The drone hit the earth like a dropped bird—wings curled, eyes glassed. It pinwheeled once, caught a vine, and slamd into a gnarled root with a sickening crunch. Its husk smoldered briefly, exhaling one last hiss of static before going still.
No more recon.
No more thermal pings. No motion overlays. No proximity alerts.
No more warnings.
We were blind.
"Move!" Anthony barked, already shoving through the tangle of branches ahead. His blade sliced low across a patch of thornvines. "Evac’s still ahead! We’re not stopping now."
No one argued. We didn’t need to. The sound of the drone crashing had rung through the jungle like a starting gun. Anyone in a five-kiloter radius knew exactly where we were now. If soone wasn’t tracking us before, they were now.
And if soone already had our scent?
Then we were being hunted.
The jungle closed around us, thicker than before. The light, already dim under the canopy, seed to collapse with the drone’s fall—like even the sun was backing away. The treetops lood, limbs tangled tight, knotted like muscle, strangling the last of the afternoon. Shadows bled from every corner, black and wet and hungry. The path ahead twisted into ink. Every footstep felt like stepping deeper into a throat.
Sienna clicked on a wrist-light, the beam flickering against wet leaves and reflecting in a thousand dewdrops like eyes. Alexis mirrored the motion a second later, casting pale gold arcs through the gloom. I didn’t reach for mine. I needed both hands free, and I didn’t want to draw any more attention than we already had.
We slipped back into formation with barely a word. Anthony took point—his stride fast, sharp, like every second of delay physically hurt him. Camille and Evelyn flanked left and right, weapons drawn, eyes wide. Sienna and 3830 watched the rear, both checking our trail with quiet efficiency. I stayed dead center, not by choice but necessity. My hand brushed the edge of the drone controller holster every ten steps, like a reflex I hadn’t unlearned.
Five ridgelines south.
Then four.
Then three.
We moved like ghosts—but sweat soaked through our collars, beading at our temples, dripping down the backs of our necks. I could feel my shirt clinging to my spine. My foot caught on a gnarled root I should’ve seen, should’ve adjusted for. I stumbled, breath hitching. Recovered. Said nothing.
Activate: Observation (Lv. 9).
Nothing.
Not even static. No ntal click. No clarity in motion or terrain. Just... absence. My system didn’t even glitch. It just failed to answer.
I swallowed hard and kept running.
It happened again five minutes later, during a sharp downhill scramble. The incline was slick with moss and silt, half-hidden under fallen leaves. Camille slipped mid-step, her boot catching, her shoulder smacking into a twisted trunk. She hissed through her teeth but caught herself before hitting the ground.
"You okay?" Alexis asked, concern laced in her breath.
Camille frowned, brushing grit from her arm. "Yeah. I just—didn’t see the slope change."
"Sa," Evelyn murmured, glancing sideways. "I can’t read you guys to know what’s coming anymore. It’s like... I thought I had better footing, but my sense of balance was just off."
My hand moved to the side, fingers brushing through the projected interface mid-run. The interface blinked once, stable. All green. Skills online. No error codes. No warnings.
But I knew better.
Sothing was wrong. Subtle, but spreading. Like rot under a floorboard. Like a scalpel slid quietly into the brainstem. We weren’t just tired. We weren’t just stressed. We were unraveling at the seams.
We pushed on. Vines reached for our ankles like grasping hands. The ground began to slant sideways without warning, then dipped sharply into a muddy ravine. Anthony barely slowed, but raised a closed fist—signal for silence. We obeyed.
The wind changed.
And sothing else with it.
The air felt charged. Not with heat or pressure, but... a kind of hollowness. Like a vacuum inside our skulls. Like we were stepping into a place that didn’t want us thinking clearly.
3830 slowed beside , her pace asured, eyes distant.
"Reflex down," she said softly, like soone noting the ti. "Reynard’s. Two minutes ago."
I blinked and turned toward her, pulse quickening. "How can you tell?"
She didn’t answer imdiately. Instead, she tapped the side of her temple with one gloved finger. "You rember how my job title lets see people’s titles, stats, and jobs in real ti, right? I can see what skills and jobs are being shut down."
I stared. "Wait, you’re actually tracking our skill failures?"
She nodded once.
"Who else?"
She hesitated. "Camille again. Ten seconds ago. Evelyn’s Insight dropped just before that. Alexis’s Cognition level dropped by almost a third."
I looked over my shoulder. Alexis was adjusting the dial on her wrist-light, lips pressed thin. Camille was flexing her hand like sothing ached. None of them looked like they knew.
"They don’t know?" I asked, voice low.
"No," 3830 said. "They won’t. Their interfaces are still displaying active. The skills are registering as ’present’, like soone deleted the function but left the label."
My blood ran cold.
"How?" I asked again. "How is it even possible?"
She exhaled slowly, expression unreadable.
