The moment they stepped through the portal into Haven, the trap was sprung. The portal snapped shut behind them with a sound like tearing reality, leaving them stranded. The air in the biodome was warm, humid, and thick with the sweet, cloying scent of alien flora. It was a jungle of impossible colors and shapes: trees with leaves of iridescent crystal, flowers that pulsed with a soft, internal light, and vines that hummed with a low, bio-luminescent energy. It was a paradise. And it was about to become a hell.
A countdown, silent and psychic, appeared in the corner of their vision, a system message from the Architect. Virus deployment in: one hour.
They had sixty minutes to get to the subterranean control room, neutralize whatever guardian the Architect had placed there, and re-purpose the environmental systems before a hundred thousand souls were lost.
"No time to waste," Olivia said, her voice tense. "Anya's schematic showed the main access elevator is in the central conservatory, half a mile north of here. Let's move."
They ran, their boots sinking into the soft, mossy ground. The jungle was a disorienting, beautiful maze. But there were no monsters, no traps. The path to the conservatory was eerily, unnervingly clear.
"He's letting us get there," Silas grunted, his eyes scanning the dense, alien foliage. "He wants the confrontation to be at the objective."
They reached the central conservatory, a massive, domed structure of glass and flowing, white First Scribes material. Inside, a single, circular elevator platform sat in the center of the room. And waiting for them, standing before the elevator with a calm, patient smile, was the guardian.
It was not a monster. It was not a hulking warrior. It was the gentle, compassionate-looking old monk who had delivered the Architect's message. He stood with his hands clasped before him, his simple, homespun robes a stark contrast to the exotic, glowing flora around him. His eyes, full of a gentle, grandfatherly kindness, twinkled as they approached.
"I had hoped you would make the compassionate choice," the old man said, his voice as calm and melodic as before. "The Architect will be pleased. Your narrative is developing with a wonderful, tragic nobility."
"Get out of our way," Elara said, her voice a low growl of warning.
The old man's smile widened. "My purpose here is not to stop you," he said. "It is to… cultivate you. The Architect believes that a hero is defined by the quality of their villains. He has sent me to be a truly challenging one."
"And what is your Aspect, old man?" Silas asked, his hand tightening on his sword. "The power of gentle, condescending speeches?"
"Something like that," the monk replied. "You could call it the Aspect of Virulent Proliferation. Or, as I prefer to call it, the power of a patient gardener."
As he spoke, he raised a single, wrinkled hand. From the lush, green moss at his feet, a single, small, black vine, thin as a thread, snaked out. It grew with an unnatural speed, and where it grew, the vibrant, healthy plant life around it withered and died, turning a sickly, blackish-grey. The vine was not just growing; it was spreading a blight.
"You're the plague," Olivia breathed, a cold, dawning horror washing over her.
"I am a precursor," the monk corrected gently. "A delivery system. The true virus is far less subtle. My work is to weaken the soil, to prepare the crop for the harvest." The black vine continued to spread, forming a circle around the elevator platform. "I am not here to kill you. I am simply here to… delay you."
The countdown in their vision ticked down: fifty-three minutes.
"We don't have time to fight him," Silas said. "We need to get past him."
He charged, a blur of motion, his greatsword aimed not to kill, but to knock the old man aside. But as he entered the circle of the black vines, he suddenly cried out and stumbled, falling to one knee.
"My power…" he gasped, a look of shocked disbelief on his face. "It's… weak. Drained."
"Of course," the old man said with a sympathetic sigh. "My garden drains the narratives of my opponents. It feeds on their stories, their power, their very will to fight. The longer you stand within my influence, the weaker you will become. Soon, you will be too tired to even lift your swords. And then, the virus will come, and you will all be part of the beautiful, tragic final tableau."
It was a perfect trap. A battle of attrition against an opponent who grew stronger the longer they fought, with a hard time limit that made a protracted battle impossible.
Elara tried next. She manifested her shield, a wall of pure, blue will, and tried to push through the circle of vines. But the moment her shield touched the blighted area, its light dimmed, its power leeching away into the black, hungry plants. "It's feeding on me," she grunted, sweat beading on her forehead.
The countdown ticked: forty-eight minutes.
This was the perfect counter-measure Leo had warned them about. The Architect had sent a being whose power was a slow, inexorable drain, a perfect foil to their own, limited reserves of strength and will.
Olivia's mind was a storm of calculations. They could not fight him with their powers. They could not outlast him. They had to change the fundamental rules of the engagement.
She looked at her team, at Silas on one knee, at Elara struggling to maintain her fading shield. She looked at the calm, smiling, and utterly monstrous old man. And she looked at the lush, vibrant, and powerful jungle of alien life around them.
The monk's power was to spread his blight, to drain and replace the existing life. His story was one of parasitic replacement. But the story of the jungle itself, of this First Scribes' biodome, was one of powerful, vibrant, and incredibly potent life. The two narratives were in direct opposition.
"Echo," Olivia projected, a desperate, brilliant idea forming. "The biodome's environmental controls. Can you access them from here?"
"The central system is in the subterranean complex," the construct replied. "However, there are localized, secondary control nodes scattered throughout the conservatory. Their signal is weak, but… potentially accessible."
"I don't need you to control the whole system," Olivia said. "I just need you to send a single command. A wake-up call."
While Elara and Silas held the line, buying her precious seconds, Olivia closed her eyes, placing a hand on the mossy ground. Echo stood beside her, its hand on her shoulder, using her as a psychic antenna to boost its signal. They were attempting another hack, a remote assault on the biodome's core programming.
The monk watched them, his smile unwavering, confident in his slow, inevitable victory. "Clever tricks will not save you," he said. "The story of decay always wins in the end."
"Decay is a part of life," Olivia shot back, her eyes still closed, her mind focused. "But you are not decay. You are a cancer. And the body is about to fight back."
"Echo, now!" she screamed.
Deep within the biodome's programming, Echo sent a single, powerful command, a command that had not been issued for thousands of years: Emergency Solar Flare Simulation. Protocol: Accelerated Growth.
The entire conservatory responded. The crystalline trees, which had been glowing with a soft, ambient light, suddenly blazed with the intensity of a thousand suns. The air grew intensely hot. And the alien flora, the thousands of strange, powerful plants the First Scribes had gathered, reacted to the sudden, massive influx of energy.
They began to grow.
It was an explosive, terrifying, and beautiful sight. Vines as thick as a man's arm shot out, growing at a visible rate. Flowers the size of dinner plates bloomed in an instant, releasing clouds of psycho-active pollen. The very ground swelled as the root systems beneath them expanded with explosive force.
The monk's calm, patient garden of black vines was suddenly assaulted by a million years of evolution happening in the space of thirty seconds. The biodome itself, the powerful, life-affirming story of the jungle, had risen up to fight its infection. The monk's blighted circle was overwhelmed, torn apart, and consumed by the explosive, unrestrained life of the conservatory.
The monk's smile finally vanished, replaced by a look of utter shock. His power, so effective against the small, contained systems of four individual warriors, was nothing against the raw, planetary-scale life force of the entire biodome. He was a single, cancerous cell trying to fight a body that had just been given a massive shot of adrenaline.
His connection to his power severed, his garden consumed, he was now just a frail, old man.
The countdown ticked: thirty-nine minutes.
They did not have time to deal with him. They left him standing, stunned and powerless, in the midst of the wildly overgrown, super-charged jungle, and ran for the elevator. They had won the battle. They had defeated the gardener. But the true, viral plague was still coming, and they were running out of time.