Everything went horribly wrong.
In hindsight, Elias would later conclude that this particular operation had been doomed from the very beginning.
Unfortunately, hindsight was not currently helping him.
He was currently sprinting across a floor made of shifting, translucent glass plates that were rapidly rearranging themselves into a staircase leading—he prayed—to an exit. Behind him, the catacombs were a scene of apocalyptic disarray. A dozen Wraiths, their forms like flickering neon ghosts, were, shrieking in a high-pitched frequency that made his teeth ache. A swarm of Hollows, clattered behind them, their movements disturbingly fluid.
Researchers screamed, security personnel shouted orders and alarms blared. Somewhere in the distance, something that definitely should not have possessed vocal cords was shrieking his description to every living thing within the facility.
Once he reached the top of the stairs, Elias vaulted over a rail, rolled across a metal platform, ducked beneath a swinging mechanical arm, and immediately crashed through a stack of crates.
"This is your fault!" Elias hissed getting to his feet and sprinting away.
Inside his soul space, Tamamo looked offended.
"My fault? You stole my tail!"
"That was the point of this whole operation!"
"Left!" Tamamo shouted in his mind.
Elias veered left, skidding around a corner and crashed directly into a wall.
"That's a wall," he gasped.
"I meant right."
"You said left!"
"You weren't supposed to crash into a wall."
"Well I did."
Tamamo considered it.
"Hmmm, bad luck?"
Elias nearly screamed. A Hollow burst through the wall in question and lunged at him. Elias slapped a talisman against its face and jumped back as it exploded, allowing the shockwave to throw him away from the creature.
Unfortunately—
The explosion also shattered three windows and somehow released a flock of glowing mechanical birds from a nearby containment chamber.
The birds immediately joined the chase.
"..."
"..."
"You said subtle." Tamamo accused.
"I was aiming for subtle!" Elias shot back.
The birds began firing sparks. Elias jumped around to avoid them, turned and ran faster.
"Why is this place like this?!" he shouted.
"Blame the architects," Tamamo replied, utterly unhelpful.
He was lost. Utterly, irrevocably lost.
The deeper he fled, the stranger the facility became. At some point the hallways stopped resembling architecture and began resembling a fever dream. One corridor stretched endlessly into the horizon despite existing underground. Another folded back upon itself like a Möbius strip. A third appeared to contain an ocean suspended upside down above....below? a glass ceiling.
Elias sprinted through all of them, hoping for the best.
Somewhere along the way he realized something deeply concerning.He wasn't getting closer to the exit. He was getting further away from it.
At first he thought it was paranoia.
But the deeper he pushed into the facility, the more the air felt heavy, pressing against him like a lead blanket. He was steadily moving towards the centre of the Severed Space and The "Vault"—the true, central storage—was calling to him. It wasn't a sound; it was a gravitational tug on his very essence. It was an existential weight that seemed to be actively warping the space around him. Like being under a mountain made entirely of souls. The very air tasted of ozone and ancient dust.
Reality itself appeared strained. Elias skidded to a halt.
He felt the corruption, like thousands of voices, whispering in a collective, discordant choir that vibrated in the marrow of his bones. His body groaned under the strain. His breathing caught, his muscles spasmed, and a nosebleed began to tickle his lip.
"What..."
His pulse quickened. His feet began moving toward the source.
"ELIAS!"
Tamamo's voice exploded through his mind.
Gold-black flames erupted around him, just above his skin.
The pressure lessened slightly and he could think staright again and he stumbled backward.
"W-what was that?"
"The Vault."
Tamamo sounded unusually serious.
"The actual Vault."
"The Vault?" Elias asked, his mind still foggy.
"Move, Elias!" Tamamo's voice suddenly sharpened, losing its mocking lilt. "I can't shield you from the ambient corruption much longer! The relics here… they're too hungry. If you stay in this focal point, you'll die."
Elias immediately took three more steps away.
The whispers weakened more and the pressure eased further. Only then did he realize sweat was pouring down his face. It seemed the call of these things only affected a certain range. A very large range at that because the Vault itself was still miles away.
