The Hades System's catastrophic failure and the blooming of the Void slit doused every internal quarrel in Prism like a bucket of ice. Animal instinct—survive—overrode factional calculation.
For a moment, all political games stopped. Dr. Dane's fevered obsession, Leighton's hard pragmatism, Evelyn's iron command—they all stood pale and mute, staring at the widening, light-devouring blackness outside the observation window.
Silence broke into raw panic.
"Report! The spatial fissure is expanding! Growth rate: 0.3 meters per second!"
"Everything touching the fissure's edge… even air… is disappearing!"
"Energy readings—unreadable! Local physical laws failing at the fringe!"
Systems inside the base, already strained by overload, spat sparks. Parts of the cavern plunged into darkness and nausea-inducing dread. An invisible psychic pressure pressed down on everyone, inducing heart-racing fear and hallucinations.
"We must shut it down!" Evelyn snapped back to life first. She grabbed the nearest, almost-collapsed engineer. "Is there a reversal routine for the Hades System? An emergency shutdown?"
The engineer shook his head like a man bereft of hope. "No… Commander… Hades was designed as a one-way extraction-and-release lattice. We… we never built a reverse. Nobody ever expected to have to close a spatial tear."
Dane pushed forward, scholar's zeal replaced by raw terror. "It's a dimensional rupture! Forcing the Primordial Relic exceeded the containment point of this local spacetime! We must compute the fissure's stability parameters and neutralize it with inverse fields—now!"
Leighton shoved aside anyone in his path with the bluntness of a man who'd spent his life solving physical problems with muscle and hard orders. Rage and fear twisted his face.
"You maniacs! You poked that thing and now we all pay the price! Compute? Neutralize? Organize an evacuation—abandon Prism!" he roared.
"Evacuate?" Evelyn's eyes were bloodshot with strain. "Leighton, the wastes outside are a sea of abominations and that Dominator lurks. Without Prism's protection, we are meat! Besides—if this fissure keeps growing, it will swallow the region. Where would we even run?"
"Better to die running than die waiting here!" Leighton bellowed.
The high command fractured into a screaming stalemate. Evacuation vs. repair. Time melted. The rift's diameter had already grown tens of meters.
Neo wrenched his attention inward despite the nausea and the howl in his skull. The relic's whispers were gone; in their stead, a thin, broken, grieving keening came through—almost as if the Primordial Relic itself was being lacerated by the Void.
And then another mind reached him—not from inside the base but from the outer swarm. The Dominator's consciousness hovered near the perimeter, and its signal was not pure hunger or battle frenzy now. It carried warning, urgency—an oddly pleading panic.
Error… container breached… Devourer awakens… must… repair…
Neo's skin prickled. The Dominator—this apex aberrant that had led the pilgrimage—perceived the Void as a world-ending threat to its own kind. It called the Void a "Devourer," and the tone suggested a desire to fix what was broken.
Neo sprang to his feet and cut through the command room's cacophony. "Stop arguing!" he shouted, voice raw. "The Dominator isn't trying to kill us—it's trying to repair this! It—wants to fix the fissure!"
The room stared at him as if he'd gone mad. Leighton, skeptical and furious, sneered. "You expect us to trust a monster?"
"Not trust—symbiosis, or necessity," Neo said quickly. He relayed the fragments he'd felt—the Dominator's fractured intent, the warning that the Void would destroy both prey and predator. Perhaps the Dark Tide had been a failed attempt at repair; perhaps the abominations were twisted guardians trying to prevent further catastrophe.
It was a paradigm-shattering claim. If true, their enemies might be their only allies.
"How sure are you?" Evelyn demanded.
"Not sure—only an interpretation of their neural patterns," Neo answered honestly. "But it's the only non-suicidal option we have. Evacuate and we die out there. Blindly force a fix and we might incinerate ourselves. Maybe… maybe we can contact the Dominator. Maybe it has knowledge about the relic and the fissure we don't."
Leighton spat. "Cooperate with monsters? You're insane."
