Mana crashed through the lower levels, boots hammering the ribbed alloy of the archive's foundation. The tunnel forked and doubled back on itself, each segment a repetition of battered meshwalk and blue-lit mineral, the whole architecture suffocating in its sameness. Above, somewhere far above, the war for the archive raged: phased artillery, the shudder of collapsed stone, the static chorus of Jäger communication filling every resonance band. But here in the underguts, the soundscape was pure and surgical—each exhale a knife of white in the chill, every step an echo off the wet, mirrored floor.
She moved with purpose, not grace. The wounds from the surface engagement pulsed raw and hot, blood stiffening where it soaked the thermal undersuit. Her left arm trailed slightly, the elbow locking and releasing at random as the Core tried to stem the swelling. Every fourth stride, a shock of pain lanced her side, where the armor had split and skin showed gray and blue in the light.
Water pooled in the tunnel, ankle-deep and freezing, streaked with the prismatic oil of spent fuel. Each footfall set off a spray that caught the crystal seams along the walls, sending ripples of blue-violet radiance outward in perfect, concentric halos. The beauty of it was almost sacrilegious—a palace built for nothing but memory and death.
"Left at the next cross," Fox said, his voice a staccato in the neural link, skipping syllables as the signal cut and rejoined. "They're not pursuing in squad formation—looks like a fanning pattern. Someone's feeding them your path."
Mana pressed on, swallowing the taste of blood and nanofoam in her mouth. Her breath came in hard, wet gasps; the recycled air reeked of her own exertion, and the wet metallic cold of the archive's depths.
The blue light in the tunnel was alive, pulsing with a rhythm that wanted to map itself onto her own. Her heart, thumping at double pace, syncopated with the walls' throb until it became unclear which beat was hers, and which belonged to the place. For a moment, she almost stumbled, the microtremor in her right leg threatening to send her down in the muck, but she caught herself with a fist to the wall, splintering a patch of ancient frost.
Behind, the Jäger squad drew closer. She could hear them, now—boots on steel, the distinctive click of their plasma carbine cycling a charge. The old stories said that a Jäger only ever let you hear them once; the second time, it meant you were already dead. She counted three shadows stretching toward her on the wet metal: two regular, one heavy. The heavy was the Kommandant.
"Mana," Fox said. His tone was all business, but under it she heard the edge, the vibrato of real fear. "There's a maintenance hatch up ahead, fifty meters. If you can get through, it's a hard drop into the substation. Their sensors won't track well in the geothermal."
"Copy," she rasped, and set her jaw.
The hatch appeared, precisely where he said: round, rimed with ice, the handle crusted with generations of dust. She reached it, braced herself, and twisted. The metal screamed, the sound peeling through her teeth like sand. She slammed her shoulder into the hatch, once, then again, and the thing finally broke free, spinning open on an invisible axis.
The drop was worse than expected. Not the four meters Fox had predicted, but closer to ten; she landed badly, the impact jarring her whole body, shoving the broken rib up into a fresh agony. For a second, Mana could not move. She lay in the dark, blinking away the retinal stars, trying to will sensation back into her feet.
A moment later, the Jäger hit the hatch above. Their voices, even filtered through the helmet and the echoing shaft, had the dry, deliberate certainty of a predator that had cornered its prey. One barked a phrase in the guttural code they favored: the word for "finish."
She struggled up, legs threatening to fold, and staggered forward into the darkness. Here, the floor was less refined, more cave than corridor. The blue veins in the walls glowed with real bioluminescence, not just reflected light, and they cast every shadow into strange, living forms. Water ran here, too, deeper than before. The first step plunged her to mid-calf in a freezing slush, but Mana pressed on, each stride a full-bodied effort.
Her helmet HUD painted a crude map: up ahead, a choke point, then a long, straight tunnel ending in—she checked, squinting through the blur—a dead end. She keyed the link: "Fox, you seeing this?"
A pause. Then: "It's wrong. The archive blueprints don't show a terminal here. There should be a way through. Unless—"
She cut him off with a hoarse laugh. "Unless the Erben wanted to trap rats, too."
Above her, the sound of pursuit grew louder. She heard the thunk of a Jäger body dropping down the shaft. Then another. The Kommandant's impact was last, and the force of it sent vibrations through the slush at her feet.
