The village didn't look broken.
That was the unsettling part.
Luma stared out from the ridge where their skycraft had landed. Below, nestled in the crook of a forest clearing, was a quiet settlement with tidy homes and swaying lanterns. Children ran in the distance. Smoke rose from chimneys. Normal. Peaceful.
But it wasn't.
The moment she stepped onto the dirt path leading toward it, something felt wrong. The air was thick—not just with mist, but with a pressure she couldn't explain. Like the whole world was trying to hold its breath and couldn't remember how.
"Do you hear that?" she asked.
Ion tilted his head. "Hear what?"
"Exactly."
There were no birds. No insects. No whisper of wind in the leaves. Just a steady, irregular thrum… like a heartbeat, but mechanical.
As they entered the village, the signs became clearer.
A child opened their mouth to laugh—but the sound didn't match the motion. It came late, as if it had traveled through syrup. A lantern flickered in time with something invisible. When Luma waved her hand in front of her face, the motion left faint afterimages, like echoes of her own movement struggling to catch up.
"This is… messed up," she muttered.
Ion nodded grimly. "Localized disruption of electromagnetic coherence. The Masters are tampering again."
Inside a small communal hall, a group of villagers sat silently. One woman reached for a glass of water—her hand phased through the rim before it reappeared in the right spot. She didn't react.
"They don't even know it's happening," Luma whispered. "Like they've adapted."
"No," Ion said. "They've been altered. Their neurons are firing out of sync with the environment. Subtle electromagnetic tampering can do that—scrambling timing cues, distorting wave transmission."
Luma placed her hand on the wall, focusing. The gauntlet buzzed and mapped invisible wave patterns into her vision.
"There's a pulse," she said. "Below the surface. Almost like a buried amplifier. Constant, rhythmic. Like someone set up a beacon… or a test."
Ion's expression darkened. "This isn't natural. This is a proof-of-concept."
Suddenly, a faint whine pierced the air—rising, fluctuating—and then the lights in the hall shattered in synchronized bursts.
The villagers barely flinched.
"We're leaving," Ion said sharply.
They stepped back into the open, and as they did, Luma clenched her fists.
"How do they keep doing this?" she snapped. "Every time we confront them, they just… vanish. Not like they run. They just disappear."
Ion sighed and knelt by their campfire from the night before. He reached into his satchel and retrieved something wrapped in cloth. Carefully, he unwrapped it: a smooth obsidian cube.
"This," he said, "is a phased displacement node."
He tapped it, and the cube floated gently, humming low and steady.
"It bends space—not fantasy, not teleportation. It manipulates refractive indices. A cloak. It warps light, sound, even thermal and motion cues."
Luma frowned. "So… it makes them invisible?"
"More than that," Ion said. "It makes them imperceptible. This prototype interferes destructively with all incoming stimuli. To the world, you're just… not there."
"And they have miniature versions of this?"
"Woven into their cloaks. They activate in milliseconds. That's why they 'disappear.' Not magic. Just terrifyingly advanced optics and wave manipulation."
Luma leaned closer, staring at the cube. "Can we counter it?"
"Not yet. But if we can generate inverse harmonics—something that disrupts the cloaking wave—we might expose them. We're close. But not close enough."
She touched the cube gently, and it pulsed once, like it felt her question.
"They're using physics to hide," she whispered. "So we'll use it to reveal."
Ion gave a small, proud nod.
That night, she didn't sleep much.
She lay on her side, watching the stars flicker above the treetops, hearing that hidden pulse below the village beat like a countdown.
Meanwhile… in a cavern beneath the continent's skin
Saren stood before a curved table etched with schematics. Behind him, strange metal coils rose from the ground like fossilized trees. Each pulsed with low, layered frequencies—waves interfering, converging, twisting.
Before him, a half-built device rested on an elevated dais: coils, rotating gyroscopes, resonance chambers etched with spiral patterns.
The Entropy Engine had begun.
He didn't speak. He didn't smile.
But as the hum rose, the air in the chamber rippled, as though the laws of physics themselves had begun to grow nervous.