264 The Hole in the World
The battle around Briana’s Trench in the Devil’s Triangle had been absolute chaos. The sky had burned with streaks of weapons fire and falling ships, while the ocean churned like sothing beneath it had been trying to claw its way to the surface. Cultists had flooded the battlefield in numbers that made my stomach twist. Every direction I looked, soone had been fighting for their life.
Over the comms and through the psychic chatter bleeding into the air, I heard the screams of my side as they struggled to hold the line.
“WE’RE GETTING OVERRUN!” soone shouted over the channel, their voice cracking. “There’s too many—AHH—GET THEM OFF—!”
Another voice cut in, hoarse with pain. “I’m hit! I’m hit! Keep them back! Don’t let them reach the trench!”
The research team had spent months theorizing why the Entity had targeted this place. They had analyzed the currents, the geography, and the strange electromagnetic interference that haunted the Triangle. One theory had revolved around Briana’s Trench, rumored to be the deepest point on Earth.
They had been close, but they had never guessed the truth.
The trench wasn’t just deep. It was an access point and the Source could only be reached through it.
I doubted the researchers even knew what the Source actually was. That knowledge sat buried inside the SRC, guarded in the highest levels imaginable. Even most capes had never heard of it. I hovered above the battlefield, my heart hamring as ships drifted overhead like dark stars. The ocean winds howled around .
Then I scread into the comms I pilfered from one of the dead.
“ALL UNITS LISTEN TO !” My voice tore out of my throat. “FALL BACK TO THE TRENCH AND FORM A DEFENSIVE RING! DO NOT LET THEM REACH THE EDGE!”
I paused only long enough to draw breath before shouting again.
“Any telepaths in range, spread the word! EVERYONE TO THE TRENCH!”
I had no idea how deep the Source truly went, even refering to my past experience with it. The estimates placed it sowhere near the planet’s mantle, maybe even brushing the core. Burying it deeper wasn’t even an option we could afford right now.
I slamd down into a cluster of cultists as I barked orders.
“Hold the periter! Flyers intercept incoming ships and do sothing about them! Heavy hitters on the front! Nobody crosses that trench!”
One cultist lunged at with a jagged blade. I phased through the strike and drove my fist through his chest as I continued shouting.
“Snipers take elevation! Telekinetics stabilize the ground and secure defensible positions! If they break through, the planet’s finished!”
Bodies hit the ground around as I moved through the fight.
Every cultist wore a hood or cowl, their faces swallowed by shadow. The rest of their equipnt had been a strange mix of scrapped armor plates, jury-rigged electronics, and pieces of what looked disturbingly like military-grade tech.
DIY and professional.
Fanaticism and funding.
It made my bones ache with worry. They hadn’t co here blindly.
Why were they doing this?
If the Entity or Paleman wanted the trench, they could simply dive through it using intangibility and be gone before anyone stopped them. But sothing else bothered even more. It was the souls. Every ti soone died, their soul slipped free from their body like it always did. Usually they lingered for a few monts, confused echoes of what had just been alive.
But here? They were vanishing, pulled sowhere and dragged away like invisible hooks had snagged them.
I shot across the battlefield and landed beside the GDF cape coordinating the defensive lines. He stood on a floating platform of wind currents, directing troops while blasts lit up the sky behind him.
He glanced at .
“I didn’t catch your na, hero.”
“The na’s Feahterfall, sir!”
I gave a quick nod. “Eclipse.”
I pointed upward at the ships hovering like silent predators.
“I’ll deal with those,” I said. “You’re in charge here. Protect the trench at all cost.”
My body slipped into warp-state, the world blurring as intangibility wrapped around like a second skin. I launched. The first ship barely had ti to react before I crashed through its hull. tal scread and folded around the shockwave as I punched out the other side.
I didn’t stop.
I warped again and smashed through the second vessel in the sa burst of montum.
When I finally stopped midair, my lungs burned.
I was already out of breath.
