The Collector-Prime stood at the end of the filtration tunnel. The concrete walls behind it flickered. One moment they were there. The next, they were smooth metal. Then they were crumbling brick. The space couldn't decide what it was supposed to be.
The Prime raised a hand. The air between us began to rewrite itself. The process was slow. A visible buffer of distorted light built in the air, like heat haze over asphalt.
"It's recompiling the tunnel," Eli said. "It will delete the path behind us. Trap us."
"Go," I said. "Now."
We ran. The Prime did not chase. It continued its methodical editing. The tunnel floor behind us dissolved into static, then reformed as polished glass. Then as dirt.
We reached a heavy blast door marked MAINTENANCE ACCESS. Rusted shut.
Marcus slammed his shield into it. The metal groaned. He hit it again. A dent. A third hit. The door buckled. We squeezed through the gap.
On the other side was the riverworks proper. A massive chamber with catwalks over dark, stagnant water. The air was thick with mildew and the ozone sting of temporal decay.
The Prime edited into existence on a catwalk thirty meters above us. It looked down. Its static form flickered through several shapes. Humanoid. Then a sphere of light. Then a writhing mass of data strands.
"It's probing," the Rival said. "Testing which form is most efficient for this environment."
The Prime settled on humanoid. It raised both hands. The catwalk beneath it began to unravel. The metal didn't bend. It didn't break. It converted itself into a stream of numbers that flowed into the Prime's hands.
Then it pointed at us.
The air crackled. A beam of white light lanced down. Not energy. Raw data. A command to unmake.
I shoved the Null Core into my belt pouch and activated the Deadlock Field. The one-meter bubble snapped into place around me.
The beam hit the field. It slowed. The data stream fractured. I could see the individual bits of code crawling through thickened space.
But the field wavered. Maintaining it against an admin-level attack spiked my Fugue. Ninety to ninety-two. A warning chime in my skull.
The beam stopped. The Prime tilted its head. It recognized the Foundational tech. It knew it couldn't edit inside the bubble.
But it could edit everything else.
It pointed at the catwalk we stood on.
The metal beneath Lara's feet began to rewrite. It turned to sand. She dropped. Marcus grabbed her arm. Hauled her back as the section dissolved into nothing.
We were running again. Across catwalks. Down ladders. The Prime edited from point to point, always ahead, always recompiling our escape routes.
My Dysphasia worsened under the stress. The world became a broken recording.
I was hearing the effects before the causes. Seeing the next moments before they happened.
It was nausea. It was confusion.
Then I understood. It was data.
I stopped running. Held up a hand. The team halted.
The Prime edited onto a catwalk directly ahead. It raised its hand. The air began to buffer.
"Marcus, shield left!" I shouted.
He reacted. Raised his shield. A data beam hit it a half-second later. The impact drove him back, but he held.
"Lara, duck right!"
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
She dove. A reconfigured pipe speared through the space where her chest had been.
I was using the Dysphasia. Turning brain damage into battlefield precognition.
The Prime paused. Its static form flickered rapidly. It was recalculating.
"Eli," I said. "The quarantine zone access. Where?"
"Beneath the central pump!" he yelled. "Submerged hatch!"
The Prime raised both hands. The entire chamber began to buffer. A massive recompile. The walls, the catwalks, the water below. All of it shimmered with distortion.
"It's going to delete the whole room," the Rival said.
"Then we go under," I said.
We jumped off the catwalk. Hit the stagnant water. It was cold. Thick with sludge.
We dove. Eli had a waterproof scanner. It glowed green, leading us down.
The Prime did not follow. It couldn't edit water efficiently. Not yet.
We found the hatch. Rusted metal. Eli worked on the manual release. Bubbles streamed from his mouth.
Above us, the chamber finished recompiling. The catwalks were gone. The walls were smooth, featureless white. The Prime stood on a platform of solid light, looking down at the water.
The hatch opened. A rush of current pulled us through.
We slammed into a concrete tube. Slid down. Landed in a dry chamber.
The hatch above sealed.
Silence.
We were in a decontamination airlock. Flickering fluorescent lights. Peeling hazard signs. A terminal on the wall glowed with weak power.
Eli checked his scanner. "We're inside the quarantine zone perimeter. The lab is three hundred meters east."
I checked the team. Marcus was bleeding from a dozen cuts. Lara had a burn on her arm. The Rival's nose was bleeding from probability backlash.
My Fugue was at ninety-three. The Dysphasia was constant now. A low echo of future sounds under every present moment.
Then the system updated. Not blue. Red.
[LIVE EVENT UPDATED]
[OMEGA-NULL PROTOCOL RECOGNIZED BY OUTER ADMINISTRATION]
[COLLECTION PRIORITY: ABSOLUTE]
[NOTE: PROTOCOL COMPLETION NOW CLASSIFIED AS REALITY THREAT]
[/SYSTEM]
We moved into the zone proper.
The corridor was wrong.
Gravity pulled at odd angles. I felt heavier, then lighter. My feet didn't always land where I expected.
