The briefing room felt like the inside of a loaded gun.
S-rank captains from every branch lined the crescent table: veterans with knuckles like old stone, young monsters whose names were already rumors. Holo-maps floated above the polished obsidian, casting indigo light over faces that didn't blink much anymore. At the room's heart, a vertical rift projection turned slowly—an oval scar suspended in air, its core the color of drowned lightning.
"The anomaly bloomed at 11° South, 78° East," said Director Han, voice flat. "Mid-Indian Ocean. Not a surface gate—a subduction rift. It's riding the trench line like a parasite and pulling every free gate in a thousand kilometers into itself."
A hush, like a knife laid on a table.
"You're deploying from our littoral platform. Warp to the perimeter, then down by carrier," he went on. "Expect false topography. The redirect lattice in that sector will dump any void overflow into the basin beneath the rift—so if it breaks, it breaks there. Not on a city. Clear?"
Nods. The kind you make when you've already started counting exits.
Han swept a hand and the map peeled open into layers: concentric storm bands, strangely warm currents, a bloom of life where nothing should live.
"Recon ghosts returned one thing: music." He didn't smile. "Underwater mics recorded—harmonics. The spectrum matches nothing we have. Treat auditory stimulus as hostile."
He let the projection collapse, then looked past the room—straight through the glass into his own reflection.
"Top-ten cadets, you're with the strike unit as observers. You interfere only if a captain flags you. If you grandstand and get someone killed, I'll bench you until you're forty."
A murmur. Metal chairs scraped.
Rin didn't answer. He'd already begun to listen for a song he couldn't hear.
---
They crossed to the launch wing through the lower skybridge. Below it, the carrier hall slept in bright silence, all angles and hungry doors. The warpship waiting for them looked like a contradiction polished to a mirror: a manta silhouette of matte obsidian, edges filigreed in pale runes that breathed in sequence. No rivets. No seams. The hull drank the lights and gave none back.
Codex Record — Riftcraft "Aegir"
Frame: Runic composite over adamantine rib.
Skin: Phase-shear plating (absorbs/bleeds kinetic vectors).
Drive: Twin Aether turbines; short-hop warp coil (4 AU envelope).
Under-belly: Drop maw with gravity lift.
Bridge: No windows; scry dome only.
Motto (etched beneath the keel): "Enter hungry. Leave empty."
They filed up the spine ramp in pairs. Hyun-woo whistled under his breath and shut up when Albert's stare—half memory, half phantom—crossed the back of his head. Min Jae-seok brushed his fingers along the bulkhead as if tasting the ship's pressure field.
The Aegir lifted without drama and knifed into sky. Clouds wrapped the hull like wet silk; the coast fell away; then the world went quiet with speed.
"Two minutes to coil," reported the pilot. "Keep your minds still when the bell rings."
The bell rang—not a sound so much as the memory of one—and their bodies remembered what it felt like to happen somewhere else.
---
The ocean platform was a black city squared against the horizon: stacked runways, wind-battered gantries, cranes like cathedral ribs. The rift hung above the water a kilometer off—like a saint's wound cut into the sky, streaming faint light downward. The sea beneath it was too calm.
"Drop range," the pilot said.
Hatches opened. Salt air poured in. Deck crews unhooked anchors the size of cars. Then the Aegir nosed toward the wound, the drop maw blooming under their boots.
"On my mark," came the captain's voice. "Don't fight the pull. It'll fight you back harder."
The floor disappeared.
For a heartbeat, there was only throat-wind and thunder. Then the rift grabbed them by the chests and pulled down—no, sideways, the world folding as if someone had mistaken directions and insisted on both.
They fell into paradise.
Leaves like lacquered jade. Water clear as glass blown in slow motion. A sky with two suns and no heat. Flowers that smelled faintly of sugar and clean linen. The ground gave beneath their boots like new bread.
Cassandra Wright (USA)—short hair, eyes like cameras—squinted. "This is a script," she said softly. "Not an illusion. It's a welcome."
Rin's blade hand didn't move. "Then it wants something."
"Everything wants something," Tariq al-Rashid (Egypt) murmured, sand braided around his forearm like a pet serpent.
They spread in a wedge, veterans at the edges, cadets nested inside the angle. Hyun-woo's flame licked his knuckles and died, well-trained now to wait. Min Jae-seok's field woke like a change in weather.
The first voice rose.