But a sliver of reason crept into other minds. Dane, the scientist, abandoned ideology and spoke like a man clinging to the only tool left: pragmatism. "If Neo's sensing is even partly right, the Dominator could indeed possess ancient, nonhuman knowledge about how the relic and fissures interact. It is our only chance."
Evelyn weighed the options—the lives already lost, the widening black maw above their heads. She made a decision that would define her command.
"Neo—try to contact it," she ordered at last. "Dane, get everything to augment his signal. Leighton—mobilize engineering to shore up structural integrity around the fissure. Prepare an evacuation contingency; don't delay the work, but have exits ready."
It was a two-pronged gamble: reach for a monstrous hand while keeping a human exit in reserve.
The base surged into a macabre choreography. Leighton, spiteful but pragmatic, threw manpower at emergency bracing. Engineers dumped scarce materials into bolts and arches. The research teams rerouted every computation cluster to boost Neo's interface, turning the first-of-its-kind psychic bridge into a tactical operation.
Neo was brought to the communications node closest to the relic—where interference was strongest and the relic's own field made human speech meaningless. Every joule of compute and amplifier Prism could throw at the problem concentrated behind him.
He closed his eyes. He slowed his breath until his heartbeat became a metronome. He shed anger and fear and let one simple, urgent will shape his mind.
"Fissure—danger… cooperate… repair…" he sent, stringing intention into thought like beads on a wire.
He repeated it, each attempt like tossing a fragile bottle into a black ocean. At first—the void. Silence. The Dominator's reply was reflexive recoil. But the crisis tightened the knot: perhaps desperation opened channels that pride kept closed.
Gradually, a response arrived—not words but a storm of shaggy impressions, raw and enormous:
Fragile… container… understand… limited…
Error… must… correct… cost… immense…
Open… channel… guide… energy… return…
Fragmented, metaphoric, and agonizingly ambiguous. The Dominator signaled agreement to cooperate but warned: repair demands a titanic price and requires a reversal of the Hades extraction—the system must be turned into a conduit to channel energy back into the relic.
Neo reported everything to Evelyn and Dane. The implications swirled like coals.
"Reverse Hades?" Dane murmured, face paling. "You mean—feed the diverted energy back into the Relic? That's possible in principle, but the energies involved could destabilize it further—an explosion, or worse…"
"What is the cost?" Evelyn asked.
Neo shook his head. "I don't know. Its communication is saturated with resignation and sacrifice. There's a sorrow there like something old and final."
Time bled. The fissure widened another ring; the whole cavern shuddered.
"Do it," Evelyn said. "We'll try a controlled reverse. Dane—compute reverse feed parameters. Leighton—brace and be ready to evacuate at my order. Neo—keep talking."
It was frantic, audacious, and terrifyingly thin on guarantees. But it was the only lantern in the pitch.
Prism did the impossible. Computers rerouted power into inverse-phase drives. Engineers reworked the Hades lattice on the fly, reconfiguring conduits to accept, rather than expel, the Relic's current. Soldiers bolstered the chamber around the fissure as best as they could in the panic.
Neo focused his mind like a ritual. He no longer tried to dominate the contact; he became a channel. Simple intent: Repair. Guide. Close. Protect.
At first, the Dominator's responses were fractured echoes:
Return… energy… fold… align…
Pain… price… bond… severed parts…
Then a deeper pulse: Open path—anchor—draw back—teach—
It seemed willing to lead, but its language hinted the cost would be dire.
Evelyn's voice carried through the noisy command racks. "Begin energy reflow. Slowly—monitor structural coupling."
The lattice hummed. Ancient conduits, the ones laid in the earliest days, began to accept power in reverse. The Hades lines throbbed like veins taking blood back into a wound.
For a few breathless minutes, something miraculous unfurled. The fissure's jagged edge slowed its growth. The blackness' devour rate eased. Sensors flickered from red toward orange.
But nothing in this world gives without taking.
