The transition into the [Glimpse of a Path] usually felt like stepping through a veil of cold water. Today, crossing the threshold into the simulated future of Alpha-Prime, it felt like stepping into a vacuum chamber.

  I stood on the precipice of the timeline, my physical body miles away in the damp safety of the hidden cavern, my consciousness projected forward into the immediate potential reality. Before me lay the Kyorian perimeter — a dome of blinding white Lux-Light that Nyx had failed to breach. It was a wall of photon-density so high it registered as solid matter to most senses.

  “You blocked the shadows,” I thought, analyzing the frequency of the shield. “But you can’t block the empty space between the photons.”

  I pulled [Prime Axiom’s Nullifying Veil] tight around my soul. I wasn’t trying to hide my presence; I was enforcing my own non-existence. To the scanners sweeping the forest edge, I became a mathematical null-value, a glitch where the light forgot to refract.

  I stepped through the barrier.

  There was no alarm. No screech of sirens. Just the heavy, oppressive thrum of the city within.

  I expected a metropolis. The reports Nyx had managed to scrape together suggested Alpha-Prime was the jewel of the Occupation — the new seat of Governor Vorr and the High Inquisitors. Akkadia had been a monument to vanity, filled with white marble, soaring glass spires, and manicured gardens designed to make the natives feel small.

  Alpha-Prime was not a monument. It was a machine.

  The city stretched out before me in a brutalist grid of grey plasteel and reinforced concrete. There were no windows to let in the sun. There were no promenades or decorative arches. The buildings were squat, bunker-like structures built for kinetic deflection and radiation shielding. The streets were perfectly straight, sterile canyons of metal illuminated by harsh, shadowless floodlights.

  It was ugly. It was efficient. It was a warehouse for a war.

  But the most disturbing thing was the sound. Or rather, the lack of it.

  A city of this size — easily large enough to house tens of millions of people — should have a roar. There should be the distant clamor of traffic, the hum of conversation, the organic chaos of life.

  Here, there was only a low, subsonic vibration. A mechanical thrum that seemed to emanate from the planet’s crust, vibrating in my spectral teeth. It sounded like a massive engine idling just below the redline.

  I drifted through the streets, maximizing my [Void Perception].

  Patrols moved with clockwork precision. Tracked heavy-loader drones rumbled on magnetic treads, carrying unmarked crates. Scanner-spheres hovered at intersections, their green lasers sweeping in perfect grids.

  But where were the soldiers? Where were the workers?

  I approached a habitation block — Sector 4-B on the maps. I phased through the outer wall, expecting to find empty rooms, evidence of an evacuated populace.

  I stepped into a communal mess hall and froze.

  It wasn’t empty.

  Hundreds of people stood in the room. Humans, Dweorg, S’skarr, Lorian and others. They were wearing standard-issue grey jumpsuits.

  They weren’t eating. They weren’t talking.

  They were standing in perfectly straight rows, facing the blank grey walls.

  I moved closer, waving my hand in front of a Dweorg woman’s face. She didn’t blink. Her chest rose and fell in a shallow, chemically regulated rhythm. Her eyes were glazed over, staring into a middle distance that didn’t exist.

  My blood ran cold.

  They hadn't evacuated. They hadn't fled. They had been turned off.

  “This again...” I whispered, the horror of the realization settling heavy in my gut.

  This was a recurring theme the Kyorians seemed to love. To the Kyorians, these weren’t citizens. They weren’t even slaves. They were biological components stored in a warehouse until needed. Millions of people, locked in their own minds, frozen in place to minimize resource consumption and prevent rebellion.

  The city wasn’t a fortress. It was a battery storage facility.

  I left the block, moving with a new urgency. The atmosphere of the city pressed down on me. It smelled of ozone, recycled air, and the terrified, subconscious sweat of a million paralyzed minds.

  I headed for the center. The layout of the city was a web, and every strand of mana, every conduit of power, flowed towards the massive, squat Citadel in the center.

  As I moved closer to the heart of Alpha-Prime, I noticed another anomaly.