At first you could mistake it for wind through reeds. Then more voices braided into it—alto over tenor over an ache that wasn't a voice at all—and a tear ran from a fresh hunter's eye for no reason he could name.
The paradise peeled away like thin ice. The ground darkened to shale; the trees crumpled inward, revealing trunks made of fused ribs. Pools unfroze into slick, red membranes that pulsed with something like a heartbeat.
The Marrow Choir came up from below.
They weren't bodies so much as arrangements: masses shaped like organs given choral robes, ribs and spines wound into lattices, skulls pressed in like studs. They sang as they moved, language made of pressure and color. The song crawled under armor and along bones, and everywhere it touched, you felt like something in you was blooming wrong.
"Eyes!" barked Captain Seo from the front line. "Filter!"
Hyun-woo clenched his jaw as a high note scraped his lungs raw from the inside. To his left a hunter gagged and coughed red. Cassandra bit her lip until she bled and spoke through clenched teeth: "Appraisal up."
[Appraisal: Marrow Choir]
Type: Hive Undead Entity.
Note-borne effects: hemolytic resonance / osteo-proliferation / induced affective hallucinosis.
Adaptive melody: changes mode on counter.
Directive: Expand. Integrate. Harmonize.
"Break the song. Or make it yours," Min Jae-seok said quietly.
"Hyun-woo!" Rin's voice cut clean. "Vertical—burn the ceiling."
"On it!"
Hyun-woo lifted both hands; flame whirled up around his forearms but didn't escape—a collar of heat held tight by new habit. "Inferno—Spire!"
A column of fire roared up and folded outward, lapping the vaulting dark. Heat changed the Choir's song; notes warped, keys slid. As they scrambled to adapt, Tariq whispered and the ground became running dunes, devouring the front rank in soft avalanches and vomiting them in new positions—off balance, off beat.
Isabella Marquez (Spain) stepped forward, her fire not red but white—the temperature of shame and stars—painting bowing silhouettes on the stone. Leonhardt Kruger (Germany) laced the room in runic lightning, glyphs flaring on his forearms as if his blood knew where to burn.
Aoi Takahashi (Japan) didn't say anything. She entered the song with twin blades and took parts away from it—the little ones: rib struts, tendon bridges, places where the harmony anchored its shape. Wherever she passed, voice fell to breath.
"Left flank!" a sergeant shouted.
Kwame Dlamini (South Africa) answered with something like a grin. He went through a Choir mass like a train choosing not to stop. The song pitched into a pain key, and chains fell out of Tollgrim myths and tried to tie him to the floor; he broke them with the headbutt of someone who thought problems should be introduced to bone.
The rookies around them shook, found their feet, and sang back with steel and spell.
Rin moved.
He didn't "counter" the Choir so much as redirect the note. The ??? Blade breathed cold without ornament—Frozen Edge whispering along the floor—and a film of glass-clear rime slicked outward. Where the song tried to push blood the wrong way, the frost silenced the instruction; where bone wanted to grow like ivory weeds, the cold told it no like a hand on a child's wrist.
A chorus cluster turned toward him and modulated—the note under the note blooming into something that wanted him to remember the worst day of his life over and over until he knelt.
He stepped into it. The Codex rose behind his eyes like a shadow of a mountain that had always been there.
"Not that scale," Rin said softly. "This one."
The Choir's pitch broke mid-word.
He slid on a ribbon of ice he made as he needed it, bent backward under a spume of spurs, threw his heel up through a skull that had never been one thing, and cut on the way down—Against the Grain—where the hive's next move would have been. A whole verse died unborn.
"Hold!" Captain Seo called, voice a wall you could lean on. "Hold—and move!"
They did. For a while the fight was momentum and checks: Choirs shifting repertoire, hunters answering in their dialects of killing. Min Jae-seok did something the Choir hated: he stole space from it. Maximum-output Blue drew whole bars of sound into a single point and ate them. Men who should have bled out in thirty seconds stood up and kept moving because a quiet boy in a black coat kept their minds from remembering why it hurt.
When the Choir finally broke and sank like bad breath into the floor, the room seemed too big. People reloaded hands. Somebody laughed, too high. The smell of bone dust was inside the sinuses and would be for days.
"Door," Cassandra said, pointing.
Set into the far wall where there hadn't been a wall, a rectangle of old wood waited with the patience of a judge.
"It wasn't there," Isabella said.
