"Unacceptable."
The word was a block of ice, dropped into the cold, humming silence of the safe house.
Chloe stood with her arms crossed, her face a mask of clinical disappointnt.
She looked like a master engineer staring at a beautiful, revolutionary engine that had one, single, critical design flaw.
"Your lack of control is a liability," she stated, her voice flat. "Your power is a wild, unpredictable variable. And I do not tolerate unpredictable variables."
"I need a scalpel," she said, her cold, gray eyes pinning Michael in place. "Right now, you are a sledgehamr. A broken one."
Jinx, who was leaning against the weapons bench cleaning her rifle, snorted. "He’s more like a grenade with a faulty pin."
Chloe ignored her.
Her entire, formidable focus was on Michael.
"We will rectify this," she announced.
It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a statent of intent.
Michael felt a familiar sense of dread.
"Oh, great," he muttered. "Another training montage. Are we going to be running up stairs and punching frozen at?"
Chloe’s expression did not change. Sarcasm, it seed, was just another form of inefficient data to her.
"Negative," she said. "Your physical stats are adequate for a low-level combatant. It is your mind that is weak."
"Your ntal fortitude is compromised. The cognitive virus you carry—the ’whispers’—is exploiting the flaws in your psychic defenses."
"So, we will rebuild those defenses."
Her training regin was nothing like the combat simulations he’d run in the Warden’s Archive.
It was worse.
So much worse.
Her first tool was a sensory deprivation tank.
It was a sleek, white pod that looked like sothing an alien would lay its eggs in.
"You want to get in the goop-tank?" Michael asked, his skepticism radiating off him in waves.
"The ’goop-tank’, as you call it, is filled with a saline solution at a precise temperature to match your body," Chloe explained, her tone that of a bored professor. "It will eliminate all external sensory input. No sight. No sound. No touch."
"You will be left alone in the dark. With nothing but your own thoughts."
"And the whispers."
It sounded like his own personal, custom-built hell.
Jinx watched from the side, a wry, almost pitying smile on her face.
"Have fun in the soup, kid," she said.
The first session was a nightmare.
The mont the external world vanished, the internal one roared to life.
The whispers were a cacophony.
Threats everywhere... secure the periter...
Protect the drive... the mission is absolute...
Hunger... need to feed... need to grow...
They were a chorus of dead monsters, all screaming for attention in the echo chamber of his mind.
He panicked.
He thrashed.
He almost drowned twice.
Chloe pulled him out after twenty minutes, his body trembling, his mind a frayed, static-filled ss.
"Failure," she stated, her voice a cold, clinical verdict. "Your emotional response is a flaw in the system. You are letting the viral data dictate your reactions. Erase it. Control it."
The next day, it was a logic puzzle.
She strapped him back into the scary brain-scanning chair and hooked him up to a virtual reality interface.
He found himself in a vast, white, empty space.
In front of him floated a cube made of shimring, interlocking lines of light.
"Your task is simple," Chloe’s voice echoed in the virtual world. "Replicate the energy lattice on the screen. You must use your Void Energy to manipulate the structure. You must be precise. Any uncontrolled output will result in a system shock."
"A psychic puzzle box from hell," Michael grumbled. "And the prize for losing is my soul gets repossessed. No pressure."
He tried.
He focused, pulling on the deep, quiet well of the Void, trying to weave the delicate threads of energy into the correct pattern.
But it was like trying to knit a sweater with live wires.
The whispers interfered.
That angle is inefficient, the Cable Hound’s logic offered. There is a faster way to connect the nodes.
Just devour the faulty connection, the Skitterer Queen hissed. Consu the error. Make it part of you.
He pushed back, fighting for control.
The lattice wavered, sputtered.
He was losing.
Jinx watched the whole thing from across the room.
She was field-stripping her rifle, the familiar, thodical process a comforting ritual.
But her eyes kept drifting back to the kid in the chair.
He was pale, sweating, his jaw clenched in a rictus of pure concentration.
She hated this.
She hated watching him get put through the wringer by the scary robot lady.
Part of her, the old, buried part that still rembered what it was like to have a crew, a family, wanted to step in.
It was the sa protective, big-sister instinct that had made her call him "kid" in the first place.
But the other part of her, the cold, pragmatic survivor who had watched him eat a monster’s soul, knew Chloe was right.
He was a bomb.
And Chloe was trying to teach him how to be a bomb that didn’t blow up in all of their faces.
"She’s gonna break him," Jinx muttered to herself, polishing a firing pin.
"Or she’s gonna turn him into a perfect, pointy weapon."
"Fifty-fifty on which one happens first."
Back in the virtual world, Michael was at his limit.
The whispers were screaming now, a wall of chaotic, conflicting demands.
He could feel his control slipping, the raw, hungry power of the Void straining against his ntal leash.
"Focus, asset," Chloe’s voice commanded, cold and unrelenting. "The viral data is a parasite. Starve it. Do not let it feed on your emotional response."
"I’m trying!" he grunted, the threads of the energy lattice beginning to fray and spark.
He could feel the presence of the Phase Hound’s echo, stronger than the others.
It wasn’t just whispering.
It was offering him a solution.
The lattice is a system, it seed to say. All systems have a back door. A vulnerability. Let show you how to phase through the problem.
It was a shortcut.
A cheat code.
It was tempting.
So, so tempting.
"No," he whispered, his voice a raw prayer. "My own power. My control."
He put every last ounce of his will into one final, desperate push.
He tried to force the lattice into place.
But he pushed too hard.
For a single, infinitesimal second, his concentration shattered.
The dam broke.
A massive, uncontrolled pulse of raw, black Void Energy erupted from him, not in the real world, but in the virtual one.
The VR simulation instantly short-circuited.
His vision went white with a screech of digital static.
In the safe house, the lights flickered violently. The bank of servers sparked, a cascade of error ssages flashing across their screens.
The humming of the room died.
And in the sudden, profound silence, a sound filled the air.
It wasn’t loud.
It was a whisper.
A chorus of whispers.
A chilling, ethereal, multi-layered sound of monstrous agony, rage, and hunger that seed to co from everywhere and nowhere at once.
...Hunger...
...Threat...
...Obey...
...Devour...
It lasted for only a second.
Then it was gone.
Jinx froze, her hands still on her rifle, her blood turning to ice.
Chloe stood bolt upright, her professional composure finally, completely shattered. Her face was a mask of shocked disbelief.
They had both heard it.
It wasn’t a hallucination.
Reviews
All reviews (0)