SCENE I – THE ALGORITHM OF VIOLENCE
The air inside Base Theta did not move. Recycled, scrubbed, pressurized, and chilled to a temperature that discouraged both bacterial growth and human comfort, it was a medium for data, not life.
In the sterile heart of the command center, silence was absolute. The only sound was the rhythmic, subsonic thrum of cooling fans keeping the Pragna servers from melting. This was the brain of the new world order—a cathedral of black glass and blue light buried deep beneath the earth, immune to the radiation and dust of the wasteland above.
General Jakal stood in the center of the room. He did not sit. To sit was to yield to gravity, and Jakal yielded to nothing.
He stared at the massive holographic wall. It displayed no map, but a stream of raw data scrolling at a speed no human eye should have tracked. But Jakal's eyes were not entirely human anymore; they were conditioned by decades of watching the world burn and cataloging the ashes.
The report from the Ash Market finalized itself with a soft, clinical chime.
*INCIDENT REPORT: SECTOR 4 (COMMERCIAL ZONE)*
*STATUS: LEVEL-C DISRUPTION*
*CASUALTIES: 5 CONFIRMED. 1 UNKNOWN.*
A high-altitude surveillance drone, hovering unseen in the grey clouds above the market, began to transmit its findings. The feed was grainy, filtered through layers of atmospheric interference, but the geometry of the violence was precise.
The drone's logic core stripped the scene of emotion. It saw no massacre; it saw vectors. It traced the trajectory of blood spatter on the dusty ground. It calculated the foot-pounds of force required to sever a human spine with a crude blade. It triangulated the positions of the bodies—the Merchant, the Guards, the Officer.
*Analysis: Asymmetrical combat. Close-quarters lethality: 100%.*
Then, the second layer of the Pragna algorithm activated. It was a subroutine Jakal himself had coded, a digital hunting dog designed to sniff out one specific frequency.
Red text bled across the blue hologram, reflecting in Jakal's irises.
*WARNING: PIKA-ADJACENT ANOMALY DETECTED.*
*SIGNATURE: UNREGISTERED DOT MANIFESTATION.*
*SUBJECT: FEMALE. AGE: EST. 18-22.*
"So it spreads," Jakal whispered.
His voice was low, vibrating with a complex frequency—part disgust, part vindication. The sound was swallowed instantly by the acoustic dampeners.
An aide materialized at his elbow. The young officer held a datapad with trembling fingers, knuckles white. He was terrified of the General. Everyone in Base Theta was. They knew Jakal viewed incompetence and emotion as the same defect.
"Sir," the aide stammered, eyes fixed on the pulsing red warning lights. "The... the behavioral analysis is complete. The system is confused."
Jakal didn't look at him. He zoomed in on the footage. "Machines do not get confused, Lieutenant. They simply lack the vocabulary for chaos. Explain."
The aide swallowed hard. "It's the comparison protocol, sir. The system is trying to match this new subject to Voi Dione. But the patterns... they don't align."
"Elaborate."
"Voi Dione," the aide recited, voice shaking, "acts as a void. He removes matter. He neutralizes threats with minimum exertion. His violence is... subtracting. He seeks Zero."
Jakal nodded slowly. "And this one?"
"This one adds," the aide whispered. "Sir, she... she initiated the conflict. Voi avoids unless obstructed. This subject hunted. The violence was performative. She displayed the bodies. She arranged them."
Jakal swiped his hand through the air, expanding the video feed. The frame froze on the final seconds before the camera was destroyed.
It showed a girl. She stood amidst the ruin of the jewelry stall. She was covered in blood—thick, arterial crimson staining her skin and rags. But it wasn't her blood. She stood with chest heaving, eyes wide and feral, holding a cleaver that dripped onto the dust.
And there, visible through the torn fabric of her shirt, right in the center of her chest, was the Dot. A single, black point of singularity.
Jakal leaned in, face inches from the light.