"It was always there," Tariq corrected, tone dry. "We simply deserved it now."
Captain Seo held two fingers out; scouts went, checked, came back paler. "Reads as shelter," one managed.
"Shelters don't read," the captain murmured, but he nodded. "Stack. Slow."
They went through.
Home. Or a dream with the good parts left in: stone benches worn by friendly elbows; braziers sending up clean heat; a shelf of sealed rations; a water cistern that looked like a word for mercy had decided to stand still and be useful. Hunters exhaled like men do when they've decided not to think about the bill yet.
"Regroup. Two minutes." Captain Seo checked his watch and didn't look at the walls, which seemed to be watching them back.
Hans Müller (Switzerland) wiped his rifle down with movements that bordered on obsessive. "We anchor here," he said, voice airy with too-much oxygen. "We set lanes. We—"
The braziers went out.
A new heat flowered in the dark—a single, perfect candle flame suspended where the air would have been if the air could have chosen not to be afraid. Then another lit. And a third.
They drifted apart until they made a triangle around the party.
"Targets," Leonhardt breathed, lifting a hand.
Cassandra grabbed his wrist hard. "Don't touch them."
The candles bent their flames in unison as if nodding, and then the door behind them vanished.
Something tall rose from the middle of the room, as if the idea of a man had been poured out and hadn't decided whether to finish. Wax robes. Lantern hands. A head that was a column of fire with faces stumbling in it like fish under ice.
The voice didn't come through ears.
All lights go out… in time. I simply help them sooner.
[Appraisal: KHARZITH, THE CANDLE OF ENDINGS]
Classification: Scripted Boss / Soul-Wax Construct.
Phases: Soulflame Pyres / Waxbind / Extinguish / Candle of Endings.
Rule: Choice paid in memory, skill, or name.
Tendency: Collect.
"Positions!" Captain Seo snapped. "Don't let the pyres touch you—"
Three candles pulsed, and three shapes stepped out of them—you, but worst-angled. One wore Hyun-woo's old fear and the smell of smoke; one had Leonhardt's arrogance sharpened to a spear; one was Rin's silhouette without a face.
"Break the clones," Isabella said, jaw set, "and it—"
"—takes something," Cassandra finished, eyes widening. "It takes something."
Wax chains lanced out. Kwame caught one and roared as it wrapped his shadow and not his arm; he strained, veins song-bright, while Min Jae-seok's field unwound the bindings one molecule at a time.
Kharzith snuffed its head flame.
Darkness fell like a verdict.
"Lights!" someone hissed.
Hyun-woo flared a Halo out of reflex and screamed as the flame bent, went cold, and ate heat from his bones. He fell to one knee, teeth clamped.
"It's moving," Cassandra said calmly, voice low and even in a way you only get by losing things. "It's behind—no, above—"
A hunter died without a sound. One heartbeat he was there; the next he was a shape on the ground that didn't understand its own outline. Wax chains rattled against the stone like ritual cutlery. Captain Seo slashed where he couldn't see and hit nothing but a feeling.
"Name!" Min Jae-seok's voice knifed the dark. "Speak his name!"
"Park Do-hyun!" half the room shouted, and the chain trailing his soul recoiled like a scalded animal and softened.
The fight telescoped into rhythm and panic. For thirty breaths there was only sound—chains, rasp, someone sobbing into their sleeve—and then Kharzith said a word none of them could remember afterward and threw his body into a wave.
"Candle of Endings," Cassandra whispered, and felt the choice bite her tongue. "Burn a memory, lose a skill, or—"
Hans Müller broke. He snapped his tether harness, drew a circle in the air that looked like a mouth, and stepped toward where the door had been as if the physics would kindly resume for him because he was leaving.
The wave did not chase him. The room did. He reached the frame that wasn't there and turned into a pillar of ash that remembered the shape of a man for three seconds and then forgot it.
No one screamed. There wasn't time.
"Hold!" Captain Seo bellowed, and planted his blade in the stone. "Hold! Hold!"
The wave came.
The room clanged like a bell hit by a god.
It was over.
Not because they had solved it.
Because something else had decided this wasn't how the song would end.
A line of white ran through Kharzith from base to flame—thin as a thought, clean as law—and for one dumb second the boss looked down at its own surprise.
Then it fell apart.
