Ascension Code: Reborn in the DC Universe - Chapter 0145

The night sky over the island was clear, starry, and empty when the object tore through the atmosphere in a silence that preceded chaos.

There was no warning. No radar beacon spun on distant towers, no siren survived to wail. Just an incandescent streak, a needle of white fire cutting through the darkness in a perfect straight line, descending not like a blunt stone, but with the cold determination of a projectile that has chosen its target. And then, the impact.

The center of the courtyard, where decades ago men in sculpted uniforms walked in circles under the equatorial sun, gave way like wet paper. The concrete cracked with a dry snap that no one heard, folding inward into an instant crater. Cracks ran in voracious webs up the oldest walls, shaking off chunks of plaster and loose rust. A column of dust and fragments rose high and dense, swallowing the moon and extinguishing the stars. The sound came afterward—a dry, deep thunder that rolled down the island’s slopes like a giant drum being struck once before dying out in the ocean, unwitnessed.

It took almost a full minute for the dust to settle. Flakes of ash and particles of pulverized rock hung in the air like dirty snow.

When he did, something moved at the bottom of the crater.

First, it was just a dark shape against the churned earth. Then, outlines. A man. Or the shape of one. Six feet nine inches tall, perhaps more, every inch covered in an armor of such deep black that it seemed to drink in the little light around it—it didn’t reflect, it didn’t shine, it only absorbed. There were no reflections on its surface, no metallic sheen betraying the overlapping layers that composed it. The darkness not only enveloped it; it embraced it. Threads of liquid shadow trickled down the joints of its elbows, knees, fingers, as if the night itself had fallen in love with that body and refused to let it go, undulating in slow, heavy volumes that did not obey the wind.

The only concession to the existence of something alive inside was the viewing window. A narrow, horizontal slit at eye level, burning a low, steady red, like embers under ashes.

The figure then moved. It climbed the steep crater wall with firm steps that didn’t slip on the loose debris or sharp rocks. It reached the edge and stopped. Its head turned once, from left to right, in a continuous and precise movement too human to be—without hesitation, without adjustment. An android cataloging a dead environment. A machine taking inventory of the end of the world.

And there was a lot to catalog.

The courtyard was a scroll of recent violence, its history written in fragments of brass and iron. Bullet casings lay scattered like fallen stars forming irregular constellations—dense clusters where snipers had dug defensive positions, solitary trails marking desperate retreats across the open terrain. The concrete displayed dark stains of various patterns: fine, arched sprays of impact from a distance, thick puddles where bodies had fallen and someone had later tried to drag away the evidence, abandoning the effort halfway, leaving coagulated furrows in the cement. The air still carried the metallic smell of human blood, confirmed by the armor’s sensors even before conscious analysis had formed.

Further on, the west wall displayed its most eloquent wound—a brutal scar on the fortification. An entire section of the wall, at least fifteen meters long, had collapsed inward with calculated violence. Not blown up by plastic charges, not demolished by heavy machinery. Pushed. Massive blocks of reinforced concrete, each the size of a jeep, lay tumbled toward the courtyard like teeth torn from a giant, their twisted rebar rods pointing skyward like broken fingers pleading. The radial pattern of the fall—the debris scattered evenly inward—left no doubt as to the direction and nature of the force applied. Something colossal had entered there. Something that had considered the walls mere suggestions and hadn’t bothered to look for the door.

The figure advanced through the field of rubble, its boots sinking slightly into the fine gravel of pulverized concrete that covered everything like a grey frost. It stopped before what remained of the ground in that section, where the base of the wall once stood.

There it was—a very clear impression stamped on the compacted earth with the disturbing clarity of an industrial mold. The footprint easily measured two meters long by one meter wide, wide enough for a grown man to lie inside it with room to spare on the sides. Five distinct toes, arranged in a humanoid shape but with slightly distorted proportions. The depth of the mold—almost thirty centimeters at the heel—suggested tons of mass descending with full weight on a single step.

