The silence that crashed down after the power died felt alive, pressing in on them from all sides. It wasn't the hum of machines coming back online that broke the stillness, but screams tearing through the night from the edge of the base. The GORCI base, now just barely alive on battery power for the really important stuff, was like a shadow of its former self. But out there, in the woods, something awful was happening.
Aris, Rostova, and Kaito stood in the red glow of the command center, watching a shaky video feed. Some brave drone pilot had somehow managed to get a drone up in the air. The picture was fuzzy and not great resolution, but it was clear enough to see something truly scary.
The place where the first sphere had opened up near the OmniGen building wasn't just burned; it was like something had sucked the life out of it. A chunk of ground about the size of a football field was now pure white, like bone, and totally dead. And from the middle of that dead zone, things were moving.
They weren't machines, and they weren't anything like normal living creatures. These Burrowers looked like shiny, metal worms, each as long as a person. Their bodies were made of connected sections, like a suit of armor that could bend. They didn't seem to have heads, just a crystal point at one end that glowed with the same gross, silver light as the Siphon. They moved smoothly, almost like water, and they tunneled through dirt and rock like the spheres did, leaving behind tunnels that glowed for a little while before fading.
The drone zoomed in on one of the Burrowers as it got close to the edge of the dead zone, where the forest was still green and alive. It reached the roots of a huge pine tree. The crystal tip touched the root.
Then, something happened that wasn't like an explosion, but more like a quick, quiet destruction.
The green needles on the pine tree didn't just turn brown; the color was sucked out of them in a wave, leaving behind a grayish-brown husk. The color drain moved down the branches and into the trunk, turning the tough bark into something like brittle paper. In less than ten seconds, the big tree was just a skeleton. A little breeze blew, and the whole thing crumbled into a cloud of fine ash.
"It's not just killing it", Kaito whispered, his face pale in the red light. "It's breaking it down to its basic parts. Total conversion of everything into energy. It's… perfectly efficient."
The Burrower, its crystal tip glowing brighter for a second, pulled back and slid into the ground, moving on to the next thing to destroy.
The drone pilot, his voice shaking over the radio, moved the camera to show a clearing. A young deer, scared stiff, tried to run as a Burrower came up from under the ground right in front of it. The crystal tip didn't even have to touch it. A shimmering field, just like the one that had killed Beta Team, surrounded the animal. It stopped struggling instantly. Its brown fur and dark eyes turned gray. It stood there for a moment, like a statue made of dust, before falling apart into a shapeless pile.
This was the Draw. Not some far-off idea, but a real, close-up destruction. They were watching the forest being eaten alive, piece by piece, creature by creature.
Aris felt it, too, a weird echo inside himself. The buzz in his head was now like a chorus of screams, a psychic pain coming from the destruction. He grabbed the edge of the console, his knuckles turning white. "It's not anger. It's not hate. It's just… It's just what it does."
Rostova's face was hard, but her eyes showed a deep horror, beyond just a military failure. This was like a holy place being destroyed. "We have to stop them. We have to try."
"How?" Kaito asked, his voice empty. "Our weapons don't work. We have no power. Anything we send in there will just be something else for it to use or shut down."
As if answering his question, Lily, who had been quietly drawing in a corner while a soldier watched her, held up a new picture. She had used a black crayon to scribble all over one of her silver network drawings. There were small, dark shapes scattered across the page, like rocks in a stream.
Aris walked over and knelt down next to her. "What are these, Lily?" he asked gently, pointing to the black shapes.
The girl looked at him, then at the tephra stone around his neck. She reached out a finger and touched one of the black shapes, then touched the stone.
The message was clear. The key wasn't for opening something. It was a way to fight back. A way to mess up the pattern.
The Burrowers were like the teeth of some harvesting machine, and they were slowly turning the forest into nothing. But the quiet child, and the rock from a dead city, had just shown that even the most perfect system could be stopped by something that didn't fit. The question was whether they could use it before everything was gone.