The Glass Canyon was a wound in the world.
For a day, the convoy had rumbled through forests of petrified crystal, a silent, beautiful apocalypse. Now, the land cracked open. The transports navigated a chasm carved from a single, unbroken sheet of obsidian-like glass. The canyon walls were mirrors, reflecting the convoy's gritty, utilitarian forms into a thousand distorted, elongated shapes. They reflected the bruised purple sky, too, making it feel as though they were driving through the shattered heart of a galaxy. The air was thin and cold, and every sound—the groan of the crawlers' treads, the static crackle of the comms—felt like a profanity in a vast, silent cathedral.
Kael felt it before he saw it. He sat with his back against the cold hull of the scout vehicle, letting the Hound's senses be his eyes. The thrum of the convoy's six power cores was a warm, steady backbeat. The faint, chaotic hum of the crystal trees on the canyon rim was a constant, low-grade static. Everything was a known variable. But then, a new signal entered the equation.
It wasn't a sound, not at first. It was a pressure change, a subtle vibration that traveled through the glass floor of the canyon. It was a rhythmic, rising hum, clean and pure in a way that felt utterly alien.
He glanced at Maya. She was already looking at him, her face a pale oval in the gloom of the transport. She gave a nearly imperceptible shake of her head. Her Glimmer Moth Echo, the one that wove light and shadow, was blind to this. This was something else.
"Ryker," Kael's voice was quiet on the squad comm. "Something's coming."
"I see it, kid," the veteran's voice rasped back, devoid of surprise. "On the walls."
The hum became a sound, a high-pitched whine that set Kael's teeth on edge. And then they appeared. They weren't charging from the front or the back. They were rolling, detaching from the high canyon walls like spherical, living boulders. Dozens of them. They were perfect spheres of mottled grey crystal, the size of a man's torso, and they moved with the terrible, accelerating certainty of an avalanche.
Resonance Geodes.
The first one hit the transport directly behind them. There was no meaty crunch, no shriek of rending metal. There was only a sharp, resonant CRACK and an explosion of light. The Geode shattered into a cloud of razor-sharp crystalline shrapnel that shredded the transport's armor plating. But that wasn't the worst of it. The impact also released a wave of something else. A silent pulse of pure, disruptive energy.
Kael felt it in his bones. It was a deep, gut-wrenching vibration that felt like a direct attack on his Aethel Frame. The steady, contained hum of his three Echoes—the Hound, the Scuttler, the Stalker—devolved into a panicked, staticky whine. The world went sluggish. His thoughts felt like they were moving through mud. It was like the operating system of his very soul had begun to lag.
"Status!" Ryker's voice was a strained bark, fighting through the oppressive interference.
The comms filled with shouts of confusion and pain. Energy shields, the first and last line of defense for a Frame User, were flickering and dying across the convoy. Weapons sputtered, their targeting systems failing. The veteran Users, men and women Kael had seen as unmovable pillars of strength, were clumsy, their movements suddenly heavy and uncoordinated. The sonic pulse wasn't just a distraction; it was a system-wide debuff, and it was crippling them.
Another Geode hit the lead transport, its shrapnel-laced explosion tearing a trench in its side. The convoy ground to a halt, a collection of sitting ducks in a glass shooting gallery.
"Focus fire!" a voice screamed over the comms, but the turrets' return fire was erratic, wild.
This was a new kind of strategy. A new kind of war. It wasn't about brute force. It was about system failure.
Kael fought through the mental fog, his technician's mind latching onto the problem with a desperate clarity. It wasn't just noise. It was a signal. A frequency. It was tuned to the specific resonance of an active Aethel Frame and designed to introduce catastrophic interference. He remembered the feeling of his spear vibrating against the Scuttler alpha, the world-bending wrongness of his [Resonant Strike]. He hadn't just made a weapon. He had learned a principle. He had created a frequency.
Could he do it again? Not to attack. To defend. To create a counter-frequency. A bubble of quiet in the heart of the storm.
He grabbed Maya's arm. Her own Frame was a faint, struggling flicker. "Maya! I need you. Your energy. Don't fight it, just… hold steady."
She looked at him, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and trust. She nodded, a single, jerky motion.
Kael ignored the chaos outside. He ignored the screaming on the comms and the jarring impacts that shook their vehicle. He closed his eyes and reached inward, past the panicked chittering of his own Echoes. He found his Core, that quiet, steady hum of his own life force. He let his Flow pour out, not into his limbs, but into the space around them.
Then, he reached for Maya's Frame. It was a frantic, terrified thing, a panicked bird beating against the bars of a cage. He didn't try to calm it. He didn't try to control it. He just listened to its song, to its high, terrified frequency.
He tried to match it.
The strain was immense. It was like trying to tune two different instruments to the same discordant note in the middle of an earthquake. The air around them didn't just crackle; it felt like it was tearing. A low hum started, a counter-point to the Geodes' high-pitched whine. Kael felt a trickle of blood run from his nose, hot against his upper lip.
The oppressive, mind-numbing pressure lessened.
It wasn't gone. But it was… buffered. The world-shaking vibration became a dull thud. The mental fog thinned to a light haze. He had done it. He'd created a small, unstable bubble of null-frequency. A quiet zone.
He opened his eyes. Inside their small pocket of reality, everything felt clear. His Frame was stable. His thoughts were his own. Outside the viewport, he could see a veteran Frame User stumbling, his movements a good half-second behind his intent, as a Geode rolled directly towards his transport.
There was no time for a plan. There was only action.
"Out!" Kael yelled, kicking the transport door open.
He and Maya spilled out into the chaos. The air was a maelstrom of shrapnel and warped sound, but inside their invisible shield, they could move. They could fight.
Kael switched his senses. Click. The Hound. The world resolved into a matrix of threat vectors and kinetic energy. He saw the arc of the incoming Geode. He saw the spray of shrapnel from a previous impact. He saw the path.
He moved. It was the low, ground-eating pounce he knew so well. He slid across the glass floor, his kinetic spear held low. He didn't target the Geode. He targeted the ground just in front of it.
Maya was a step ahead of him. A concentrated beam of silvery light erupted from her hands, not a flash, but a solid, blinding wall that momentarily silhouetted the rolling Chimera.
Kael used his spear, not as a weapon, but as a lever. He jammed its tip into a hairline crack in the obsidian floor and channeled a single, explosive burst of kinetic energy from his Core. Shockwave Step.
It wasn't a ground-shaking boom. It was a focused, concussive pop. A plate of the glass floor, a section the size of a transport door, shattered upwards. The Geode, its trajectory interrupted, was launched into the air, tumbling end over end. It flew over their heads and slammed into the far canyon wall, its self-destructive payload wasting itself on inert rock.
They didn't stop to celebrate. Another Geode was bearing down on them. While the convoy's defenders were still fighting the effects of the sonic attack, Kael and Maya were fighting the Chimeras. They were two components, finally working in sync, a desperate, improvised solution to an impossible problem. They were no longer just survivors. They were a functioning system. And in the heart of the Glass Canyon, under the gaze of a broken sky, they held the line.