  High above the streets, in the magnetic-levitation tubes that crisscrossed the sky, streamlined transport pods were moving.

  They were sleek, heavily shielded, and moving fast.

  But they weren’t coming in. They were leaving.

  I Walked upwards, latching onto a data-node on one of the transit rails. I used a trick Zareth and I had developed — injecting a tendril of Void mana to siphon the data stream without breaking the encryption.

  Priority Evacuation Protocol 9. High-Command Assets leaving via Stratosphere Uplink. Loyalty Tier Platinum and Gold personnel: Cleared for departure. Tier Silver and below: Hold position.

  “They’re running,” I realized. “The leadership is abandoning the city.”

  Why? They were controlling this position, and preparing traps for enemies like me, so why leave?

  Unless the traps required an empty house.

  I looked down at the streets below, filled with the frozen, “Low Tier” bodies of the civilians.

  They weren’t holding positions. They were inanimate stones.

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  I reached the Citadel. It was a black box of reinforced Null-Steel, devoid of aesthetics. The hum here was deafening, a physical pressure that tried to push my astral form out of alignment.

  I slipped through the blast doors.

  Inside, the command deck was a ghost town. Automated systems flashed amber and red lights. The chairs were empty.

  But the central tactical table was active.

  It projected a real-time volumetric map of the city. And overlaid on the city map was a pulsing red grid that tracked energy fluctuations.

  It was tracking me. Or rather, it was tracking the infinitesimal distortion my Nullifying Veil created in the local mana field.

  They knew I was here. In the simulation, I had walked right into the crosshairs.

  “Welcome, Anomaly,” a recorded voice echoed through the empty command deck. It was cool, computerized, and utterly indifferent. “Protocol: Dead Zone initiated.”

  I looked at the console. A countdown timer hit 00:00:01.

  [Yield: 500 Megaton Mana-Cascade.]

  [Mechanism: Containment Implosion.]

  My eyes widened. “It’s a nuke.”

  But it wasn’t just a bomb.

  The ground beneath me lurched. The hum stopped.

  Then, the Domain slammed down.

  It wasn’t a wave of fire or force. It was a Cage.

  [Void-Anchor Activated. Local Spatial Geometry Locked.]

  The grey, misty world of the Void — my escape route, my highway, the place I started to feel like home — suddenly solidified. The Lattice strings snapped tight, fusing into an unbreakable cage of high-density Reality.

  I tried to step sideways into the Void.

  I slammed into a wall. Not a physical wall, but a conceptual one. The Space refused to bend. The Kyorians had deployed a counter-measure specifically designed for a Void Walker. They had hardened the universe around the city.

  I was trapped inside the blast radius.

  “Clever,” I whispered, panic flaring hot and sharp. “You lock the door before you light the gas.”

  Through the walls, I felt the ignition.

  It didn’t start in the core. It started in the streets.

  Millions of people. The frozen civilians. The Neural Override chips in their necks triggered simultaneously.

  They didn’t scream. They just… ignited.

  They were the fuel. The Kyorians were using the bio-mana of an entire city’s population to jumpstart the singularity engine buried beneath the Citadel.

  “Monsters,” I hissed. The sheer scale of the atrocity nearly broke my concentration.

  But I couldn’t die here. Not yet. Even if this was a simulation, I needed to know how they did it. I needed the schematics. I needed the kill-codes.

  I looked at the central console. A black crystalline data-spike protruded from the main terminal. It glowed with the activation codes for the trap.

  Intel.

  I remembered the sessions in the white room with Syntheia. I remembered testing with Zareth.

  Information is just a pattern of energy, Zareth had said. And the Hunger eats patterns.

  I couldn’t Void Walk out. The Lattice was locked.

  But Fire…

  I reached deep into my gut. I bypassed the frozen Void mana. I ignited the Flame.

  “Burn,” I roared.

  I released the Flame inside my own body, flooding the Void-Hunger vortex with white-gold entropy.

  I didn’t try to burn the city. I tried to burn the Concept of the “Anchor.”

