They advanced slowly.In line.Rifles raised.
The air seemed to freeze as they approached the Tower.
The black silhouette, motionless,remained suspended fifty meters above the ground.Hands clasped behind its back.Head bowed.Unfathomable.
— Nothing to report...no thermal interference,no wave variation,whispered one of the soldiers.
— We stick to observation protocol.No firing without clear orders.
Then...the unthinkable.
A snap.Dull.Almost muffled.
A shot fired.By accident.
The weapon slipped.Sweat,panic,angle...the finger faltered.
The projectile never reached its target.
It was absorbed by the air itself.
Then,the silhouette slowly raised its hand.
With a simple gesture...it levitated the culprit.
The soldier struggled,arms and legs flailing,in an abnormal silence.
Then he imploded.
A black breath.Internal compression.
No blood.No screams.
Just...erasure.
Time suspended.Then hell.
The other soldiers screamed.They fired.Unleashed their weapons like possessed men.
All...were erased.
Without violence.Like calculation errors.
Nothing remained.Not even their shadows.
Except one man.Prostrate.Stunned.Helmet still on.
A communications technician.
He had not raised his weapon.He had not moved.
And at that moment,he understood.
The entity...had only struck those who had tried to interfere.
— Echo Base-3?Do you copy?Respond immediately.
Silence.
— Echo Base-3, this is Global Headquarters.You were to observe only.What is your status?
Voices followed one another.Nervous.
The communications technicianstared at his screen, pale.
The signals of the thirteen soldiers...had gone out.One by one.In less than six seconds.
— Complete line outage on Echo-3,confirmed an analyst.
— No thermal trace.No shockwave detected.No residue.
In the room,the general sat up slowly.
He knew what it meant.
Not an attack.Not a retaliation.
A... sentence.
— An erasure anomaly,whispered an engineer.
— You mean...?
— They are not dead.— ...— They have been deleted.
A secondary screen blinked.
Only one beacon remained active.
A technician, alive, panicked,voice trembling:
— He...he only touched those who fired.Only them.
— What do you mean, "touched"?
— He...he erased them.
A long silence fell in the room.
Then, slowly,the cameras around the other Towersstarted crackling.
A signal was arriving.
It was not an image.Nor a sound.
It was... a vibration.
The entity was about to speak.
A sound was heard.No...sound is not the right word.
It was a call,without timbre or frequency,a vibration that did not resonate in the air...but in the soul.
The first to hear itfell to their knees.
Some collapsed,convulsing,hands pressed against their temples.
Others, even more sensitive,bled from the ears,or vomited black blood.
In the meeting room,a woman in uniform screamed.
But her scream never came out.Her vocal cords had just ruptured...without her opening her mouth.
A young diplomat tried to flee the room —his eyes went blankbefore he even reached the door.
His mind...had been shattered.
On the floor,the most awakened trembled.
Their bodies reacted.
But it was not human fear.
It was an instinctive reaction,visceral,to something that had no place in this reality.
In every known language,no word could conveywhat the Guide had just stated.
And yet...
It was not a threat.It was not an attack.
It was a simple sentence.
But it carried the weight of anAbsolute Concept.
A notionthe human soul could not contain.
In the air,the seventeen silhouettes remained motionless.
Only their lips moved...slowly...perfectly synchronized.
Their words, infused with Magia,were untranslatable,but their reverberation was universal.
Then, after eighteen seconds —silence returned.
Suddenly.Absolute.
The silhouette, still suspended halfway up the tower,stopped speaking.
It sighed.A long sigh...without irritation.Without anger.
Just...cold disappointment.
Its gaze swept the world,the seventeen observation points.
And, without a word,without any apparent gesture,the wave stopped.
Those who had survived direct exposurefell unconscious.
The others...were only beginning to feel the side effects.
The Guide's voice was about to change.Not for them.But so the rest could survive.
It then tried another language.Not theirs.
But a bridge language,designed for inter-species exchanges —
the one used in the higher spheres,on connected planets,in civilizations three cycles ahead.
A stable language,precise,universal in the universe...except here.
Not a single frown.Not a twitch of understanding.Nothing.
Empty stares.Useless whispers.
A handful of automatic translatorsstarted crackling into the void,unable to interpret a single phoneme.
The Guide, suspended in the air,seemed... to sigh.
Slowly.
Like a tired teacherfacing a class of stones.
Its shoulders dropped.Its head barely turned.
And in this slight tilt,one read what words had not yet said:
disgust.
The Guide stopped speaking.It did not sigh this time.
It watched.
Its invisible eyesseemed to scan the crowd...then stop.
On an old man.
Sitting in the second row,back straight,suit too large,clear gaze despite age.
He did not tremble.
He was not listening —he understood.
As if recognizing...an ancient breath.
The Guide barely nodded.
A discreet wave swept the air,almost imperceptible,but the man shivered.
And then, he spoke again.
A dead language.A dust language.But a root language.
Latin.
A few words, carefully chosen.A visible effort,almost humiliating.
Like a sovereign forced to stammerin the language of a forgotten people.
— Ecce veritas systematis. Ordo, selectio, ascensus.
A fraction of the room jerked.Eyes widened.Scholars.Monks.Linguists.
But...barely twenty out of thousands.
The Guide froze.
Slowly, a cold anger replaced the shadow of hope.