There were more than a dozen ships still hovering above the battlefield, each one shaped with sleek alien geotry. Their technology radiated a level of advancent that made human engineering look primitive.
Taking down two of them had already pushed my limits.
Below , the first damaged ship spiraled downward.
“Damn it, pace yourself,” I muttered, scolding myself too aware I wasn’t that in tune with the potency of my elevated power.
I warped again.
This ti I aid straight through the belly of another ship, puncturing it like a bullet. The vessel drifted for several seconds before alarms began screaming. Behind , the ships I had already crippled erupted into explosions that lit the sky in violent orange bursts.
I forced myself to ignore the firestorm.
Instead, I focused on the souls.
They kept vanishing.
I descended to the battlefield and landed beside a dead cultist sprawled across the wet sand. More cultists rushed the mont my feet touched the ground. I didn’t even bother fighting them properly. I phased them downward with a gaze.
I crouched beside the corpse and found sothing tallic glinting against the cultist’s chest. I pulled it free. It was a dal, a circular device with strange grooves carved into its surface. It seed to be acting as a ‘port’ of sorts.
Another cultist charged at with a scream.
I turned and punched him straight in the head, dropping him instantly. The mont his body hit the ground, I ripped the sa strange dal from his armor.
That’s when I saw it.
His soul slipped free from his body and the dal sucked it inside.
I folded myself deeper than I ever had before.
Phasing into two dinsions was sothing I’ve mastered to a fine degree I could easily slip past through nullification. It felt like flattening my existence, like slipping between the pages of a book. But this? This was different.
This was one dinsion.
It felt harsher, like forcing my entire being into a razor-thin thread. Every part of compressed into sothing almost abstract. Movent beca strange and slippery, like sliding along the edge of reality itself.
I slipped inside the dal as I chased after the soul, realizing it was heading to a ship above us..
When I rematerialized, the first thing that hit was the screaming. Not by the dozens or hundreds. Instead, it was hundreds of thousands. I found myself standing inside a colossal transparent tank, suspended in the middle of so vast chamber. Inside the tank swirled an impossible mass of pale shapes.
Souls.
They twisted and churned like a storm made of ghosts, their forms stretching and collapsing as if the tank itself was grinding them together.
At a scientific level, what exactly was a soul?
The best theory I had ever heard was that a soul was data. Not taphorical data, but actual informational structure. The thing that defined a person’s identity, mories, patterns, and instincts. It was the complete blueprint of the human individual.
Looking at the tank, it felt less like spirituality and more like a database.
The wraith-like figures drifted toward the mont I appeared.
Their voices overlapped in a horrifying chorus.
“Please—please let us out—!”
“IT HURTS—!”
“I don’t want to disappear—!”
“Release us, please, release us—!”
“I CAN’T FEEL MY BODY—!”
They clawed against the glass from inside, their forms distorting like smoke against a storm.
As I looked at them, sothing else happened.
Flashes.
mories burst through my mind like broken film reels. A woman laughing as she walked her daughter to school. A chanic wiping grease from his hands while arguing with a coworker. A teenage boy sitting alone in a dark room while soone in a hood whispered promises to him. A soldier bleeding in the sand after cultists ambushed his convoy. A father dragged into an alley and stabbed because he refused to join. A college student who joined the cult willingly, believing they were saving the world. A doctor murdered during a hospital raid. A fanatic chanting in a candlelit basent before detonating a bomb.
The mories crashed together violently.
So of them had beco cultists.
Many of them hadn’t.
But the end result had been the sa. Their souls ended up here. I backed toward the edge of the tank, trying to ignore the tidal wave of mories.
Eventually, my hand touched the curved surface and found glass.
I raised my fist.
“If I break this…”
Before I could strike, a hand phased through the glass, grabbed my shoulder, and yanked. Reality flipped. I was ripped out of the tank and thrown into the ship’s corridor.
Paleman stood there.
I didn’t hesitate.
My leg warped forward, oscillating between tangibility and intangibility at high frequency as I returned to shape. The kick slamd into his face, but the mont it connected, my leg stuck there like clay.
