The sound from the abyss just stopped. No echo, nothing repeating—it disappeared into silence so thick it felt like breathing underwater. And honestly, that silence wasn't comforting. It brought paranoia that crept under your skin and refused to leave.
Vance Kensington froze, hand pressed against the icy obsidian wall. He barely breathed, afraid the sound would carry. Axiom stood right next to him, just a hulking shadow—fur bristling, gold eyes slits like lanterns, staring deep into the pitch-black tunnel.
[Seismic Activity: Ceased.]
[Entity Location: Unverifiable.]
The Astral Engine was barely working now. It projected words in Vance's vision, shaky, almost burned out.
"We keep moving," Vance whispered—so soft it was barely anything.
He let go of the wall and stepped down. The tunnel angles down sharply, like it's trying to shake them off. The floor? Forget about smooth rock. Just loose shale everywhere, pieces sliding underfoot, daring them to fall.
And the descent—honestly, every step was torture. Combat adrenaline and the threat from Vanguard dropships were gone. Now, reality slammed into Vance like bricks. His muscles, already pushed way beyond normal for a full day, started twitching on their own. Air kept getting colder, and sweat kept clinging to him like something sick just waiting.
Worst was his left arm.
That Parasitic Tether stuck around, threads of Axiom's energy keeping his torn flesh from falling apart. But the price—five years off his life—wasn't just a number. He could feel it. His bones ached; his joints felt rusted up, every breath harder with the ancient, thin Sub-Stratum air.
This is how the parasite wins, he thought, grinding his jaw until his teeth hurt. Doesn't need to break my mind—just wait for my body to rot.
He glanced back. Axiom followed silently, always two paces behind—paws nearly floating over the shifting rock. The beast didn't care about the cold, never tired. It watched Vance—like a guard, but also like a prison warden.
"Don't look at me like that," Vance muttered, struggling to control his breath, vision wobbling in the dark. "If I die, the Engine drags you down with me. We're on the same timer."
Axiom didn't reply. Instead, the electricity in Vance's arm spiked, hitting him with a jolt so sharp his nerves screamed. Vance bit his tongue, blood flooding his mouth.
Alright, loud and clear. It understood every word.
Time started slipping—the descent felt endless. No sun, no wind, nothing to mark the hours. Just rock, pain, and the crushing sense of ancient worlds above.
Finally, the tunnel leveled out.
Walls opened up into a massive cavern. The air changed, stale and lifeless, almost like a tomb sealed for centuries.
Vance stopped. He stood on solid ground—flat and wide. Couldn't see walls or ceiling, only darkness stretching out. He was standing on the Sub-Stratum floor.
He closed his eyes and, using the connection from the Tether, borrowed just a sliver of Axiom's night vision. When he opened them, total darkness faded into blurry grey shapes.
And his breath caught.
This place wasn't any natural cave. Beneath his boots were huge square slabs of dark, unknown metal—laid out so carefully, fused together without a single seam.
Out in the gloom, towering pillars rose from the metal floor—massive, geometric, covered in deep runes. They glowed faintly, pulsing like something alive but asleep.
It hit him: Ruins. Not a dead zone, but a graveyard.
Vance remembered his past—years spent in the Fracture. Vanguard pretended the Fracture was a wilderness full of monsters. But everything here felt engineered, built. Clearly intelligent hands had shaped this place long before any human showed up.
Axiom stepped ahead, fur prickling, nose pressed to the stone. It rumbled—a sound wary, not angry.
Vance moved closer, boots tapping quietly. At a pillar's base, he ran his fingers over deep, alien runes—nothing like any human language. As he traced them, his fingers hit something stuck in a fissure.
He knelt, joints screaming, and pulled it free.
Held it up to Axiom's sparking fur for light.
It was a combat helmet. Visor shattered, metal eaten away—looked centuries old.
But what froze Vance's blood wasn't the decay.
On the side: an unmistakable silver wolf's head. The insignia of the Argent Cartel.
Vance stared, mind blank. The Fracture's gates had only opened fifty years ago. The Argent Cartel's existed for thirty. But this helmet? Its corrosion said it'd been here three hundred years.
