The moment Kai hit the ground, he felt the wrongness in his bones. The air smelled like burnt copper and rot. Something hissed, mechanical and alive. He coughed once, groaning, palms scraping across what felt like dried blood crusted into the concrete.
He had been pulled through the rift and thrown at a wall.
The room was a processing center — industrial in build, brutal in intent. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, their buzz drowned by the slow whir of a scanning rig mounted on rails. The walls were steel-paneled, reinforced, stained in places with black tar that smelled like dead resonance. Caged soulprint fragments glimmered faintly in glass tanks stacked along the far wall, humming in broken sync. This was not a medical facility. It was a dissection chamber with paperwork.
A metal desk sat near the center, manned by a thin, bored-looking man with half-lensed goggles. He was hunched over a console, tapping controls with nicotine-stained fingers. Next to him was a tall woman with her spirit guardian fully manifested — a golden humanoid construct wrapped in cords of iron and ash. Its only purpose was clear from its frame: containment. Its arms were built like clamps, fingers replaced by sigil-inscribed tethers. Its chestplate read: [SPIRIT SUPPRESSION TYPE: 06-CAGE].
The third figure was crouched beside the wall, staring at Kai with glee. The ghoul. Its skin was pale, stretched thin over a ribcage too wide. From its back sprouted a nest of twitching black tentacles, each ending in twisted blade-bone. It gave off no resonance. No soulprint. It was resonance inverted — some sick fusion of human biology and corrupted rift matter.
Velnix slammed into the room a second later, her misty form erupting in snarls of shadow. Twelve coiling arms shot forward, aiming straight for the ghoul's face.
Before she could reach it, the containment-type guardian moved. Faster than Kai could follow, it snapped a tether across the room. It struck Velnix mid-air — and she screamed. Not in voice, but in that silent, internal agony that only Kai could hear. The cords wrapped around her, absorbing her into the guardian's torso with a hiss like cauterized flesh.
"Guardian sealed," the woman muttered, voice flat. "Soulprint suppressed. No backlash."
Kai reached forward instinctively, but the ghoul moved first.
"Well, well," it chuckled, slithering closer. Its voice was human, almost playful, but cracked in odd syllables like something learning language through mimicry. "You really chased me through a yellow rift. That's adorable. You got any idea where you are?"
I ignored and took a defensive stance
The desk worker glanced at Kai, adjusting something on the console. The scanner lit up red, passing a thin beam over Kai's body — his wrists, chest, head.
"He has an infinite pack of smokes," the operator muttered. "No visible core. Spirit guardian: sealed. No soul items beyond the cigarettes."
Kai turns pale. He thought about rushing back though the rift but as the thought came it got shut down.
Literally. The portal got shut down.
The women grabbed a sealed canister and walked away.
Holding Velnix
"You bastard I'll ki" Kai shouted
"Hush hush" the ghoul laughed and punched his gut.
The ghoul leaned close, sniffing Kai's face. "You're not from here. Not a local. That's rare."
Kai growled, trying to push up, but a blunt object slammed into the back of his shoulder, sending him crashing back down. One of the suppressor cords looped around his ankle, then his neck.
The containment woman didn't even blink.
"He's not bonded. No data tags. Toss him in the pit after extraction."
The ghoul grinned. "Nah. First… let's get to know each other."
---
They didn't walk him. They dragged him.
One suppressor cord yanked at his neck while another wrapped around his legs, forcing him into an awkward crawl as he choked on dust and blood. The ghoul followed gleefully, its bladed tentacles clicking against the floor with rhythmic hunger.
They reached a reinforced steel door near the back of the processing center. The suppressor guardian stepped forward and tapped a sequence into a control panel. The door hissed open — and a different kind of silence followed. The kind of silence that made Kai's skin crawl before he even saw the contents.
The room inside was wrong.
Tools. Everywhere. Bone saws. Crude syringes. Twisted pliers designed for soul anchors. A resonance drill still whirred lazily on a rack, humming against a blood-stained table. Chains hung from the ceiling, swaying gently. It smelled like copper and failure.
Kai kicked at the ground, screaming. "Let go of me! Get the hell off—!"
The suppressor cords reacted instantly. One wrapped around his jaw, snapping his teeth together with a violent click. Another forced his arms outward, locking him against a chair bolted to the floor.
The ghoul sighed theatrically. "You should've let me go, kid. That was your first mistake."
They strapped him in.
Arms. Legs. Neck.
The suppressor guardian's eyes flared once — then dimmed, returning to standby near the door.
The desk worker didn't follow them in.
Only the ghoul remained.
"You chased a monster through a rift," it whispered, moving to the rack. "And now you're gonna learn what kind of monsters wait on the other side."