The road to the crash was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that made you feel like the world was holding its breath, waiting for you to trip so it could laugh in your face.
The figures made it worse.
At first, Ash thought they were just statues. Ugly decorations left behind by people with no taste. But they breathe. They all looked like they were heading toward the open pit mine, arms swinging, legs mid-step. Frozen in motion, but too many of them to ignore. The kind of too many that gnawed at the back of your skull.
He kept running. Then he noticed something off. The further he went, the more their poses shifted. One after another, like the frames of some sadistic storybook. The closest figure had its shoulders just beginning to twist. Another had its head halfway turned, as if someone had whispered its name. The ones beyond that had their bodies angled completely around, staring at the same place Ash was running toward.
It was a flipbook in stone. Page after page telling the same story: something had made them all look back.
Ash slowed. He didn't like it. Not the way their stillness pretended to move, not the way his brain tried to trick him into thinking they might actually twitch if he blinked too long.
He forced his legs forward anyway. He couldn't afford to stop.
The wreck finally came into view.
The vessel lay in ruins, torn apart like a carcass after a feast. Its steel belly split open, fire leaking from the gaps. Cables dangled in the air like veins stripped out and left to swing in the wind. Smoke rolled upward, thick and oily, dragging the smell of burning metal with it.
And as if the scene wasn't bad enough, the frozen mob surrounded the ship. They hadn't stopped politely at its edges — they were on it. Fists jammed through hull plating. Weapons lodged halfway into the structure. Some clung to the torn walls like insects mid-climb. All of them frozen in the act of taking the ship apart piece by piece.
Ash's stomach turned when he realized what that meant.
They hadn't been standing still a long time. They had been moving. Fighting. Destroying. And then something had hit pause on the whole nightmare.
If the ship hadn't fallen long ago, then Max could have survived the crash. Which would have been great news if not for the army of living statues apparently hellbent on murdering him afterward.
Ash swallowed, scanning the hull. Gaping holes torn through the side revealed only fire and wreckage. Seats ripped in half, glass shattered, walls crumpled. Every detail he saw made it harder to believe his brother was inside, breathing.
But then he noticed something else.
The statues weren't just stopped at the ship. They had gone past it, their frozen bodies stretched in poses that made it look like they were chasing something. Something that had fled deeper into the ruins beyond the mine.
Ash clenched his jaw. Of course.
If Max wasn't in the wreckage, then he was what they had been chasing.
Ash kept moving.
The ground shifted into ruins — old buildings half-collapsed, stone walls leaning at sick angles, rooftops caved in like skulls punched through. Small houses, maybe. Or shops. Hard to tell through the wreckage, but they carried the weight of something old and forgotten, their bones left behind to rot.
The statues infected everything here too. On rooftops, out windows, crawling across broken streets. All of them facing the same way, locked in the same unending chase.
It was almost funny. Almost. A trail of nightmares pointing like a road sign.
He tightened his grip on the Washizaki and followed the trail until it led him into more of the ruins of what must have once been a town. The buildings weren't just broken — they were scattered like toys thrown by a bored child. Walls cracked open, stone and metal twisted, rubble piled high. And, of course, the statues stood here too. Figures frozen mid-swing, mid-step, mid-crawl. It didn't take a genius to figure out what had done this.
Ash gritted his teeth. He'd been keeping quiet because silence seemed smart. Survival was supposed to matter. But right now he couldn't bring himself to care. His brother was missing, and that mattered more than his own life.
He drew in a breath, ready to shout into the dead air — then a hand clamped over his mouth and yanked him into the shadows of a half-collapsed building.
Ash didn't fight. He already knew who it was.
The man looked like he'd aged too fast. Early twenties, but the exhaustion written into his face was older. Black hair fell over tired eyes. His armor was functional but sleek: segmented plates with cables and faint strips of light running into a collar where respirator and comms pulsed steadily. A suit built for breathing in places that didn't want you alive.
Ash let out a heavy sigh of relief and wrapped his arms around him in a quick, firm hug. He tried to speak, but Max pressed a finger to his lips. Ash frowned, confused, and tried again, only for Max to gesture sharply for silence before tapping at a band on his wrist. A pale blue holographic screen lit up, followed by a keyboard. His hands moved quick, words assembling across the display.
[Sorry about that. Even a whisper is dangerous here. Lucky it's you and not Ty. That one would've started a marching band by now. These things react to any sound that doesn't belong. Keep your mouth shut and we'll live.]
Ash turned his head away, biting down on his frustration, then glanced back at Max and gestured that they should leave before it got worse.
Max sighed through his respirator and typed again.
[I know you're worried about Ty. I am too. But I'm a hundred percent sure he can handle himself. What you should worry about is you. My Soul Core is damaged. It has to do with that giant thing mixed in with them.]
Ash's eyes narrowed. Giant one? He hadn't seen anything bigger than the twisted crowd outside.
Max was already typing before he could dwell on it.
[Check your Soul Space. You might not feel it yet since you barely use your skills, but I need to know if you're stable. If not, fix it. We don't have time to carry dead weight.]
Ash stared at him with a cold, confused look.
Another line of text blinked up.
[Oh, and I think I found something. Don't know if it's tied to Apex, but this planet isn't what we thought. Remember the scans? We were told there was no life on the far side. Just miners. But these things… they're part of the planet. Like the earth grew them. They only respond to sounds that feel "natural" to it. I dug deeper. There's something worse. Something that broke the scan itself. And I want to find it.]
'Of course he did.'
Ash looked at him with the same frozen expression as always. Inside, the sarcasm practically boiled.
'Fantastic. Not only are we neck-deep in nightmare statues, but now he wants to go treasure-hunting. Because curiosity never killed anyone, right?'
Max caught the look and sighed again, his fingers moving.
[I know that face. But think. If Apex gets there first, and it's as bad as the readings suggest, do you really want to sit back and let them hold it?]
Ash didn't answer. He just studied his brother, the flicker of the hologram lighting up Max's stubborn, sleep-starved eyes. He already knew how this went. Max's curiosity was a fire that couldn't be put out. No matter how dangerous, no matter how stupid, once he found something that didn't make sense he had to pull it apart.
And stopping him? Ash had tried before. It never worked.
Max was the smartest of all of them, and when he was confident, he rarely missed. Ash didn't hate that. He trusted it. He always had.
If Max said they had to dig deeper, then Ash would follow. Not because he believed in whatever secret was buried in this cursed ground, but because he believed in him.
His brother's fire had never led him wrong before.
Ash gave a single nod, sharp and certain . Whatever waited beyond these ruins, whatever had torn this planet into something unrecognizable. They would face it together.
And if the world thought it could take Max from him, it would learn just how wrong it was.