The workshop in the heart of Terminus smelled of old ozone and new fears. It was the scent of a system running too hot for too long, a city of survivors held together by desperation and scavenged tech. On a scarred plastek workbench, the ghost of Zane's ambition lay in state. The Berserker Module was a dead thing now, a grotesque tumor of fused crystal and wire, but it still radiated a faint, sickly heat, a residual fever from the soul it had consumed. It didn't look like a piece of technology. It looked like a scar given physical form.
"It's a dead end," Corbin rumbled from the doorway. The big Nomad was a mountain of quiet presence, his arms crossed, his scarred armor seeming to shrink the already cramped space. "A failed weapon."
"It didn't fail," Kael said, his voice quiet. He hadn't moved from his spot before the workbench in an hour. "It did exactly what it was designed to do. It turned Zane into a Tier-3 threat, for a few minutes. It unmade him, and in the process, it nearly unmade us."
He thought of the fight, the raw, untamed violence. He had spent weeks, months, learning to weave the ghosts in his soul into a fragile harmony. He had created art. The Berserker Module was the opposite. It wasn't art. It was a scream. It didn't weave. It just opened the floodgates.
And in that thought, a new, terrifying door opened in his own mind.
Site Zero. The Alpha Project. The Director.
Whatever was waiting for them there wouldn't be a beast. It wouldn't be a soldier. It would be a weapon system built on principles they were only just beginning to understand. A power so overwhelming it might as well be a force of nature.
"Our armor is good," he murmured, more to himself than to the others. "The [Kinetic Rebound Armor]… it's a perfect mirror for physical force. But it won't be enough."
Anya looked up from the diagnostic slate she was studying. "Why not?"
"Because that's not what we'll be facing." Kael finally turned from the dead module, his eyes finding hers. The ghosts in his soul were quiet, cowed by the memory of the module's fury, but the Stalker, the cold architect of logic, was working. "The Director's work, the Alpha Project… it's not about kinetic force. It's about Aethel. Pure, overwhelming Aethel energy. The Berserker Module was a crude version of it. It didn't just hit Zane, it overwrote him. A pure energy attack won't be something we can rebound. It'll be something that un-writes us."
The room grew colder. They had all seen what raw, untamed Aethel did to a Frame. They wore the scars of it, carried the ghosts of it.
"We need an answer to overwhelming Aethel-based attacks," Kael continued, the technician in him laying out the parameters of an impossible problem. "We can't build a bigger wall. We need… a different kind of wall. Something that doesn't block Aethel, but negates it. Something that creates a null-field."
Silas, the old engineer, looked up from the custom power cell he was tinkering with, his prosthetic optics whirring softly. "A null-field. Boy, you're talking about turning off the sun with a switch."
"There has to be a precedent," Kael insisted, his gaze shifting to Kirra, the data-broker. Her knowledge of the Nomad archives was absolute. "Something in the bestiaries. A Chimera with anomalous energy-dampening properties. A creature that evolution tried to build a shield out of."
Kirra's face, a roadmap of a hundred badlands, was unreadable. She tapped a few commands into a datapad. "The archives are a mess. A library burned down and then looted. Most of the high-tier ecological data is corrupted. But…" She paused, her expression uncharacteristically hesitant. "There are whispers. Ghost stories from freelancers. 'Dead zones' in the wastes where Frames just… stop working. Where Echoes go quiet. They're not just empty. They're voids."
She swiped the data to a central holotank. A fragmented bestiary entry appeared, pieced together from a dozen corrupted files. Most of it was static, but a few lines of text were clear, stark and terrifying.
Designation: [Redacted]… (Tier-3). Colloquial: Null-Field Moth.Primary Trait: Passive Aethel-Energy Nullification Aura.Analysis: …not a predator. Possesses no offensive capabilities. Threat is environmental. Subject's aura generates a field of… absolute Aethel stasis. All Frame functions cease within effective range. Echo integration fails. Synthesis becomes impossible…
The final line was from a panicked, corrupted audio log of a freelancer who had stumbled too close. "…it's not that it's strong. It's that… I'm not. I'm just… meat again. The air is empty…"
The recording ended in static.
"A creature that can't be fought with a Frame," Anya stated, her voice flat. She saw the implications immediately. It wasn't a hunt. It was a suicide mission.
"Exactly," Kael said, a strange, feverish light in his eyes. He saw the problem, but he also saw the solution. "So we don't fight it with a Frame."
Corbin let out a short, harsh laugh. "Then how do you fight it, kid? Throw rocks at it?"
"We hunt it like men, not like Users," Kael countered, his voice gaining a cold, hard certainty that silenced the big Nomad. He was the anomaly. The specialist. This was his language. "We can't use our powers to fight it, but we can use them to find it. I can use [Phantom Resonance] from a distance, outside its null-field, to get a general location. A blueprint of the terrain."
He looked at the others, the plan taking shape, a horrifying and beautiful schematic blooming in his mind's eye. "We can't kill it with Aethel. So we kill it with physics. We treat it not as a Chimera, but as a target. An objective. We use the environment. We set traps. We become the ghosts, not it."
A heavy silence settled over the workshop. The idea was insane. To willingly walk into a zone where their greatest strength, the very core of their identity as survivors, was stripped away. To face a Tier-3 Chimera armed with nothing but their wits and scavenged gear.
Anya was the first to move. She walked to a storage locker and began pulling out equipment. Not power cells or Aethel-laced ammunition. Spools of high-tension cable. Det-cord. A set of conventional explosives scavenged from the TTM-Logistics Base. She looked at Kael, a single, sharp nod of her head.
The debate was over. The hunt was on.
They were no longer just a team of Frame Users. They were becoming something else. Something older. They were becoming technicians again. And their job was to find a flaw in the design of a god, and then, with nothing more than wire and scrap and a terrible, brilliant idea, they were going to set a trap for the void itself.