The red display pulsed gently as blue lines of light swept across the depression in the ground in complex patterns, measuring, triangulating, comparing to archived databases. Inside the helmet, torrents of data cascaded silently across the retinal display: estimated mass between eight and twelve tons, predominantly anterior weight distribution, angle of locomotion suggesting bipedal posture with an unusually low center of gravity. Cold numbers that described a monster without giving it a name or a face.

‘Ah.’

The voice echoed from within the sealed chamber of the armor—feminine, perfectly modulated, each vowel trimmed with the clinical indifference of someone programmed never to waver, not even in front of a cemetery.

‘As you saw with your own eyes, without needing a scanner, there was some kind of disastrous battle here. Complete perimeter scan completed. No sign of life inside the base. Security systems disabled or destroyed. All of them.’

The figure did not respond. It left its footprint behind.

The main prison block occupied the back of the courtyard like a fulfilled promise of incarceration—four stories of unadorned reinforced concrete, slit windows so narrow that sunlight must have entered only theoretically. The door on the right was in place, sprawling at an angle of abandon, its lower hinges torn from the masonry, leaving two shallow holes in the concrete with the screws still inside, twisted. The one on the left had simply vanished, and the gap it left exhaled a breath of confined air with notes of burnt gunpowder and something organic that the sensors preferred not to name immediately.

Inside, darkness was the natural state. Light was the anomaly.

The lights in the main hallway didn’t follow a recognizable pattern of failure—not the gradual dimming of a generator exhausting its last reserves, not the methodical flickering of a circuit breaker vibrating at a constant frequency. It was something else: spasms of brightness that lasted long enough to reveal a detail and suppress it before the eye could complete the inventory. Pitch black. Flash: drag marks on the floor—not those in the courtyard, those were different, narrower, parallel, left by something with less mass being carried by someone in a hurry. Pitch black. The entire building trembled with a low frequency that wasn’t audible but was perceptible in the soles of boots, some rupture in the electrical infrastructure propagating through the ducts embedded in the walls like a hiccup that the building couldn’t stop.

For the figure in the armor, it was irrelevant. Thermal vision painted the corridor in cold, uniform indigos, without any indication of presence. But there was something deserved in that electric agony—the installation disintegrating at the same slow, erratic pace with which it had been built to crush the time of others.

The dining room opened to the right through a double door, one leaf still on its hinges but jammed at a forty-five-degree angle, the other tilted inwards and used as an unintentional rug—the floor beneath marked by the repeated passage of soles that hadn’t bothered to go around it. The ceiling was low and ribbed, the supporting beams rusting at the joints with that orange hue that suggested years of untreated dampness. Six rows of steel tables bolted to the floor, built-in benches, nothing loose, nothing that could be lifted. Next to the serving counter, a serving tub contained at its bottom a dried residue of an indefinable color—not the original color of the food, but the color that food assumes when time reduces it to its most honest version.

Two trays stacked on the edge of the counter had slipped and landed on the floor at an angle, still leaning against the wall, as if waiting for someone to pick them up. On the fourth table in the middle row, a paperback with a broken spine lay open face down, its pages warped with dampness, the bookmark—a folded piece of biscuit wrapper—still in place between the pages where someone had stopped reading. The lights flickered, and for a moment the cafeteria existed in full: clinking cutlery, trays sliding across the counter, the low, collective noise of men eating without obligatory conversation. Then, the darkness returned true silence—only the irregular hum of overloaded circuits, the occasional creak of metal contracting in the cold, and the methodical weight of boots descending the corridor, each step echoing on the concrete with the regularity of something that didn’t need to hurry because it already knew what it was going to find.

—

Why I applied the editing in this way: “be more descriptive” in this context doesn’t mean using more adjectives—it means constructing the environment with the density of a place that existed before being destroyed. What I did was identify the details that the original only named and inhabit them with physical and temporal specificity: the open book with the bookmark still inside, the drag marks different from those in the courtyard, the residue of the sink reduced to its most honest color. Each detail carries implication without needing to enunciate it. I maintained the voice of the original—restrained, almost forensic, with dry irony emerging at the right moments—and expanded within it without altering its temperature.