  The Flame lashed out. It struck the invisible wall of the Domain Lock.

  The universe screamed as I forced Entropy onto a fixed point of Order.

  The lock fractured. Just for a second. A tiny hairline crack in the spatial hardening.

  It was enough.

  I lunged forward. I grabbed the data-spike from the console.

  I didn’t read it. I didn’t scan it.

  I opened the Maw of the [Void-Star’s Hunger].

  I shoved the crystal into my chest.

  I felt it hit. It wasn’t mana. It was cold, sharp logic. It tasted like algebra and death. Geometric shapes flooded my mind — runes, frequencies, the specific harmonic signature of the trigger signal.

  Then, the world turned white.

  The city detonated.

  It wasn’t an explosion that pushed out; it was an implosion that pulled in. The entire city folded. The buildings, the factories, the empty barracks, the millions of burning souls — they were all dragged into a singularity point right where I stood.

  I watched, dispassionate in the final millisecond of the Glimpse, as the shockwave reversed. The sheer gravitational shear tore the simulation apart.

  I saw the blast radius extend.

  It consumed the forest. It consumed the perimeter.

  And miles away, deep in the earth, I saw the shockwave hit the hidden acid-cave.

  I saw my friends. I saw their equipment.

  All vaporized. The rock turned to glass instantly.

  The Glimpse ended.

  My eyes flew open.

  I gasped, sucking in the cool, damp air of the real cave. My heart was trying to batter its way out of my chest. I fell forward off the crate I was sitting on, crashing onto the stone floor.

  “Sovereign!” Zareth was there instantly, his hand on my shoulder. “Stability check!”

  Nyx blurred into existence, her daggers drawn, scanning the room for threats. Rexxar jumped to his feet, overturning a table.

  I scrambled up, gripping Zareth's robes.

  “Pack it up!” I choked out, the taste of burning souls still in my mouth. “Now! Leave everything that isn’t essential! Portal! Now!”

  “Master?” Jeeves’ voice cut through the panic, steady and calm. “What is the threat level?”

  “The entire surrounding region can get glassed at a moment's notice, 50 mile radius I’d estimate,” I hissed, dragging Nyx toward the portal archway Zareth was hurriedly constructing. “The city isn’t a base. It’s a massive bomb. They didn’t evacuate the civilians; they rigged them to blow.”

  I tapped my temple, my eyes wide and frantic.

  “I saw it. I ate an information crystal through the Maw. They have a remote detonator. It triggers the moment a high-tier Void signature enters the inner wall. It locks space so you can’t jump out, and then it turns the population into fuel.”

  The team went deathly still.

  “They are sacrificing their own population?” Lucas whispered, horrified.

  “To kill us? Yes.” I shoved Lucas through the portal. “Move! The cave is in the blast zone! 500 megatons! If I had walked in there outside a Glimpse…”

  I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t have to.

  Zareth finished the chant. The portal stabilized — a jagged rift leading back to the safety of Bastion.

  We poured through.

  I came through last, marching onto the flagstones of the Sanctum.

  I rolled onto my back, staring at the cavern ceiling of my home.

  “We survived,” Rexxar rumbled.

  "Only because I looked before I stepped in," I muttered, sitting up.

  I closed my eyes, focusing on the sharp, metallic lump of “data” I had swallowed in the dream. The Hunger held it suspended in my soul — a packet of pure information waiting to be unzipped.

  “Jeeves,” I said, my voice hardening into steel. “I have their trap protocols. I know the frequency.”

  I stood up. The fear washed away, replaced by a cold, calculating anger.

  “They wanted to use that city as a coffin,” I said, looking at the map where the red light of Alpha-Prime still blinked, ignorant of my survival.

  “If I know the frequency... Leoric can jam it. Or better yet…”

  I looked at Zareth, whose galaxy eyes were swirling with anticipation.

  “...I can redirect it.”

  “Redirect the explosion towards their Station in orbit?” Jeeves asked.

  “If I can,” I grinned, terrifying and sharp. “But I’m also going to try eating it.”