Not in chunks. In decisions. The lantern chains stopped meaning anything; the wax remembered it was coward ice; the flame forgot it had names to say. Kharzith lay on the floor like an argument nobody could be bothered to finish.
The masked swordsman standing where the wave had been didn't pose. He didn't need to. His coat hung like a shadow had decided to be polite. The sword in his hand carried no light and all the attention.
No rank tag. No branch sigil. Only a mask, smooth and eyeless, that made your brain want to squint.
Isabella swallowed. "Who—"
He was gone between one blink and the next.
Silence moved in. Then it had to move out because the room needed air again.
Captain Seo exhaled the kind of breath you live long enough to learn. "Check your people," he said, voice not soft but not iron either. "Now."
They did. Someone cried, quietly, because the price pile was already on the floor and you could see the denominations—memories burned, skills muted, names gone. Cassandra touched her temple and felt a little empty place where something she'd been proud of had lived. The shape it left behind was clean.
Out in the larger chambers, the rest of the strike was dying or shaking it off or standing very still because standing very still sometimes fools your nerves into thinking they can try again.
Rin wasn't there to see the sword.
He had stepped through the other door.
---
The room beyond it wasn't a room. It was a garden planted in a vacuum: obsidian flagstones, moonlight finding ways to be sensual without being bright, thorned silks draped over frames that suggested furniture and threat by turns.
She stood at its center with the ease of someone who never waits. Midnight skin traced in red script, crescent wings breathing in and out without moving. Her longsword was not steel; it was a promise hammered into an edge.
"Welcome," she said, and the word put warm fingers on the back of your neck. "You came alone. Good. I dislike choir work."
Rin didn't rise to it. He took one step onto the silk-slick stone and it did not creak for him.
[Appraisal: VEL'SHARRA, THORN OF THE VELVET MOON]
Scripted High Arcana.
Vectors: Sword (Moonpierce), AOE (Velvet Eclipse), Mindcraft (Crimson Caress), Terrain Control (Queen's Tapestry).
Phase Two: Wings separate; body accelerates.
Rule: Desire is leverage.
"Skipping introductions?" she purred. "Rude. But I suppose your blade can say my name for you."
"You weaponize allies," Rin said simply. "So you meet me."
She smiled with a kind of delight that had teeth. "You do understand. How refreshing."
They moved at the same time.
Her Moonpierce slid into the space near his heart as if it had memoed the address and he wasn't home. Rin rotated his wrist half a degree—one-point severance—and the lethality lost its handle. They passed each other by centimeters and traded air and a feeling that something had almost, almost happened.
She stepped again and the room grew threads under his boots—Queen's Tapestry—silks that made traps of both rest and haste. Rin answered by making ice under the silk, sliding where the rules required walking, ruining rhythm with a different rhythm. Her mouth curved. She liked it when prey had taste.
The first kiss of her blade on his was a violin note held too long. The second was a slap he let pass his ear and answer the empty place where his face had been.
She teleported behind him without bothering to start first. "Crimson Caress," she whispered at the hinge of his skull.
Nothing happened.
Her pupils dilated very slightly. "Who is that," she breathed, head tilting, "sitting in your house?"
Rin cut at what she would do next, not what she was doing. The Codex sat in his mind like a black fire with opinions and quietly ate the hooks she sent.
Vel'Sharra's wings unfolded, then separated; four crescents drifted up and out, fanning into turrets that hummed in four sorceries at once. Her body lost weight and gained speed.
"Phase two," she smiled, finally engaged.
Rin slid forward on a ribbon of frost, the ??? Blade tracing a line in air that left the idea of cold behind it. One cut birthed a Frozen Fang Dragon that took a turret whole and was still hungry; another touch raised a barricade between two spells that wanted to breed.
She lifted her palm and a Velvet Eclipse moon swelled above them, red light the color of wine and graves. Five seconds.
"Run," she suggested, voice like warm lacquer.
Rin didn't. He drew a circle with the point of his blade—small, precise—and the frost inside it was so still the world forgot its own argument there.
Four seconds.
He looked at her over the line. "Stay."
Three.
Outside the silk garden, in a room that had become a tomb and then a miracle in under a minute, men and women steadied hands and counted heads.
Two.
A masked swordsman who should have been someone's father stood very far away and very close and watched nothing, because if you looked at that blade too hard you would start to remember that even light can be cut.
One.
The eclipse fell.
Rin lifted his sword to meet it.
To be continued.