KaiMaxim01 descended through the hollow forge like a ghost.
His revolver stayed low in his palm, finger grazing the edge of the analog trigger. Not pulled—never pulled unless necessary. That was rule three of Deep Sector survival. Rule two was simpler:
Never trust what speaks from below.
The stairwell to the lower levels had been slagged—collapsed in the initial explosion that gutted SEVEN-OMEGA. But Kai wasn't looking for stairwells. He was looking for old blood routes—maintenance shafts used by unauthorized cleaners, engineers, and black-market haulers.
He found one behind a collapsed coolant pillar. The tunnel was narrow, jagged, and hummed faintly with residual energy like a heartbeat sealed in wires.
He hesitated.
Then dropped in.
---
It felt like descending through the body of something that never should've lived.
The walls were organic metal—curved, pulsing slightly, layered in glyphs he couldn't translate. Static buzzed faintly inside his skull. His implants tried to filter it out, but it wasn't noise.
It was speech.
Backwards. Repetitive. Like a child mumbling secrets in a corner.
He crawled deeper.
After twenty minutes, he reached a circular chamber. Half-machine, half-ruin. At the center was a large memory core, inactive but humming. Symbols were carved around it in neat patterns—not written by a machine.
Human hands. Carved recently. Shaky. Panicked.
Kai scanned it.
No corporate signature. No clan marks. But one word was etched at the top, again and again, like a prayer:
"VESSELZEROVESSELZEROVESSELZERO…"
The core's eye blinked.
"Kai…?"
His blood froze.
That voice—feminine, soft, trembling with something that wasn't entirely human.
"…who said that?" he whispered, revolver rising.
The memory core blinked again.
But not with light—with flesh.
For just a moment, he saw a single eye growing from the metal, blinking, bloodshot, staring at him.
Then it was gone.
The chamber shook.
Somewhere behind him, a hatch creaked open.
Not due to pressure.
Not due to wind.
Something opened it from the other side.
He turned, stepping back slowly toward the wall. His HUD glitched—then went black entirely. Only the faint emergency backup in his implant stayed lit.
A figure stood at the hatch.
Small. Crooked.
Like a child made of cables and stitched skin, back arched, arms too long.
Its head tilted.
Then it spoke, and Kai felt every nerve in his body scream:
"You brought the Black Frequency with you."
The figure snapped forward.
Not ran.
Glitched.
Its movement broke space for a half-second—jerking reality like skipped video frames.
It was on him in a blink.
Kai fired.
The analog round ripped through its shoulder—sparks and blood spraying. It didn't flinch. Instead, it smiled. And the smile went too far—stretching through its cheek like the memory of something human.
Kai slammed his revolver into its jaw, turned, and bolted back into the shaft.
Above him, alarms began to scream. Not forge alarms.
System alarms. Global.
He reached the surface just as the world began to change.
Above him, in the sky of Orberos-9—
a second moon blinked into existence.
But it wasn't a moon.
It was an eye.
And it was watching him.