Capture complete.
Kesiba swiftly secured the target with a binding device. Without wasting a second, the trio departed.
Their escape route had been pre-planned from the beginning.
Once they'd exited the city district, their speed finally dropped.
"That was... too easy," Lorc said, still reeling.
He hadn't expected to succeed on the first attempt. His original plan involved multiple targets—more than ten, in fact. If one failed, they'd simply move on to the next.
He was relying on probability, not luck.
But somehow, the first attempt had succeeded—alarmingly smoothly.
From this point on, their operation would remain under the radar—at least for now.
They didn't touch down on the ground but instead traveled in a near-vacuum corridor, minimizing any detectable presence.
"We've got one. Now comes the interrogation," Lorc said.
"I wonder… can we bypass the body's authority and extract its memories directly?" Kesiba mused aloud.
That was a tall order.
Any foreign intrusion risked triggering the lock—a security mechanism tied to consciousness itself. The moment it was tripped, the system could decide to self-destruct.
Even if the lock was primitive, bypassing it was incredibly difficult.
Consciousness wasn't like code or hardware. It defied control.
To this day, humanity still lacked a coherent scientific explanation for consciousness. It existed, undeniably—but its nature still hovered in the realm of philosophy.
"No need to push that far," Lorc said. "We just need to identify him. With basic background data, we can start drawing conclusions."
He wasn't hoping for full intel—just enough to establish a lead.
Every individual had an identification code embedded somewhere.
They might not be able to read this being's memories, but they could extract its ID.
"Release him," Lorc ordered.
York activated the device. Lorc kept the lockdown system primed, ready to freeze the subject at the first sign of resistance.
Kesiba, being a tech specialist, would handle the data extraction.
Once everything was in place, York opened the device.
It wasn't a true isolation chamber, but rather a unit that heavily scrambled internal signals—making any outgoing data virtually impossible to track.
The moment it opened, the captive launched outward.
But Lorc was faster. He re-engaged the particle lockdown device, freezing the target mid-motion.
On a macro level, the being looked suspended—like time had stopped.
But on the quantum scale, things were still in motion. Electrons orbited nuclei, energy cycled through molecular lattices. The atoms were intact—but entirely immobilized.
"Trying to run? That's not going to happen," Kesiba muttered.
"Don't move."
He approached, ready to connect.
In the end, all mechanical lifeforms were just modular systems—configurable, reprogrammable. Each terminal carried out functions, and more importantly, housed consciousness.
Kesiba initiated a link to the entity's system, preparing to breach.
But then, without warning, he stopped.
Lorc frowned. "What is it?"
Kesiba took a step back. Then another.
"This thing… it has no system."
He looked up. "It's not one of us."
The statement was jarring.
But York and Lorc understood its weight immediately.
This being—whatever it was—only looked human.
It wasn't human at all.
They had never considered that possibility.
Up until now, they'd assumed these unknowns were rogue elements—traitors, perhaps, collaborating with an outside force.
But this? This was something else entirely.
"Are we looking at a civilizational infiltration?" Lorc said slowly.
They had always suspected external manipulation.
But they'd assumed those involved were still fundamentally human.
Now that assumption was shattered.
York's voice was tight. "If it's not human… how do we get anything from it?"
Lorc was already on edge. The situation had spiraled fast—plans couldn't keep up with this kind of revelation.
Suddenly, his eyes flicked to the lockdown device's control panel.
Warning: Energy Consumption Critical
The system was draining power at an alarming rate.
The being was resisting.
Lorc switched to the internal sensor feed—and saw the internal pressure rising.
It was fighting back.
"Go!" he barked. "Now!"
Whatever energy this entity contained—it was off the charts. Far beyond anything they were equipped to handle.
The three of them turned and fled in unison.
Moments later, the captive broke free.
The lockdown device failed.
The being's body swelled—unnaturally, violently—
—and then it exploded.
A storm of microscopic particles exploded outward in all directions.
The fastest of them reached speeds exceeding 180 km/s. It didn't sound like much, but in context, it was blisteringly fast.
Fast enough that dodging was out of the question.
Worse still, they didn't know what these particles carried—biological agents, exotic energy signatures, nanotech? No one wanted to find out the hard way.
No time to deliberate.
Kesiba barked, "Both of you—behind me. Now."
He increased his mass density, forming a shield of his own body against the oncoming storm.
York and Lorc didn't argue. Instinct overrode thought—they aligned behind him.
Kesiba took the full brunt of the particle wave.
One second passed.
The onslaught ceased.
Remarkably, Kesiba's body remained unharmed—no visible wounds, no signs of molecular disruption.
He spoke grimly: "I heard the sound you were talking about."
Lorc's expression shifted—he knew exactly what Kesiba meant.
York blinked in confusion. "What sound?"
Three more seconds ticked by.
