
From its spinning body, a sliver of light detached—a memory, a file, an artifact, she couldn't tell. It hovered before her, a prism cut into infinitely refracting planes.
"Take it," he said. Drei, vier, fünf. "Mit diesem Schlüssel, findest du Eden. Wenn du Glück hast."
Mana took the shard. It was warm—alarmingly so—like a fever in her palm.
Fox's voice broke through at last, raw and unfiltered: "Mana! What are you—"
She closed her hand around the prism. Her other hand traced the edge of her chestplate—three right, three left—as all the blue in the world fell away.
She opened her eyes to the sound of alarms. Real, not simulated—her suit's readout screamed warnings across every surface. There was blood on the inside of her visor, frozen and black. Outside, the world was blue and dead and very, very quiet.
"Fox," she whispered. "Still here?"
His voice was back, full and urgent. "You had me cold for four minutes. I was ready to nuke the outpost if you stopped breathing."
Her jaw tightened, blood crusting at the corner of her mouth. "Noted."
He fumed, but didn't argue. "Extraction route is clear. The marines—" He trailed off, regret heavy. "We got what we came for?"
Mana looked at her gloved hand, still clenched. The prism shard rested there, pulsing gentle gold against the blue.
"Yeah," she said. "We got it."
She staggered to her feet, limped toward the airlock. The wounds would scar, if she lived. She hoped they did.
At the threshold, she glanced back. The pit where the Arbiter had hovered was empty, the blue engine now cold and dead.
But as she left, she could have sworn she heard it counting. Not seconds, not cycles—something bigger, and much, much older.
Mana staggered into the tunnel, boots scraping on glassy debris, head half-swimming with the afterimage of the archive's impossible geometry. The air in the corridor snapped and bit—ozone, burning plastic, and the sweet, wrong echo of the blue. She'd barely cleared the first corner when Fox's voice sliced into her neural link, so controlled it was nearly a whisper, with that particular flatness she'd learned to recognize during childhood trauma runs—the sound of him fighting to keep his breathing even:
"Mana, halt. Do not advance."
Her body stopped before her mind caught up. The corridor ahead was gridded with emergency bulkheads, each one half-shuttered, sensors cycling orange to red. Through the gaps, she glimpsed what waited beyond: the night outside glowed. The heads-up in her visor parsed a thousand new contacts where before there had been only dread. Incoming.
Fox's words dissolved into a spray of algorithms: "Redirection. Reroute. No-go on egress route. Jäger fleet has dropped from light, four hundred, maybe five—" A gasp, then the voice returned in a whisper. "They're not after this rock. They want the archive. They want you."
Mana's throat closed, cold and dry. "Copy. What's the fallback?"
Fox was silent for the longest two seconds of her life. She could almost hear him breathing—rushed, shallow, too close to the edge. When his voice returned, it didn't sound like Fox at all.
"Tunnel. Repeat: Strip all nonessential, go now."
Mana moved. Her suit responded like instinct, ignoring pain, ignoring the Core burn at the base of her neck. The archive's tunnels sloped sharply, past bodies glazed in blue and a new dust—fresh, powdery, the kind that came only from kinetic breaching charges. She descended, feet echoing on the synthetic stairs, and the rumble of war grew louder with every meter.
Fox's voice burrowed in again: "Faster. First wave drops in under a minute. They're using Phantom-class landers. Hundreds of them. If you don't get clear—" The channel clipped. Mana's breath caught in her throat, the sudden silence in her head more terrifying than any enemy. She pressed her palm against her temple where the neural link burned cold, a reflex as old as her training. "Fox?" she whispered to the void where his voice should be. Nothing answered but the distant thunder of the approaching fleet.