"Voi is the vacuum," Jakal analyzed, voice cold and clinical. "He represents the emptiness of the world after the wars. But this..." He pointed a gloved finger at the girl's snarling face. "She is the reaction. She is the anger of the survivors. She feeds on the structure we built. She wants to replace it with herself."
"Orders, Sir?" the aide asked, dreading the answer. "Should we deploy the Interception Squad? We can have the P-Unit prototypes mobilized within the hour. We can crush her before she leaves the sector."
Jakal paused. He looked at the global map.
Two bright signal points burned on the grid.
One was a steady, cold blue light moving East—Voi Dione. His path was a straight line, efficient, indifferent.
The other was a jagged, pulsing red light—Nolif. Her path was erratic, pausing, turning, surging forward.
"No," Jakal said. "Do not engage."
The aide blinked. "Sir? She massacred a Pragna officer. The protocol states—"
"The protocol was written for a world that made sense," Jakal snapped, voice cracking like a whip. "We are no longer in that world. We are witnessing an evolution, Lieutenant. To interfere now would be to contaminate the experiment."
He stepped back, clasping his hands behind his back.
"Track both," Jakal commanded. "Let them walk. Let them eat. Let them kill."
"And... and if they intersect?"
Jakal's expression did not change. It was a mask of iron. "Then we will finally understand if chaos has a hierarchy. Or if they will simply cancel each other out—matter and anti-matter annihilating in a flash of light."
The General turned away from the screen, dismissing the massacre with a shrug. He walked toward the far wall, where a different sector of the map was displayed—a sector shrouded in static and marked with overlapping bio-hazard warnings.
He stared at the green, static-filled void on the screen.
"We have other problems," Jakal murmured to the humming machines. "The garden is overgrown. And something is moving in the roots."
SCENE II – THE GREEN LINE
The transition was not gradual. It was a violation.
One moment, they were driving through the familiar, grey death of the wasteland—endless miles of cracked concrete, rusted steel skeletons, and dust that tasted of sulfur.
The next moment, the world turned green.
But it was not the vibrant, life-affirming green of the old stories. It was a sickly, bruised green. The color of gangrene. The color of mold growing on a corpse left in the water too long.
The stolen transport vehicle rattled violently as Rahs drove it off the remnants of the highway and onto the dirt track. The suspension groaned, metal grinding against metal, protesting the uneven terrain.
"The Forests," Rahs said.
The word tasted like ash.
Beside him, Jeila sat clutching the dashboard. She was small, vanishing into the oversized passenger seat. In her lap, she held the two halves of the red ball she had retrieved from the market. Her knuckles were white, fingers digging into the rubber as if it were the only anchor keeping her tethered to reality.
"It looks... wet," she whispered.
She was right. The trees looming ahead were not made of dry bark and leaves. They looked slick. The trunks were dark, swollen, and bulbous, glistening with perpetual moisture. They oozed a thick, amber resin that slid down the bark like slow-moving blood. The leaves were massive, thick, and rubbery, hanging heavy in the stagnant air, dripping a condensation that wasn't quite water.
"This is where the rejects go," Rahs said, voice tight. He tried to rationalize the fear tightening his chest. "Everything Pragna couldn't burn, they dumped here. Chemical waste. Biological failures. The mistakes of the war. They thought if they buried it deep enough, the earth would swallow it."
"Is Voi Dione a mistake?" Jeila asked, eyes fixed on the wall of vegetation.
Rahs gripped the steering wheel until his leather gloves creaked. "I don't know," he admitted. "But if he was made, the instructions are hidden in there. If we want to kill a god, Jeila, we have to find out who built him."
He slammed his foot on the accelerator. The truck surged forward.
They crossed the boundary line.
The physical shock was instant. As they passed under the first canopy of twisted branches, the temperature dropped twenty degrees in a second. The dry, scorching heat of the desert was replaced by a heavy, suffocating humidity.
