The cold was unbearable.
It clawed at Lucent's exposed skin, gnawed at the edges of his vision, turned every breath into a knife dragged through his lungs.
The Rank 1—Thermal Sync glyph hummed beneath his flesh, a fragile net holding back the worst of the cryo-generator's wrath, but he could feel it fraying at the edges.
Together with Rank 4—Rupture glyph left his fingers like a bullet leaving a barrel, its precise, vicious intent honed to a razor's edge.
It struck the cryo-generator's main housing with a sound that wasn't a sound—more a vibration that shook the bones, the teeth, the very air in his chest.
For one suspended moment, nothing happened.
Then the world came apart in white.
Liquid nitrogen erupted in a geyser, a tidal wave of absolute zero that swallowed the abomination whole.
The creature's final shriek froze in its throat, cut off as the supercooled vapor encased it in an instant glacier.
Tendrils locked mid-lash.
Eyes wide and unblinking beneath layers of ice.
The chamber became a frozen cathedral, every surface glittering with hoarfrost, the air itself shimmering with suspended crystals.
Silence.
Lucent exhaled, watching his breath curl away in a slow, fading ribbon.
His fingers ached.
His bones ached.
The Q-Serin in his veins was burning out, its protective buffers collapsing one by one.
But it was done.
Almost.
His hands rose again, trembling now not from cold but from the sheer, impossible weight of what came next.
Aether burned in his veins as he began tracing the glyph—not in the air, but in the space between thoughts, where true power lived.
Rank 6—Annihilation Protocol
The computations unfolded like a fractal nightmare behind his eyes, each equation more complex than the last, each variable a spinning blade threatening to shear his mind apart.
He could feel it—the way his consciousness stretched thin, the way reality itself warped at the edges of his perception.
Blood dripped from his nose, hot against his frozen lips.
His vision tunneled.
Almost—
Then—
The glyph stuttered.
Not from lack of will.
Not from insufficient aether.
Something stopped it.
A hand closed around his wrist.
Warm.
Impossibly, unbearably warm in this frozen hellscape.
"I'm sorry."
The voice was soft.
Almost kind.
Lucent's head snapped up.
The man standing before him shouldn't have been there.
Shouldn't have been alive.
He wore the tattered remains of a Myriad lab coat, the fabric fluttering in a breeze that didn't exist.
His face was gaunt, his milky eyes are hollow pits that somehow still held a terrible, aching sadness.
Frost didn't cling to him.
The cold didn't touch him.
His boots left no prints in the ice as he stepped closer.
"But I can't let you kill my friend here."
Behind him, the ice cracked.
A sound like a glacier calving, like bones breaking, like the world itself coming apart at the seams.
The abomination's frozen prison split down the middle, fissures racing through its surface in jagged lightning bolts.
Black tendrils slithered through the gaps, probing, testing.
The man didn't turn to look.
He just kept smiling that sad, hollow smile, his fingers still wrapped around Lucent's wrist like a lover's caress.
"You see," he whispered, "That would have been dangerous if I didn't stop you."
And then the ice exploded outward, and the abomination moved again.
Lucent recoiled, his body moving before his mind could process the impossibility before him.
His knife was in his hand instantly, the blade glinting in the frozen air, but the man didn't flinch.
He just stood there, his hollow, milky-white eyes fixed on Lucent with an unsettling clarity.
"Who the fuck are you?" Lucent snarled, his breath curling in the subzero air.
His instincts screamed at him—this thing wasn't human.
No human could have walked through that storm of freezing death untouched.
No human could have stopped a Rank 6 glyph with just a touch.
Zero tilted his head slightly, as if considering the question.
Then, slowly, his lips curled into a small, almost amused smile.
"Hmm... Ah!" he said, his voice light, almost conversational. "I know. You can call me Zero."
The name hung in the air like a bad omen.
Lucent's grip on his knife tightened.
Zero's eyes—those wrong, milky-white eyes—tracked the movement, but he didn't react.
He just stood there, his other hand loose at his sides, his posture relaxed.
Like this was nothing more than a casual meeting.
Karen and Kai came behind towards Lucent, their expressions mirroring his disbelief.
Karen's good hand hovered near her pistol, though she didn't draw.
Kai's Conduit flickered weakly in his grip, its screen glitching as if struggling to process what it was seeing.
Zero wasn't like the other Hollowed.
He wasn't shambling, wasn't mindless, wasn't a snarling beast driven by hunger.
He was lucid.
Calm.