"I’m not sure. But..." Her tone shifted. Hesitant. Distant. "...There was soone in the program. Back at NovaCore. A subject they kept locked down longer than most. His skill didn’t let him fight. It let him... switch things off."
I frowned. "You think soone like that is doing this?"
She didn’t et my eyes. "I think he could. If they still have him. If he’s not dead."
I narrowed my eyes. "And you think he’d work for them? For the sa people that locked him up? That tortured him?"
"...I’m hoping..." she said, voice flat now, "...that I’m wrong."
We moved deeper into the dark. My fingers brushed the hilt of my knife. It felt heavier now. My balance off by degrees.
I didn’t trust any of it.
We took a left fork. Roots like ribs. Vines like ligants. The jungle stopped feeling like a place and more like a body. Cramped and flexing.
Another skill failed. I knew it instinctively, even though the interface said otherwise. My grip slipped again—too much torque on the draw.
I said nothing.
Anthony held up a hand.
We froze.
Up ahead, just barely kissed by moonlight, the treeline thinned and broke—branches fading into open air. The jungle gave way to sothing else. A clearing.
We slowed as we approached, weapons already drawn, each footstep quiet but deliberate. The tension in our formation was palpable—no one trusted the silence, not after everything. Even the wind seed to hold its breath.
Then we saw it.
A crate. Grey, rectangular, unmistakably military-issue. Its edges were dulled by weather and half-sunken into the dirt like it had landed too hard or been buried partially by the elents. Moss clung to its corners. But there was no doubt what it was. Ergency Evacuation Drop. One of ours.
A flicker of hope—brief, bright—lifted in my chest.
We’d made it.
But the feeling didn’t last.
The mont stretched, souring in my gut. Sothing was off.
There were no beacon lights. No signal pings. No automated periter scan or defense drone flickering to life. Nothing that scread rescue.
Just stillness.
Then movent—soft and synchronized.
Figures stepped forward, erging from the shadows around the crate like ghosts from fog.
Eight of them. Maybe more. It was hard to count in the dim light. They ford a loose periter around the drop site, rifles drawn and angled low—but ready. Their gear was matte black, no reflective visors or active HUDs. No faction insignias. No glowing emblems. Just n and won standing like statues with eyes that didn’t blink.
And silence. So complete it made the wind seem loud.
At the center stood a man who didn’t need a weapon to command attention.
He wasn’t armored. Wasn’t visibly augnted. Just... present. The others stood slightly apart from him, orbiting like satellites. Their formation had a gravitational pull, and he was its anchor.
He wasn’t tall enough to tower. He wasn’t bulky enough to intimidate. But he radiated sothing worse than force.
Control.
The kind of calm that only ca from knowing the rules of the world didn’t apply to you anymore.
Even at a glance, the damage was impossible to ignore.
Half of his lower face was scarred beyond recognition, the flesh twisted and retextured from burns or acid. The lines were old—too deep to be recent. His jaw was reinforced with dermal grafts, pale and uneven. One ear was gone entirely, the scar tissue smooth and grown over. His left eye glowed faintly—a buried cybernetic, old model, twitching slightly with calibration drift. The rest of him looked... thin. Worn, like a body pushed past the edge and left standing out of sheer stubbornness.
He didn’t speak.
Didn’t gesture.
His eyes t mine—and didn’t waver.
There was no overt aggression. No challenge. Just... assessnt. Like he already knew who I was. What I was. And maybe—what I’d lost.
The weight of that gaze held us still.
Sienna’s voice broke the silence, barely above a whisper. "What is this?"
"A trap," Camille muttered, not even blinking. "Obviously."
Then 3830 moved forward, just a step, her body stiff with tension, but her eyes sharp with sothing else.
Recognition.
Her voice was quiet when it ca—not hushed by fear, but by mory.
"That’s him."
Anthony glanced sideways at her, one brow furrowed. "Who?"
"Subject 3829."
The na dropped like a stone into a still pond.
The clearing, the n, the air—all of it froze around her words. She said it like a number, not a na. Like sothing catalogued and sealed away. A designation etched into bone.
Her eyes didn’t leave him.
"He was the one before ," she said. "In the experints."
I swallowed hard. "He escaped?"
She shook her head. "No. He didn’t escape NovaCore. He was kept. Controlled. Buried deeper than the rest of us. They never let him out, because his job... his job wasn’t combat. It wasn’t analysis. It wasn’t support."
She turned to us slowly.
"His job," she said, the words heavier with each syllable, "was to turn us off."
A chill threaded down my spine, slow and sharp.
Not jamd.
Not blocked.
Not misfiring.
Disabled. Systemically. At the core.
Cut off from the inside.
And as the realization clicked into place—cold and unmistakable—I looked back toward the man at the center of it all.
His gaze hadn’t shifted.
He was still staring directly at .
Reviews
All reviews (0)