A Heli-carrier was flying across the water, heading towards one of the affected cities. It was not the only helicopter, other helicopters were heading towards other affected cities
The heli-carrier shook, rotors thrumming like a god's heartbeat as it tore across the morning sky.
The interior was dim, red-lit and humming. A cold tal bench under him. Restraint straps digging into his armorless arms. Andrew sat still, spine straight, gaze fixed on the far end of the cargo bay, where a flickering monitor played live drone footage.
Paleview City was not a city anymore.
Smoke coiled upward like dark fingers. Buildings collapsed inward in slow motion, glass raining like shattered starlight. On the streets, people ran like insects—screaming, stumbling, trampled—while things not ant to exist stalked behind them.
One of the beasts—massive, spine-armoured, four arms twitching unnaturally—tore a sedan in half like it was paper.
Andrew's lips didn't move.
But his eyes—a muted amber glow pulsing beneath the irises—did not blink.
The hum of the aircraft grew louder. Beneath the rotors, Andrew could still hear the static whispers of the monitor, broken voices feeding in from ground-level teams.
"Civilians breached—zone red! I repeat, zone!"
"It's chewing through the—!"
"We're falling back—falling ba—"
—static—
The footage was cut.
The drone had been lost.
He let out a slow breath.
The air inside the carrier was cold, sterile, but not clean—it stank faintly of disinfectant, sweat, and blood that had dried long ago into the floor panels.
They had cleaned the bodies, sure.
But you couldn't wash out that scent of purpose.
Andrew looked down at his own hands. Fingers long, callused. Too steady. He didn't rember what his real hands looked like before the treatnts, before the injections that made his bones ache at night and his dreams flutter with static.
Sotis he tried to recall his life before the Facility.
But the earliest thing he rembered was a scalpel glinting beneath white lights.
"I was eleven when they put under," he thought.
Not allowed. He didn't speak much. Not unless ordered.
He rembered the feeling of cold clamps on his limbs. The whisper of doctors saying, "He's one of the viable ones."
He rembered pain.
Then he rembered strength.
Strength that didn't belong to children.
Now, seventeen years old, Andrew was ready. Or so they said.
The man across from him shifted—Subject 011, Malik. His knuckles were bleeding again from punching the steel wall earlier. His bones were denser than titanium now. Still get bored easily.
Next to Malik sat Inez—013—humming softly to herself, tapping a rhythm with her boot. Her pupils were shaped like a wolf's.
They all had one thing in common: they were designed.
They were the Genesis Unit, whispered in classified briefings, forgotten in war budgets, shaped in darkness by people who believed that one day, humanity might lose control of the planet.
And today?
That day had arrived.
Andrew shifted slightly as the carrier banked.
The view outside tilted. Now he could see Paleview more clearly—the black smoke spiralling higher. Sowhere in the east quarter, sothing detonated, and the glow of fire painted the clouds orange.
Andrew stood slowly, his boots pressing down with a faint tallic click against the cold interior floor of the heli-carrier. The aircraft trembled slightly beneath his feet, the motion subtle yet ever-present, like the heartbeat of sothing alive, straining to carry its deadly cargo toward a dying city.
Around him, the others followed suit—rising not in unison, not with practised synchronisation, but with the heavy, instinctive awareness of those who had waited their entire lives for this mont. There were no shouted commands. No heroic speeches. Not even a whispered prayer.
Andrew's gaze shifted toward the thick blast doors at the rear of the carrier, where the red warning lights had begun to blink in a slow, steady rhythm. A countdown was nearing its end. The ti was almost here.
Paleview City – Eleven Minutes Before the First Breach
The morning unfolded like any other in Paleview City, humming with the synchronised rhythm of urban life. The sun hung low but bright behind a veil of clouded haze, casting a pale gold over the jagged silhouettes of glass towers and rising apartnt blocks. Cars moved in slow, honking chains through congested intersections while electric trams humd along steel tracks, their interior lights flickering softly like digital heartbeats. Street vendors stirred hot oil in battered pans, filling the air with the mingled scent of spice, grilled at, and fried dough. A child's laughter echoed from a nearby sidewalk, where pigeons scattered with the flapping urgency of wings startled mid-al.
