**Content Notice**
**Warning:** This chapter contains scenes of extreme and graphic violence. Killing, crushing, and tearing will be described in explicit detail.
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(Kael's POV)
The smell of the Bastion always made me sick.
It's the "non-smell." A suffocating mix of ozone from the runic power conduits, medically-scrubbed recycled air, and the dull, metallic cold of the polished titanium alloy that formed every wall and every corridor. This is the price of guarding a high-tech prison dimension.
"All quiet in Sector Delta," Jenna's voice came over my comms, dry and formal as always. "My sweep is done. How's your sector look, Kael?"
I stopped walking. We were in the "Grand Concourse," a fancy name for a kilometer-long hallway overlooking "The Core." From here, behind ten-meter-thick, rune-plated glass, you could see the captive Archons. Hundreds of them, suspended in amber-like stasis fluid.
"My sector, Jenna," I answered, bored, "is, as always, dead-boring. 'Rust-Wraith' hasn't moved in a century. Everything else is asleep."
"Complacency is a Warden's first enemy, Kael."
I rolled my eyes, even though she couldn't see me. "Complacency is a luxury you earn when your ancestors' work is perfect. Aegis built this place to last forever. The Bastion is impenetrable. That's not doctrine, it's physics."
"I'll remind you that Malakor is still here."
"Of course he's still here," I muttered, looking down into the center of The Core, where "The Well" was located. The deepest point in the Bastion, shielded by layers of energy-draining seals. Even from here, The Well was just a patch of absolute darkness. "He's locked in the deepest hole mankind ever built."
"And arrogance is the second enemy," Jenna said. "See you in the brief in one hour."
"Wait," I said. "Don't you ever get... bored?"
A second of silence. "I'm doing my duty."
"No, seriously. Jenna. We're in our mid-twenties. We're spending the best years of our lives watching sleeping monsters that are never going to wake up. Don't you ever just... crave something? Anything? Even a false alarm?"
"No," she said flatly. "Because an alarm in this place doesn't mean 'excitement.' It means the end of everything. Don't ever wish for it, Kael. Finish your sweep."
The comm clicked off.
I sighed, leaning my forehead against the cold glass. She was right, of course. But goddamn, did I hate the boredom. I had trained my whole life to be humanity's shield, to fight monsters. Instead, I was a glorified babysitter for comatose monsters.
I finished my sweep, the sound of my tactical boots echoing sharply on the alloy floor. The confidence I'd expressed to Jenna was real. Aegis was absolute. The Bastion was eternal.
Which is why, when the floor vibrated beneath my feet, I didn't register it as a threat at first.
It was a light tremor, followed by a deep, metallic *click*, like a colossal bone snapping.
I froze. I hit my comms. "Jenna? You feel that?"
No reply.
"Jenna?" I repeated, a cold feeling starting to crawl up my neck. "Command, this is Warden Kael. I'm reporting an unscheduled tremor in Sector Gamma..."
Then the alarms went off.
Not the yellow or orange alarms. It was the Crimson Alarm. The "Catastrophic Containment Failure" alarm.
"Shit!" I yelled. "What the hell is happening?!"
Before anyone could answer, the rune-plated glass in front of me *tore* open. Not shattered. *Tore*.
I leaped back instinctively, raising my rune-rifle. From the broken cell, "Rust-Wraith" flowed into the hallway. It wasn't just energy; it was a nightmare of torn metal and rotting flesh, a ten-foot-tall mass of shrapnel and rusted spikes spinning around a pulsing heart.
I fired. The blue blast of energy tore through its chest, vaporizing a large chunk of its mass. But it kept coming, reassembling itself as it charged.
"Sector Gamma is breached!" I screamed into the comms, firing and retreating. "We have an Archon loose!"
"Two loose!" Thorne's voice came from the Runic department, panting. "Sector Delta, too! The 'Alpha-Consumer' is out!"
"Jenna!" I yelled. Jenna was in Delta.
"Kael! I'm fine!" her voice came back, punctuated by gunfire in the background. "It's on me! I'm heading for the Grand Concourse!"
"Dammit! Thorne, where's the breach? What's happening to the seals?"
"They're not breaking!" Thorne screamed. "They're being *disabled*! Something... something in The Well... Oh my god... It's Malakor! He's waking up!"