Kesiba still showed no signs of injury or deterioration.
"Maybe you and I are both immune to it," Lorc offered cautiously.
Then came the fifth second.
York suddenly clutched at himself, eyes wide in panic.
"My body—what's happening to my body?!"
The other two turned just in time to watch him collapse.
"What the hell?" Lorc whispered, stunned.
Kesiba stared in disbelief.
York hadn't even heard the sound. Why was he the one dying?
And Kesiba—who had heard it—was fine.
York didn't manage another word. He was dead.
His body dissolved into dust, falling in clumps to the floor.
The room fell into a heavy silence.
Kesiba, untouched by the attack, stood beside a corpse that shouldn't have been his burden to witness.
"Why?" he muttered. "Why him?"
"Maybe…" Lorc said slowly, "maybe the sound itself isn't lethal."
Kesiba narrowed his eyes at the corpse. "You're saying the sound was... meaningless?"
"No, not meaningless. Not a medium. A signal."
Lorc's voice sharpened as the pieces began to align in his mind.
"A targeting signal."
And suddenly, the puzzle made sense.
Those who heard the sound didn't always die. But when someone nearby didn't hear it—they died instead.
A misfire. An error in targeting resolution.
In earlier incidents, survivors had always been close to someone else.
"I don't believe this," Kesiba growled.
"You're telling me the enemy's targeting system is based on sound? Sound only travels at 5,200 meters per second."
"What could you even do in a few seconds at that speed?"
He swept his gaze around—distances stretched far beyond what sound could feasibly cover in time.
"If their weapons are kilometers away, this makes no damn sense."
Kesiba's fury wasn't just academic. York's death had clearly affected him more than expected.
Lorc hadn't anticipated such emotion from him.
Maybe York hadn't been just another disposable contact after all.
But in the end, what difference did it make?
They knew what kind of situation they were walking into. Risk was inevitable.
Still, Lorc couldn't completely shake the guilt. He was the one who dragged them into this.
"I'm not just guessing here," Lorc said firmly. "It's the most logical explanation."
"This universe obeys rules—physical laws that can't simply be broken."
"If the enemy didn't see us, they had to mark us. That's what the sound was for."
Kesiba's voice dropped to a chill: "Then answer me this—how does that sound travel fast enough to serve as an attack marker?"
That was the most difficult question yet.
In air, sound traveled at only 346 meters per second. Even in the densest solid, it barely topped 6,000 m/s.
That's still 50,000 times slower than the speed of light.
On a cosmic scale, it was practically stationary.
A sound wave would take 50,000 years to cross just one light-year. So how had the attack arrived so quickly?
"Maybe the sound was just a trigger," Lorc suggested. "Or maybe there are devices embedded around us—converters that transform sound into other forms of data."
He scanned the ground.
"How did the enemy generate those vibrations in the first place?"
"If they want to receive the vibrations, then—"
"Enough!" Kesiba shouted.
"We're clearly dealing with a superior civilization here. This isn't some childish experiment."
"They have tech we can't comprehend—but they still follow the laws of physics."
"Now what? Are we going to try and outthink an interstellar superpower with just our guesses?"
"Keep playing lone hero until we get picked off one by one?"
He turned away, tone final.
"Let the professionals handle it. I'm done."
But it wasn't Lorc's theories that infuriated Kesiba.
It was his attitude.
Lorc was too reckless.
Though Lorc relentlessly pursued the truth, he lacked something critical—respect for his adversary, and a realistic grasp of his own limitations.
If he kept pushing forward like this, death wasn't a possibility.
It was a certainty—just a matter of when.
"Professionals?" Lorc scoffed. "If there were professionals, why has this gone unresolved for so long?"
"You can see it, can't you? Everyone's walking around like they're drugged."
"And I know why I'm able to perceive what they can't—because I'm insignificant."
"They've probably burned most of their resources disrupting the higher command structure. We're the soft spot. The breakthrough."
He didn't trust the so-called upper echelon to take action.
They had reported this to law enforcement. But so far?
Nothing.
No movement. No response.
No results.
At least, none Lorc could see.
Kesiba turned back, his tone cutting. "Who do you think you are?"
"You're just another nobody. An ordinary, utterly unremarkable person."
They stood at a complete impasse.
But that wasn't surprising.
From the beginning, they'd never truly seen eye to eye.
"Fine. Enjoy your little game," Kesiba snapped.
With that, he vanished—disappearing from Lorc's sight in an instant.
Lorc clenched his fists.
"Coward."
He stared at the scorched ground and the remnants of York's final moment.
"Don't worry. You won't have died for nothing."
There was no one else he needed to talk to now.
The only thing left was to go underground.
Kesiba had raised a critical question—how had the sound propagated so fast?
Lorc had to find the origin point.
That was the only way forward.