It had just lowered its dialect,lowered its thoughtto the cultural bone of a backward planet —
and less than 1% had reacted.
A chilling murmur rose around it.
It had not come to dialogue.It had come to announce the beginning of the end.
It spoke no more.It no longer needed to.
With a simple blink of an eye —or maybe it was a beat of the world —
words began to imprint minds.
Directly.Without voice.Without sound.
One sentence.Then two.Then a flood.
Each heard itin their own mother tongue,with chilling precision.
Not a translation.An imposition.
It forced the brain to understand.
Even the illiterate.Even the comatose.Even the undead of progress.
"Pitiful embryos of consciousness.You think you are the center.You are not even a contour."
Men fell to their knees,overcome with nausea.
Others cried without knowing why.
The pain was not physical.It was... ontological.
"You are not observed.You are tolerated.And for the majority of you —barely."
The Guide poured out its discourselike one empties a bag of garbage.
But in this absolute stench,some felt a difference.
A few...received a silence.
No insult.No disdain.
Just a pause.
Their hearts slowed.
As if someone, somewhere,had just noted their name.
— What you call "Tower"... is a manifestation.A fractal expression.A branching of what your words cannot define.
But so that your mindsdo not collapse at the first exchanges,
I will keep your terminology.
Call it "Tower,"if it soothes you.
— I am the assigned entity.
Neither savior.Nor god.Nor judge.
I am the Guide.
Systemically linked to your world,and your species.
— Some of youhave already been selected.
Not for your strength.Nor for your will.But because the criteria demanded it.
A first integration has begun.
And if the systemic need justifies it,others will follow.
— The Axis is a cosmic filter.A path.An ascension.
Those who resist its Trialswill receive what you call power.
But it will only be a permission.A temporary right,reversible,conditional.
Because the Axis grants nothing.It lends.And takes back.
— Your species has been freed from its chains.
The old barriers have been broken.
Those of awakening.Those of the dimensional lock.Those of your cosmic ignorance.
But you have not yet realized it.
Some will understand.Many will die.And among the survivors...Few will be worthy.
— I have scrutinized your existences.Observed your structures.Weighed your thoughts.
Nothing you are...deserves attention.
— You do not create.You reproduce.You do not understand.You consume.
— Your mental noise is a parasitein the fabric of the planes.
Your ambitions,ego's excrementsthrown on ruins.
And your civilizations?Shaky scaffolding,built on lies...by children playing at being gods.
— I have seen life formscrawl in the primordial abysses,whose consciousness surpassed yoursby a billion years.
And never have I judged them so...pitiful.
— Even fractal insectsof dead moonssing with more order,more grace,more beauty...
than your civilizationsthat bleat for survival.
— You are not a race.You are a propagation error.A systemic degenerationborn from a holein the matrix of laws.
A phenomenon...tolerated,because the Axis does not judge.
But me?I see.
— It would have been better if you had remainedlocked in your sleep.If the cage had stayed sealed.
Because now that you have glimpsed Infinity...Infinity will see you too—
He stopped.His eyelids barely narrowed.
A beat.
His gaze had just crossed something.Someone.
— N-no...It's imp—...Im... p-p-p...
His voice broke.His breath stopped.
He stepped back half a pace,levitating.
A silence felllike a shroudover the entire globe.
His pupils,of absolute black,trembled.
— ...you.
One word.Muffled.Charged with pure terror.
And in the floating mist,about a hundred meters from the Tower,two silhouettes remained motionless.
Kael.Torso partially bare,marked by Magia,eyes half-closed.
And Thana.Calm.Upright.A cold smile hanging on her lips.
Arms crossed,as if she had been waiting for this momentfor centuries.
The Guide stared at them.
And for the first time since the beginning of its appearance...it was sweating.
The Guide slowly turned its eyes away.Its gaze had crossedsomething it should not have seen.
Or rather...someone it had sworn never to mention again.
A freezing silencesettled in the air.
Heavier than a thousand threats.More real than any declaration.
He resumed.Voice lower.Less steady.
— I...remind you that this...is not a declaration of hostility.
This message is not meant...to trigger confrontation.
A slight tremorran through his hand.
— Some...beings...— some presences here...must under no circumstancesbe included in this protocol.
He dared not look at them again.He did not even dare to think their names.
He merely added,avoiding eye contact:
— An exclusion clause has been established.— Out of respect.— Out of necessity.
One word failed him.He wanted to continue,but his throat tightened.
His voice broke.
— ...and I...He stammered.
— I conclude.— The system will continue its process.
A black rift opened behind him.
He stepped back.Then a second step.
Without ever turning his backto the source of his terror.
And just before disappearing:
— ...Thank you for not having... deleted me.
Then he vanished.Fleeing.
A sharp painpierced his skull.
A dry voice,mechanical.Foreign to the Guide.
— Candidate identified.— Trial succeeded.— Validation sequence in progress...
Silence.Then:
— Validation complete.
— [Conqueror – Kael Valtheris]— [Race: Human – Universe ΣΩ-51943 – Terra]— [Potential: Incalculable]
Then...nothing.
But suddenly:
— [Anomaly detected]— [Direct link established with Axis ΣΩ]— [Permission: Granted]— [Instance: Thanatos... observed]
The voice went silent.The Guide, itself,did not move.
Then disappearedthrough the rift.