Ren fell like a stone.
Gravity grabbed hold of him, dragging him down the sheer face of the canyon wall. The wind roared past his ears, whipping his dark hair violently across his eyes. He was plummeting toward the rocky valley floor at a speed that would shatter every bone in a normal human body upon impact.
He should have been screaming. Terror should have paralyzed his lungs. Yet, as the jagged stones rushed up to meet him, Ren felt a terrifying, unnatural calm wash over his mind.
The roaring wind did not sound like chaos. It sounded like a massive orchestra violently warming up before a grand performance. Every gust of wind tearing through the canyon arches, every scrape of the monster's claws against the rock below, and the very thrum of the Whispering Canyon felt like distinct musical notes on a page. His mind was unconsciously sorting the noise into a coherent, deadly rhythm.
"Right on cue," the voice whispered in his mind. It was Valen again. The voice was smooth, cultured, and utterly detached from the life or death struggle happening below. "Let us see if you still remember the opening act, Conductor."
Ren shut out the voice. His eyes locked onto the target in the clearing below.
The Reverb Alpha was a nightmare of corrupted biology. It was the size of a military transport vehicle, covered in matted grey fur that seemed to phase in and out of reality. But its most horrifying feature was its head. Instead of a face, the beast possessed a massive, fleshy concavity that resembled the cone of a high-end speaker. Veins of sickly yellow light pulsed around the edges of the cone, building up a charge of static electricity that made the air smell like burnt copper and ozone.
Trapped in the shadow of the beast was the silver-haired scout.
Lin was not cowering. She was not crying for a savior. She was on one knee in the dirt, violently trying to force a snapped bowstring back onto the cams of her matte-black Whisper-String compound bow. She used her bare hands and her teeth, glaring at the towering monster with absolute, unfiltered disgust.
"Of course," she muttered. Her voice was steady, calculating, and completely devoid of panic. "The one day I decide not to pack a spare tension actuator. Fantastic."
She realized the bow was useless. With a heavy sigh, she spat out the frayed end of the bowstring. She did not freeze. Her hand shot down to her thigh holster in a blur of practiced motion, drawing a sleek, serrated combat knife.
She shifted her weight, planting her boots firmly in the dust to brace for the inevitable impact.
The Reverb Alpha unhinged its massive jaw. The air inside its fleshy speaker distorted. The yellow static reached a blinding intensity.
It fired.
A localized sonic shockwave tore out of the beast. It was a solid wall of kinetic force. The blast ripped boulders out of the ground, shattering them into shrapnel and turning the canyon floor into a blinding storm of debris.
The shockwave never reached Lin.
Ren slammed into the ground directly between the girl and the charging beast. He did not hit the earth with a sickening, bone-shattering crunch. His boots touched the sand, and his knees bent at the exact right angle, perfectly absorbing the massive kinetic energy of his fall. He dispersed the momentum through his legs and into the bedrock below.
He did not even kick up a cloud of dust.
The sonic blast hit him a fraction of a second later. It was enough force to flip a heavily armored tank.
Ren simply raised his right hand. He flattened his palm and pushed it forward into the oncoming wall of sound. He opened his mouth and released a sound of his own.
It was not a shout. It was a hum.
It was a note so low, so impossibly dense, that the canyon itself seemed to hold its breath.
[CORRUPTED FILE RECOVERED: THE SILENT PALM]
[PROFICIENCY: MASTER]
The hum collided directly with the monster's shockwave. In the laws of physics, when two identical frequencies meet perfectly out of phase, they cancel each other out completely.
The deafening roar of the Reverb Alpha vanished. Absolute, unnatural silence dropped over the clearing like a heavy lead blanket. The yellow static carrying the destructive force froze in mid-air, shuddered, and then shattered like fragile glass.
The beast's eyes widened in profound confusion. Its ultimate attack had simply ceased to exist. Enraged, it lunged forward, snapping its jaws to bite this arrogant human in half.