Elias couldn't help but tremble. For a terrifying moment he had genuinely wanted to walk toward them.
To touch, to listen. To accept...
"How are they able to keep these things contained?" Elias asked turning away after recovering and running away.
"Humans are very stupid." Tamamo snorted.
"Lets hurry."
Elias didn't need convincing and sped up.
Unfortunately—
The moment he rounded the next corner—
More problems arrived.
A security squad emerged from the opposite hallway.
"There!"
"Stop him!"
Elias immediately climbed up a platform and hid in the room on top. The guards rushed past then stopped. They looked around in confusion.
"Where did he go?"
"I just saw him."
Elias remained completely still.
The Anti-Flow cuff around his wrist continuously drained his energy. Combined with Flow Suppression, he was practically a mundane human. The detection artifacts couldn't lock onto anything.
The guards spread out.
"Clear that area," a voice barked. "The target is hiding their Flow somehow. Use the thermal resonance sensors."
'Wait they have infra-red?' Elias' eyes widened.
He forced his heartbeat to stabilize and hoped they didn't come inside the room as here was only one exit. The search team however moved away from the container to search other places.
Elias almost smiled.
Then something phased through the wall beside him.
His smile disappeared as a wraith appeared, its ethereal hand passing directly through the solid walls to pull itself through. It stopped, its face—a shifting, featureless blur—turning toward Elias.
Then another.
Then another.
Then another still.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," Elias hissed.
The first wraith shrieked, a sound like tearing metal, the others immediately responded and charged. Elias grabbed the nearest object he could find, a metal cylinder sitting on a research table.
He swung it like a club at the Wraith. It passed through the ghost harmlessly as if it were nothing but air.
The Wraith's fingers closed around his forearm.
Pain.
It wasn't a physical sting;it was a shock of utter cold. He felt his life force—his Flow—being siphoned out through his skin.
Elias jumped backward.
He looked down and gasped. The skin of his forearm was shriveled, turning grey and brittle, his veins turning black.
"What the hell?!"
He scrambled backward, pressing himself against the far wall, his vision swimming.
The wraiths hissed as another lunged. He raised his arms, a desperate, useless shield against the tide of horrors.
And something activated.
Elias looked around. The room had taken on a pale, slightly monochromatic hue. He was still standing there, his arms raised, but his body was a statue. He took a step, and his soul—a shimmering, translucent version of himself—floated free from his physical form.
He looked around, startled.
He was in the 4.5Ddimension. A plane of space that existed partially above time.
"Tamamo?" he whispered.
Silence.
"Tamamo? Are you here? Can you hear me?"
Silence was his only answer—a thick, suffocating quiet that made his heart stutter even in his soul-state.
He was about to shout again, his frustration mounting as the pressure of the surrounding reality began to weigh on him, when the air directly in front of his face rippled like a disturbed pond. In a sudden, violent blur of motion, Tamamo materialized, her face mere inches from his, eyes wide and teeth bared in an exaggerated, terrifying grin.
"GOTCHA!" She shrieked, at the top of her lungs, throwing her hands up in a classic, jarring jump-scare gesture. Elias recoiled so violently that he crashed back into his body, his "heart" hammering against his ribs in a phantom panic while she dissolved into a fit of hysterical, high-pitched laughter.
Elias steadied his breathing, his eyes narrowed and his posture stiff as he glared at her.
"We are in the middle of a literal existential crisis. My physical body is currently being swarmed by homicidal echoes of the dead, and you're practicing for a carnival act?"
Tamamo straightened up, brushing invisible dust off her shoulders with an air of immense unconcern.
"Oh, calm down, little one. You looked like you were going to fold under the pressure. I was simply providing a moment of levity. It's what companions do."
"Companions help each other survive," Elias snapped, pacing the stagnant air.
"They don't try to give each other heart attacks."
"And yet, here you are, breathing harder than you were a second ago. You don't even need to breath." She leaned back, crossing her arms and floating effortlessly in the dead space. Elias was about to retort when the realisation hit him.
"Wait, You're—you manifested?"
"You're now realizing that?"
"How?"