Next came the living quarters, a silent testament to the chaos the occupants had left behind. Heaved quilts and crumpled blankets formed haphazard ridges atop mattresses whose springs creaked under the imagined weight of those who had left in haste. Wide-open closets displayed empty shelves, twisted hangers, and broken compartments, as if hoses had been ripped from a combat station. An empty holster lay abandoned in a corner of the bed, the belt still fastened around the torn mattress, suggesting that the owner had only had time to remove the weapon before being forced to abandon everything else.

The next door opened into the surveillance room, where the silence screamed louder than any explosion. Sixteen monitors lined up against a curved wall, their inert screens reflecting the cracked ceiling. The swivel chairs were tilted at odd angles, casters misaligned and upholstery torn. On the floor, a communication radio lay sprawled, its side shattered, wires exposed like bare veins. Under normal circumstances, there should have been watchful eyes and murmurs exchanging bored codes in the early hours of the morning. Only the intermittent hum of tired transformers and the metallic sound of deformed capsules rolling under the boot of passersby remained, a muffled clinking that echoed through the room like a grim warning.

The corridor that followed revealed the scars of a fierce confrontation. The wall beside the steel elevator doors was riddled with bullet holes, so many that the plaster had crumbled into slabs, exposing the raw masonry and shattered plaster fragments on the floor. Down the corridor, a carpet of shell casings gleamed under the dim spotlights, dozens, hundreds of them forming a yellowish trail, a silent record of those who defended every inch until the last projectile. Drag marks—strips of metal and torn fabric—disappeared into the twilight ahead, like vestiges of a resistance that had not been enough.

The elevator doors, heavy and pockmarked, remained closed like the mouth of a tomb. The call panel beside it was dead, its meters completely blank. The figure stepped forward and, in an almost formal, protocol-driven gesture, pressed the call button just once. Not a sound followed. The echo of the unanswered ring reverberated down the corridor.

Then, the black-gloved hands rose. Long fingers dug into the gap between the steel blades, forcing them open. The metal groaned, a sharp wail that echoed through the walls. The doors gave way with the ease of tin foil, folding in twisted folds, finally releasing the emptiness behind them.

Instead of a cabin, there was a shaft: a vertical void that stretched through the living rock of the island, plunging into darkness. From there rose a cold breath, like the breath of a grave, a stagnant air impregnated with the smell of old oil, mineral dust, and a sweet, unsettling touch that the sensors did not hesitate to classify as anomalous.

At the top of the shaft, the elevator cables hung loosely, like severed arteries. They were neatly sectioned—not torn by tension, nor melted by heat—but interrupted by precise blades. The exposed ends displayed a dry, unmistakably deliberate cut.

The figure leaned over the abyss, the reddish visor of its helmet outlining only the first few meters before a deep blackness swallowed even that light. And, without hesitation, it leaped.

The fall consumed seconds with the slowness of a nightmare. The air whistled through the joints of the armor, each metal rod creaking under the pressure of the wind. The walls of the pit slid in blurs, vertical, mesmerizing. Until the impact happened, dry and absolute: the legs of the armor cushioned the shock against the twisted ceiling of the cabin, thrown to the bottom like a metallic coffin. The metal gave way with a shrill bang, releasing a deep echo that reverberated through the crack. The crushed can of a soft drink abandoned there gave way under the weight of the boots, completing the somber symphony of the moment.

The hands worked again. The fingers sank into the cabin ceiling, groped for the structural metal seams, and tore them open with a shrill, steely screech, opening a raw mouth through which the figure slid into the dead elevator. Inside, the inner doors hung ajar and crooked, wounds in the smooth sheet metal. A firm push finished the job, and the steel groaned as it gave way.

On the other side, a long corridor awaited, a narrow concrete tunnel that disappeared into the twilight.

