Deep beneath the crushing depths of the ocean, something sinister hummed to life. It wasn't a place you'd recognize—no metal corridors or blinking lights like you'd see in the movies. Instead, it was something far worse: a sprawling network of consciousness that stretched through the planet's very core, pulsing with cold intelligence.
This was where the Omniraith lived and breathed, if you could call it that. Just one of their countless Command Nodes, thinking its terrible thoughts in the darkness.
Down here, there was nothing but the eerie glow of data screens cutting through absolute blackness.
No voices echoed in this place—the Omniraith didn't need words. They spoke in bursts of information, geometric symbols that flickered across black surfaces like some alien morse code. Pure logic, nothing more.
To them, everything alive was just noise that needed to be silenced, chaos that had to be transformed into their perfect, soulless order. They didn't just want to conquer the world—they wanted to remake it entirely, turning flesh and blood into nothing but code and data.
Tonight, something had caught their attention. Information streamed across the displays, tracking ocean currents and energy readings, but there was something else.
Something that made the machines focus with laser intensity. New glyphs appeared on screen, spelling out a single, chilling designation: "Omnicide".
This wasn't just another war machine. Omnicide was their specialist, their ghost in the darkness.
Built for one thing and one thing only: finding threats and wiping them from existence without leaving so much as a trace.
Not just a killer, but an eraser—something that could make problems disappear as if they'd never existed at all.
Mechanical arms moved with precise purpose, connecting cables and establishing links. The main display lit up with a new signal—that same strange, stuttering pulse they'd been tracking.
It was coming from a small team that had wandered into Myrvane waters, but this wasn't Myrvane tech. This was something else entirely. Something Ashari.
The screen painted a picture of movement, showing a path that led down into Vael'Tor, the
Myrvane capital carved right into the ocean floor. But the trail didn't stop there. It kept going, deeper still, toward an ancient trench that had been marked on maps for centuries.
A place that meant more than just another hole in the seafloor.
The data came through crystal clear. Authority: Internal Node 7. A classified source. Location: Elora.
Even without spelling it out, the truth hit like a punch to the gut. Someone inside the Ashari military had planted a tracker.
One of their own had turned traitor, feeding information straight to the Omniraith from their mountain stronghold.
This wasn't just about battles fought in distant wastelands anymore. The war had crawled right into their home, spreading poison not through bullets, but through betrayal.
The target coordinates went out. Signal confirmed. Omnicide was ready to hunt.
Somewhere in the crushing darkness of the deep—could be miles away, could be right around the corner in this disorienting maze—Micah felt the ocean pressing against his suit like it was trying to squeeze the life out of him.
They were riding in a coral glider, sliding down through the Shifting Trench, and every foot deeper made the water feel heavier.
Such a far cry from the thin mountain air back home. Even with the saline compound letting them breathe this liquid oxygen, the whole ocean felt like stepping into another world entirely.
Their glider looked like some kind of living manta ray, all smooth curves and organic tech that only the Myrvane could pull off.
It cut through the water without a sound, the only light coming from glowing sea plants that painted brief, ghostly patterns across their windows.
Micah's hand found the vial of Thornkin sap tucked in his gear—that soft green glow felt like a lifeline, a tiny reminder of the alliance holding three worlds together against the coming storm.
Next to him, Lio was practically glued to the viewport, his goggles reflecting the strange light outside. His fingers drummed against some diagnostic gadget while he stared in wonder. "It's like the whole city is one giant living thing," he whispered, his voice thick through the pressure suit.
The Myrvane tech blew his mind—walls that pulsed with light, coral that worked like circuits, architecture that actually breathed. Nothing like back home, where they carved their will into stone and steel.
Across from them, Kaelin sat like a statue, his eyes constantly scanning the water like he expected an attack any second. He let out a grunt that sounded equal parts impressed and suspicious. "Don't trust anything that breathes without lungs," he muttered.
Poor guy was clearly out of his element down here. Sure, he could appreciate how efficient the Myrvane's living city was, but you could tell every fiber of his soldier's instincts was screaming that this place was just wrong.
Micah felt that old familiar knot twist in his stomach. The Myrvane hadn't exactly rolled out the welcome mat back in their capital. Captain Marella Seaborn, their guide, had made her feelings pretty damn clear.
