## 🌌 **Chapter 2 – That Which Wakes**
The ground trembled under Aarin's feet. His HUD flickered, trying to keep up with the seismic activity. The creature—no, the *thing*—rising over the horizon moved like liquid metal wrapped in muscle. Tall as a four-story building, its limbs shifted unnaturally, each movement accompanied by a shrill metallic screech that pierced the silence like a blade.
"AARIN, FALL BACK!" Captain Raylen shouted through the comms, voice laced with raw panic. "We've got movement—unknown entity—hostile threat approaching!"
Aarin blinked rapidly, trying to reorient. The vision. The cube. The voice. His father.
It all clawed at his mind like a dream trying to stay remembered, just as the present demanded his full attention.
> "The key has returned…"
"What the hell does that mean?" Aarin muttered, rising unsteadily to his feet.
He sprinted back through the tunnel as the alien ruin pulsed around him like a living heartbeat. The narrow passage narrowed and rippled in response to his breath and movement—organic and mechanical at once. By the time he emerged into daylight, the creature was already halfway to the landing site.
His team stood in defensive formation, weapons drawn.
"OPEN FIRE!" Raylen ordered.
A storm of plasma bolts lanced through the air, striking the entity's reflective surface with bursts of blue light. It didn't scream. It didn't flinch. It simply adjusted. The creature's limbs absorbed the energy and twisted, reshaping into newer forms, almost mimicking the weapons aimed at it.
"It's *learning,*" Selene gasped. "Every hit teaches it."
"Fall back to the ridge!" Raylen called. "Now!"
Aarin, however, stood frozen, staring at the creature. His glove pulsed. The black cube—now a part of him—burned beneath his skin like a second heart. And then, without warning, a new interface blinked to life in his helmet. Foreign glyphs translated themselves into basic English.
**\[Directive Acquired]**
**\[Initiate: Protocol 09 – Gate of Return]**
"What gate?" Aarin whispered.
Then the earth cracked.
Not beneath the creature—but beneath Aarin.
A ring of alien sigils erupted in a circle around him. A gravitational pull yanked at his boots as a spiraling black orb began to form in the soil—calm, smooth, and humming with impossible energy.
The creature stopped.
It *looked* at Aarin.
No eyes, no face—but somehow, unmistakably, its attention snapped to him.
> "He has the core," it said—not in sound, but inside everyone's minds.
Raylen dropped to one knee, clutching her head. Selene screamed. The rest of the squad fired blindly, their minds scrambling under the weight of the psychic intrusion.
Aarin gritted his teeth and stared back.
"Then come take it."
---
The creature lunged.
Faster than a machine, heavier than any lifeform should be. It crossed the hundred meters between them in seconds.
But Aarin didn't move.
The cube burned brighter now, tendrils of dark light swirling around him like an eclipse. The interface in his HUD clicked again.
**\[Weapon System: Initialized]**
**\[Armor Assimilation: 22%]**
Too slow.
The creature's claw descended toward him, its edge humming with vibration, enough to slice through steel.
But before the blow landed, the black orb below Aarin pulsed—and from its core, a shockwave exploded outward in absolute silence. The world blinked.
And the creature—vanished.
No explosion. No blood. No scream.
Just... gone.
The air vibrated with the memory of the impact. The sand around Aarin turned to glass in a perfect ring. His body dropped to one knee, smoke rising from his suit. He panted hard, heart pounding against the cube fused to his palm.
The HUD flashed.
**\[Hostile Teleported: Location Unknown]**
**\[Energy Reserve: 3%]**
**\[Recovery Required]**
"Aarin! What... what the hell was that?" Raylen's voice returned, breathless and cracked.
"I don't know," he whispered. "But it's inside me now. The cube... it's a key. And something's trying to unlock it."
---
Back at the makeshift base camp, the team gathered around Aarin in stunned silence. The planet remained eerily quiet again, like it had exhausted itself.
Selene checked his vitals. "His biology's changing. The cube—it's altering his DNA. There's foreign code... symbiotic, not viral. I've never seen anything like this."
Aarin sat motionless, staring at his hand.
Captain Raylen knelt beside him. "What did you see?"
Aarin met her eyes.
"I saw a war," he said quietly. "And we already lost it. Earth is next."
---
That night, under the moons of Orion-9, while the others slept or watched the horizon in fear, Aarin opened the encrypted file embedded in the cube. It wasn't just a key.
It was a **map**.
Not of space.
But of **time**.
---
**\[End of Chapter 2]**
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Would you like to move on to **Chapter 3**, or add more details to Chapter 2 (e.g., alien species, backstory of Aarin's father, or exploration of the alien tech)?