||The Shattered Cocoon||
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The silence was alive.
Deep within the bowels of an abandoned Amalthean facility, silence reigned—not the peaceful kind, but the predatory quiet that waited before a storm. Cold, unnatural stillness oozed through metallic hallways lined with shattered lights and dried streaks of blood. Red emergency bulbs pulsed dimly, casting a heartbeat rhythm across walls that had once gleamed with sterile pride.
Now, the only rhythm that mattered came from something else entirely. Something not born from machines or men.
It came from within the central chamber, where the Empire's final experiment had broken its chains.
The glass containment tube lay shattered at the base, its walls jagged and warped as if something had erupted outward—not with brute force, but with precision. Burned runes flickered around the rim, ancient glyphs no longer glowing. They had tried to bind a soul with language older than memory, and now the chamber stood as a monument to their failure.
The floor was littered with surgical tools, data slates, fragments of shattered armor, and the remains of three security drones—each torn apart in patterns that suggested neither claws nor weapons. They had simply… failed to exist in the right way when the subject awoke.
And amidst it all, standing barefoot on the cold floor, was the one they called Code Seven.
He was tall, perhaps too tall for the chamber that had been made to contain him. His physique was lean, carved by design rather than training, and his skin bore the marks of procedures that would have killed lesser beings. Scar lines intersected in unnatural grids along his back, reaching toward a neck embedded with an obsidian disc—dead now, like the facility around him.
He opened his eyes slowly.
No light shone in them. No spark of humanity, no reflection of the overhead red. Instead, they were clear. Still. Like a mind had awoken that had never been allowed to dream.
Seven looked at his hands first. Not as a newborn discovering limbs—but as a warrior awakening after a thousand-year sleep.
Faintly, the room responded to his thoughts. Not with beeping monitors or alerts, but with silence thickening even more. His awareness expanded. Not by will—by design.
Then, it came.
[Threshold Achieved. Observation Protocol Initiated.]
A ripple passed through the air—one not made of sound or heat, but of something else. The shattered containment glyphs flickered once, then died completely.
[Designation: Code Seven. Soul Mark Confirmed.]
He frowned for the first time, hearing the words not in his ears but in the center of his being. It was not a voice. It was law—spoken not to the mind, but to the soul.
[Plane Access: Eligible.]
The mark had been dormant. Buried. Forgotten even by its creators. But now, it pulsed faintly within his soul like a second heartbeat.
He staggered.
The world around him twisted. The broken facility shimmered, blurred—and reality itself yielded.
For the briefest instant, the Amalthean Empire lost track of one of its most dangerous creations.
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He was not unconscious.
He was elsewhere.
He stood upon a place where there was no gravity, no shape—only meaning. A sky filled with memory, a ground made of dreams, horizons drawn from a thousand futures. Stars blinked in impossible colors, and voices—millions—rose in a chant that carried neither praise nor judgment, only recording.
[Welcome, Initiate.]
The Infinite Planes did not require gates. It existed beyond place. The mark on his soul had served as a key, unlocking a door etched in fate rather than stone.
[Existence Status: Divergent.]
The chant in the air silenced as though holding breath.
[Observation Level: Passive Tier Zero.]
He sensed others—countless others. Some hidden in swirling fog, some shaped like men, others like weapons, concepts, or hunger itself. One flickered near him, a being of golden feathers that whispered names that hadn't been spoken in ten thousand years. Another floated like a glass sphere full of sand made of stars, orbiting itself.
They observed him.
Not with eyes, but with intent.
[Retention Status: Pending.]
And then, all at once, the moment passed.
The Infinite Planes did not hold what it had not chosen.
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His knees hit the facility floor. Sweat poured down his spine. Air rushed back into his lungs, and the sound of failing generators and the distant moan of structural collapse welcomed him like old friends.
But nothing was the same.
He had seen something else. Touched something no human was meant to grasp.
He rose slowly, muscle by muscle, as the distant walls groaned again.
From beyond the broken chamber doors, the sound of boots echoed—quick, coordinated, imperial. A team. Late to the disaster, likely drawn by the facility's last flickering signals.
Seven moved silently, pressing his back to the wall. He picked up a jagged shard of glass, its edge warped from the explosion, and held it like a dagger.
Footsteps approached. Five soldiers. Fully armed. Visors down. High-grade kinetic rifles and anti-psionic shielding. These weren't ordinary troops. They were Containment Recovery.
But they were not prepared.
The first soldier stepped into the room. Seven moved like a shadow made flesh. One step—two—strike. Glass through the throat, twist, silence. The body crumpled without sound.
The others turned—but he was already there. He was among them, between them, behind them. Movements too fluid, timing too perfect. They died one by one, necks broken, throats crushed, weapons clattering to the floor uselessly.
Less than seven seconds.
Seven stood amid the bodies, untouched. Calm. He dropped the glass shard.
The facility was no longer his prison.
It was his tombstone.
And he had risen.
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Meanwhile, half a galaxy away, aboard the Imperial Dreadnought Cynosure, Admiral Calven Rheos stood in silence before a starmap flickering with red alerts.
"Facility Twelve has gone silent, sir."
The aide's voice was grim. "Last recorded message was an emergency fail-safe ping. No survivors logged. Internal logs corrupted."
"Any signs of breach?"
"No. External perimeter was untouched. It imploded from within."
Rheos narrowed his eyes.
"And Subject Seven?"
The aide hesitated. "Unknown. His vitals disappeared five minutes before the facility collapsed. All containment metrics failed at the same instant."
The Admiral clenched his jaw.
Then, slowly, he turned to the holo-communicator and activated the black channel.
"Bring in the Watchers."
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Elsewhere, in a domain with no name, a presence stirred.
It was not a person. It had not been for millennia.
It watched.
[New Divergence Detected.]
A long-slumbering eye opened. It saw the echo of Code Seven's first steps into the Infinite Planes. It saw the mark burn bright in the abyss.
It did not speak, nor scream.
But it remembered.
And it hungered.