Ren did not retreat. His muscle memory took over completely, moving his body with a terrifying, surgical precision. He stepped smoothly inside the monster's guard, dodging the snapping teeth by mere millimeters. His hand moved in a blur. He pressed his open palm directly against the center of the beast's biological speaker.
He hummed a second note.
This one was not low. It was a razor-sharp, agonizingly high frequency designed solely to shatter bonds at a molecular level.
The Reverb Alpha froze in place. Its massive body began to vibrate violently, blurring at the edges. The static holding its corrupted flesh together rapidly destabilized. With a sickening, wet crunch, the monster's entire skeletal structure liquefied.
The beast collapsed instantly, melting into a localized pile of grey ash and a foul-smelling black fluid that hissed as it hit the dirt.
Ren stood up slowly. He stared at his open palm. His breathing was ragged, and his chest heaved. "What... what did I just do?"
"You ruined my line of sight, that is what you did."
Ren blinked, turning around slowly.
Lin was standing a few feet away. She was casually brushing the grey monster ash off her dark uniform with a look of intense irritation. She spun her combat knife expertly in her hand before sliding it back into her thigh holster. She then kicked the pile of dust that used to be a terrifying apex predator.
"I had the kinetic dampener on my blade set to zero," Lin complained. She did not even look up at him yet. "If I had thrown the knife at its throat exactly when it fired, the backdraft of its own blast would have blown its head clean off. Now I just have mutant ash in my boots."
Ren just stared at her in utter disbelief. He had expected profound gratitude. He had expected tears of relief, or at least a shocked silence.
"You are... welcome," Ren managed to say, his voice raspy and confused.
Lin finally looked up. Her silver hair was tied in a messy, highly practical braid that kept it out of her eyes. Those eyes were a sharp, icy blue, calculating and completely devoid of warmth. She scanned him from head to toe, taking in his tattered standard military collar, his lack of armor, and his completely empty hands.
"A Null recruit?" Lin raised an elegant eyebrow, her voice dripping with skepticism. "How did a Null get all the way out here into the Whispering Canyon? And more importantly, how did you kill an Alpha without a Resonance Core or a weapon?"
Ren opened his mouth to answer, but the words died in his throat.
He looked deeply into her icy blue eyes, and the world abruptly stopped spinning.
A violent, agonizing spike of pain drove itself directly into the center of his skull. It was so intense it forced him to his knees in the dirt. The Whispering Canyon vanished. The violet sky disappeared. The smell of ozone was replaced by the overwhelming stench of burning blood and melted marble.
For a fraction of a second, Ren saw her.
It was Lin, but she was older. Much older. She was wearing the ornate, tattered uniform of a High Commander. Half of her face was covered in horrific, glowing burn scars. She was standing in the center of a ruined palace of white marble, holding a broken sword in her hands. She was weeping openly as she looked down at him.
"I will hold the line, Conductor," the phantom Lin whispered. Her voice was choked with blood and an ocean of grief. "Just play the final note. Please. Do not let them take the silence."
The vision shattered violently.
Ren gasped, clawing desperately at the sand. His heart hammered against his ribs like a frantic war drum. Tears streamed down his face, completely unbidden and unstoppable. He did not know why he was crying. He only knew that a profound, suffocating sense of failure was crushing his lungs, a guilt so heavy it felt like a physical weight.
A blue translucent window violently glitched into his vision, flashing a brilliant, angry red.
[SYSTEM OVERLOAD]
[TRAUMA TRIGGER RECOGNIZED: SUBJECT 'LIN']
[CORRUPTED FILE RECOVERED: PASSIVE SKILL - ECHOLOCATION]
[SYNC RATE: 2%]
Ren collapsed forward, his vision blurring as the red warning screens multiplied in front of his eyes. The last thing he saw before the darkness finally took him was Lin stepping closer. Her pragmatic annoyance had finally vanished, replaced by a look of guarded curiosity and slight concern.
"Hey," Lin's voice sounded muted, like he was listening to her from underwater. "Null. Are you having a stroke?"
Then, the world went completely black.