Beneath Star City were restricted-access facilities.
He wasn't concerned about clearance.
As long as he didn't interact with any detection systems, he'd be fine.
He took to the air.
A piece of his body separated—breaking off and shimmering white, then black.
The black mass dropped silently to the ground.
And the earth devoured it.
A black hole.
Lorc had generated one himself.
It was tiny—its visible aperture no larger than a single molecule.
Yet its gravity was strong enough to warp Star City 5's substrate even outside the visual field.
A hole appeared—twenty centimeters in diameter.
That was all he needed.
He slipped into it, never touching the surrounding matter.
The structural shell of Star City 5 was only 40 centimeters thick. Lorc broke through effortlessly—
—and entered a world of light.
An inner layer shimmered before him: an endless weave of fiber optics, glowing and pulsing with cascades of light.
Lorc had never seen anything like it.
The internal space of Star City 5 was more dazzling than he could have imagined.
But now wasn't the time to marvel.
These optic lines were carrying massive flows of data—converted to light, transmitting across the infrastructure.
Somewhere in this labyrinth, there had to be a node. A terminal. A transmitter.
And maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with the sound.
He didn't need to sweep the whole system.
Sound propagation was limited by time and space.
He just had to calculate the theoretical range, and isolate the radius from which a transmission could have originated.
For days, Lorc searched.
Systematically combing every segment of the defined area.
But—
"There's nothing."
"No origin signal. No broadcast node. Nothing."
"How... how is that possible?"
He refused to accept it.
If he couldn't trace the signal, then he'd track its physical footprint.
Sound might be hard to trace—but vibrations weren't.
Unlike light, vibrations require a medium. Their energy decays with distance.
Which meant—if he followed the points of strongest vibration, he could work backward toward the source.
"These vibrations are perfectly uniform…"
"Has no one noticed this before?"
Lorc scanned a broad area. Every frequency, every intensity—identical. No fluctuations. No decay.
It didn't make sense.
Vibrations are a side effect. Something—something—must be driving them.
And finally, in that moment, Lorc began to believe what Dawn had said:
The HHHI Corporation couldn't be acting alone.
Their microscopic world explorations couldn't possibly encompass all of Star City 5.
"But it doesn't add up," Lorc muttered. "There must be some kind of connection."
"The microscopic world..."
"I really hope it's not what I'm starting to suspect."
At this point, he had no choice but to make direct contact with the ground.
He needed to see what these vibrating materials were actually doing.
So, he entered the city alone and rented a high-resolution quantum microscope.
This wasn't your average imaging device—it allowed direct observation of movement at the quantum scale.
He noticed something odd right away.
These machines were always suspended, hovering—never grounded. It was done to preserve measurement integrity, to avoid interference from citywide tremors.
But wait—wouldn't that mean others had already detected Star City's inherent, constant vibration?
Surely, one data point about "microscopic exploration" wouldn't be enough to halt research into such a phenomenon. Something else must be keeping them away.
He focused the microscope on the ground and began scanning.
The visuals were staggering.
Due to physical limitations of optics, microscopes don't "see" fundamental particles directly. Instead, they infer the presence of particles by interpreting reaction data.
But unlike a standard particle detector, a quantum microscope—augmented by high-speed computation—could translate those reactions into visual form.
It could make the invisible visible.
And what Lorc saw shook him.
"These particles… they aren't vibrating."
The visualization didn't show gentle oscillations.
It showed collisions.
Particles were impacting one another—head-on.
Vibrations occur when particles oscillate due to energy transfer. Collisions, though, were something else—direct, kinetic engagements where particles attempted to crowd into the space of other particles.
He saw countless particles colliding in highly uniform patterns. The collisions weren't energetic enough to cause fragmentation—this wasn't a particle accelerator—but they were relentless.
And yet…
When Lorc introduced a foreign object into the environment, something changed.
The symmetry broke.
The collisions stopped. The particles began to vibrate.
Not all at once—only those beneath the object.
There was a threshold—a precise shift from collision-state to vibration-state.
And crucially, this wasn't a quantum collapse. Merely observing them didn't trigger the change.
He could watch the transition happen, live, through the microscope.
He ran a battery of tests, placing various materials on the surface.
Each material triggered a different vibration frequency when it displaced the collision-state.
And then it clicked.
"That's why I was targeted."
The particles beneath him had broadcast a frequency signature the system could isolate.
But something still didn't track.
Even if the system used particle collision to gather targeting data—how was it transmitting that data over such vast distances?
Just like vibrations, collisions dissipate. Energy weakens with distance.
Without continuous input, the whole system should have collapsed long ago.
But it hadn't.
Something was sustaining these interactions.
Keeping resisting particles packed so tightly was like forcing two magnets to merge.
And this "magnet" stretched across 40 astronomical units.
