We sat in the filtration plant control room. The only light came from the gold cracks in the sky outside. The air tasted like rust and ozone.
Marcus leaned against a console. He had taken a hit in the last fight. A deep gash on his arm. Blood soaked through the bandage.
I focused on the sound of water dripping. The rhythm was wrong. My brain processed the effect before the cause. The splash, then the drop. It was like listening to a recording played backwards.
Lara cleaned her phase-blade. Eli worked on his scanner. The Rival watched the entrance. No one spoke.
The silence was broken by a crackle from a salvaged radio. A Union emergency broadcast.
"Attention all sectors. City-wide lockdown in effect. Curfew enforced by Patriot Guard units. Any movement during curfew will be met with extreme prejudice."
The broadcast shifted to a System alert tone.
[PUBLIC NOTICE]
[ASSET REPOSSESSION UNITS DEPLOYED IN SECTOR 7]
[UNITS DESIGNATED: COLLECTORS]
[OBJECTIVE: RECOVER HIGH-VALUE ANOMALIES]
[BOUNTY ON ANOMALY-CLASS ENTITIES INCREASED BY 300%]
[REPORT SIGHTINGS TO NEAREST AUDITOR TERMINAL]
[/SYSTEM]
The Rival turned the radio off. "They're calling us assets now. Makes it cleaner when they delete us."
Eli pulled up a map on his scanner. "The Collectors are concentrating their search near the financial district. They know we took the Null Core. They'll triangulate our energy signature eventually."
"We need to move," Lara said.
"Not yet," Marcus said. He looked at his arm. "The bleeding hasn't stopped."
I checked the wound with Audit Vision. Gold lines showed the damage. The blood flowed, but the clotting process was frozen. The platelets weren't changing state.
"The Deadlock Field," I said. "When we were inside it, the cut couldn't heal. The chemical reactions stopped."
I activated the Null Core's one-meter field around us. The air thickened. Sound dampened.
Marcus's blood, which had been dripping, now hung in the air around his arm. Liquid beads suspended in motion. The flow from the wound continued, but the blood didn't fall. It collected in a floating cloud.
"The blood moves," I said. "But it can't change. It can't clot. The wound stays fresh."
I deactivated the field. The suspended blood droplets fell to the floor. The bleeding continued.
"So if I get cut inside that bubble," Marcus said, "I bleed out. But slowly. Because the blood doesn't leave my body fast enough. It just... floats."
"Exactly," the Rival said. "The Deadlock Field halts entropy and change. Not kinetic motion. Your heart can pump. Your blood can flow. But it can't thicken. Wounds don't close. Infections don't progress. You exist in a state of permanent now."
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
"That's not a power," Lara said. "That's a curse."
"It's a tool," I said. "With a cost."
The Rival stood. Walked to the broken window. He picked up a piece of concrete rubble. "We need the Trigger Mechanism next. It's in the quarantine zone."
He threw the rubble toward the distant glow of the zone's perimeter fence.
The rubble arced through the air. As it crossed an invisible line, it flickered. Then it split. Five identical pieces of rubble hit the ground. One turned to dust. One aged into rusted metal. One remained unchanged.
"The disease isn't biological," the Rival said. "It's causal. Reality in that zone doesn't know which timeline is real. So it manifests all possibilities at once. You step in there, your body might age a hundred years in a second. Or duplicate. Or unravel into your component atoms across a dozen alternate histories."
Eli studied the scanner readings. "The Trigger Mechanism is at the center. In the old medical research lab. They were studying temporal diseases. Trying to weaponize them."
"How do we survive that?" Marcus asked.
"By being a fixed point," I said, holding up the Null Core. "The Deadlock Field should stabilize our personal causality. As long as we stay inside its radius."
"Should?" Lara said.
"There are no guarantees with Foundational tech," the Rival said. "The zone has been festering for decades. The disease might have evolved."
I checked our timers.
[CONSTRUCT OMEGA-NULL PROTOCOL]
[TIME REMAINING: 70:48:12]
[COMPONENTS ACQUIRED: 2/5]
[/SYSTEM]
[ARCH-CONSUMER MANIFESTATION]
[ETD: 70:48:12]
[/SYSTEM]
We had less than three days.
Then my Dysphasia spiked.
A second later, I heard them. Boots on concrete outside the plant. Not the scattered steps of Patriot Guards. A perfect, rhythmic march.
The team heard it too. Weapons came up. We moved to defensive positions.
The footsteps stopped outside the main door.
Silence.
Then the door didn't open. It didn't break. It unfolded. The metal twisted itself into a spiral staircase leading outside. No heat. No force. The material simply decided to be stairs instead of a door.
A figure stood at the base of the stairs.
It looked like a Collector, but different. Its static form was sharper. More defined. It wore something like armor made of fractured light. Where regular Collectors edited space, this one made reality stutter. The air around it flickered like corrupted video.
It didn't walk up the stairs. The stairs moved to meet it. Each step rose to place itself under its feet.
It entered the control room.
We opened fire.
Marcus's shield blast hit it. The energy dispersed into static. Lara's phase-blade passed through where its chest should be. The blade emerged from the other side, but the entity was untouched.
The Rival tried a probability shift. The entity flickered. For a moment, it was in two places at once. Then it stabilized.
"It's overwriting my manipulations," the Rival said. "It has admin priority."
The entity focused on me. On the Null Core in my hand.
I activated the Deadlock Field.
The one-meter bubble snapped into place. The entity stopped at its edge. It tilted its head. Studying.
It reached a hand toward the field. Its fingers entered the bubble. They slowed. The static patterns on its skin froze.
It pulled its hand back. Examined it. The static resumed flowing.
It understood the limitation.
Then it spoke. Its voice was the sound of data corruption.
[ASSESSMENT: FOUNDATIONAL ARTIFACT DETECTED]
[THREAT CLASS: OMEGA]
[RESPONSE: IMMEDIATE REPOSSESSION]
It raised both hands. The air between us began to rewrite. The floor pixels dissolved. The wall behind me started to unmake itself.
But it was slow. Methodical. The recompiling of reality took processing power. I could see the buffer building. A hesitation in the air.
"Run!" I shouted.
We ran for the back exit. The entity didn't chase. It continued its recompiling. The control room behind us ceased to exist in geometric chunks.
We burst into the filtration tunnels. Ran through ankle-deep water.
The system finally updated. A single red text box, different from the usual blue.
[OUTER ADMINISTRATION PROBE: INITIAL CONTACT AUTHORIZED]
[ENTITY CLASS: COLLECTOR-PRIME]
[OBJECTIVE: SECURE NULL CORE]
[STATUS: PURSUIT ACTIVE]
[/SYSTEM]
We kept running. The Prime didn't follow. It didn't need to.
It would recompile the entire plant until it found us.
And it had just been authorized.