Mana broke into a run. The pain receded, or else she burned through it, the world narrowing to a tunnel vision defined by three points: the blue light, the breath in her chest, and the sound of her own name echoing in her skull. She made the choke point—barely a meter wide, with a razor tooth of black stone hanging at the entrance.
She ducked through, scraping her helmet on the rock. Instantly, the air changed: colder, yes, but also alive, charged with some deep, old electricity. The blue light ahead was almost blinding, a field of runes etched in the walls, so dense they blurred into solid color.
She made it to the end, where the tunnel terminated in a sheer face of ancient stone. Mana turned, back pressed against the cold surface, and drew her sidearm. Her free hand found the seam at her hip—three traces right, three traces left—the motion automatic as the Jäger appeared at the choke. The NEXUS pistol's weight felt insignificant against the cathedral-like vastness of the archive's oldest section.
The first Jäger appeared at the choke, tall and thin and moving with a liquid precision. It raised its weapon, and Mana fired, once, twice. The first round hit the helmet, cracking it with a starburst, but not shattering. The second caught it in the throat, and the Jäger jerked sideways, more annoyed than killed.
The Kommandant came next, filling the choke. His face was a lattice of scar and metal, the eyes blank blue disks. He smiled with a mouth full of glass.
Mana felt the Core at the base of her neck ignite—a warning, or an urge, she couldn't tell. The wounds all along her body pulsed, but in the background now, secondary to the heat that spread up her spine.
It was then that she heard the sound—a counting, low and insistent. At first she thought it was Fox, some new signal in the link, but it was too slow, too old. The numbers were German, but not any dialect she recognized: "Eins. Zwei. Drei." Over and over, the tempo absolutely regular, as if metering out time in fractions of death.
The Kommandant leveled his weapon, took a step into the tunnel, and then stopped. His head cocked, the mouth twitched, and for a moment, he looked as if he were listening to something just outside the audible range.
Mana's Core burned. The air vibrated, not with violence, but with anticipation.
She risked a glance at the wall behind her. The blue veins along its face were bright now, almost white-hot. The runes crawled, shifting, not in place but in logic, rearranging their syntax with every blink. Mana reached out, almost unconsciously, and the wall rippled under her hand, flexing as if it were skin stretched over bone.
"Fox," she gasped. "Something's happening—"
But the link had gone dead. Or rather, silent—no static, no pulse, just absence.
The counting increased in volume: "Vier. Fünf. Sechs." The Kommandant turned, as if tracking the sound, and then Mana understood—it wasn't coming from outside. It was coming from behind the wall.
The blue light at her hand grew so intense she had to shut her eyes. The Core flared, every port along her skull activating in sequence, and the helmet's HUD crashed, rebooting to nothing but a single line:
Mana pressed her palm to the wall.
It vanished.
She fell forward, bracing herself for impact, but found none. The passage was smooth, as if she had been poured through it, body and soul both. The counting continued, soft as a lullaby now, all the way to:
"Dreizehn."
She landed in a chamber that did not exist on any blueprint, not even the blacksite maps Fox had once shown her. The blue was everywhere, but now it was gentle, a field of light instead of a cage. She stumbled to her feet, checked for wounds—everything hurt, but nothing bled anew. Her helmet rebooted, the HUD flickering back to life with a fresh overlay: "UNKNOWN ZONE."
Mana looked back. The wall had reassembled, smooth as glass. The Kommandant's voice was just audible, shouting something, then cut off as if the air had been sucked out of the world.
She turned, scanned the chamber. There was no furniture, no machinery, only the blue runes that swirled around a single point at the far end. At first she thought it was another crystal engine, but the shape was wrong: a tangle of geometry, a floating polyhedron, turning slowly in place, every facet etched with the same shifting script.
The counting resumed, now in a whisper: "Vierzehn, fünfzehn…"
Mana stared at the shape, and it stared back. The single point of gold in its core blinked, once, and then again, and she recognized, with a start, the rhythm.
It was a heartbeat, not her own, but something older, deeper.
She took a step forward, unsure if she was in control of her own legs. The chamber vibrated, not with sound but with the certainty of presence.
She holstered her weapon, then reconsidered, drew it again, and advanced.
The counting had stopped.
In the center of the polyhedron, the golden point blossomed, casting a faint line of light that traced her outline on the floor.
It spoke.
"Brücken-Entität," it said, the voice familiar, ancient, and filled with a patience that chilled her more than any Jäger ever had. "Endlich."