The emergency lights downstairs suffered from the same fever as those on the upper floor, flickering in uncertain spasms, tinging everything with a sickly amber that rose and fell in irregular waves. Beneath that agonizing strobe light, the corridor told its own story of violence: arcs of dried blood scattered on the left wall, bullet casings swept to the corners like crumbs, the floor fanned out – a pattern impossible to mistake for anything other than the shock of a concussion blast – and deep, parallel claw marks furrowing the concrete in three straight lines that stretched for almost four meters before disappearing into the shadows.

At the end of the corridor, where there should have been a heavy, sealed armored door, a metal yawn gaped open. The circular blade hung ajar, not forced open by him that night, but left there for hours, motionless on colossal hinges that no one else had bothered to close.

The figure crossed the threshold without hesitation.

On the other side, the room opened up vast and silent: a hall with a very high ceiling, carved into the living rock, with columns lined up like ancient sentinels. On the wall opposite the entrance, dominating the space, was the door of a vault. “Large” didn’t quite describe it: the metallic disc had the diameter of a house, forged from steel and composite alloys that exceeded a meter in thickness. Its locking mechanisms emerged in profile like petrified tree trunks, the kind of barrier designed to survive wars, centuries, any cataclysm conceivable by human hands.

And yet, it was open.

Wide open like the previous door, turned on its hinges until it almost touches the rock, offering its interior to anyone brave enough to enter.

Inside the helmet, a face contorted in a flash of disbelief.

The figure crossed the hall unhurriedly, each step reverberating in the stony vastness, and stopped before the opening. Hands touched the cold edge of the door, pushing it a few more degrees, completing the gesture that other intruders had begun. Then, it stepped onto the threshold and confirmed what all the data already whispered: the safe was empty.

Bare steel shelves rose like metallic ribs against the curved walls, gleaming in the dim light that barely filtered through. Each shelf, cold to the touch, displayed a varnish scratched by time, accentuating the metal’s grooves. Open containment niches gaped open like silent mouths, purposefully empty—cradles designed to hold tons that now accommodated only a thin layer of dust. There was a dry smell of rust and abandonment in the air, while microscopic grains danced in light swirls, at the mercy of any air current. The echo reverberated distantly, echoing the void: that space had been built to hold something priceless, and now it preserved not even a fragment of memory.

But the emptiness wasn’t the most painful thing. It was the wounds in the vault’s shell.

On the opposite side of the entrance, a slit ran across the steel from one side to the other. It wasn’t a crude hole, like one from an explosion; it was a clean, continuous cut, of supernatural precision, as if an ethereal blade had glided across the metal with the smoothness of a brush tracing arabesques. The edges, absolutely smooth, showed no burrs or traces of heat. No human technology left a similar signature—and he knew almost all of them.

In the center of the floor, another cut of the same nature outlined a perfect circle that opened onto a lower level. The second chamber of the vault: mysterious, not recorded on any plan, known to very few, a secret guarded as well as any treasure that had ever been there.

The figure stepped to the edge and peered inside.

A profound darkness, broken only by the silhouettes of empty shelves. Still, sparks of silent certainty lined up in his mind: whoever had created that access knew exactly where to cut. There had been no random search, no trial and error—the precise line betrayed confidential information. And perhaps that was the mark of the one he was looking for. The realization brought not relief, but an overwhelming weight.

He stepped back and allowed the sensors to scan the entire area.

Ballistic casings were scattered across the floor and walls in densities that recounted the choreography of a fierce battle: concentrations around the entrance, where a firing line had been erected; arched trails containing the charges of moving snipers; wear marks on the concrete. On one of the side walls, a deep dent furrowed the steel in a vaguely human shape—as if someone had been thrown against the sheet metal with enough force to leave a permanent impression. Below, deformed bullets lay intact: whole projectiles, flattened and twisted, remains that had struck something that had resisted penetration. He recognized that pattern: ammunition consumed by extremely high-density armor. By a suit.