I felt null power instantly as my phasing faltered.
Paleman’s hand lifted. His arm stretched, reshaping into a long, tallic blade that glead under the ship’s lighting. He swung. I twisted and kicked off his face with my other leg, throwing myself backward as the blade carved through the air where my chest had been.
The edge humd with sothing dangerous. Paleman’s arm reford into normal flesh, and then he slowly shrugged off his trench coat and let it fall to the floor.
“Co at ,” Paleman said calmly as he squared up on his legs.
It sounded like a taunt.
I folded my arms slightly, hovering just above the ground.
“How about you co at ?”
I didn’t know his official ratings, but I knew he was strong. My best guess was that he had so kind of power mutation, similar to Griffin’s adaptive abilities.
Paleman tilted his head slightly.
“You asked for it.”
I didn’t even blink. The world flipped. Suddenly, I was standing where Paleman had been. And he was standing where I had been. It was teleportation.
Under my feet, the trench coat exploded into gray matter.
The transformation was so sudden and violent that if this had been a year ago, I would have been dead before realizing what happened. Spikes of organic sludge erupted upward. I phased down through the floor.
I dropped straight into a lower hallway.
A split second later the gray matter burst through the ceiling like a storm of bullets.
I phased sideways, reappeared to the right, and imdiately found myself surrounded by robots. It was a full ring of them. Every unit was plated in null tal, their bodies angular and precise like weapons given legs.
Their faces glowed with scrolling lines of zeroes and ones.
Master Sequence.
They spoke in perfect unison.
“If it isn’t Eclipse himself—”
I didn’t stay long enough to hear the rest. I blasted forward, phasing straight through their bodies while accelerating into flight. The hull of the ship tore open as I burst outside into warp. The sky above the Devil’s Triangle had turned into a battlefield of burning wreckage and hovering warships.
And above them all was one ship floating far higher than the rest. It was bigger and heavier, commanding the battlefield like a throne in the sky.
I stared at it and felt a knot tighten in my chest.
Those souls…
I should have exorcised them when I had the chance.
Now, they were still trapped in that system.
I launched toward the ship. Warp-state kicked in full force as I spiraled around its structure, tearing holes through the hull with high-speed passes. Each impact ripped chunks of armor free as I circled again and again. Then I dove back into the vessel and returned to the chamber where the soul storage tank had been.
Paleman stood there waiting, but I was faster.
I shot past him.
A voice suddenly spoke beside .
“I can read your thoughts plain as day.”
A figure appeared directly in my path.
Master Sequence.
This body looked different from the other iterations. Its fra blended biological tissue with chanical plating, wires threaded through muscle like veins. A translucent barrier ford around him.
I slamd into it.
But the mont my foot touched the surface, my direction changed. It was a portal surface, forcing an atempt of an attack redirected sowhere else. I stomped down hard, carving a shallow trench into the tal floor as I forced my montum to stop.
Paleman was already waiting for . The mont my boots touched the floor, several dark tentacles erupted from his body and shot toward like harpoons, each one aiming directly for my torso and skull.
His body itself was a weapon.
I still couldn’t forget the injury he gave the last ti. That ambush had nearly ended my life permanently. The mory of that pain lingered in my nerves every ti I saw him move.
The tentacles lunged.
I slipped sideways through space using intangibility, teleporting across the chamber and reappearing in the opposite corner near the towering container of swirling souls. The wraiths inside continued screaming, their forms thrashing against the glass as if the entire mass felt every second of the battle happening outside.
Before I could launch my next move, another voice cut through the chaos.
“I hope I’m not late to the party.”
Thin red strings suddenly illuminated the room like glowing wires stretched across the air. They shot toward with surgical precision, their edges burning with such heat that the surrounding space visibly warped around them.
I inhaled slowlyhen I dropped my warp-state completely and relied purely on intangibility.
The strings sliced straight through my body as if I were a shadow.
tal screeched above as soone burst through the ceiling.
