The breach should have been silent.
Instead, it screamed.
Ren Hadrien felt the rupture before he saw it. A tearing in the air, sharp and frantic—like metal grinding through thought. The frequency was wrong. Not wild like the spiral before, not trembling like the first anomaly.
This one was weaponized.
He emerged onto a jagged plateau where time itself rippled. Ruins of towers cracked open into air, then reversed, rebuilding for seconds before collapsing again. Lightning forked upward. Shadows moved against the wind.
This wasn't a fracture born of mistake.
It was designed.
Engineered.
Exploited.
He descended into the broken valley.
Ash floated like snow. The ground pulsed with burnt memories—static, raw, jagged. With each step, he saw impressions: hands reaching out, cities being pulled into thin air, voices shouting against silence.
This place hadn't just been breached.
It had been harvested.
He found the machine buried in a crater of glass and bone.
A core of obsidian steel, half-sunken, flickering with unstable light. Around it, shattered glyphs and cracked conduits twisted into dead circuitry. Nearby, skeletal remains—bodies half-merged with metal, expressions frozen in agony or awe.
They had tried to control the anomaly.
Tried to trap it.
He knelt beside one of the corpses.
Its eyes still glowed faintly.
"You opened a door you didn't understand," Ren whispered. "And then you tried to own the voice that answered."
The body crumbled into dust.
He moved through the fractured zone, and soon, they found him.
Not Resonants.
Not echoes.
Humans.
But not like before.
Armored. Armed. Eyes implanted with light. Voices clipped, sharp, devoid of resonance.
They called themselves the Threshold Division.
"Identify," said the first soldier, raising a pulse-rifle crackling with neural current.
Ren raised no hands. No threat.
"I'm not here for war."
They scanned him. Sensors blinked red.
"He's unaligned," another muttered. "But his field is unstable."
"Resonant contamination?"
"No. Something older."
The squad leader stepped forward.
"You're not from this world, are you?"
"No," Ren replied softly. "But I came because yours is screaming."
The soldiers hesitated. The tension in the air cracked.
Then—another voice cut through the comms.
A woman.
Cold. Clear. Commanding.
"Bring him in."
They took him to their compound—a labyrinth of stone fused with tech, hidden within a dead mountain. Every surface hummed with suppression fields, designed to mute anomaly interference.
It didn't mute him.
As he walked, the air bent subtly around his presence. Circuits misfired. Lights dimmed, then flared. The deeper they led him, the more the ground seemed to whisper:
Not meant to hold this one.
Finally, they arrived.
At the core of the mountain.
A control chamber.
Monitors surrounded a central sphere—another breach, this one stabilized by containment rings and artificial resonance dampeners. Unlike the others, this one didn't pulse.
It shivered.
And standing before it, arms crossed, was Commander Ilara Vorn.
She turned slowly.
Tall. Lean. Gray eyes like polished steel.
She studied him.
"You're the anomaly traveler," she said.
"I'm the witness," Ren replied.
"No," she corrected. "You're the variable."
He frowned.
She circled him.
"We've mapped six hundred and twelve breach events in the last cycle. Most fade. Some collapse. A few expand. But only one travels from node to node. Rewrites harmonics. Calms systems. Leaves behind growth."
"You've been tracking me," he said.
"We've been tracking the infection."
Her words cut deeper than a weapon.
"You see resonance as a threat."
She gestured toward the sphere.
"This world was stable—until the breach opened. Civilizations collapsed. Climate shattered. The rules of reality twisted. You call it resonance. I call it entropy."
Ren stepped closer to the containment breach.
"It's not the breach that breaks things. It's the fear of it. You tried to own what should have been listened to."
She raised a hand.
"Do not preach to me, Witness. I've buried cities."
He looked her in the eyes.
"And I've remembered them."
That night, they locked him in a cell made of stasis fields and obsidian.
He did not resist.
Instead, he meditated.
And the anomaly spoke to him—not through words, but through pressure.
This world had cracked not from the breach, but from disconnection.
It had been fractured long before the anomaly touched it.
What was left was only the reflection of its hunger.
And yet—
He felt something else.
A child.
A dreamer.
In this very facility.
Tethered to the resonance by instinct, not knowledge.
Someone the system feared.
Someone they would destroy, if they knew.
At dawn, the containment alarms blared.
The breach had shifted.
Not because of instability—
—but because someone was calling to it.
And the resonance was answering.
He stood.
Eyes glowing faintly.
The fracture was no longer a threat.
It was a path.