Shadows moved a half-second behind their objects. A pipe on the wall cast a shadow that stretched left after the pipe ended.
Then I saw the first body.
A researcher in a decayed lab coat. It walked down the corridor ahead of us. But its echo walked three meters behind it, out of sync. The echo moved through walls. Through closed doors.
The researcher turned a corner. Its echo kept walking straight, passing through solid concrete before fading.
"Temporal echoes," the Rival whispered. "The disease splits perception from reality."
A terminal flickered on the wall. We approached.
[QUARANTINE ZONE ALPHA]
[STATUS: CONTAINMENT FAILED]
[TEMPORAL PATHOGEN LEVEL: OMEGA]
[WARNING: CAUSAL INTEGRITY UNSTABLE]
[AFFLICTIONS RECORDED:
CHRONAL DISSOCIATION
IDENTITY BLEED
SKILL CORRUPTION
REALITY LAG]
[/SYSTEM]
"Skill corruption?" Lara said.
As if in answer, her phase-blade flickered in her hand. The system text above it glitched.
[SKILL: PHASE-BLADE]
[PROFICIENCY: 87%]
[CORRUPTION DETECTED]
[PROFICIENCY: 86%]
[PROFICIENCY: 85%]
[/SYSTEM]
The numbers ticked down. Slowly. Inexorably.
"My skill is decaying," she said, her voice flat.
Marcus checked his shield. His defensive proficiency was also dropping. Seventy-nine percent. Seventy-eight.
The disease wasn't attacking our bodies. It was attacking our data. Our progress.
Eli's scanner fizzed. "The Trigger Mechanism is ahead. In the main lab. But the pathogen concentration is highest there. Exposure will accelerate the corruption."
"We don't have a choice," I said.
We moved forward. The corridor worsened. Gravity shifted directions every ten steps. Up became down. Left became right. We climbed walls. Walked on ceilings.
We passed a window looking into a lab. Inside, a researcher was trapped in a time loop. He picked up a beaker. It shattered. He picked up the beaker. It shattered. He had been doing this for years. His echo was five iterations behind.
We reached the main lab doors. Sealed with a biohazard lock.
Eli worked on the terminal. "I can bypass, but it will trigger a purge cycle. Thirty seconds of raw pathogen exposure."
"Do it," I said.
He tapped the keys. The doors hissed. Opened.
A wave of wrongness hit us. The air wasn't air. It was solidified time. I breathed in moments. Exhaled memories.
In the center of the lab, on a pedestal, was the Trigger Mechanism.
A crystalline device that glowed with inverted light. It didn't emit illumination. It sucked it in. The space around it was darker than black.
We stepped inside. The doors sealed behind us.
A countdown started on the terminal.
[PURGE CYCLE ACTIVE]
[PATHOGEN RELEASE IN: 29 SECONDS]
[/SYSTEM]
We had half a minute in a room that would accelerate the disease.
I moved toward the Mechanism. My Dysphasia screamed. Future sounds overlapped into a wall of noise.
The researcher's loop was echoing in my head.
I reached the pedestal. The Trigger Mechanism was cold. Colder than ice. It didn't just absorb light. It absorbed heat. Sound. Time.
I grabbed it.
The world snapped.
I wasn't in the lab. I was in a white space. The Rival stood beside me. Not the real Rival. A memory.
"You don't just catch this disease," the memory said.
"You become it."
Then I was back. The Trigger Mechanism in my hand.
[ARTIFACT ACQUIRED: TEMPORAL IGNITION TRIGGER (LEGENDARY)]
[DESCRIPTION: FOUNDATIONAL WEAPON COMPONENT 3/5]
[EFFECT: CAN INITIATE OMEGA-NULL FIRING SEQUENCE]
[WARNING: USER'S TEMPORAL SIGNATURE NOW CONTAMINATED]
[PATHOGEN LEVEL: 12% AND RISING]
[/SYSTEM]
The purge countdown hit zero.
Vents opened in the ceiling. A mist descended. Not chemical. Temporal. It was made of fractured seconds.
It touched my skin. My pathogen level ticked up. Thirteen percent.
"Run!" I yelled.
We ran. Back through the shifting corridors. Past the looping researcher. Past the out-of-sync shadows.
My phase-blade proficiency dropped as we moved. Eighty percent. Seventy-nine. Lara's followed. Marcus's shield skill decayed.
We reached the airlock. Slammed the hatch sealed.
We stood in the dark, breathing hard.
I checked my status.
[PATHOGEN LEVEL: 17%]
[EFFECT: SKILL DECAY ACCELERATED BY 170%]
[NEXT STAGE: IDENTITY BLEED AT 25%]
[/SYSTEM]
We had the third piece.
And we were infected with a disease that ate progress.
The Rival looked at me. His nose had stopped bleeding. But his eyes were wrong. The pupils were slightly out of sync. One reacted to light a fraction slower than the other.
"We have the Trigger," he said. "Two parts left."
"And a deadline," I said, watching my skill tick down. "Before this disease unmakes us."