Further on, a profusion of dark, burnt stains licked the floor and one of the shelves: soot radiating in a fan shape from a single point of origin. The bittersweet odor of chemical combustion still lingered, mixed with fragments of partially melted glass that dotted the edge of the burn. Across the ceiling, shards of torn concrete and impact grooves recounted the thrusts of fallen debris. Each scar was a brutal sentence; that entire chamber formed a paragraph written in the violent grammar of the attack.

The internal computer of his armor never stopped: it layered analysis, labeled each trace with floating data visible only to the visor, compressing everything into encrypted packets that projected through underground networks to the base, where superprocessors would devour every byte to try to answer the only relevant question: what had happened there.

Then, in the center of the ransacked room, under the flickering light coming from the hall behind it, the figure stopped.

A soft click echoed through the armor’s joints—plates upon plates sliding in fluid sequence. The helmet began to retract: black sections folded over one another, trickling toward the neck ring like water down a drain. The shadow that enveloped everything hesitated, merging with the whole, before surrendering to the movement.

And there, finally exposed, was a face: young and, at the same time, marked by a hardness that no age could justify. Features that suggested little more than twenty years, furrowed by an implacable expression. The hair, crushed by the hoof, fell in disheveled strands; the jaw, firm as tempered steel.

Erick frowned at the empty safe. The artificial red light of the display had disappeared, giving way to something more dangerous: two human eyes, inflamed with rage and with nowhere to unleash it.

…

Two hours.

Two hours had passed since Natasha had appeared simultaneously on every screen in the lab—an event so extraordinary that it required protocols reserved for catastrophes—and uttered the words he had been pretending not to want to hear:

“We completely lost touch with Jade.”

What followed etched itself into his memory like a film of abrupt cuts, each scene exploding in brief bursts of light before fading away. In the lab, the air vibrated with shards of white light ricocheting off the metallic walls, screens multiplying in rows of scarlet codes and alerts. Morgana awoke from her circles of vigil like a resurrected predator, her eyes gleaming with amethyst hues as she posed sharp questions he didn’t have time to answer.

He ran through corridors flooded with sirens, sparks leaping from exposed panels, to the containment platform. There lay the prototype: a titanium and ceramic skeleton, wire and conduit cores revealing the unfinished depth of its conception. Months were still to come before the final version—the one the Engineer had outlined in every minute detail and Morgana had refined with arcane glyphs that emitted a faint hum of contained power. The flight systems, tested only in simulations, blinked an optimistic “green”; the shielding lacked certification; the reactor pulsed within limits that even the Engineer himself, in hermetic reports, had classified as “audacious.”

Erick put on the armor anyway. Each servo motor squeaked as it adjusted nano-ceramic plates against his body, each joint feeling like a mechanical tendon that tensed and calibrated itself. When the last fastener clicked into place, he felt the cold weight of the metal and the almost organic pulse of the reactor pulsing inside his chest.

And then came the sky. The outer chamber opened with a shrill whistle, and he was sucked out by the instantaneous pressure. Below, the United States flowed like a mosaic of yellowish lights: highways snaking like trails of fireflies, cities blinking in a frenzy. The Gulf of Mexico gleamed in patches of silvery oil; the entire Peninsula – a thin strip of darkness and crystal – slipped away in twenty minutes of vision; Central America crossed his field of vision in a single blur. Until the immense blue gave way to the jagged profile of the island. He let himself fall upon it like a stone thrown at random, determined to shatter into fragments.

Two hours of flight just to confirm what he already knew before takeoff. He had arrived too late.

Jade had been taken long ago. And not only her: any clue with operational value—the identity of the kidnappers, the extraction method, the escape route—had been coldly erased with the precision of a professional scalpel. The only mark in the courtyard was a deep furrow, made by something enormous and heavy, but this narrowed the list of billion-dollar suspects down to a few hundred entities, organizations, or experiments—known and obscure. Information that revealed nothing.