A young man dropped into the chamber surrounded by fluttering red threads that trailed behind him like puppet strings. A long red scarf whipped around his neck, and the upper half of his face had been horribly burned. His skin looked lted and scarred, and both of his eyes were gone.
Despite that, he grinned like a lunatic.
“The na’s War, nice to fucking et you!”
“I don’t care,” I replied flatly.
I flicked my hand downward and phased his body directly through the floor beneath him. He vanished into the level below like soone dropping through a trapdoor. He didn’t carry any null. That made him easier to deal with. Or so I thought.
One of the red strings snapped tight around my leg before I could move.
The line burned against reality itself and yanked downward with monstrous force.
The floor disappeared beneath as I was dragged violently through several decks of the ship, crashing through tal and machinery like a falling missile. Each floor shattered around my body before the string finally hurled completely outside.
Cold ocean wind slamd into .
The ship itself was already beginning to crash, but it sohow maintained altitude as massive thrusters ignited across its underside. Blue fire roared around the hull, stabilizing the crippled vessel just enough to keep it airborne.
I phased the string wrapped around my leg and prepared to warp back into the interior.
Sothing burst through the hole I had just been dragged through.
An armored figure rode straight out of the ship on top of a horse.
The sight almost looked dieval if not for the fact that both rider and mount moved with impossible speed. The armor glead like polished steel, and the rider held a long lance aid directly at .
The charge happened in a blink.
The lance pierced straight through my chest and detonated with raw kinetic force. The impact launched backward like a cannonball. The armored rider left the weapon on my chest as the explosion of montum threw across the sky.
I tried phasing the kinetic energy away as my body spun through the air.
Before I could stabilize myself, the ship unleashed a barrage of projectiles.
Missiles.
Railgun shells.
Energy bursts.
They rained down around in relentless waves, each impact pushing further and further toward the ocean like gravity had suddenly multiplied.
Then Paleman appeared directly in front of through teleportation.
One of his fists had already expanded to the size of a car.
He swung.
The punch connected with terrifying weight, and the force behind it sent plumting downward with twice the montum the armored lancer had generated.
The ocean rushed up.
I crashed through the surface and sank like a teor.
As I fell toward the seabed, I finally noticed sothing strange about the broken pieces of the lance still lodged in my chest. The outer casing had cracked open during the impact, exposing internal components.
Radiation shielding.
Detonation circuitry.
My stomach dropped when the realization hit.
“That’s a fucking nuke…”
The weapon detonated before I could escape the blast radius.
Light swallowed everything.
The explosion vaporized a massive portion of the surrounding ocean, blasting water outward in a colossal sphere. I hit the seabed monts later, the pressure wave flattening the sand and rock around while the displaced ocean above began collapsing back downward like a returning avalanche.
I lay there on the ocean floor as millions of tons of water rained back down.
High above, powerful energy beams fired from the hovering ships and speared into the sea, searching for my position.
They all missed.
I slipped through space again and teleported away from the impact zone.
The world reford around as I reappeared back in the skies over the Devil’s Triangle, forcing myself to slow down and reset.
This ti, I watched carefully.
Instead of charging blindly back into the fight, I began teleporting rapidly between vantage points from one city-state to another. My vision jumped across different sections of the battlefield and even further beyond, peering into nearby city-states and conflict zones tied to the cult’s operations.
Everywhere I looked, chaos unfolded.
And everywhere I looked, I saw the sa pattern.
Souls leaving bodies, and then disappearing. Every cultist that died had their soul vanish almost instantly. The sa thing happened to civilians or soldiers killed by cultists. They were being harvested and pulled sowhere through whatever system those dals and ships were connected to.
I exhaled slowly as the realization settled in. Their operation wasn’t just about the trench. The trench was probably a gateway or catalyst. The real objective involved the souls themselves. They were gathering them like fuel, which ant sowhere out there existed a machine, ritual, or entity capable of converting human souls into energy.
I rubbed my face and muttered to myself while staring at the burning sky.
“That’s so fucked up voodoo shit.”
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