Elena Morales stepped off a crowded city bus and adjusted the strap of her handbag while juggling a coffee cup in one hand and her phone in the other. The city's pulse was already in full swing, a cacophony of tires screeching, distant sirens whining, and voices layered in frustration, urgency, and purpose. She was midway through a terse conversation with her departnt head when her phone screen glitched. For a mont, the display went black, then flashed red with sudden brightness, forcing her to squint.
Before she could react, every billboard in sight—across the towering buildings, on the side of buses, even the digital sign outside the laundromat—froze mid-advertisent and flickered violently. The bright neon tones of consurism bled away, replaced with solid crimson. Lines of massive black text scrolled across the displays in a rapid, unreadable torrent that looked more like corrupted code than human language. Sparks burst from a nearby screen as if it had been overloaded.
At the sa ti, a sharp, shrill tone pierced the air. The noise blared from every speaker in a several-block radius—traffic lights, phones, store intercoms—emitting a unified, pulsing ergency alert stabbing into the skull like a dentist's drill. Pedestrians staggered and clutched their ears. Coffee cups spilt. Car horns ceased, replaced by startled screams and confused shouts.
Elena's phone slipped from her fingers and clattered onto the pavent, the call long forgotten.
Then, without warning, every screen froze again, and silence fell.
It was not the silence of relief. It was the silence before the scream.
Then the voice ca.
It did not emanate from any single source. It bypassed the rules of sound entirely, vibrating directly into the minds of every living person. It was deep and chanical, crackling with static at the edges, but perfectly comprehensible.
"People of Planet #1556, your free period is over. It's ti for the real test to begin."
All across Paleview, thousands of people froze mid-step. Conversations ended in half-ford syllables. The voice left a chill that seed to sink into the marrow, bypassing comprehension and sinking straight into instinct. The original source is *.
So people looked around in disbelief. Others began to cry. A few dropped to their knees, thinking it was God. But most stood there, utterly confused, eyes wide and bodies frozen with a primal understanding that sothing terrible had just begun.
Overhead, the clouds began to ripple unnaturally, as if sothing massive pressed against the other side of the sky, distorting it like a plastic sheet pulled taut. Without warning, a sound cracked across the heavens—sharp and otherworldly, like the shattering of a continent-sized glass mirror. The sky split open.
A vertical rift, jagged and glowing with red-black energy, tore across the skyline above the Riverfront District. Its edges pulsated with an organic, writhing motion, sending waves of visible heat distortion through the air. Lightning forked within the wound, illuminating the inside of the tear, where only swirling void and alien colours existed.
From the breach, a shape erged.
It ca slowly at first—an appendage, clicking and jointed, covered in dull, dark chitin that reflected light like oiled stone. Then ca the rest of it. A creature the size of a delivery truck, insectoid in form but wrong in too many ways to describe. Its limbs moved with twitching, unnatural speed, its eyes were compound but glowing, and its mandibles dripped a translucent green fluid that hissed upon contact with tal.
The creature landed hard on the roof of a city bus, collapsing it instantly. tal shrieked as it tore through the structure, grabbing a passenger trying to escape through the shattered windshield and ripping him in half in a blur of movent. Blood sprayed in arcs across the street, followed by a mont of stunned stillness.
Then ca the screaming.
People fled in every direction, trampling over each other in blind panic. Mothers dragged children. Office workers dropped laptops and ran with the desperate, mindless energy of prey. Drivers swerved onto sidewalks. Cars collided, tal folding with the crunch of twisted steel, engines bursting into fla. The creature shrieked—a high, ear-piercing signal that echoed off the buildings like a sonar pulse—and began to chase.
Then another rift opened. And another. Across the city, portals blood like infected wounds in the air—tearing themselves open on the sides of buildings, above intersections, in alleyways, and even underground. From each one erged more creatures. So crawled. So flew. So slithered or pounced, but all of them shared one trait: they were built for extermination.
The city descended into chaos in under a minute.
Sirens wailed, this ti real ones, as first responders attempted to make sense of the disaster. But even as armoured police vehicles rolled out from district HQ, more monsters appeared. The air was filled with smoke, fire, and the screams of the dying. Shattered glass rained from above like silver confetti.
Sowhere in the sky, satellites recorded it all.
From the surface, the city of Paleview collapsed into madness.
From above, the test had only just begun.
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