ログインPOV: ViggoSkin was softer than shadow. And much warmer.A moment ago, she had been a mountain of translucent darkness that could eat stone. Now, she was a girl curled on a cold metal grate, shivering.My heart hammered against my ribs—violent, erratic, too fast. Each beat was a fist pounding against bone. I moved before my mind registered the shift, my thigh muscles locking up and then exploding into motion."Neoma!"I dropped to my knees. The impact resonated through the floorboards—dull, heavy, final. I felt it in my feet as I slid the last foot across the grating. The metal bit into my knees, but I didn't feel the bite. I only felt the heat coming off her.She was naked. The nanoweave suit was gone, disintegrated by the energy of the transformation.Her skin was slick with a strange, viscous fluid that looked like liquid mercury. It coated her limbs, sliding off her in slow, heavy droplets. The residue didn't evaporate. It felt heavy on my hands—thick and oily, clinging to my palm
POV: NeomaI didn't walk; I phased. The ground was a suggestion, a faint memory of resistance.I looked down at my paws. They weren't flesh. They were pillars of midnight smoke, dense and lightless, shot through with veins of silver lightning that pulsed in jagged, irregular rhythms.I tried to place them on the metal grating of the gantry. I braced for the sharp vibration of impact, the sound of steel meeting bone.Instead, I felt a sickening lack of substance. My paw sank into the metal. The molecules of the steel didn't break; they parted, a cold, oily sensation sliding through my phantom limbs.My stomach dropped—not butterflies, but a deep, hollow nausea that made me want to retch. My skin crawled from the inside out, as if a thousand needles were stitching through my pores.I pulled back. The metal re-solidified. The sound was a dull, heavy resonance that traveled up through the gantry and settled in my jaw.What am I?The thought didn't form in words. It was an impulse. A viole
POV: BarzilIt wasn't a Lycan. It was a shadow given teeth.The thing that hauled its bulk from the ink of the Moon Well wasn't made of flesh, fur, and bone. It was composed of the vacuum between stars—a dense, light-eating darkness that turned the cavern into a blurring void.I stood paralyzed on the gantry. My hand clamped around the hilt of my sword until the metal bit into my palm. I didn't want to fight; I needed to hold onto something solid as the world tilted. My vision sparked at the edges, dark spots encroaching as my brain struggled to process the wrongness."Impossible," Wolfy whispered.His voice was a thin, dry rasp. It was the first time I’d heard it tremble.The creature dragged itself onto the metal grating. The steel didn't just bend; it shrieked—a high-pitched, metallic agony that vibrated through my boots and settled in my marrow. The vibration was a physical weight, pressing against my eardrums until they throbbed.It stood ten feet at the shoulder. Looking up sent
POV: WolfyTime was a variable they couldn't calculate.In a standard tactical scenario, time is linear. T-minus ten seconds to impact. ETA five minutes. The decay rate of a Barzil isotope.But in the cavern beneath the Dead City, time had stopped. Or perhaps it had looped back on itself, trapping us in a singular, agonizing moment of suspension.I stared at the readout on my datapad. The screen was cracked, the jagged edges of the glass biting into my thumb. The battery was a flickering red bar, critical, but the sensor array was functional.Target Status: NULL.Energy Signature: NULL.Biological Life Signs: 0."It's a glitch," I whispered.My voice sounded like a stranger’s—thin, brittle, and too high. My finger trembled as I tapped the screen, the movement erratic. The skin of my hands felt tight, dry, as if all the moisture had been sucked out of the room."The sensors are calibrated for carbon-based life forms. If she has... transitioned... the algorithm is invalid."I rebooted t
POV: NeomaBurning. Freezing. Everything. Nothing.My nerves didn’t just fire; they overloaded, sending a white-hot surge of static through my spine that made my back arch until the vertebrae groaned. There was no water. There was no liquid. There was only a wall of raw, unadulterated existence slamming into the fragile container of my ribs.The moment I hit the silver surface, my body stopped being a biological entity. The nanoweave suit didn't just tear; it disintegrated into individual atoms that stung my pores like a billion microscopic needles.My skin crawled from the inside—then it was gone. It dissolved into heat and light. My bones didn't break; they turned into a high-frequency vibration that rattled my brain against the inside of my skull until I tasted copper. I wasn't drowning. I was being unmade.I tried to scream. No mouth. I tried to thrash. No limbs.My cells screamed. Not pain—wrongness. Bones bending. Reality fracturing. Gravity pulled sideways, then vanished entire
POV: ViggoShe was fading. Losing the shape of a woman.Neoma stood at the edge of the metal gantry, and the world began to hum. Not a sound, but a vibration that started in the soles of my boots and climbed up my shins, rattling my kneecaps.The silver light from the vision didn't die. It grew. It became a blinding, aggressive glare that burned against my retinas.The black veins on her arms weren't just lines anymore; they were channels of white-hot energy. They pulsed. Rhythmic. Throb-throb-throb. They moved in perfect sync with the ocean of liquid Barzil churning fifty feet below us.Sweat broke out across my neck, stinging the fresh cuts on my shoulders. My heart hammered against my ribs—violent, erratic, too fast. Each beat was a fist pounding against bone."Neoma!" I roared.I lunged forward. My thigh muscles knotted, screaming with the sudden exertion.The air in the cavern didn't just vibrate; it tore. A high-pitched, electric shriek erupted as the atmosphere compressed. The
POV: NeomaThe inside of a Vanguard transport smelled of stale sweat, gun oil, and violence waiting to happen.It was a claustrophobic steel box. Vibrating so violently with the roar of the engine that my teeth had been aching for the last three hours. A dull throb in my jaw.We were sitting on ben
POV: NeomaThe Dregs didn't look like hell anymore. Through the red tint of the tactical visor, they looked like data.I crouched behind a slab of collapsed concrete. The heavy Barzil-mesh suit adjusted its temperature, fighting the humid, suffocating heat of the Foundry District.My HUD flashed wi
POV: NeomaThe room was larger than the entire shack I had shared with seven other scavengers in the Warrens.Commander Barzil had marched me through the labyrinthine halls of the Citadel. Past the Spartan steel of the barracks. Into a wing that smelled of lavender and money.The scent was cloying.
POV: NeomaIn the Citadel, a grey tunic was better than a cloak of invisibility.I moved through the service corridors. My footsteps were silent on the lower-grade stone. I wasn't supposed to be here. According to Wolfy’s schedule, I was supposed to be in "Recovery Meditation" with Guller. But Gull







