Northern Cliffs – Perimeter of Site Omega
The wind here howled like a warning.
Elena stood at the edge of the crater with Marcus, Zara, and Rico at her back. Below them, nestled within broken rock and overgrown flux-corrupted trees, lay the ruin of Site Omega — the buried lab where Casian's echoes still lingered.
None of them spoke at first.
They all felt it — the heavy, oppressive pull in the air. Not just flux, but something worse. Twisted. Intelligent.
Marcus gripped the hilt of his flux-etched baton.
"Feels like the place itself remembers what happened here."
Rico nodded slowly. "It does. It wants us to remember too."
________________________________________
Infiltration
The entry tunnel had partially collapsed, forcing them to use flux enhancements to descend. Elena manipulated gravity to lighten their fall, while Marcus reinforced the structure with pulsing bursts of stabilized flux. Zara used silence fields to muffle the movement.
Rico walked last, flickering with copies. One of them whispered:
"You're walking into your own birthplace, you know."
He didn't respond.
Inside, Site Omega looked like a corpse: sterile, rotting, half-lit by backup power. But flickers of strange energy pulsed in the air — dark signatures, weak but coiled like coals waiting for breath.
They passed broken containment pods. Most were shattered. Some still held human-shaped stains burned into glass.
Zara touched one gently. "They were children."
Elena tightened her grip on her gauntlet. "No. They were test subjects. We're going to end this."
________________________________________
Deeper Truths
In the command center, Rico accessed the mainframe. Flux-coded encryption filled the interface.
He stared at it for a long time.
"Half this data is written in a feedback loop. It's… my pattern. My energy signature."
Marcus leaned over. "You mean they used your flux as a passcode?"
Rico shook his head. "No. I mean… they used me as a template. For all of them."
He tapped a screen. Dozens of silhouettes appeared — failed subjects, Wraithborn hybrids, clones that broke down at birth.
Zara gasped. "They weren't just testing Awakening. They were trying to manufacture it."
"And you," Rico whispered, "were the one that worked."
________________________________________
Casian Arrives
The lights dimmed.
Then surged.
Casian's voice echoed from overhead.
"You found the nursery. Good. That means you're ready."
A panel on the far wall slid open.
From it stepped the woman Elena had seen in fragments of memory.
Porcelain face. Flux-thread hair. Eyes like oceans full of drowned memories.
Subject Zero.
Casian's voice followed.
"She was the first. The mother. The blueprint. Before Rico, before the Wraithborn. And she still remembers everything."
Subject Zero raised a hand.
And the walls began to melt.
________________________________________
Battle with Zero
Subject Zero didn't move like a fighter — she flowed. Her attacks weren't physical strikes. They were memories, pulled from the minds of the team and weaponized as illusions.
Elena suddenly stood inside the burning restaurant again — her brother screaming. The fire closing in.
She screamed back — and gravity fractured the memory, shattering the illusion.
Marcus fought off the weight of every broken bone he'd ever suffered — reliving pain, again and again.
Rico's copies turned on him. Each one whispering truths he tried to forget.
"You're not real."
"You're just the version they let live."
"You weren't born. You were chosen."
Zara dropped to her knees, overwhelmed by memories that weren't hers.
But then she saw through the pain — realized the truth.
"These aren't illusions," she gasped. "She's burning them into us."
"She's trying to make us like her."
________________________________________
Flux Unbound
Elena took a step forward.
Her eyes burned with awakened flux.
"I'm done being defined by my past."
She stomped the ground.
Gravity reversed.
Subject Zero was flung upward, pinned to the ceiling.
Marcus leapt, delivering a crushing upward strike, reinforced by every scar he carried.
Zara released a precision burst — a memory detonation that stripped Zero's mental grip for half a second.
Rico moved last. Five copies surrounded Zero. Each one whispered different things.
"You can't rewrite me."
"You can't erase me."
"I am what I choose to be."
"You're not my origin."
"I am my own story."
And in perfect sync, they struck.
Zero shattered — not in blood, but in fragments of memory. Crystals, sparks, and flux mist fell like broken glass.
________________________________________
Casian's Final Message
The air stilled.
Casian's voice echoed one last time.
"Well done. Truly. You've proven yourselves."
"But this was never about power. It was about choice. And now, with the truth laid bare, your real journey begins."
The screens went dark.
Zara turned to the others. "We shut down the facility. But the data — the projects — they're already in the wild."
Elena looked at them all.
Rico. Marcus. Zara.
"Then we go after him. No more shadows. No more running.
From now on, we define what Flux means."