As energy was fed back, the Relic convulsed. The keening that had been a thin whimper deepened into a roar that shook bones. Through Neo, images flooded: sealed chambers reopening in choking light; shapes once shoved into corners pressed into healing frames; something like sewn wounds being knotted—but with a price.
The Dominator's thought came back, clear and blunt: Sewing costs. Exchange demanded. Flesh for stitch. Anchor requires sacrifice of mass—living mass.
Evelyn's jaw clenched. "Define sacrifice," she demanded, voice brittle.
Give. The answer was absolute.
Neo's blood ran cold. The metaphoric language could mean anything—energy expenditure, system losses, lives taken. But the dread in his gut pushed him toward a truth: this fix would demand life. The relic wanted to be mended; its healing required something in the real world to be consumed.
And the fissure continued to pulse, inch by inch. Prism had bought time, but not absolution. The Dominator's continued cooperation implied willingness to pay its part—the twisted guardians that had come like pilgrims had their own dues. But would the cost ask them to be the price, or us?
Evelyn rolled every risk in her head. She could not gamble lives blindly. Yet the alternative—doing nothing—was certain death in slow, devouring silence.
"Proceed," she ordered finally, voice cracking but definite. "Do what you must to stabilize the fissure. Maximize the guidance field. And Leighton—if at any point the balance tips, you have authority to trigger the evacuation. We maintain a human exit."
The base became a single, terrible organism: engineers humming like feverish medics, soldiers stationed as human shields, researchers monitoring arcane waveforms, Neo a nervy bridge between two alien minds.
Neo's voice, thin and steady, relayed the Dominator's commands: "Focus energy phase at core. Modulate frequency to match the relic's pulse. Shift lattice phasing to open a return channel."
Little by little the fissure's inexorable hunger slowed. The black center thinned like a bruise being drained. The air pressure stilled. Soldiers who had moments before knelt in mortal fear now whispered prayers, breath fogging in recycled air.
But every meter of stabilization cost them. Power banks burned. Sections of exterior wall sagged. Several outposts ceased functioning as their souls—human technicians—fell asleep at consoles or passed out from overload. The Dominator's guiding waves demanded extreme kinetic alignment; alignment demanded energy and—Neo's mind screamed—tribute.
When the first clear sign came—that the Void's devouring edge actually receded by a full half meter—cheers rose in the command room. It was raw and stunned and terrified.
Yet Neo realized the last currency exchanged to achieve that retreat was not stored energy. He saw, like an ugly reflection, the ledger of cost: a pattern of silence in field units, a lurching loneliness in the mind of a soldier who had felt something pulled from him. The repair took from life—somehow nicking the living, thinning them, taking little pieces until the matrix would hold. Whether it took will, lifespan, or something stranger, he could not say.
As the operation continued, the Dominion's tone shifted: less desperation, more weary instruction. The Dominator, for all its monstrous form, seemed to mourn the necessity of exchange.
Prism had won a reprieve. The fissure steadied. The black spot shrank to a darker coin at the sky's center. The swarm in the wastes, sensing the retreat, hesitated, and then withdrew in ragged, fearful waves.
But celebration would be short-lived. The knowledge burned into Neo was simple and terrible: the fix was possible, but it required sacrifice. The relic could be stabilized—if Prism agreed to bleed precious things back into it. The Dominator could guide the repair—but it would not be a painless mending. Something would be given up. Perhaps lives. Perhaps years. Perhaps something the engineers had no vocabulary to measure.
Evelyn looked at Neo, at their battered crew, and then at the shrinking blackness overhead. In her eyes there was a steel-hard truth: survival would demand bargains that might strip them of what made them human.
And Neo—once a lone engineer from another world—stood in the center of the bargain, the fragile mediator between a rescued relic and a base that had just learned that salvation in this age never came gratis.
Outside, the wastes calmed—temporarily. Inside, the weary machinery of Prism began the slow, impossible work of paying the price it had agreed to. The pact had been struck at the edge of the void.
The future had a cost. They had signed for it.