The moment Luma stepped past the moss-ringed stones that marked the edge of the new zone, she felt it—like walking into a dream stitched by a drunken seamstress. The air shimmered. Not with heat, but with possibility. The trees swayed without wind. Pebbles jittered in place, then floated up slightly before settling back down like they were reconsidering gravity altogether.
"Physics is having a tantrum," Ion muttered, his cloak caught in a gust that didn't touch the grass.
"Or maybe it's just… confused," Luma offered, nudging a stick. It hovered for a heartbeat before flipping midair and thudding down in the wrong direction.
A few meters ahead, Toma stood on a slope holding what looked like a broken compass crossed with a weather vane. He was squinting at it, teeth chewing a leaf absentmindedly.
"Bad news," he called. "The readings are non-linear again. Whatever that means. I'm not the science one, remember?"
Luma stepped forward, boots crunching on twigs that then un-crunched themselves seconds later. "Non-linear usually means trouble. In science. In life. In dating."
Ion chuckled, the sound grounding them slightly. "You're not wrong."
They had entered the Fractured Veil—a zone where the natural laws of motion, heat, and interaction had begun to misbehave like a classroom full of unsupervised students. Here, inertia was a suggestion, and friction came and went like stage lighting.
A rock slid uphill in the distance, lazily pirouetting as it moved.
Luma blinked. "Okay, that's not supposed to happen."
"Nothing in here is," Toma said, kneeling to adjust a metallic stake into the soft soil. "We've lost three drones, two scouts, and one very expensive kettle trying to understand what's driving it. Something… deeper is pulling at the rules."
Ion ran his hand over a tree trunk. The bark shimmered under his fingers—peeling, repairing, and aging in rapid loops. "It's not chaos," he said thoughtfully. "It's imbalance. An induced state… entropy fed artificially."
Toma grunted. "Care to explain that without the philosopher's hat?"
Luma beat Ion to it. "Imagine a playground where every swing, see-saw, and merry-go-round runs on exact rules. Now picture a kid sneaking in with a wrench and adjusting them all while you're mid-air."
Ion smiled at her. "Perfect."
Toma looked mildly disturbed. "Now I'll never trust a playground again."
They set up camp at the rim of a small hill that occasionally turned slightly concave and then went back to normal. Luma took first watch, scribbling notes in her gauntlet's journal while Toma tried roasting tubers over a fire that kept reversing—burning raw food, then somehow freezing it.
Ion eventually offered to cook instead. Within minutes, they were eating semi-charred, semi-frozen root slices that tasted vaguely like lemon and charcoal. "Mmm," Luma lied. "Just like home. If home was broken."
After the meal, Ion opened a battered leather case. Inside were a few paper diagrams and a small glowing orb. "I've been working on a theory," he said, pointing to a sketched diagram showing pulsing arrows around a central device. "Entropy, as a concept, is just the measure of disorder. But what if something is amplifying that disorder—manipulating it to infect the laws themselves?"
"Like… an entropy parasite?" Toma asked.
"More like an engine," Luma whispered, eyes locking with Ion's. "The Entropy Engine."
Ion nodded. "Miles mentioned it once. As theory. Not as something possible."
Luma stood slowly, walking to the edge of the hill where the air pulsed gently like a heartbeat. "Well, guess what. It's not just possible. It's real. And it's working."
The next morning, just before dawn, the forest shuddered.
Not the way a tree might shake in the wind—but as if space itself flinched. The birds scattered silently. A distant roar echoed… then reversed.
Luma jolted awake, gripping her gauntlet, which was blinking rapidly.
A message.
The static-ridden hologram fuzzed into place, revealing Leo's face, his brows furrowed. "Luma. Miles is missing. Spire sensors went dark from his last location. We think he—" BZZT. "—Entropy Engine. It's active. Watch your—" BZZZZZZZHHHT!
The signal collapsed.
Luma stared at the dead image, heart hammering.
Toma sat up. "What was that?"
"I think the real war just started," she said softly.
By mid-morning, the forest's oddities had worsened. Trees leaned in odd angles, time seemed to jump slightly—Luma would blink and find her boot a few steps ahead, or birds frozen mid-wingbeat.
"Localized decoherence," Ion explained, gesturing to a floating leaf frozen between falling and rising. "Phase states are losing unity."
"Say that again in human," Toma groaned, massaging his temple.
Luma patted Toma's back. "He means reality's glue is coming unstuck. Like soup separating in slow motion."
"That's worse."
They walked carefully down into a ravine where the temperature dropped sharply—then rose. Then dropped again.
Ion stopped at a point where the shadows pooled unnaturally. "Look at that." He threw a pebble into the air. It stopped. Hovered. Then zipped sideways into a tree trunk and vanished.
"Okay, that's definitely not friction behaving," Luma said.
Ion crouched and began drawing equations in the dirt. "If entropy is being locally reversed in spots, it suggests someone is reprogramming physical constants."
Toma raised an eyebrow. "How?"
Luma sat next to him. "The Entropy Engine might be tapping into the laws themselves. Not breaking them, but… bending them."
Suddenly, Ion went still. His fingers trembled.
Luma looked at him. "What is it?"
Ion's voice was quiet. "The implications… If they can do this, they're not just disrupting physics. They're rewriting what's possible."
The weight of his words hung between them like fog.
Toma stood. "Then we need to find them. Fast."
Luma nodded slowly. "We'll have to go deeper."
That night, the stars blinked out for ten minutes.
No one said anything. They just sat by a cold fire, listening to the forest pulse.
Luma stared into the shifting dark and whispered to no one in particular: "Hold on, Miles. I'm coming."