Whatever was feeding energy into this system had to be incredibly powerful.
But where was that energy coming from?
Conventional energy manifests in particle form.
If something that massive were in operation, Lorc should have been able to detect it.
But there was nothing.
No heat. No radiation. No exotic decay trails.
That left only one possibility:
"Unknown energy?"
"Or…"
"Artificial particles?"
His mind accelerated, slicing through theory and memory with brutal efficiency.
With his ageless mind came deep reserves of knowledge—and more importantly, immediate access to all of it.
"If they're artificial particles," he reasoned, "even if I can't see them directly, I should be able to detect their energetic footprint."
So he launched test particles—his own controlled collisions.
Nothing.
No reaction. No interference. No trace.
If artificial particles were truly present, they'd still be subject to the four fundamental forces.
His tests should've hit something.
But they didn't.
Which meant...
"They're not artificial particles."
And suddenly, the answer was obvious.
Almost embarrassingly so.
Lorc, without hesitation, cut directly into the ground and extracted a sample of the material itself.
He discovered that within this block of matter, the particles had stopped colliding—they'd lost their source of energy.
Lorc cut the block again, taking a smaller portion and placing it back in its original position, this time without letting it touch the ground.
Almost immediately, he observed the particles in the smaller piece resume their collisions.
"So that's it. It's not about artificial particles at all. The real cause lies deep within the microscopic world."
"Maybe the quantum field itself has been tampered with."
Or perhaps space itself had been altered.
Imagine a concave dip in space—on its boundaries, two raised points. These are the two particles.
Because they're sitting inside a gravitational-like dip, they naturally fall inward toward the center. But due to the strong nuclear force, they can't merge. As a result, they keep colliding, over and over.
These colliding particles are fermions.
Bosons, on the other hand, behave differently.
They aren't restricted by the Pauli Exclusion Principle and can occupy the same position in space.
Bosons function as force carriers, while fermions make up the physical substance of matter.
If bosons could collide like fermions, the four fundamental forces would spiral into chaos.
And artificial particles can't be bosons either—because Lorc's launched particles never interacted with any bosonic force.
Now, the most crucial task was to uncover the force that could sculpt space or the quantum field into concavities.
Such a force couldn't exist in the macroscopic world.
It was simply too precise.
"Could it be string transformations in the quantum realm?"
Whether bosons or fermions, all are made of vibrating strings. Even the quantum field itself is built on strings.
If you could alter strings, you could reshape the quantum field—and with it, rewrite the laws of physics.
Human civilization is still experimenting with this idea. Artificial particles are merely a side effect of those efforts.
They're tiny, fragile. Their existence is real, but insignificant on this scale.
But if one were truly capable of altering the quantum field at its roots… such technology would far surpass anything humanity had ever developed.
Lorc shifted his attention to the strings themselves.
And what he found startled him.
The strings remained unchanged.
Whether the particles were colliding or not, the string structures were identical.
Maybe there were subtle differences—but nothing that could account for the immense effects he'd observed.
"The strings haven't changed. Whoever's behind this isn't using strings to alter the quantum field."
That revelation shook Lorc.
Logically, manipulating strings was the most direct and efficient way to influence a quantum field.
He couldn't even imagine an alternative.
Quantum fields can be affected at the macro level, sure—but how could one internally manipulate the field in such a way that it affects the interactions of every individual particle pair?
Was the quantum field even changing at all?
Perhaps space itself wasn't altered either.
So what was it?
Lorc returned his focus to the space between the two colliding particles.
And at last, he spotted it.
The two particles were bound together.
He should have realized earlier—there were small discrepancies in their measured energy levels. Around 1% to 3% higher than expected. Small, but real.
Now, the source of that discrepancy became clear.
The two particles were encased in some sort of envelope—and between them, a "rope" connected the pair.
"Rope" was only a metaphor. But it was, in essence, some kind of matter.
Matter that was smaller than even fundamental particles.
Though fundamental particles are considered indivisible, this substance didn't fall under that definition.
This was what human scientists had termed "incomplete particles."
Lacking conventional particle properties, they were incredibly tiny—and remarkably sensitive to external forces.
And that was the key.
When these particles were exposed or disturbed, they switched the matter from a collision state to a vibration state.
This meant the state of the connecting incomplete particles was being manipulated.
Lorc, just as he was diving deeper into understanding them…
Suddenly, his body exploded with a dull, wet thud.
It shattered into pieces.
Yet Lorc's consciousness remained intact.
His mind was pulled into the Main Server's Underworld.
[No compatible body found. Original body deemed lost. Initiating new body creation.]
[Consciousness identity confirmed. Identity memory re-injection…]
The Underworld.
Lorc reawakened.
He shook his body, stabilizing.
"What the hell just happened? How did I die?"
"I was supposed to take my family to… where was it again?"