Consciousness returned like drowning in reverse.
Marcus clawed his way up from the black depths of unconsciousness, each breath a struggle against the weight pressing down on his chest. Metal groaned somewhere above him. The acrid smell of burning electronics filled his nostrils.
His training kicked in before his mind fully cleared—assess injuries, check vitals, establish situation.
Ribs: probably cracked, but not punctured lungs. Head: pounding but skull intact. Vision: blurry but clearing. The taste of blood in his mouth was his own—he'd bitten his tongue during impact.
"Commander?" His voice came out as a croak.
No response.
Marcus forced his eyes open. Their capsule had been torn open like a sardine can, twisted metal petals spread wide against a backdrop of impossible blue sky. Sunlight streamed through the opening, warm and gentle and completely at odds with the violence of their landing.
Takashi hung motionless in his restraints across from him, head lolled forward, blood trickling from a gash on his forehead. But his chest was rising and falling steadily.
"Himura." Louder this time.
The Commander stirred, groaned, then snapped awake with the instant alertness of a trained soldier. His eyes darted around the destroyed capsule, taking inventory with military efficiency.
"Status?" Takashi's voice was steady despite the blood on his face.
"Alive," Marcus replied, working at his restraint buckles. "Which is more than we had a right to expect."
They extracted themselves from the wreckage in careful silence, each man assessing the other for signs of serious injury while maintaining the careful distance that prejudice demanded. Marcus noted how Takashi favored his left shoulder, the way he blinked too often—possible concussion. Takashi, despite himself, observed Marcus's controlled movements, the way he unconsciously catalogued visible injuries with a medic's practiced eye.
The capsule had carved a burning scar through what looked like a pristine beach, white sand scattered with debris and strange, translucent fragments that might have been leaves. Palm trees—or things that resembled palm trees—swayed in a breeze that carried scents Marcus couldn't identify. Sweet, but with an underlying note of something organic and wrong.
Behind them, the ocean stretched to the horizon, impossibly blue and peaceful. The storm barrier that had nearly killed them was nowhere to be seen.
"Where are the waves?" Takashi asked quietly.
Marcus paused in his examination of their surroundings. The Commander was right—the ocean was perfectly still, like glass. No surf, no rhythm of tide against shore. Just silent, motionless water that reflected the sky with mirror perfection.
"I don't know," Marcus admitted.
That's when they saw the second capsule.
It lay half-buried in the sand fifty meters down the beach, its reinforced hull cracked open like an egg. The impact crater around it was already being filled by wind-blown sand, suggesting it had been there for some time.
Marcus was moving toward it before he'd consciously decided to help. His medic training overrode everything else—where there was a crash, there might be survivors.
"Wait," Takashi called after him, but Marcus was already jogging across the sand.
The capsule was empty. But the restraint system had been cut—not torn by impact, but sliced through with something sharp. The metal edges were clean, precise. And there were dark stains on the seats that Marcus's experienced eye recognized immediately.
Blood. But not from crash injuries.
"Anything?" Takashi had approached, maintaining careful distance.
"Someone survived the landing," Marcus said, not looking at him. "But something happened after."
They stood in awkward silence, both men understanding the implications without wanting to voice them.
"We should find water," Takashi said finally. "Food. Shelter."
Marcus nodded, scanning the treeline. "You go inland. I'll check the shoreline for useful debris."
It wasn't cooperation—it was mutual convenience with built-in separation. Neither man wanted to rely on the other, and both were relieved to have an excuse to work alone.
Takashi headed toward the jungle while Marcus began combing the beach for anything useful from their wreckage. For twenty minutes, they worked in parallel silence, the only sounds the distant whisper of wind through alien foliage and the soft crunch of sand under their feet.
Then the silence became *absolute*.
Marcus first noticed it when he could no longer hear his own footsteps. He lifted his foot and brought it down hard on the packed sand—nothing. No impact, no scrape of leather on grit. The ocean behind him had gone not just still but *silent*—no lap of water against shore, no whisper of breeze across the surface.
He looked toward the treeline and saw Takashi standing perfectly motionless about thirty meters into the jungle, his back rigid with tension.
The invisible line of silence ran through the forest like a wall. On one side, Marcus could still hear the ocean's stillness, the whisper of wind through the trees. Cross that line, and sound simply... stopped.
Marcus approached the boundary carefully, extending his hand across it. His fingers disappeared into absolute quiet—he could see them moving, but heard nothing. Not even his own heartbeat.
He pulled his hand back and sound returned—the rush of blood in his ears, his own breathing, the soft rustle of his jumpsuit against his skin.
Takashi was mouthing words, gesturing urgently, but no sound crossed the barrier.
*Get back,* his lips seemed to say. *Something's wrong.*
No shit, Marcus thought, but he found himself stepping across the line anyway.
The silence was more than absence of sound—it was presence of wrongness. The air felt thicker here, pregnant with potential energy. The trees were wrong too, now that he was among them. The bark had a metallic sheen, and the leaves moved in patterns that had nothing to do with wind.
Takashi appeared beside him, close enough to touch but still maintaining careful distance even in this impossible place. He pointed deeper into the jungle where something vast was moving between the trees—not walking but flowing, like oil given form and purpose.
They backed away together, two men united in their understanding that they had wandered into something beyond human comprehension.
That's when they heard the scream.