The air inside the cab changed. It suddenly tasted of copper, ozone, and wet rot. It smelled like a butcher shop left open in a thunderstorm.
Rahs shivered. It wasn't just the cold. It was the feeling of being swallowed. The light from the sun didn't reach here. The grey sky was blotted out, replaced by a filtered, underwater gloom. Shadows stretched and twisted, seemingly moving on their own in the periphery of his vision.
"Lock the doors," Rahs whispered, though he knew the locks wouldn't stop what lived in these woods.
SCENE III – THE ARCHIVES OF FLESH
They couldn't drive far. The forest fought back.
The dirt track dissolved into sludge with the consistency of muscular tissue. Roots, thick as pythons and hard as iron, rose from the earth. They wrapped around the truck's axles, grinding against the driveshaft, choking the vehicle's movement until the engine whined, sputtered, and died.
Rahs killed the ignition. The silence that followed was heavy.
It wasn't the empty silence of the desert. It was a crowded silence. The forest was breathing. A low, rhythmic thrumming seemed to come from the ground itself.
"We walk," Rahs said.
He checked his rifle, pulling the bolt back to ensure a round was chambered. The mechanical *clack-clack* sounded obscenely loud, a violent intrusion in the organic quiet. He checked his pistol. Then, he reached into the truck's emergency kit and pulled out a small combat knife—serrated steel, barely six inches long.
He handed it to Jeila.
"Do you know how to use this?"
Jeila looked at the blade. The metal was cold and heavy in her small hand. She remembered the market. She remembered the girl, Nolif, and the way she had dismantled the Pragna officer.
"Pointy end goes in the bad thing," Jeila said. Her voice was flat, devoid of the innocence a child should have had. She was learning the language of this broken world too fast.
They climbed out of the truck. Their boots sank into the soft, spongy ground. It rebounded slowly, oozing a dark liquid under their weight. It felt like walking on a lung.
They moved deeper into the trees, Rahs leading with his rifle raised, Jeila close behind him. The air was thick with spores that caught in their throats.
After an hour of trekking through the gloom, they found the structure.
It was a Pragna laboratory, half-consumed by the forest. It was a brutalist block of concrete cracked open like an egg. Vines had shattered the reinforced glass windows, reclaiming the steel for the earth. Roots had pulverized the walls, growing through the masonry like veins.
Rahs wiped a layer of thick, velvety moss from a metal plaque bolted to the remaining wall.
*PROJECT: ADAPTATION. SECTOR 7. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.*
"What is this place?" Jeila asked, stepping over a rusted steel beam blocking the entrance.
"A graveyard," Rahs murmured.
They stepped inside. The interior was a ruin of science and slaughter. The air here was colder, smelling of formaldehyde and old dust. The floor was covered in debris—shattered test tubes, rusted surgical tools, overturned gurneys, and bones.
Not human bones. Or rather, not *just* human.
Rahs shone the tactical light of his rifle across the floor. The beam cut through the darkness, revealing horrors.
There were ribcages too wide, too barrel-chested to fit a human uniform. Skulls with double rows of teeth, jaws unhinged and elongated like snakes. Femurs that had split and fused with titanium rods, the bone growing over the metal like a tumor.
"They were trying to make soldiers," Rahs realized, horror dawning on him. He kicked a pile of rotting files, scattering dust. "Before the armor. Before the tanks. They tried to make monsters to fight the war. They tried to evolve us forcefully."
Jeila picked up a file folder from the floor. It was damp, the paper turning to mush in her fingers, but one photo was still visible, protected by a plastic sleeve.
It showed a man strapped to a metal chair. Thick cables were hooked into his brain. His mouth was open in a silent, eternal scream. His eyes were wide open, entirely black, the sclera consumed by ink.
"They failed," Jeila said, dropping the photo as if it burned her.
"Did they?" Rahs looked deeper into the dark hallway of the lab, where the shadows coiled and writhed. "Or did they just lose control?"