At that moment, Jenna appeared at the end of the hall, firing her rifle behind her. Right behind her was the "Alpha-Consumer," not darkness, but a massive, disembodied maw, crawling on the walls and ceiling, chewing the metal into nothing.
"Jenna!" I ran toward her. "To the weapons station! We need the heavy cannons!"
We met in the middle, going back-to-back. Rust-Wraith was closing in on my side, the Alpha-Consumer on hers.
"Just like the training sims, huh?" she said, trying to sound calm, but her voice was shaking.
"Just don't die," I said, and fired a precise burst that hit Rust-Wraith's pulsing core.
The monster shrieked, a sound that was pure grinding metal, and began to collapse.
"Behind you!" Jenna yelled.
I spun to see the Consumer lunging. Jenna fired a sticky grenade from her under-barrel launcher. It detonated inside its open mouth. The explosion tore it apart from the inside, splattering it across the walls like thick, black tar.
We stood panting, covered in black sludge and rusty dust.
"Is it over?" I asked her.
"Kael," she said, her eyes staring not at the dead monsters, but at The Well in the center of The Core. "It hasn't even started."
I looked.
The absolute darkness in The Well was moving. It was rising.
Then, all the alarms stopped. All sound stopped. Even the hum of the Bastion itself died, replaced by an immense pressure, as if all the air had been sucked from the entire dimension.
"No," Thorne whispered over the comms, his voice breaking with terror. "He's reversing the flow of the seals... He's not breaking them... He's *eating* them..."
The Well exploded.
Not as a column of energy, but as an explosion of liquid black metal. A fountain of physical darkness climbed a mile high, and then began to coalesce and take shape.
We watched in horror, frozen in place. The liquid metal formed. Arms. Legs. A torso. A head.
A massive, twelve-foot-tall figure stood in the center of The Core. It wasn't made of flesh, but of the same dark alloy as the Bastion, as if the prison itself had been given a twisted, sentient form. It wore what looked like heavy plate armor, but it was part of its body.
There were no eyes in its smooth helmet, just two slits glowing with pure crimson light.
"Malakor," I whispered.
He turned his head, slowly, toward us. He wasn't looking *through* the glass; he was looking *at* us.
**"At last,"** a voice resonated in our heads. It wasn't heard, it was *felt* in our bones, a voice deep and hard as the edge of a glacier. **"Fresh air."**
He raised his hand, and simply... pushed.
The ten-meter-thick, rune-plated glass, designed to withstand a nuclear strike, imploded like cheap window glass.
"Move!" I screamed, grabbing Jenna and pulling her behind a metal bulkhead as a wave of shattered glass swept the hall.
"Thorne! Initiate 'Scorched Earth Protocol'!" Jenna yelled into her comm. "Destroy the Bastion!"
"I can't!" Thorne's panicked voice came back. "He's in the systems! He's locking everything down! Oh god, he's—"
Thorne's voice cut off in a wet, choked scream.
"Thorne? Thorne!!" I yelled.
(Narrator POV)
In the control room, five kilometers away, Thorne was frantically slamming the self-destruct panel. But it was dead. His shadow trembled, then elongated, becoming solid. Talons of physical darkness erupted from the floor, forged from Thorne's own shadow. They impaled his body from a dozen angles, lifting him into the air. His face turned gray as he watched his own blood flow *against gravity* and into the shadows. His body was slowly crushed and compressed, his bones snapping like dry twigs, before he was dragged entirely into the shadow, which was now the size of a bloodstain.
(Kael's POV)
"He's dead," I told Jenna, seeing the terror in her eyes. "He's playing with us."
**"Where are your manners?"** Malakor's voice echoed as he stepped from The Core into our hallway. Every step left a trail of black frost on the metal. **"I have spent a thousand years as your guest. Should you not welcome your host?"**
"Go to hell, you bastard!" Jenna screamed, breaking from cover and emptying her rune-rifle's entire magazine into his chest.
The blue blasts, which had torn Rust-Wraith apart, simply *ricocheted* off his dark armor, scattering like harmless sparks.
**"Brave,"** Malakor said, tilting his head. **"And foolish."**
He moved.
I didn't see him move. One second he was fifty meters away, the next he was in front of Jenna.
"Jenna!" I yelled, raising my rifle.
It was too late.