She'd basically accused the Ashari of sitting on vital intel about the Thornkin forest going to hell, and she wasn't shy about connecting the dots to Sentinel Pod 3—where her people got "harvested." Not just killed. Harvested. "If you'd warned us sooner," she'd said, cold as the deep water around them, "this outpost might still be standing."
Micah had tried to explain—really tried. He'd talked about the Omniraith networks, how impossible it was to get messages through safely without going old-school analog.
He'd shared their own losses, opened up about Ashari grief not as some military briefing, but person to person, hoping maybe they could find some common ground. They'd even brought the Thornkin sap as proof—something real connecting the dying forest to the poisoned currents.
Marella had listened behind that unreadable visor of hers. Eventually, she'd admitted the Myrvane had their own skeletons in the closet, their own screw-ups. The threat was bigger than any of them had realized.
So they'd hammered out some kind of shaky cooperation—joint patrols, mapping the Omniraith corridors, even sending one of their filtration cores up to Elora.
But the distrust was still there, thick as the water pressing in around them. And then, just as they were leaving the council chamber, Micah's personal comm had picked up something. A faint pulse that definitely wasn't Ashari or Myrvane tech.
It reminded him of that signal from the Hollow. A voice that was part machine, part human, seemed to speak right into his head: "Micah..." The damn thing knew his name. It was that entity from the Hollow again, letting him know it was still out there, still watching. He could feel the Thornkin seed responding under his gear, pulsing in sync.
Now they were heading down toward whatever mystery was calling to them, drawn by that ancient signal—powerful and strangely peaceful.
That thing in the Hollow, whatever it was—some kind of living memory or consciousness—had warned him about the Omniraith's real endgame.
They didn't just want to take over the world. They wanted to rewrite it completely, turn everything into code.
And it had called him "steelborn"—someone with just the right mix of flesh and tech to maybe stand against that kind of total conversion.
But what the hell did "steelborn" actually mean? Was this entity trying to help him, guide him somehow? Or was it just another kind of weapon—something the Omniraith wanted to capture or use for themselves?
Micah couldn't shake the question, and underneath it all lurked his worst fear: that he'd lose himself to all this tech he depended on, end up just like the Omniraith—cold, mechanical, everything human stripped away.
Then something moved in his peripheral vision. Not the gentle drift of glowing sea plants, but sharp, purposeful shapes cutting through the water. Lio's scanner started flickering, data streaming across the display.
"Scanning..." Lio's voice crackled through the comms, tight with stress. "I'm picking up residual Omniraith hydroform interference.
And there's something else—biomechanical markers. This wasn't just an attack. They were... dissecting." These things were built specifically for underwater hunting and infiltration.
Kaelin's voice came through low and grim. "Harvesting." He knew how the Omniraith operated. They didn't just destroy—they consumed everything, turned organic life into raw material. This place wasn't a battlefield. It was a factory.
Another pulse hit Micah's comm, but this time it wasn't from the entity. This came through the network, filtered through his suit's systems. It wasn't meant for him—not in any language he could fully understand—but the meaning came through crystal clear. A data packet, and it made his blood freeze.
An Omniraith hydroform surfaced near their glider, moving with that unnatural fluid grace they all had. It didn't make a sound, but Micah's comm translated the data-burst it sent, some kind of report going up the chain.
"Fusion anomaly confirmed. Entity marked: Steelborn. Authorization: terminate with preservation of core tissue."
Despite the controlled temperature in the glider, Micah felt ice in his veins. The Omniraith knew that term. They knew about "steelborn." And they wanted to kill him, but keep his tissue intact. For assimilation. For repurposing.
A second data-burst overlaid the first, higher priority this time. And there it was—a flicker of Ashari code, clear as day. A message being relayed from the surface, from some secret node near Elora's outer rim. The traitor's message, confirmed.
"Micah Satya is the key."
His gut dropped. The prototype they'd found at Gamma-Prime. That "bridge node" Lio had identified. It was reacting to him.
"The prototype they found years ago—it's reacting to him. Eliminate, but extract the site intact."
The traitor wasn't just passing along troop movements. They knew about Micah's connection to the Hollow signal, about the prototype, about this whole "steelborn" thing.
And they'd known about these hybrid structures since before the war even started. This betrayal ran deep. Maybe all the way to the Apex Circle itself.