"How? Wait, don't tell me you assumed I was trapped inside your Domain all this time." She laughed.
"Silly boy, I could have come out anytime I wanted to. I just didn't want till now."
"Why now?"
"I couldn't resist the idea of scaring you." She laughed again.
Elias was naturally not ammused. He reached out and pulled one of her ears.
"Hey, ow ow ow ow ow. Ok I'm sorry, I'm sorry. What's the plan?"
Elias let her go and she rubbed her ear.
"You're no fun." she muttered sticking her tongue out at him.
Elias looked around. The frozen Wraiths surrounded his body. The security forces were, without a doubt, not that far behind. From the entrance he could seethe shriveled hand of a hollow about to pull itself onto the platform and into the room.
"The Wraiths and Hollows—how are they tracking me?" he wondered, folding his arms and rubbing his chin.
"Blackwave said he could 'sense' me back in the cell. Whatever that meant. Hollows and Wraiths are just people who overloaded their own systems, right? They consumed or used too much Flow until they either burned out into empty shells or dissolved into incorporeal energy."
"Correct." Tamamo affirmed.
Eliaslooked at his hands, then up at Tamamo.
"But I'm wearing the Anti-Flow cuff. I'm suppressed so how?"
Tamamo circled him, her expression shifting into one of pitying amusement.
"You're thinking like a human, Elias. You think because you've locked the door, they can't smell the feast inside. You forget what they are. Transforming into a being thats all physical and no energy or all energy and no physical gave them acute senses to the Flow of the World. The very thing you have in abundance."
Elias looked at his frozen physical body, his forearm still shriveled and blackened by the Wraith's touch. Then an idea hit him.
"Can you still sniff out that Pirate."
"Yeah, he's still here. Why d'you ask."
Elias stared at her.
"Wait, you're going to break him out?" Tamamo asked, sounding surprised.
"I thought the point of the operation was to not draw attention."
"I am! But this place has made it impossible to be subtle. y all means the Inquistion will try to investigate how someone was able to get in the vault and why. By using the pirate as a diversion i can throw the trail off of me entirely."
"And you're sure its gonna work? I mean, we could steal a random artifact as a cover up."
Elias pointed toward the frozen cylinder still trapped in his hand.
"If they're studying it, it's not dangerous enough that they'd be bothered."
Tamamo frowned. He continued.
"And I guarantee there are containment measures preventing artifacts or relecs from leaving thos severed space."
The fox spirit groaned.
"Hate it when you're logical."
"Thank you."
"That wasn't a compliment."
Tamamo's voice was thoughtful.
"Perhaps thats our only option. But before you can do that, there is something we must do." She said as her expression turned mischievuos.
"What?"
She reached out and snatched the fluffy white artifact—her tail—from his physical belt, pulling it into the 4.5D space. It floated in her hand, now pulsing with a faint, golden light.
"Wait, what are you doing?" Elias started.
Tamamo didn't answer. She grabbed Elias by the collar, pulling his translucent spirit toward her with a force that felt like an anchor dragging on a ship. Her grip was iron.
"You said we were in a serious situation, didn't you?" she whispered.
Before he could react, she shoved the glowing, pulsing artifact directly into his mouth. Elias's eyes bulged and his eyes truned bloodshot with tears streaming down his cheecks as she forced it down his throat. Elias struggled, his translucent hands clawing at her wrists, but she did not let up until it was done.
He felt the artifact dissolve against his tongue, turning into a searing, liquid heat that poured down his throat like molten gold. It wasn't just physical; it was a rush of memory, of ancient power, of a name he didn't know but instantly understood.
Time returned to normal with a violent BOOM!
Elias's body was wreathed in golden-black flames that erupted outward in a shockwave. The Wraiths nearest to him were incinerated instantly. The Hollows were burned and knocked away, shrieking. The walls of the room shattered leaving only the platform beneath him with cracks spider-webbed across the stone.
The researchers stared.
The security personnel stared.
The Hollows and Wraiths stared.
Stylized smoke rolled outward, twisting around a single silhouette.
This was the first appearnce of a Yako in deca-millennium.