He harbored suspicions, of course. But suspicion didn’t set a plan in motion. Suspicion didn’t chart a course. Accelerating it toward the wrong target would be worse than standing still: it would be burning the only trump card he had left, the element of surprise.

What was needed now was data. Clear data to orchestrate the perfect rescue.

His face, however, was an impenetrable mask of calm. Inside, a whirlwind. Not even the voices that used to whisper in the depths of his conscience dared to break the silence—they held back, withdrawn, like wild animals that sense the storm and fall silent so as not to attract attention. They knew that contained rage: it wasn’t fire in flames, but growing pressure, a column of dark water rising centimeter by centimeter, and he didn’t know what it would become when it reached the top.

One thing he understood: paying with his own body, enduring pain, seeing blood—he had accepted all of that the night he first opened his eyes, part of the pact he had made with himself. That he knew how to face.

What he still didn’t know how to deal with was the other side of the equation: exposing someone to danger, then seeing them not return.

It was the first time.

All the plans, operations, and calculated risks over the years—and never, not once, had he lost a single man he had sent. The first time. The words swirled in his skull like warped gears: “the first time.” The anger wasn’t a flame: it was pressure. And that pressure threatened to break any restraint.

He crouched down carefully, feeling the biting cold of the metal floor beneath his knees. Among the twisted rubble of the wall—pieces of concrete sprinkled with dust and twisted beams—gleamed an unusual fragment: a deformed bullet. Erick picked it up between his index finger and thumb, noting the surprisingly dense weight and the rough feel of the dark gray metal, crushed until it had lost all sense of being a projectile. Looking closer, the surface reflected small fissures, deep grooves that told a story of violent compression.

Suddenly, the armor on his right shoulder snapped. Articulated plates slid in sequence, echoing like ancient gears, until they revealed a small mechanical chamber—a round, relentless lens that tilted toward the bullet. Thin beams of blue and amber light intertwined in spirals over the fragment, mapping every micrometer of its deformation, tracing grooves and identifying minute impurities of exotic alloys embedded in the metal.

Erick raised his left palm and, in a firm gesture, concentrated luminous energy upon it. In a silent pulse, the light condensed into a volumetric hologram: the twisted bullet took shape in the air, rotated slowly, and then began to unfold from within. The folds of metal receded, the edges aligned with microscopic precision, and the tip reformed layer by layer, as if reassembling a puzzle from decades past. In a few seconds, the perfect bullet floated untouched before him, intact, exactly as it should have been before the crushing.

The sensors in his armor picked up the data: uncatalogued caliber, tip geometry absent from any commercial list, alloy with compounds unknown in conventional ammunition. ‘Unusual bullet, sir.’ Natasha’s voice sounded in his ear with its characteristic coldness, but today tinged with a hint of caution. ‘I’m cross-referencing the information with all the databases we have access to. If we don’t find it in our files, we’ll have to hack into some.’

He kept the hologram floating and advanced through the vault, whose walls were obscured by metallic reflections under the white light of the automatic flashlights. The scanner on his shoulder spun incessantly, capturing details that escaped the human eye, while a low, constant hum reminded everyone of the living presence of that ceramic and steel armor.

While his body moved forward, Erick’s mind raced through scenarios. The League of Assassins? They possessed global reach, military discipline, and a ruthless history—but they would never wage a pitched battle with tons of weaponry buried on an isolated island. Intergang? They had secret vaults linked to powerful figures; they would react brutally to a property violation, but they wouldn’t mount ambushes with the precision of a professional army. The United States government? Infinite resources, monstrous payrolls that public opinion denied existed, and institutional patience for long-lasting manhunts. Beyond them lay foreign agencies, international syndicates, and factions without even an official name.

The problem was the lack of certainty. And certainty was the only currency that mattered at that decision-making table.

