LOGINThe door sealed behind Robert Sterling with a hiss that sounded final.
Inside the containment chamber, the silence was absolute, save for the blood rushing in his ears and the overwhelming, thrumming beat of the Progenitor Heart suspended in the abyss beyond the observation port.The air here didn't feel like air. It felt like soup—thick, metallic, and vibrating with an energy that made his teeth ache. Robert took a step, and his knees nearly buckled. The radiation warning on the wall wasn't just flashing red; it was burning a steady, unblinking crimson.So this is what a microwave dinner feels like, he thought, a grim smile touching his lips."Robert!" Elena’s voice came through the comms, distorted by the magnetic interference. She was pounding on the glass partition behind him, her face a mask of terror. "Robert, the sensors are maxed out! Your cellular degradation is accelerating! Get out of there!""I’m already cooking, Ellie," Robert"BRACE FOR IMPACT!"Ben Carter’s voice cracked over the intercom, shrill with panic.The Osprey transport hit the turbulence layer like a stone skipping on water. Inside the cargo hold, gravity seemed to be a suggestion rather than a law.Jack was thrown against the bulkhead, his arms wrapped tightly around Olivia. Catherine tumbled past him, her magnetic boots sparking as they failed to grip the vibrating floor. Cain’s unconscious body slid across the deck like a sack of potatoes, slamming into a crate of munitions.CRASH.The Osprey landed—if "landing" could describe a controlled crash—on the ice shelf, two miles away from the pyramid. The landing gear sheared off with a screech of tearing metal, and the belly of the plane skidded across the glacier, carving a trench deep into the blue ice before finally grinding to a halt.Silence.Then, the groans started."Status," Jack barked, checking Olivia immediately. "Liv? Yo
The door sealed behind Robert Sterling with a hiss that sounded final.Inside the containment chamber, the silence was absolute, save for the blood rushing in his ears and the overwhelming, thrumming beat of the Progenitor Heart suspended in the abyss beyond the observation port.The air here didn't feel like air. It felt like soup—thick, metallic, and vibrating with an energy that made his teeth ache. Robert took a step, and his knees nearly buckled. The radiation warning on the wall wasn't just flashing red; it was burning a steady, unblinking crimson.So this is what a microwave dinner feels like, he thought, a grim smile touching his lips."Robert!" Elena’s voice came through the comms, distorted by the magnetic interference. She was pounding on the glass partition behind him, her face a mask of terror. "Robert, the sensors are maxed out! Your cellular degradation is accelerating! Get out of there!""I’m already cooking, Ellie," Robert
The universe, it turned out, did not care about money, or vengeance, or the petty squabbles of the Sterling family. The universe was hungry.High above the North Pole, the entity known in ancient texts as the "World Eater"—a biological scout for a high-dimensional civilization—began to feed.Cain was screaming now. It was a sound that defied human vocal cords, a high-pitched keen of absolute agony as his very essence was distilled and siphoned upward. His body withered rapidly, turning from a glowing god into a husk of grey, dried skin, yet the tendril kept him alive, refusing to let him die until every drop of energy was extracted."It’s eating the energy grid!" Jack roared, his voice barely audible over the sound of atmospheric tearing.The tendril that had impaled Cain split. Smaller, secondary tendrils lashed out, whipping across the top of the pyramid like searching tongues. One smashed into the communications tower, dissolving the steel in
The wind atop the Black Pyramid didn't howl; it screamed. It was a physical force, a wall of pressurized air generated by the swirling violet vortex directly above them. The Aurora Borealis, usually a curtain of ghostly green, had twisted into a bruising purple cyclone, its eye fixed directly on the altar where Cain held Olivia Sterling over the abyss.Jack froze. His boots were locked to the obsidian tiles, his black coat whipping violently around him. His right arm—the Obsidian Limb—pulsed with a dull, necrotic ache. It hungered to destroy, to rot, to end things, but Jack forced it down.He couldn't use Entropy on Cain. Not while Cain was holding his daughter. One slip, one stray tendril of that void energy, and Olivia wouldn't just die; she would cease to have ever existed, erased from the timeline like dust wiped from a table."You hesitate," Cain noted, his voice amplified by the electromagnetic field surrounding him. His jade-like skin glowed with an
While Robert descended into the earth, Jack ascended to the heavens.The elevator had failed, destroyed by the structural shifts of the pyramid, so Jack climbed the service ladder of the central spire. Every rung was a battle against gravity and the increasing pressure of the Progenitor energy radiating from above.He emerged onto the Observation Deck.The wind hit him first—a howling gale of arctic air mixed with static electricity that made the hair on his arms stand up.Then, the light.The top of the Black Pyramid wasn't a roof; it was an altar. The apex had retracted, revealing a circular platform made of obsidian and gold. Above them, the sky had been torn open.The Aurora Borealis was no longer a natural phenomenon. It was a swirling vortex of deep violet and bruised black, rotating directly over the pyramid. It looked like a funnel, or perhaps an eye, staring down at the world.And in the center of the platform, floating three feet of
The deeper they went, the more the architecture of the Black Pyramid surrendered to the grotesque biology of its true nature.Robert Sterling leaned heavily against a support beam, his breath coming in ragged, white puffs. The air here wasn't just cold; it was old. It smelled of deep earth, frozen metal, and something sweetly rot-like, akin to formaldehyde and lilac. His hands, wrapped in thick thermal gloves, trembled violently—the Parkinson’s was flaring up, aggravated by the stress and the biting cold."Robert, stop," Elena said, her voice sharp with worry. She adjusted her grip on the heavy diagnostic tablet she had salvaged from the upper labs. "Your heart rate is spiking. We need to rest.""We can rest when we’re dead, Ellie," Robert wheezed, forcing a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. He looked at the corridor ahead. The floor was no longer titanium grating. It was a dark, calcified substance that looked disturbingly like bone. "Jack is







