Chapter 1: The Severing StormThe hum began as a low thrum beneath Kiran's bones, a vibration he'd come to associate with the deeper, more invasive experiments. He floated in the inky black liquid, a sensory void where only the echo of his own heartbeat and the distant, maddening whispers of Dr. Koval's voice existed. Conjure it, Subject 07. Focus. Bend time, or it will break you. Liam, Subject 12, had once whispered that the hum was the facility breathing, a serpent in the dark. Kiran had believed him.
Then, the hum became a shriek. Not a sound, but a tearing force, shredding the very air. Lights flickered above the observation window, then exploded in a shower of sparks. The black liquid around Kiran, designed to suppress and amplify, violently began to churn, thickening, transforming. It became a viscous, abrasive black sand, grinding against his skin, pulling him down. Alarms blared, a discordant symphony to the screams of other subjects echoing through the compound. Through the rippling observation window, Kiran saw the girl from Unit 3, her eyes wide with terror, her body flickering in and out of existence, a horrifying strobe light against the chaos. In Unit 8, a boy screamed as his skin rippled, shifting, one moment solid, the next dissolving into shimmering vapor.
Survival instinct, honed by years of relentless training, slammed through Kiran's fear. He reached for it, that cold, familiar power, the ability to make the world stutter. Five seconds. That's all you get. He focused, and the world around him froze. The churning black sand hung suspended, a frozen tide. The screams became silent, distorted masks of agony. Kiran strained, the cost already a dull throb behind his eyes, and pushed off the solidifying wall of sand. He spotted a hairline fracture, a weakness, in the observation glass. With a guttural cry, he slammed his fist into it, the impact reverberating through his bone-deep exhaustion. The glass shattered, not into shards, but dissolving into more of the sinister black grit.
Through the widening gap, he glimpsed Dr. Rhea Koval, his handler. She wasn't fleeing in panic. She was deliberately smashing a console, circuits sparking and dying. Then, with a speed that belied her usually composed demeanor, she snatched a small, armored data-drive from a hidden compartment. Her eyes, usually cold and assessing, met his for a fraction of a second – a flicker of something he couldn't decipher – before she vanished into a collapsing service tunnel. On the shattered remnants of the console, a faint, newly etched symbol pulsed with a sickly green light before fading into nothing: a stylized, three-pronged mark, vaguely reminiscent of a claw or a broken star. The mark of the "Zero Cabal,"though Kiran wouldn't know its name until much later. He threw himself through the opening just as the entire section of the facility gave way, tumbling into the torrential rain of the outside world, the black sand already solidifying into unnatural, shifting dunes behind him, swallowing the monstrous structure.