The Mission Begins – Faultline District
Rain battered the rooftops of the derelict industrial zone known as Faultline — a grid of fractured concrete, rusting steel, and broken memory. Once a center of flux-tech development, the district was abandoned after an experiment ruptured the leyline beneath it.
Now, it pulsed with unstable energy. The perfect storm for a Wraithborn resurgence.
Team Flux had been dispatched to investigate increased flux anomalies. What they didn't know — couldn't know — was that Elena's own awakening had begun to tear at its core.
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Elena hovered just inches above the cracked ground, her boots never quite touching. The others walked. She drifted — instinctively lighter, more disconnected with every passing hour. Her body remained anchored, but her sense of place wavered.
Even her voice felt thinner to her own ears.
"Zara, anything?" she asked.
Zara paused, eyes closed, scanning the psychic residue around the shattered architecture.
"There's pain," she murmured. "But… not just pain. Regret. It's fresh. Human."
"Then someone's still here," Marcus said, tightening the wrap around his fists.
Rico frowned. "Or something that remembers being human."
They moved cautiously, weapons and flux at the ready, unaware that Faultline was more than a trap.
It was a mirror.
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Unseen Gravity – The Build-Up
As they entered the remnants of an old testing lab, something shifted.
The hallway elongated unnaturally. Light bent. Walls seemed to push outward, groaning under invisible pressure.
"Elena?" Marcus said sharply.
"I feel it," she whispered. "The gravity… it's wrong. But not external. It's me."
Her heart pounded as she tried to compress the field, center herself. But her flux didn't respond. It resisted.
Like something inside her was unraveling — and pulling the world with it.
Zara turned, wide-eyed. "Your personal field… it's destabilizing. The radius is over 40 meters and expanding."
Rico looked around. "Guys. My copies can't sync. One of them just imploded."
"Everyone out—" Marcus began, but it was too late.
The corridor around them folded.
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Flux Collapse – The Event Horizon
It didn't explode. It didn't shatter.
The space between molecules simply stopped obeying rules.
Gravity went inward. Then outward. Then nowhere at all.
Dust froze midair. Metal warped like wax. Elena floated, eyes wide, unable to breathe — not because there was no air, but because her body didn't know where "down" was anymore.
The others tried to reach her, but every step pulled them sideways, like time and space were spiraling apart.
Zara screamed, "She's collapsing the field! If it hits critical, she'll crush this entire block!"
Marcus ripped open the case Thorne had given him. Inside: a simple-looking bracer inscribed with archaic sigils and a black flux crystal embedded in its center.
He ran toward Elena, body breaking apart under the gravitational strain.
"Elena!" he shouted, forcing himself forward inch by inch. "Focus on me!"
"I can't—!" Her voice cracked. "I'm not here anymore!"
"Yes, you are. You're still you. You're just… spread out. You need a center."
He reached her.
Clamped the bracer around her wrist.
The Counterweight activated.
A pulse. A tether.
The collapsing field halted like a snapped thread. The weight of her power yanked inward — violently — and for a moment, time stilled.
Then:
Gravity reasserted.
The hallway crashed back into place, violently compressing in a thunderous quake. Everyone hit the ground hard.
Silence followed.
Then — Elena exhaled.
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Aftermath – The Truth in the Silence
Elena sat on the ground, shaking, wrapped in her own arms. The bracer now glowed faintly against her skin, flux lines stabilizing her pulse, feeding her micro-adjustments.
Zara knelt beside her, eyes serious. "That wasn't a power spike. That was a threshold event."
Marcus leaned against the cracked wall. "What does that mean?"
Zara met his eyes. "She's entering Evolution Stage."
Rico whistled low. "That's supposed to take years."
"It does," Zara said. "Unless you've already been Awakened before."
The air chilled.
Elena looked up, voice raw. "What do you mean 'before'?"
Zara hesitated. Then pulled something from her coat — the memory shard she had stolen from the vault beneath the university.
She placed it in Elena's hand.
It glowed on contact.
Images surged:
A collapsed reactor.
Dozens of bodies.
Children. Crying.
Elena, younger. Screaming. Gravity crushing everything around her.
A memory she had buried. One she wasn't supposed to survive.
She had Awakened once before.
And someone had erased it.
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Final Scene – Circle Watchpoint
High above Faultline, Casian and Mira observed the gravity signature on a spectral map.
"She accessed the memory," Mira said.
Casian nodded. "And still survived. That makes her…"
Vincent stepped forward, watching the signal flicker and fade.
"A candidate for Stage Two Ascension," he said. "But unstable. She'll need another fracture to break the rest."
Casian frowned. "You want her to lose control again?"
Vincent smiled faintly.
"No. I want her to remember what she did…
and who helped her forget."