{Chapter: 334 The Red Pulse}
Jane, Darcy, and Ian stood frozen as three children cautiously emerged from behind a pile of rusted metal and concrete. For a heartbeat, everyone was still—then realization dawned, and the tension in the adults' shoulders eased.
"Oh, just kids," Darcy breathed, tossing her head back with exaggerated relief. "You guys scared the molecules out of me."
The smallest girl stepped forward with wide, curious eyes. "Are you... police?"
Jane blinked as if she were returning from a far-off thought. Her voice came soft and detached, like she wasn't entirely present. "No. I'm... a scientist."
There was a flicker of tension in the kids' expressions, then it eased.
"That's good," one of the boys said quickly. "We didn't mean to do anything wrong. We just found it."
"Can you show us?" Ian asked with genuine curiosity, already clutching his tablet.
"Sure. Come on."
The kids led them between two half-collapsed buildings into a crumbling courtyard. In the center of the clearing was a massive old truck, its paint dulled to dust and metal mottled with rust.
Without a word, one of the children walked over, grabbed the edge of the truck's front bumper, and casually lifted it like it weighed nothing.
Darcy gawked. "What in the Marvel is happening right now?"
She ran over and tugged on the bumper herself. Her brows furrowed in disbelief. "This thing is like... lighter than my coffee cup. It's like something's holding it up."
Jane stepped forward slowly, eyes scanning the environment, half-focused, half elsewhere.
"It's a gravity field anomaly," she said. "The pull here… it's been reduced dramatically. It's like being on the moon—except it's not just lightness. It's weird. It's not uniform."
"It's seriously weird," Darcy muttered. "We're talking Twilight Zone times quantum physics."
One of the kids beamed. "You haven't even seen the best part. Come with us!"
They went into the adjacent building, the interior shadowy and half-gutted, as if the place had given up trying to exist. They climbed the creaky, graffiti-covered stairs to the third floor and stopped at a corridor lined with broken tiles.
One of the kids ran up to the fifth floor, holding a plastic bottle in his hand.
"Watch!" he shouted, and dropped the bottle.
Jane's gaze followed it absentmindedly. Then, when the bottle hit the second floor—it vanished.
"What?" Ian blinked.
"Where did it go?" Jane asked, more out of reflex than actual curiosity. Her tone had a distant hollowness, as if something more important was forever lodged in her mind.
A kid pointed upward. "There."
They all looked up. The bottle reappeared—hovering above the sixth floor. Then it fell again… down to the second floor… and vanished. Then it came back again, and again, looping endlessly.
Darcy watched, mouth slightly open. "This is like physics took a shot of espresso and did a backflip."
Jane, silent, bent down and picked up a nearby soda can. She dropped it from the third floor. It fell—vanished—and this time, it didn't come back.
"Huh," Jane muttered, staring into the space it had disappeared into.
"Sometimes it loops, sometimes it doesn't," one of the kids explained with a shrug. "We think the stuff that doesn't come back ends up… somewhere else."
Jane didn't respond. Her eyes were locked on nothing. Her fingers toyed with the edge of her instrument tablet. Her mind was drifting again—back to someone who wasn't there.
The device in her hand suddenly let out a low-pitched hum. Data pulsed on the screen. She snapped back into reality.
"These readings…" Her voice was hoarse. "The last time I saw this kind of rift distortion... was during the New Mexico event."
Darcy grinned. "You mean when he showed up? Thor with the pecs?"
Jane looked away. "Yes."
Her voice was too quiet.
Darcy's smile dimmed a bit.
Jane turned toward the stairwell. "You two stay here. I'm going to check the lower levels."
"Alone?" Ian asked.
Darcy waved him off. "It's fine. When Jane starts walking like that, she's halfway back in another dimension already."
---
The factory floor below was silent. Not just quiet—still. The kind of silence that makes your ears ache.
Jane stepped into the long corridor, her boots crunching softly over gravel and glass. The light from the broken windows filtered in through long, dusty beams, painting ghost-shapes across the floor.
She didn't flinch, didn't blink, but she felt it. That pressure again. That ripple in space.
She stopped.
Everything around her seemed to hold its breath.
She didn't know what she expected. A voice? A sign? A hand reaching through the veil?
She'd seen worlds beyond Earth. She'd studied stars, grav-waves, anomalies that bent logic. And yet, her mind always circled back to him.
William.
He'd disappeared in a way the data couldn't explain. Not through science. Not through portals. Just—gone.
The ache inside her never left. It had become a companion. A shadow. A constant hum in her chest, like a gravity well only she could feel.
Suddenly, the leaves on the ground stirred. Then they rose—not floated, rose, pulled upward like they were being inhaled by the air itself.
Jane didn't move.
She whispered, "William… is it you?"
But no answer came. Only the silence. And the swirling dead leaves rising higher, circling like a slow-motion storm.
Dead leaves littered the floor—but they didn't scatter. Instead, they were drawn upward as though pulled by an invisible current. It wasn't wind. It was suction. A vacuum.
Jane stepped back instinctively, her heart racing.
The space around her warped. The edges of the factory seemed to twist slightly, as though reality were being bent, folded, reshaped.
She stood motionless, clutching her tablet to her chest, watching as more debris began to rise into the air. Time seemed to stretch.
Somewhere deep inside her, she felt it—that same cosmic hum she'd felt the day the sky opened and he fell from it.