There was an even bigger problem looming over him, a silent monster he refused to face—no gaze could change the past. That unforeseen event had toppled the first domino piece, set on a board his eyes couldn’t fully encompass. The vault before him, with its brushed steel walls and beams of sensors flashing red, belonged to extremely dangerous people. Jade’s capture involved him with even more lethal individuals. Soon all those pieces would begin to move in response, interests would collide in a muffled crash, and the shockwaves could spread in directions not even his most sophisticated models could foresee.

On another occasion, he would have lost himself in cold calculations, in endless simulations.
But now that mattered little. The moment was to rescue Jade. Let the rest of the world wait in line.

“Natasha.” The word came out low, tense, almost too slowly to echo in the metal space of the safe. Since the beginning of that crisis, he had maintained a functional silence, reacting only when ordered to. Once again: “Is the signal back?”

She raised her head, her face illuminated by the white monitors of the control station. “Negative, sir. Since we lost contact, the tracker emitted for a few minutes, like a dying whisper. Then it disappeared.”

Erick’s brow furrowed with the rigidity of twisted metal. It was improbable, impossible—and yet it had happened. Natasha hadn’t been able to identify who had attacked Jade the instant the signal was cut. It was too abrupt: a violent burst of light burned the suit’s sensors, a cold, acidic flash, saturating everything to the edge of distortion, and then… nothing. Static. A silence so dense that, minutes later, it repeated itself a second time, and that was the bang that made no sense.

He knew the tracker wasn’t attached to the suit’s fabric—those could fail, tear, be ripped off. That’s why the device had been implanted inside Jade’s body, in a discreet surgery: a “signal seed” lodged in the flesh, invisible to any scrutiny. If she were captured, knocked unconscious, or even killed—and he almost stepped on that word as if it were hot coals—the pulse would continue to echo, guiding him to her body. The signal’s range covered the entire planet and beyond: if they had taken her to the Moon, to Mars, he would know. After all, he had his own satellite, positioned precisely for this type of listening.

But the signal had simply disappeared.

It hadn’t weakened, it hadn’t been bogged down by frequency jammers. It had disappeared clean, completely — as if the captors had been expecting precisely this counterattack and had planned the response months in advance.

And this enraged him on an even deeper level, because the fault had his name etched into it in iron.

Erick possessed magical means. He always had. An arcane tracking link, a ritual anchor connected to her essence, not a chip: a spell powerful enough to bypass any technological cage. The idea had existed, sketched on some page of a forgotten notebook, but he pushed it aside in the face of so many demands—metal, primates in the lab, enchantment research, dimensional portals. That small gap was relegated to the back of his mind as an administrative detail.

The fact that he could have done more—and didn’t—was the bitterness that made the anger even more bitter.

But Erick had other options.

Resorting to them was irritating: they demanded a high price, humiliated his pride, and forced him to do favors for entities he could barely call “things.” Still, it was worthwhile. That night, any means would do.

Erick closed his eyes.
The low hum of the generators echoed through the vault, and the trembling hologram on his left hand dissolved into streaks of incandescent light. He raised his right palm, empty, and opened it toward the concrete and steel ceiling, where pale spotlights cast precise shadows. For an instant—perhaps an eternal sigh—he allowed himself only to breathe, digging within himself the door he preferred to keep locked.

Then, suddenly, her voice burst into song.

Not in English. They were primordial sounds, composed of harsh syllables that seemed to tear the throat as they escaped and lacerate the air as they existed. A guttural cadence rose and fell in intervals that no human instrument could reproduce. Each word had the weight of an ancient stone. Each phrase made the surrounding air freeze, as if the space itself took on a higher degree of cold.

First, the lights reacted.

The electrical fault that had been languishing in the circuits of the entire base convulsed in surges. The lights in the hall, as well as the vault door, began to flicker incessantly, emitting filament crackling and a low hum. Floors above, silent corridors trembled in intermittent flashes; in the deserted cafeteria, the central light fixture pulsed furiously, casting dancing shadows on the walls. In the surveillance room, the screens flickered: the sixteen monitors switched on and off as if trying to regain life. The entire installation trembled, like a heart in tachycardia obeying the rhythm of that voice.