SCENE IV – THE REJECT
A sound came from the darkness at the end of the hall.
*Click. Hiss. Drag.*
It was the sound of wet meat sliding over concrete.
Rahs spun around, heart hammering against his ribs. "Back," he ordered Jeila, voice a sharp bark. "Get behind me. Now."
From the shadows of the collapsed ceiling, something emerged.
It had been a man once. Long ago.
It still wore the tattered remnants of a test subject's gown, fabric fused into flesh. But its skin had turned grey and hard, calcified like living stone. Its arms were elongated, joints distended, knuckles dragging on the floor with a scraping sound.
And where its face should have been, there was only a smooth surface of scar tissue. No eyes. No nose. Just a mouth—a vertical slit filled with jagged, unfinished teeth that clicked together in a spasm of hunger.
A **Reject**. A biological failure that refused to die. A mistake left to rot in the dark for decades.
The creature didn't roar. It didn't have vocal cords. It just clicked its teeth together. *Click-click-click.*
It tilted its head, sensing the heat of their bodies. It smelled Rahs. It smelled the fresh blood pumping in his veins.
It lunged.
Rahs fired. *Bang. Bang.*
The sound of the rifle was deafening in the enclosed space. The muzzle flash illuminated the creature's grey skin. The bullets hit the creature in the chest, center mass.
Impacts that would have dropped a normal man instantly. Impacts that should have shattered ribs and pierced lungs.
The Reject didn't even flinch. It absorbed the kinetic energy into its callous skin like a stone absorbing rain. It didn't stop. It didn't slow down.
"Run!" Rahs shouted, backing up, boots slipping on the wet debris.
He fired again, aiming for the head. The bullet struck the scar tissue face, tearing a chunk of grey flesh off, but there was no brain behind it—only more muscle, more rage.
The creature slammed into Rahs.
It was like being hit by a landslide. The rifle flew from his hands, clattering across the floor into the darkness.
Rahs hit the ground hard, breath driven from his lungs. The creature was on top of him instantly, weight immense, pinning him to the cold concrete. It smelled of chemicals, preservatives, and old, stale blood.
It opened its jaws. Saliva, thick and acidic, dripped onto Rahs's face. It lowered its head to tear out his throat.
Rahs struggled, pushing against the grey chest with both hands. It was like pushing against a solid wall. He was a soldier of Pragna, trained for war, trained to fight men and machines. But this wasn't war. This was nature gone wrong. This was a nightmare made flesh.
Jeila screamed.
She ran forward, the small combat knife in her hand. She didn't think. She didn't calculate. She acted.
She stabbed the creature in the back, putting all her small weight behind the blow.
*Snap.*
The blade broke on the stone-like skin. The metal shard skittered away uselessly.
The creature ignored her. It didn't even register her attack. It was focused solely on Rahs. It lowered its jaws, the jagged teeth grazing Rahs's neck.
Rahs closed his eyes. The weight crushed his ribs.
*I failed,* he thought, darkness closing in. *Just like Unit 32. Just like everyone else who came here.*
SCENE V – THE NERVE
A whistle cut the stagnant air. Sharper than a scream, faster than the thought of death.
*Thwack.*
The pressure on Rahs's chest vanished.
There was a wet, tearing sound, followed by a heavy thud against the wall.
Rahs opened his eyes, gasping for air, hand instinctively going to his throat to check for blood. He was alive.
He looked up.
The creature was pinned to the concrete wall three meters away. A long, black metal spear had punched straight through its chest, lifting it off the ground. The creature thrashed, grey limbs flailing, clawing at the shaft, but it couldn't pull itself free. The metal had pierced the callous skin and anchored deep into the wall behind it.
Rahs scrambled backward, boots sliding in the slime. He grabbed Jeila and pulled her close, shielding her. He looked toward the entrance of the lab, toward the source of the spear.
A figure stood there.
