Neo forced himself to maintain a calm façade, but the whispers gnawed ceaselessly at his nerves, threading through his thoughts like background radiation. At times they were meaningless murmurs, at times jagged shards of concepts, half-formed and incomplete, slipping directly into his subconscious.
He threw himself deeper into analysis, trying to rationalize everything with science. But logic was not enough. The whispers bled through reason, bypassing barriers, sliding into the cracks of his mind.
Then came the changes.
Reports from the outer sensor arrays arrived one after another. The abominations that haunted the wastelands were no longer roaming at random or driven only by hunger. Their movements began forming patterns—subtle, deliberate, converging.
From every direction, scattered packs were beginning to drift toward Prism Base. Even breeds that rarely approached this sector were drawing closer.
More disturbing still were the accounts from patrol squads. Certain aberrations—especially those with grotesque fusions of twisted flesh and scavenged metal—were behaving strangely. At set times, they would halt, turn toward the base, and stand perfectly still. As if… listening.
Some squads swore they heard it too: a deep, subterranean hum, almost identical to the low resonance Neo carried inside his skull.
Officially, Security Command dismissed it all as seasonal migration, or some ecological quirk not yet understood. But Neo knew better.
The synchronicity was too exact. The whispers in his head and the movements beyond the walls were connected. The relic was not whispering to him alone. It was broadcasting. A beacon. A call.
And something out there was answering.
Evelyn Kane had noticed as well. Patrols doubled. The outer walls were reinforced. Her face grew more troubled each day. Several times their paths crossed—her gray eyes lingered on him, heavy, searching. Each time she seemed on the verge of speaking, but only tightened her jaw and walked away. The look in her eyes said it plainly: You know something, don't you?
Meanwhile, Dr. Dane's team moved with a feverish contradiction. The researchers were elated, convinced the relic's increasing activity signaled an imminent breakthrough. Yet the encroaching threat forced delay after delay, their experiments frozen in a state of trembling anticipation.
Pressure built like a tightening noose.
And then—night shattered.
Neo was parsing one of the clearest whisper-logs he had ever recorded when a stabbing jolt tore through his chest. His vision warped—and then came the image.
A vision projected directly into his mind.
The endless wasteland. Shadows uncountable, twisted silhouettes dragging themselves forward, not in chaos, but in pilgrimage. They moved toward a single glowing point.
At the front marched giants—creatures unlike anything he had seen before. Hulking, misshapen, their bodies half-organic, half-machine, eyes gleaming with a fusion of madness and intent. Their heads lifted, and in the vision their gaze pierced rock and distance and time itself. They looked straight at him.
And then the base alarms screamed.
Sharper. Louder. More desperate than the warning that had heralded the burrower's attack.
"Alert! Massive abomination surge detected! Numbers—cannot be estimated! Vectors—approaching from all directions! Estimated contact in thirty minutes!"
"Warning! Multiple high-energy signatures detected! Classification: unknown aberrant strain! Designation: The Listeners!"
Neo bolted from the analysis chamber into chaos. Sirens wailed. Soldiers ran. Civilians scrambled for bunkers. Evelyn intercepted him mid-corridor, armored and armed, her squad racing at her back.
"What's happening?" Neo demanded.
Her face was grim, harder than steel. She thrust a tactical slate into his hands. Onscreen, drone feeds painted a nightmare: the horizon itself moving. Countless glowing eyes, tides of creatures crashing forward from every compass point.
At the vanguard towered horrors the size of hills. Their forms were blasphemous amalgams of flesh, steel, and bone. One even bore the grotesque silhouette of a mecha's upper frame, twisted into mockery. They moved not with frenzy, but with dreadful cohesion. Purpose.
The drone zoomed closer, and Neo's breath hitched.
The Listeners. Their eyes shone with hunger and devotion. They weren't looking at the walls. They weren't looking at the soldiers.
They were staring straight through the earth. Straight into Prism's depths. Straight at the relic.
And the whispers roared inside Neo's skull, no longer fragments but a tidal surge of broken meaning—warning, yearning, hunger, homecoming. The relic was alive with it. Was it terrified? Ecstatic? Or calling its children home?
Evelyn seized Neo's arm hard enough to bruise, her voice ragged with tension:
"Neo! Tell me the truth. Dane's damn artifact—what the hell has it summoned?! These things… they're not here to feed, are they?"
On the slate, the swarm surged closer, unstoppable, divine in their madness.
Neo's throat went dry. The whispers screamed in his head.
"They're not hunting," he croaked. "They're pilgrims."
He forced the words out, each one heavier than lead.
"They've come to answer a call. This isn't an attack, Commander. This is a war of faith. A war… to claim a god."
Evelyn's pupils contracted like gun barrels.
And Neo knew, with dreadful certainty, that his role had changed. No longer observer. No longer analyst.
The whispers had chosen him.
And in the war that was coming, he would either wield that voice—or be consumed by it.