They heard it before they saw it.
A deep resonant hum, like a tuning fork made of thunder. It pulsed through the trees, rattling branches, vibrating in their bones. Birds fled in erratic patterns. Even the insects went silent.
Luma froze mid-step. "What is that?"
Toma's eyes widened. "We've only heard it once before. When a camp was attacked. We didn't survive that one."
Ion raised his gauntlet, tuning into the frequency. The readout flickered. "It's… subsonic. Below human hearing, mostly. But powerful enough to shake molecular bonds."
"In normal people speak?" Luma asked tightly.
"It can kill," Ion said. "Quietly."
The path twisted down into a basin filled with distorted light and shimmering heat. At the center, smoke curled unnaturally upward—from Camp Virell, the largest resistance outpost in the Fractured Veil.
What remained of it, anyway.
The metal towers had collapsed inward, like pulled by invisible hands. The tents looked… shaved, fabric sliced cleanly mid-air. Trees had bent into unnatural spirals.
No sound.
No flames.
Just a strange pulsing silence.
"Wave burst attack," Toma muttered, hand on his blade. "They used sound. Weaponized resonance."
"Any survivors?" Luma asked.
"Maybe in the lower bunkers, but that hum… it crushes from the inside out. Like glass under perfect pressure."
Luma stepped forward—and the world twisted.
One moment she was on a ridge, and the next, falling sideways as if the terrain had tipped beneath her. She hit the ground hard, skidding through moss and ash. Her gauntlet sparked. Her lungs burned.
"Luma!" Ion's voice boomed above her, strangely delayed—as if traveling through honey.
She looked up through swirling distortions, her body heavy and light all at once. Shapes flickered around her—metal poles wobbling, debris floating, then sinking in slow motion.
The camp wasn't just damaged.
It was fractured in time.
She forced herself to move, crawling toward the heart of the ruins. A glint of motion caught her eye.
A young boy, maybe thirteen, crouched beneath a slanted support beam. His skin glowed faintly with reflected wave energy. He wasn't crying. Just staring.
Luma's heart caught. "Hey," she called softly. "I'm coming."
She didn't wait for permission. Her legs surged, dodging flickering beams and twisted fragments. Every few feet, the laws of motion glitched—one step carried her too far, the next one barely moved her at all.
She reached the boy and grabbed his arm. He flinched.
"It's okay," she said, brushing soot from his cheek. "You're safe. I've got you."
He nodded numbly.
Together, they stumbled back toward Ion and Toma, who were both fighting the landscape—one bent nearly double in warped gravity, the other floating slightly with each step.
Then—
The hum returned.
But stronger.
Sharper.
Luma's vision blurred. The boy screamed.
A wave of compressed air cracked through the camp—distorting space, flattening tents, and shattering a tree in total silence.
Luma dropped, curling around the boy. She activated her gauntlet's pulse dampener just in time. The shimmer around her flickered, warping the incoming energy like a ripple dodging stones.
But it wasn't enough.
The next wave came with a visible arc of distortion—like a heatwave wearing armor.
And then—
It stopped.
Mid-air.
The wave froze, vibrated, and collapsed inward, sucked into a ripple that unmade itself.
Standing at the edge of the camp was a familiar silhouette.
Saren.
He didn't say a word. Just stared at Luma. Then, with a flick of his wrist, the remnants of the wave unraveled—dispersed harmlessly into the trees.
Ion stepped forward. "Saren…"
But Saren turned his head. His face was unreadable. He looked almost… regretful.
Then he vanished, slipping behind a shimmer of light that bent unnaturally and swallowed him whole.
Silence.
Real this time.
Luma exhaled, trembling. The boy was safe in her arms, unconscious but breathing.
Toma jogged over. "What in the ten fractured laws was that?"
"A sound weapon," Ion said. "Using wave resonance. It's like singing the right note to shatter a glass—except they're using it on people, structures… and reality itself."
Luma looked around. "But Saren… he stopped it."
"Yeah." Toma frowned. "He's not supposed to do that, is he?"
Ion shook his head. "No. He isn't."
Later, they set up a temporary shelter just beyond the ruined camp. Luma sat with the boy—Cassel, he'd said faintly—while Ion tuned the gauntlet's logs.
"Resonance," he muttered, showing Luma a readout of overlapping waveforms. "They stacked frequencies, like waves in a pond amplifying each other. That's why the destruction was so clean. Everything fell at its weakest points."
Luma groaned. "So the enemy is using physics… better than we are."
"More like they're abusing it," Ion corrected. "Resonance is powerful. But unstable. You overuse it—you destroy the system itself."
Luma looked at Cassel, now asleep, curled up near a heat emitter. "We need to find the Entropy Engine. Before it finds more places like this."
Toma raised a brow. "And if we find Saren first?"
Luma's jaw clenched. "Then we ask him: why save us?"
Ion didn't answer. He just stared into the shimmering sky—where the stars still blinked in and out like they were unsure they wanted to shine.