Outside, across the narrow night, clouds that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere slid past the full moon and swallowed it completely. The darkness that enveloped the island thickened, descending in damp layers and tightening around every trail and every metal antenna.

Something moved from the shadows.

First, in the corners. In the spaces between the shelves laden with files, behind the sturdy columns of the hall, in the dark folds that the convulsive light could not reach. Vague shapes, unstable outlines—silhouettes that only existed where the light failed. And from them voices were born: overlapping whispers, dozens of sonic threads intertwining in the air, fragmented words that dissolved even before the mind tried to comprehend them.

Then, eyes appeared.

Incandescent points of a flaming red, opening in pairs, quartets, or even solitary amidst the shadows. Crimson as live embers, they floated at different heights—some skirting the ground in silent steps, others hovering three meters above, ascending one by one until the darkness around the vault was dotted with this sea of ​​fleeting lights.

Slowly, the lighting stabilized—but in a sickly way. The lamps reached a trembling, moribund level: a weak, cadaverous glow, unable to completely dispel the darkness that enveloped the corners, but strong enough to enclose the scene in a funereal twilight.

In the center of this ill-defined circle, under a single, more steady beam of light, Erick awoke.

The creatures surrounded him. Motionless silhouettes, silent breaths, and dozens of red eyes fixed on him with an attention that was neither servile nor affectionate. It was a pact sealed in the dark.

“These are the people who were inside this vault,” he said in a soft voice—and it was this calmness that sounded most terrifying. “Can you feel it?”

The answer came in sound: a collective rustling that climbed through the shadows as if a thousand invisible feet were scratching the earth, hidden nostrils sucking air in moist, voracious puffs, ethereal tongues licking the residue of violence and fear impregnated in every inch—rancid sweat, coagulated blood, cold gunpowder. The cacophony thickened, pulsating and hungry, like beasts pressed against the bars of a cage that only existed while the voice, there in the center, did not pronounce its final sentence.
“Find them.” Erick spun on his feet, his gaze cutting through each pair of silhouettes, each quartet gathered in a wedge, each flickering point of light. “I want location. I want them found. All of them.”

Whispers faded in a second. The silence that remained had the weight and texture of tension about to burst.

“They go.”

The world exploded in sound.

Paws thundering against the concrete, claws scraping the stone, hooves thundering in a gallop, the rhythmic thud of monstrous bodies gaining momentum. Above this clamor, the beating of wings in dozens of winged spindles—membranes and feathers clashing against the air in a thunder of living leather. In a single instant, the looted chamber sounded like an entire forest in panic, and then, with the first crack of a distant gunshot, dissolved into chaos, each creature dispersing in an explosion of energy.

The roar pierced through walls as if they didn’t exist: it seeped into the grooves of the torn steel, climbed up the empty elevator shaft, bled through the fractures of the concrete island towards the night sea, and just faded away, faded away, until only a distant echo remained.

And then the light came back on.

Stable, immaculate, almost cruel in its normality. The hall lamps relit with a serene glow, as if they had never wavered, and the safe reappeared before him in all its detail—bare shelves, twisted plates, dark burn marks, empty capsules that still smelled of destruction.

Erick stood there, motionless in the center of the room, alone again, staring at the crime scene as one stares at a broken mirror. He knew the price of what he had just spent. He knew how much they would charge later—in favors borrowed, in half-open doors to shadows he preferred to keep outside. The bill would come due. It always did.

But he would save his worries for later.

He raised his left hand one last time. At the top of his palm, the hologram of the reconstructed bullet appeared, delicate and precise, slowly rotating in the restored clarity, a small, incorruptible artifact full of answers yet to be discovered. Erick studied each metallic curve, each line of impact, engraving it in his mind. Then he spoke, in a whisper that seemed to pierce the emptiness of the vault, the dead island, and the surrounding ocean, reaching whoever held the fragment of his heart at that moment:
“Don’t worry, Jade. I’ll find you.”