[Anomaly Detected: Extreme Chronological Paradox.]
[Item Origin: Future.]
[Item State: Fossilized.]
Vance lowered the helmet.
He wasn't the first human to travel back in time.
Whatever dragged that merc down here—centuries before they were even born—was exactly what they'd just woken up.
Vance wiped his thumb across the silver wolf embossed on the helmet, bits of brittle, ancient metal flaking off. He usually kept his thoughts sharp and organized—nothing slipped past him. But now, everything just stopped. His mind couldn't wrap around what he saw.
The Fracture? People only found it fifty years ago. The Argent Cartel, infamous outer-sector mercs, apparently picked the silver wolf as their crest thirty years back. So how was this helmet falling apart as if it'd been buried for centuries? The steel felt almost fossilized, like it'd been lying in the Sub-Stratum for three hundred years or more.
"System," Vance whispered, the air cold and stale, and suddenly his voice was shaking. "Cross-reference. Replica? Counterfeit?"
The Astral Engine, barely functional, flickered and projected gold letters into the cavern's darkness.
[Analysis Complete.]
[Material: Mk-IV Argent Cartel Ballistic Weave. Authenticity: 100%.]
[Isotope Decay Rate indicates minimum 312 years of environmental exposure.]
[Conclusion: The artifact predates the opening of the Fracture.]
He lowered the helmet, breath puffing white in the freezing air. But the chill that twisted in his stomach wasn't from the cold.
Three hundred years old. That meant the Syndicates hadn't just stumbled on the Fracture fifty years ago—they'd been here long before. Or worse, the Sub-Stratum wasn't just under the earth. Maybe it sat outside time altogether.
Suddenly, a jolt—like a bolt of dark electricity—stabbed through Vance's arm.
He gasped and dropped the helmet. Metal slammed the floor and a sharp CLANG echoed, shattering the silence. "Axiom, back off," Vance growled through his teeth, clutching his arm.
But the mutated Lynx, all black fur bristling, wasn't looking at Vance or lashing out. It pressed itself flat against a gigantic pillar, eyes thrown wide and glowing like twin supernovas. Vance had never seen Axiom like this.
Pure terror.
The distant grind of stone scraping against stone echoed again, but this time, it was right there at the edge of the metal floor.
Scrape. Pause. Scrape.
Felt like something huge dragging itself along.
Vance didn't bother reaching for his knife. A blade wasn't going to help. He pressed his back against the pillar, breathing shallow, eyes straining to see anything in the gloom.
Suddenly, the runes carved into the pillars glimmered alive—not magic, but a sick golden light that tasted rotten and too sweet.
That same eerie glow—the temporal energy, just like the Aethelgard Watcher.
The scar on Vance's chest—clockwork, cursed—flared, burning him. The Astral Engine in his mind spun wild, not hungry, but resonating, like it had found a matching frequency and hated it.
[WARNING. WARNING. WARNING.]
[Massive Temporal Fragment Detected.]
[Entity Class: Siphon.]
[Status: Corrupted.]
From the pitch darkness between pillars, something enormous hauled itself into the runes' light.
Vance's heart stopped.
Not an Eidolon.
A Siphon. But not normal, not even close. Towering, maybe nine feet tall, its body twisted—a grotesque mix of rusted human power armor fused to raw Eidolon bone. Its right arm ended in a huge, ruined greatsword welded into the flesh, dragging, rasping against the metal and setting nerves on edge.
It wore a cape torn and stained with blood, but at some point, it'd been white and gold—the colors of a Vanguard Syndicate Commander.
The creature halted. Its head, visor cracked and broken, revealed a burning empty eye socket. Slowly, it turned toward the pillar where Vance and Axiom hid.
Inside its chest, exposed and hollow, a massive golden clockwork gear turned. Black, corrupted blood dripped from it.
It didn't roar. When it spoke, the voice sounded human, deep, booming, but warped—echoing straight into Vance's mind, carrying ce
nturies of madness.
"The Watcher... bleeds... again." It lifted its fused greatsword, leveled it at Vance's chest.
"Return... the pieces."