"It's starting again," she whispered.
And this time, she wouldn't just be an observer.
Jane felt it before she understood it—a strange, irresistible pull that gripped her like gravity reborn.
She took a shaky step forward.
"Ah…"
And just like that—she vanished.
The world shifted. The air changed.
The tug that had yanked her forward dissolved as suddenly as it had come. All around her was darkness—not absence of light, but something deeper. The kind of dark that felt alive.
Her feet were planted on solid ground, yet it wasn't earth. It was a black, jagged rock, cold and slick beneath her boots. Below her… nothing. An endless abyss swallowed all sound, all distance, all logic.
"Huh…" Jane exhaled softly, steadying herself as she instinctively took a step back from the edge.
Then she shouted, her voice cracking in the vacuum, "Darcy?!"
No reply.
Only silence. Vast and echoless.
Jane turned in a slow circle. The void was broken only by towering stone pillars in the distance—monoliths that pierced upward, vanishing into the unseen.
"What... is this place?" she whispered to no one.
Behind her, something glowed faintly.
She turned.
There was a massive slab of stone, ancient and silent. But it wasn't whole. It was split—two enormous stone pieces floating one above the other, the upper half suspended in midair, just ten centimeters above the lower. Between them flowed a dark red light, like molten blood seeping through a wound in space.
Jane's steps were tentative, but curiosity pulled her forward like a leash. She stood before the anomaly and peered into the narrow gap. The glow pulsed rhythmically, like a heartbeat.
"What… are you?" she murmured.
Her hand lifted involuntarily, drawn toward the crimson light like a moth to flame. As her fingers neared the gap, the red liquid surged upward, as if it sensed her.
Suddenly, the substance lunged—a sharp tendril of glowing fluid lashed out, snaking around her wrist and disappearing beneath her skin.
"Ah!" Jane gasped, stumbling back. Her body shuddered. Something was inside her.
Then—
Bang!
The red light vanished. The floating stone lost its support and slammed onto the one below with a thunderous, final clunk.
Jane stood there, breathing hard. She rubbed her hands together frantically, her voice trembling. "Nothing… It's gone? Was that… real?"
But the dizziness came fast.
Her knees buckled.
She dropped to the cold black rock as the void swallowed her.
---
Somewhere deep in space...
A monstrous warship drifted silently through the darkness of the void. Its design was ancient, conical, and cruel—like it had been built to hunt stars, not defend them. It looked abandoned, its hull scarred and weathered, like it had been asleep for a thousand lifetimes.
Suddenly, the ship lit up—internal systems humming back to life with a low, dreadful thrum.
Inside the ship, a figure reclined against a strange biomechanical device. His skin was pale, his presence like a whisper of death itself.
His eyes opened.
"The Aether has awakened…" he murmured, his voice dry as ash. "The convergence of celestial bodies begins anew. This time… the darkness will not be stopped."
---
Jane's eyes fluttered open.
She was lying on the floor of the abandoned factory—back in the ruined hall, sunlight streaking through broken glass.
For a second, she didn't move.
Then: "What… just happened?"
She sat up slowly, touching her head. "Did I… imagine it?"
No answer came—just the distant sound of sirens.
"Forget it. I need to find Darcy," she muttered and stumbled to her feet, half-dazed.
She stepped out of the building—
—and froze.
There were police cars everywhere. Blue and red lights flashing, officers talking into radios. Some of them were cordoning off the building with yellow tape. Others had drawn weapons and were scanning the area.
"…What?"
"Jane!"
Darcy's voice cut through the chaos, followed by the sight of her running toward her with a mix of relief and full-blown frustration.
"Where the hell have you been?!"
Jane blinked. "I—I was just in the building. I think."
"You think?" Darcy's tone shot up a full octave. "Jane, you disappeared for five hours! You were here one second, and then—poof!—you were gone like that space accident."
Jane looked past her at the police tape. "You called the police?"
Darcy folded her arms. "What else was I supposed to do? I searched the entire place like a caffeine-fueled bloodhound. When I couldn't find you, yeah, I called them."
"You do realize what we found, right?" Jane snapped, her voice unusually sharp. "A stable gravitational anomaly—one that can bend space! Now the police are involved, and next it'll be the FBI, and then S.H.I.E.L.D., and we'll never get near it again!"
Darcy threw up her hands. "Oh, I'm sorry I didn't want you to be a missing person on the evening news! My bad for assuming you hadn't been swallowed by a black hole!"
"I was gone five hours?" Jane whispered, mostly to herself.
The realization finally hit her. She looked down at her hands—the same hands that had touched that red liquid. Her fingers trembled, but she quickly shoved them into her coat pockets.
"Yeah," Darcy said, a little quieter. "We were starting to think… you weren't coming back."
But Jane wasn't listening. She was staring at the sky.
"Thunder?" she whispered.
Darcy followed her gaze.
A sunny, cloudless sky rumbled with unnatural thunder. Lightning split the blue above like jagged cracks in glass.
A chill ran down Jane's spine.
And then—she saw him.
Walking through the crowd of police and flashing lights, moving with calm purpose, was a figure she hadn't seen in what felt like an eternity.
William.
He wore the same jacket. The same unreadable expression. As if time hadn't touched him.
"Jane," he said softly, smiling.
She stared at him.
Then—
SLAP!
Jane's hand struck his face with a sharp crack.
The officers nearby froze. Darcy's jaw dropped.