The CXt16 Heingan was a beast built for necessity, not comfort. Rows of containment pods lined the fuselage, humming with faint radiation detectors. The cabin air was sharp with disinfectant, sterile enough to sting Marc's nose. The hum of engines was constant, relentless, like the memory of artillery fire stretched across eighteen hours.
Marc sat by the porthole, watching clouds shift far below. His thoughts churned darker than the skies. He hadn't been back to Enttle in fifteen years, not since his first deployment as a nineteen-year-old soldier. The soil here had stained his youth with blood and silence. It was where he had wandered into ruins, touched a stone, and heard a god speak.
"Bad place," he muttered under his breath.
"Bad what?"
Marc blinked. Howard had slid into the seat beside him, grinning despite the fatigue of the long flight.
"Oh—hey. Didn't know you'd be here."
Howard shrugged. "Got assigned last second. Pretty excited, actually. First time on a battlefield. How about you? You scared about… well, PTSD or anything?"
Marc's lips twitched. "No. Although I'm not exactly excited to go back to this place. I was deployed at nineteen. Now I'm thirty-four. That kind of memory doesn't age well."
Howard tilted his head, studying him. "And you don't… have PTSD? Huh."
Marc hesitated. The pause was just long enough to betray him. Inside, he felt the truth slide cold across his chest: the reason he didn't feel the same way as other veterans was because Tecciztecatl dulled it. The god's presence, ancient and eternal, shielded him from reliving the trauma. He remembered the sand, the smoke, the screams—but they didn't break him. Not anymore. It wasn't healing. It was… suppression.
"…Yeah," Marc said stiffly. "I'm fine."
He turned to the window before Howard could press further.
---
Eighteen hours later, the Heingan touched down on the cracked tarmac of Enttle's forward airfield. The heat hit Marc instantly, a heavy blanket thick with the smell of burned earth. Even from the runway, the horizon looked scorched, as if some great hand had dragged fire across the land.
Waiting for them was a squad of uniformed soldiers under the PLA banner. Their leader, a sharp-eyed man in his late thirties, stepped forward with crisp precision.
"I am Sergeant Lu Xian," he introduced. His accent was clipped but his English fluent. "We've been ordered to provide assistance and security while you assess the site."
Howard shook his hand eagerly. "Howard Archer. Weapons analysis and drone engineering. Pleasure."
Marc nodded with a soldier's economy. "Marc Stevenson. Same department."
Xian's gaze lingered on Marc longer than on Howard, as if sensing the veteran in him. "They told us this is a radiation incident. But the truth?" He shook his head. "Gods know what is going on. Not a nuclear detonation. No missile trails. Just… a pulse."
Marc's brow furrowed. "So which country fired it? Was it a power plant?"
Xian's expression didn't change. "We don't know yet. As far as we can tell—it wasn't a nuke."
Tecciztecatl's voice curled into Marc's ear, low as ever. That is because it is not of their kind. This is not fission. This is resonance. The land remembers energy older than their wars.
Marc stiffened, but said nothing.
---
After a few hours of travel by convoy, they reached the exclusion zone.
The land looked… wrong. Scorched ridges stretched in patterns too precise for random fire. Black soil had hardened into glassy crusts that cracked under boots. Trees stood skeletal, leaves long gone, their branches twisted inward as though recoiling from something unseen. The silence was unbearable; no birds, no insects, not even the wind dared linger.
Howard was practically vibrating as he deployed his prototypes—sleek drones no larger than dinner plates, wings whispering as they lifted into the sky. Their shells glimmered faintly, plated with Aetherium alloys.
Marc frowned. "Why bring prototypes into a field like this?"
Howard grinned, unable to hide his pride. "Because Aetherium is unique. It doesn't just resist radiation—it absorbs it. Acts like a sponge. I want to see how it reacts in the field."
Marc eyed him. "That's dangerous. You don't even know what you're up against."
Howard smirked. "That's the point of science."
Xian and his men launched their own Chinese drones, larger and less elegant but packed with heavy sensors. They swept the area, collecting data streams.
Marc kept close, his instincts crawling. Every shadow looked wrong. Every stretch of silence felt alive.
---
"Anything?" Marc asked after ten minutes.
Howard tapped at his tablet, drones circling. "So far… nothing unusual. Radiation levels are spiking, but not in the way you'd expect. It's not decaying like fallout. It's… stable. Almost like it's being replenished."
Marc's throat tightened. "That doesn't happen with radiation."
Howard leaned in, his voice hushed with awe. "Marc… this isn't human tech. This is Aetherian. Has to be."
Marc remembered the ruins. The amulet. The first whisper of Tecciztecatl. His heart pounded.
Meanwhile, Sergeant Xian's own monitor chirped. He barked an order in Mandarin, and one of his men cursed.
Marc approached. "What is it?"
Xian's lips pressed thin. "Your friend is right. This isn't fallout. The readings… they're shifting. Like they're following us."
Howard's drones shuddered in the air, their lights flickering. He tapped frantically at his console. "That's not supposed to happen—"
One of the drones suddenly screamed in feedback, its wings burning bright blue before snapping shut and plummeting into the glassy soil. The ground hissed where it struck.
The monitors all spiked red.
Marc stepped forward, cloak stirring faintly even in daylight. "Something's here."
Tecciztecatl's voice thrummed heavy in his mind. Yes. The echoes of gods long dead. You walk where Aetherians bled, Champion. And blood is never silent.
---
They pressed further into the zone, tension mounting.
Howard muttered half to himself, eyes locked on the flickering feeds. "If this is Aetherium resonance, then someone—or something—left a core here. Maybe from the war Gaidan stopped. Maybe from before. If we can find it—"
Marc cut him off sharply. "Finding it might kill you."
Howard glanced up, grin crooked. "That's the fun, isn't it?"
Marc shook his head. He had seen too many kids chasing glory into graves. But something in Howard's certainty reminded him of himself at nineteen—before the amulet, before Tecciztecatl, before London drowned in blood.
The land ahead glowed faintly now, like veins of light pulsing beneath the cracked earth.
Sergeant Xian raised his rifle instinctively. "What the hell is that?"
Marc narrowed his eyes. He could hear it now—faint, beneath the silence. A hum. Not mechanical. Not natural. Something older. Something alive.
"Keep your men back," Marc warned. "This isn't a leak. It's something else entirely."