He was not wearing white like Voi. He was not wearing rags like the girl in the market.
He wore a suit of matte-black tactical armor, but it was scavenged, pieced together from different units—a Pragna chest plate, a resistance shin guard, a belt made of industrial webbing. It fit him like a second skin, customized for silence. His face was covered by a mask—half military gas mask, half ballistic visor.
He didn't move like a soldier. He didn't march. He moved like a shadow, liquid and silent.
He walked over to the pinned creature. The Reject snapped its jaws at him, *click-click-clicking* in fury.
The figure reached out. His hand was gloved in black. He grabbed the creature's head with a grip that looked casual but was terrifyingly strong.
With a simple, brutal twist, he snapped its neck.
The sound was like a tree branch breaking in a storm—a dry, final *crack*. The creature went limp, arms hanging uselessly.
The figure reached up, grabbed the spear, and placed his boot against the creature's chest. With a wet squelch, he pulled the spear free. He wiped the black, tar-like blood on the creature's tattered gown.
Then, slowly, he turned to Rahs and Jeila.
He didn't speak. He just stared at them through the dark visor of his mask. The silence stretched, heavy and dangerous.
"Who are you?" Rahs asked, voice shaking as he stood up, keeping Jeila behind him. He looked for his rifle but didn't dare move toward it. "Pragna Special Forces? Project Adaptation?"
The figure stood still. Then, he reached up and unclipped his mask.
There was a hiss of depressurization, a release of filtered air. He pulled the mask off.
His face was young, maybe mid-twenties, but it was a ruin. His skin was pale, almost translucent. Beneath the surface, a web of green veins pulsed, radiating from his neck up to his temple, throbbing with a toxic rhythm.
His eyes were green—not a human green, not the color of emeralds or leaves. They were the phosphorescent green of a chemical spill, glowing faintly in the gloom.
And on his forehead, right between his eyes, was a **Dot**.
Rahs froze. Blood drained from his face. "A Pika."
The man looked at Rahs. He looked at the Pragna uniform—the grey symbol of the order that had burned the world. He spat on the floor. His saliva was dark.
"You are loud," the man said.
His voice was raspy, damaged, as if he hadn't used it in years. It sounded like grinding stones. "Noise attracts them."
"Attracts who?" Jeila asked, peeking out from behind Rahs.
The man turned his glowing eyes toward the deeper darkness of the lab.
"The others," the man said. "The ones who are hungry. The ones the spear doesn't kill."
He turned and started walking back toward the forest entrance, moving with a predator's grace.
"Wait!" Rahs called out, stepping forward despite his fear. "We came for answers. We need to know what this place is. We need to know about Voi."
The man stopped. He didn't turn around. He stood framed by the sick green light of the forest entrance.
"This is the factory," he said, voice flat. "This is where they made us. This is where they broke the world."
"Us?" Rahs asked.
The man turned his head slightly, the green veins on his neck pulsing.
"The mistakes," the man said. "I am **Nerve**. If you want to live, you follow me. If you want to die, stay here. The facility wakes up at night."
He walked out into the green gloom, disappearing into the vegetation.
Rahs looked at Jeila. He looked at his broken knife. He looked at the dead monster on the wall.
"We follow," Jeila said instantly. She picked up her half of the red ball, clutching it to her chest.
"He's a Pika, Jeila," Rahs whispered, panic rising in his throat. "He has a Dot. He could kill us."
"He just saved us," she countered, eyes hard and far too old for her face. "And he knows what Voi is. He knows the secret."
Rahs looked at the dead creature on the floor, then at the green-eyed man disappearing into the trees. He realized that his war, the war of guns and orders, was over. He was in a new war now.
The order of Pragna ended here. The logic of the world ended here.
Rahs picked up his rifle. It felt heavy and useless in his hands.
"Let's go," he said.
They stepped into the deeper dark of the forest, following the monster to find the truth about monsters.
END OF CHAPTER V