Malakor grabbed her by the throat with one hand, lifting her off the ground. She was kicking and clawing at his metallic gauntlet, but he was unfazed.
**"You are the first to see the new world, little one,"** he whispered to her.
He looked at me, right into my eyes, while he still held her. There was almost a smile in his voice. **"Watch. This is what happens when you resist 'Truth'."**
He didn't use energy. He didn't use a weapon.
He simply balled his other fist. And punched her.
A straight punch to her abdomen.
Her tactical armor, made of ceramic-titanium alloy, collapsed like tinfoil. I heard a sickening *crunch*—the sound of bone, armor, and metal shattering all at once.
But the punch didn't stop.
His fist tore through her abdomen and out her back, taking her spine and a mass of shredded gore and viscera with it.
Jenna froze. Her eyes were wide, staring at me, mouth open in a silent scream as blood poured from the corners of her lips.
**"Weak,"** Malakor said with disdain.
Then he retracted his arm.
The sound it made—pulling free from her body—was *wet*. Tearing. Jenna collapsed to the floor in a lifeless heap, her upper torso barely connected to her lower, a thick, crimson pool spreading rapidly around her.
I screamed.
It wasn't a scream of rage or fear. It was a primal, sanity-shattering howl.
"You fucking monster!" I emptied my entire rifle into his face. Every shot, every ounce of my rage, impacted his helmet.
He did nothing but stand there, letting the shots deflect off him, while Jenna's red blood dripped slowly from his gauntlet.
**"Are you finished?"** he asked, bored.
That's when I knew. This wasn't a fight. It was an execution. And we were next.
Malakor was ignoring me now. He was moving slowly toward the main portal... the portal to Earth.
"No..." I whispered, hot tears mixing with the sweat and Jenna's blood that had spattered my face. "No, you bastard. I won't let you."
I remembered. The final emergency protocol. "The Crimson Seal."
I looked at Jenna's mutilated corpse. I looked at Malakor, about to destroy my world.
"Fuck it all."
I ran. Not at him, but away from him. Toward the emergency control panel at the end of the concourse.
**"Running?"** Malakor asked from behind me, his voice dripping with mockery. **"Disappointing."**
"'Crimson Seal' Protocol!" I yelled at the panel.
`Warning: This procedure requires direct soul-binding. Containment Failure: 99.9%. Target Corruption: Confirmed.`
"I know, you goddamn bitch!" I slammed my bloody hand on the scanner. "Activate! Warden Kael authorization!"
`...Confirmed. Initiating binding sequence.`
Pain.
It felt like my soul had been ripped out of my body, put in a furnace, and then beaten with a sledgehammer.
The panel fired a beam of pure white energy, not at Malakor, but at *me*. It pierced my chest, pinning me in place.
At the same time, a dozen massive mechanical arms fired from the walls, shooting containment beams designed not for all of Malakor, but for a *fragment* of him.
Malakor sensed the danger. He spun toward me, his rage so physical it almost crushed me. **"What have you done, you parasite?!"**
He screamed this time, a real shriek of tearing metal, and dashed for the portal.
"Get him!" I roared.
The beams caught part of his material form just as he was crossing the threshold. For a second, there was an impossible tug-of-war. Part of him was escaping to Earth, the other part was held by the containment beams.
Then, Malakor *broke*.
A massive chunk of his material mass—his entire left arm and shoulder, torn from his torso—snapped off from the main body. The larger part vanished through the portal, screaming in fury. The smaller part was left behind, writhing in a rage of crimson darkness and black metal.
`Binding in progress.`
The panel fired another beam, this one connecting the torn-off piece of Malakor to the white beam that was impaling me.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
It wasn't pain anymore. It was... *all-consuming*. I felt everything. A thousand years of rage. A bottomless, cosmic hunger. A pure hatred for existence itself. All his memories, all his fury... became mine.
I saw the Bastion collapsing around me.
And I saw the torn mass of darkness and metal rush toward me, not as an enemy, but as a missing piece returning home. It flowed toward me, not *into* my body, but *into* my soul.
I felt a tattoo burn itself onto my chest. I felt my eyes boil and melt in their sockets.
The last thing I saw before the crimson dark consumed me was Jenna's mutilated corpse, and Malakor's furious laughter echoing in my mind.
I had bound a monster... to myself.