Even through the silence barrier, it came through—raw, human, filled with a terror so pure it seemed to bypass the ears entirely and resonate in their bones. It was the sound of someone discovering that death was not the worst thing that could happen to them.
Marcus was running before the echo faded, crashing through the undergrowth toward the source of that inhuman agony. Behind him, Takashi followed—not from any desire to help but from the soldier's instinct that scattered forces were dead forces.
They found the source in a clearing thirty meters from the silence line.
What had once been a man in an orange jumpsuit was suspended three feet off the ground in the grip of something that shouldn't exist. It was tall—maybe eight feet—and covered in what looked like black coral that grew in impossible geometric patterns. Where it should have had a face, there was only a void that seemed to pull light into itself.
The prisoner was still alive. Still screaming.
Marcus started forward—every instinct screaming that this was a trauma patient, that his job was life, that he had to help—but Takashi's hand slammed into his chest, driving him back behind a massive tree trunk.
They watched in silence as the thing examined its prize with the methodical curiosity of a child pulling wings off a fly. It extended appendages that were part tentacle, part surgical instrument, and began to carefully separate the man along lines that followed no anatomy Marcus had ever studied.
The prisoner's screams rose to a pitch that made their teeth ache. Then, mercifully, stopped.
But the thing wasn't finished. It continued its examination with clinical precision, arranging the pieces in patterns that might have been art or science or something else entirely.
Marcus felt bile rise in his throat. Beside him, Takashi's breathing had gone shallow and rapid.
When the thing finally finished its work, it simply faded back into the jungle like smoke, leaving behind an arrangement of meat and bone that would haunt their dreams for whatever remained of their lives.
They crouched behind their tree for what felt like hours, neither man wanting to be the first to move, to breathe, to exist loudly enough to draw that attention.
Finally, Takashi whispered, "What the fuck was that?"
Marcus had no answer. In Afghanistan, he'd seen IED victims, helicopter crashes, friendly fire incidents that had reduced human beings to component parts. But this was different. This was deliberate, methodical, *curious*.
"We need to get back to the beach," Marcus said.
They began to retreat, moving with the careful silence of men who understood they were prey. But as they navigated back through the alien forest, something was wrong beyond the obvious wrongness of everything else.
The trees had moved.
Not swaying—moved. Relocated. The path they'd taken into the jungle was gone, replaced by dense undergrowth that looked like it had been there for decades. The massive trunk they'd hidden behind was now twenty feet to the left, and the clearing where they'd witnessed the atrocity was nowhere to be seen.
"This isn't possible," Takashi muttered.
A butterfly landed on his shoulder—beautiful, iridescent, perfectly normal except for the human face in the pattern of its wings. Not a resemblance or a trick of perception, but an actual human face, complete with eyes that tracked their movement and a mouth that seemed to be trying to speak.
Takashi drew his sidearm and fired three rounds into the creature. It exploded in a shower of gold dust that settled on their skin like pollen.
"What the fuck?" Marcus grabbed his arm.
"It had a face," Takashi said, his voice tight with barely controlled panic. "A human face. It was looking at me."
Marcus stared at the settling golden dust, then at Takashi's wild eyes. "You're seeing things. The crash, the stress—"
"I know what I saw, idiot."
The gunshots echoed through the jungle like thunder. In the sudden silence that followed, they could hear something else—footsteps. Heavy, deliberate, moving through the underbrush with the patient rhythm of a predator that knew its prey couldn't escape.
"We need to move," Marcus said. "Now."
They ran.
Behind them, the footsteps followed—not hurrying, not concerned. Whatever was back there knew this jungle in ways they never would. It could afford to be patient.
They burst from the treeline onto the beach like men surfacing from deep water, gasping and desperate. The familiar sounds rushed back—wind, their own breathing, the soft whisper of sand against their feet.
But the beach had changed too.
The ocean had risen. Their capsule was half-submerged now, and the tide line had moved twenty feet inland. Worse, floating in the gentle swells, they could see the communication equipment from their crash—waterlogged and useless.
"Shit," Takashi breathed, staring at their only link to the outside world bobbing just beyond reach.
"I wouldn't," Marcus said quietly.
"What?"
Marcus was studying the water with the focused intensity he'd once reserved for triage decisions. "Something's wrong with it."
"Well guess you never saw seawater in your life."
"No." Marcus knelt at the water's edge, careful not to let it touch his skin. "Look at the way it moves. Too thick. Too... deliberate."
Takashi looked closer and saw what Marcus meant. The water didn't flow like water—it moved in patterns that suggested intention, purpose. And there were shapes beneath the surface. Large shapes, moving with the lazy confidence of apex predators.
"The equipment—"
"Is gone," Marcus said firmly. "We touch that water, we're dead."
For the first time since they'd been forced together, Takashi found himself grateful for his companion's medical training. Whatever Marcus was seeing in that water, his instincts had kept them alive.
They stood on the shrinking beach, trapped between an alien jungle that rearranged itself when they weren't looking and an ocean that wasn't really an ocean, watching their last hope of rescue drift away on currents that moved like living things.
In the distance, those heavy footsteps were getting closer.
"Well," Marcus said with the dark humor of a man who'd already accepted his own death once, "I guess we're going to get to know each other after all."
Takashi, after remembering that he was talking to a prisoner, a black one, as if bitten by a bitter mouth responded
"Wonderful, now a monkey like you thinks we're equals… Lemme tell you something punk, don't expect us to become friends, follow my orders, but stay away from me"
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End of Chapter 3