The dread Kael had taken to bed with him did not fade with the morning's grey light. It clung to him like the Waste's fine dust, a persistent grit in his soul. He woke before the enclave's chimes, the familiar hum of the Aethel-Barrier feeling less like a heartbeat and more like a strained, shallow breath. The real source of his unease, however, was the silence.
Normally, the dawn was punctuated by the distant, unsettling symphony of the Chimeras. The clicking chatter of Scuttlers, the mournful cries of high-flying Crystal-wings—sounds that were both a threat and a strange sort of reassurance that the world outside was behaving as it should. Today, there was nothing. A profound, unnatural stillness had fallen over the Grey Waste, as if the entire world was holding its breath.
He dressed mechanically, his mind replaying the dismissal from Guard-Captain Valerius. A flicker, you say? The man's condescending tone echoed in his ears. Kael had been a fool to think anyone would listen to a technician's gut feeling. He was a cog in the machine, and his job was to fix other cogs, not to question the integrity of the whole mechanism.
He met Lina at the mess hall, the cavernous room already buzzing with the morning shift. She slid a tray of nutrient paste and a mug of steaming, bitter chicory brew onto the table in front of him.
"You look like you wrestled a Gremlin in your sleep and lost," she commented, stirring her own paste into a grey, unappetizing swirl.
"Didn't sleep much," Kael admitted, pushing the food around his tray. "The silence… doesn't it bother you?"
Lina paused, listening for a moment. "Now that you mention it, it is quiet. Probably means they've migrated. Good for us. Maybe the patrol squads can finally get a day off." She took a large gulp of her chicory. "Stop worrying, Kae. The wall has stood for two hundred years. It's the one thing in this whole damn world we can count on."
Her pragmatism was usually a comfort, a solid weight that anchored his drifting anxieties. But today, it felt like willful ignorance. The knot in his stomach only tightened. He couldn't shake the image of the crystalline dust coalescing, dancing to a tune only it could hear. It wasn't a migration. It was a gathering.
He was halfway through his tasteless meal when it happened.
It was not a sound, at first. It was a feeling. A violent, bone-jarring concussion that slammed up through the ferrocrete floor, launching trays and mugs into the air. The hum of the Aethel-Barrier, the constant note of his entire life, stuttered and died. For one terrifying, silent heartbeat, the enclave was utterly dead.
Then came the sound.
A deafening, grinding CRACK that was not merely heard but felt in the teeth, in the chest, in the very air itself. It was the sound of the world breaking. It was followed immediately by a high-pitched, metallic shriek that tore through the enclave, a sound of such alien agony and rage that it bypassed the ears and clawed directly at the primitive core of the brain.
For a moment, the mess hall was frozen in a tableau of shock. A hundred faces turned as one towards the outer wall. Then, the enclave's alarms blared to life—a frantic, wailing klaxon that signaled the unthinkable. Catastrophic barrier failure. A breach.
Panic erupted. It was a primal, contagious thing, a wave of terror that swept through the hall and turned a thousand disciplined citizens into a stampeding herd. Shouts and screams replaced the klaxon's cry. People scrambled over tables, pushing and shoving, their only instinct to get away from the wall.
Kael was knocked from his bench, his head striking the hard floor. Lina grabbed his arm, her face pale with shock but her eyes sharp, and hauled him to his feet. "Kael! Move!"
He stumbled after her, caught in the current of bodies flowing away from the danger. But his gaze was fixed in the opposite direction, drawn by a horrifying fascination. Through the archway of the mess hall, he could see the source of the chaos.
Section Gamma-9. The very section of the wall he had inspected. The very conduit he had felt pulsing with wrongness.
It was gone. A jagged, gaping wound had been torn in the side of Enclave 7, an impossible hole of shattered rock and sparking, severed power lines. The smooth, light-drinking stone of the Ancients had been violated, its pieces strewn across the outer hab-blocks like broken teeth. Through the swirling dust and raw, leaking Aethel energy, figures began to pour.
The first were the Shard Hounds. They moved with a liquid, predatory grace, their slender bodies forged from jagged, ice-blue crystal. They were wolf-like in shape but moved with the speed of broken glass carried on a gale. Dozens of them swarmed through the breach, their crystalline claws scrabbling for purchase on the ferrocrete, their multifaceted eyes scanning the chaos with cold, hungry intelligence. They fell upon the nearest, slowest civilians with a terrible efficiency, their jaws snapping shut with the sound of cracking geodes.
The Defense Force responded, their training kicking in a half-second after the panic. Squads of armored Frame Users formed a desperate line, their energy rifles spitting coherent light into the horde. Some of the Hounds shattered under the fire, their bodies dissolving into a shower of fading light particles. But for every one that fell, three more took its place.
And then, through the breach, the leader emerged.
It was immense. A Tier-2 Obsidian Ravager. Where the Hounds were sleek and sharp, the Ravager was a monument to brutalist power. It was built like a hulking gorilla, its body composed of thick, interlocking plates of smoky black crystal that seemed to absorb the very light around it. Raw, untamed Aethel energy, like captured lightning, crackled between the plates of its massive shoulders and chest. It moved with a ponderous, ground-shaking certainty, each step a tremor.
A squad of Frame Users focused their fire on it. A volley of energy blasts, enough to vaporize a lesser Chimera, slammed into its chest. The effect was sickening. The obsidian plates glowed for a moment, the energy swirling across their dark surface before being drawn inward, absorbed with no visible effect. The Ravager didn't even flinch. It let out a low, guttural roar, a sound like an avalanche grinding a mountain to dust, and charged.
The defensive line shattered. The Ravager smashed through the armored soldiers as if they were made of clay, its massive fists pulverizing shields and armor with contemptuous ease. The world dissolved into a blur of motion and terror. Kael saw a flash of polished armor—the same kind Valerius wore—tossed through the air like a child's toy.
The hum of the wall was gone. In its place was the shriek of the dying, the roar of monsters, and the crackle of a world coming apart at the seams. Lina's grip on his arm was the only real thing in the universe. The cage had broken. And the outside world, in all its crystalline, horrifying glory, had come flooding in.