And that made him infinitely more dangerous.
Lucent's mind raced.
He had seen Hollowed retain fragments of their past selves—glimpses of speech, flashes of recognition.
But nothing like this.
Nothing so... aware.
"You're not human," Lucent said, his voice low.
Zero's smile didn't waver.
"No. Not anymore." He glanced past Lucent, toward the abomination, which had gone eerily still, its many eyes fixed on him. "And neither is my friend here. But then, you already knew that, didn't you?"
The abomination let out a low, shuddering sound—not a growl, not a scream, but something almost like... recognition.
Lucent's blood ran colder than the ice around them.
This wasn't just a fight anymore.
This was something far worse.
And Zero was at the center of it all.
Then a sensation that was like having his veins turned inside out.
Lucent gasped as the black-blue aether corruption snaking through his body began moving, drawn toward Zero's touch like iron filings to a magnet.
The dark tendrils under his skin slithered up his arm, converging at the point where Zero's fingers rested against his wrist.
It should have hurt.
It should have torn him apart.
But instead, there was only a terrible, icy relief as the buildup of spent aether left his system.
His vision cleared.
The pounding in his skull eased.
Even the Q-Serin's harsh burn in his veins softened to a dull throb.
Zero watched him with those unsettling milky eyes, his expression unreadable.
The aether traveled up his own arm in creeping tendrils, the black-blue veins standing stark against his pale skin before fading entirely, absorbed into whatever passed for his body.
"There," he said softly. "That should stabilize you."
Lucent jerked his arm back, his knife coming up between them.
His body felt lighter, sharper—cleansed of the toxic buildup that came with rawcasting.
But the relief was overshadowed by a deeper, more visceral horror.
No one could do that.
Behind him, Karen had her pistol drawn now, the barrel trained unsteadily on Zero.
Kai's Conduit sparked in his hands, though what good he thought it would do was anyone's guess.
The abomination hadn't moved.
It loomed behind Zero like a grotesque shadow, its too-many eyes flickering between them, waiting.
"What the hell are you?" Lucent demanded, his voice raw.
Zero tilted his head, considering the question. "A remnant," he said at last. "A keeper. The first of many." His gaze drifted past Lucent, toward the ruined facility around them. "Though you... you are quite interesting."
The abomination let out a low, shuddering sound—not a threat, not a snarl.
A whimper.
Zero reached back without looking, his fingers brushing one of its frozen tendrils in a gesture that might have been comfort.
"Shh," he murmured. "It's alright. They'll understand soon."
Then his milky eyes fixed on Lucent again, and his smile returned. "Won't you?"
Zero's apology hung in the frozen air like a bad joke.
His milky eyes didn't waver as he gestured toward the abomination, its massive form still half-encased in ice.
"I was too late getting in here," Zero repeated, shaking his head with theatrical regret. "I was supposed to collect her sooner."
His fingers twitched toward the abomination's frozen mass in a gesture that might have been affectionate. "All this mess... the containment breaches, the Hollowed and poor Dr. Rhys." He sighed. "Really, I should apologize for dragging you into our family drama."
The way he said it – her – with that faint, almost parental tenderness, made Lucent's skin crawl.
Karen's pistol didn't waver. "Bullshit."
Zero's smile widened, showing too many teeth. "Oh? And what part, exactly?"
"All of it." She adjusted her grip, her finger resting against the trigger. "You didn't 'stumble in' late. You let this happen. You wanted it loose."
For the first time, Zero's expression shifted—a flicker of something almost like surprise, there and gone in an instant.
Then he laughed, the sound too human, too warm for this frozen tomb.
The air tasted of aether and something sharper—the metallic tang of reality itself fracturing.
Zero's form shimmered at the edges, his outline bleeding into the space around him like ink dissolving in water.
The fluorescent lights above flickered violently, their glow bending unnaturally toward his distorting figure as if afraid to illuminate what he was becoming.
Lucent's knife hand trembled—not from fear, but from the sheer wrongness radiating off Zero in waves.
His mind automatically tried to categorize the phenomenon:
spatial distortion?
Teleportation?
The terms felt laughably inadequate.
This wasn't just science.
This was something older, something that made his teeth ache and his vision blur at the periphery.
"Oh well," Zero sighed, the sound layered with echoes that didn't match his mouth's movements.
His milky eyes darkened momentarily, the whites filling with swirling gray like storm clouds moving behind frosted glass.
"Rhys isn't here at this facility." A pause.
The abomination behind him shuddered, its frozen carapace shedding diamond-bright shards that hovered unnaturally before clattering to the floor. "I thought we could finally corner that rat."
The space behind Zero screamed.
Not metaphorically—the air itself tore apart with a sound like a thousand sheets of glass shattering in reverse.
Jagged fractures spread through reality, each splinter glowing with sickly purple light that cast long, twisting shadows across the frozen chamber.
Through the cracks, Lucent caught glimpses of... elsewhere.
Endless corridors that twisted in impossible angles.
Laboratories with equipment that hurt to look at.
A dark shape that might have been human scurrying through ventilation ducts.
The abomination moved toward the rift with disturbing eagerness, its form flowing like liquid shadow between the floating debris.
As it passed Zero, one massive tendril brushed against him with unmistakable familiarity—not a weapon, but a touch.
A greeting.
Lucent's breath caught in his throat.
The Q-Serin still coursing through his veins enhanced his perception just enough to see the truth—the way the abomination's flesh momentarily synchronized with Zero's frequency, their aether signatures harmonizing perfectly before separating again.
They weren't just allies.
They were the same.
Zero turned back one last time, his features now blurred beyond human recognition.
The fractures in reality pulsed hungrily around him, strands of his lab coat unraveling into the void as he spoke:
"Don't look so surprised." His voice came from everywhere now, vibrating through the floor, the walls, the fillings in their teeth. "You of all people should know—we're all experiments here."
Then he stepped backward into the maelstrom.
The implosion hit with physical force—a thunderclap of displaced air that sent Kai sprawling.
Karen barely kept her footing, her boots sliding across the suddenly frictionless ice.
Only Lucent remained unmoved, his Thermal Sync glyph flaring one final time to stabilize him as the universe stitched itself back together with a sound like a dying man's gasp.
Silence.
The chamber stood empty save for the three of them and the ruined machinery.
Even the cold felt different now—ordinary, mundane, no longer charged with that otherworldly presence.
Karen's pistol clattered to the ground, her fingers too numb to maintain their death grip.
"...What the fuck was that?" Her voice sounded small and broken in the vast emptiness.
Lucent opened his mouth to respond when his knees buckled.
The Q-Serin's protective barriers had been the only thing keeping him from feeling the full brunt of the damage—the neural overload, the aether burns snaking through his veins, the microscopic hemorrhages blossoming behind his eyes.
Now, with its effects gone, the toll crashed over him in a single, suffocating wave.
He should be dead.
Would be dead, if not for Zero's intervention.
The memory of those black-blue tendrils of corrupted aether being drawn from his body replayed in his mind with terrible clarity.
The way they had slithered toward Zero's touch like serpents to a charmer's flute.
The unbearable relief as the toxic buildup left his system.
Lucent's hands trembled against the ice.
Not from the cold.
From the understanding of just how close he'd come to becoming something worse than a corpse.
Karen was at his side in an instant, her good hand gripping his shoulder hard enough to bruise.
"Hey. Hey. Look at me." Her voice was rough, urgent. "Don't you fucking faint out on us now."
Kai stumbled over, his Conduit sparking weakly in his hands. "The aether corruption—it's gone?"
His wide eyes darted between Lucent's cleared veins and the spot where Zero had disappeared. "He... he actually helped us?"
Lucent tried to respond, but all that came out was a wet cough that painted his lips red.
The taste of copper filled his mouth, thick and cloying.
No.
Not helped.
There had been nothing altruistic in Zero's actions.
That much was certain.
The way he had looked at them—like specimens under glass—spoke volumes.
He'd cleansed Lucent's system for the same reason a gardener might pluck weeds from between prized flowers.
His vision tunneled dangerously, but through the haze, one thought burned brighter than the pain.
Probably to keep someone of interest clean.
Karen's grip tightened.
"We need to move. Now." Her gaze darted toward the ruined cryo-generator, then to the gaping holes Lucent had torn through the sub-levels.
"Whatever the hell that was, it's gone. But this place?" She shook her head. "It's coming down."
Lucent forced himself to nod, though the motion sent fresh waves of agony through his skull.
She was right.
The facility had been dying long before they arrived.
Now, with its power systems failing and structural integrity compromised, it was little more than a tomb waiting to be sealed.
As Kai helped him to his feet, Lucent cast one last look at the space where Zero and the abomination had vanished.
The air still shimmered faintly there, as if reality itself hadn't quite healed from their passing.
A warning.
A promise.
This isn't over.