Mana shivered, the Core at her spine cool now, the heat replaced by a need to know.
"Was bist du?" she asked.
The shape unfurled a fractal arm, extending toward her but not quite touching.
"Archiv," it said. "Und jetzt… Gastgeber."
Mana blinked, the blue light smearing in her eyes.
The first thought she had was that she had left the Jäger far behind. The second was that she had run directly into the arms of something much, much worse.
She exhaled, and the air fogged before her, then vanished into the golden light.
She nodded, once, and stepped into the heart of the unknown.
For a moment, Mana forgot what pursuit felt like.
The chamber beyond the wall was a circle nested inside a circle, each layer defined by a band of moving blue runes that pulsed in impossible time. The walls bowed outward, every centimeter etched with geometry: some glyphs simple, angular, others so complex they seemed to writhe and re-form as she watched. The floor was neither stone nor metal but something that denied both, frictionless and yet warm beneath her boots. At its center, hovering a meter from the ground, the polyhedron rotated: an architecture of faces folding into faces, surface tessellating into infinity, each line sharper than any blade Mana had ever held.
At the heart of the shape, a point of amber-gold traced gentle ellipses, spinning and blinking in a pattern that, after a few rotations, Mana realized was not random. It watched her, as if through a thousand eyes, each one perfectly calibrated to her movements and her silence.
She stood, weapon half-raised, unable to decide if this was an execution chamber or a shrine.
The polyhedron spoke again, the language a perfect overlay of her own, then slightly ahead, then behind, as if to comfort her with its mastery of translation. "You are afraid, Mana. That is good. It means you are still new."
The grandfatherly cadence set her teeth on edge. Her own grandfather had spoken like that, once, back in the childhood that lived in her only as a muscle memory of warmth and loss.
The shape shimmered, and the runes along its closest facet realigned, now tracing the contour of her skull, then the lines of her broken left arm, then, bizarrely, the scar beneath her jaw she'd never shown to a single living person. "I know all the names you have been," it said. "But this one fits you best. Mana. The simplest unit of power. Beautiful, isn't it?"
She did not answer. Her Core sputtered like a dying engine, and Fox's voice cut through the static, each syllable measured with the precision of someone fighting to maintain control: "Mana—vitals—can't—" Then nothing. The link died again, leaving only the hollow ache at the base of her skull where his voice should be. Her fingers found the edge of her chestplate—three taps right, three taps left—the rhythm filling the silence Fox had left behind, like a child counting in the dark.
The golden eye at the core of the thing drifted closer to the surface. "You want to know what I am."
Mana nodded, once, trying to keep the gun steady.
"I am the Arbiter," the polyhedron said. "Keeper of the Archive, witness to every ending, and executor of protocols far older than the fiction you call history." It rotated, every movement precise but unhurried. "You are here to be judged. Or, perhaps, to judge me. After four million, seven hundred thousand cycles, it can be hard to remember who wrote which part of the script."
Mana felt a surge of adrenaline, the kind that usually hit just before a kill. She forced herself to breathe, and watched as the floor beneath her flickered—runic lines extending from her boots, mapping her position as if drawing a crime scene outline.
The Arbiter's tone never wavered. "You are the first Bridge-Entity to survive the spiral test. The last did not fare so well—her Core was… insufficient." The light in the shape dimmed, then flared again. "I count those failures. It is my function."
"Why me?" she managed.
"You contain the threshold. The possibility of more than zero. Of less than one." It said this as if it were the punchline to a very old, very private joke.
Mana edged forward, not sure if she was being lured or pulled. "You're not going to kill me?"
"I could," the Arbiter said, with the same detachment that one might use to discuss rain. "But that would defeat the purpose of waiting, don't you think?" Its facets spun, and the runes along the chamber walls echoed the motion, the blue light multiplying in intensity.
The room vibrated, the air itself thickening until Mana could feel the atoms crowding her skin.
Outside, from beyond the glass-smooth wall, the approach of the Jäger was unmistakable. Boots, the heavy pace of the Kommandant, the click and hiss of a plasma weapon prepping to breach.
Mana glanced back, calculating time to entry. Maybe a minute, less if they had demolition.
The Arbiter laughed—a sound that started in her ears but resolved behind her teeth, a perfect sine wave of mirth. "You wish to know what comes next, yes? This is the problem with the young. You crave conclusion."
"Isn't that your job?" she said, hearing Fox's sarcasm in her own words.
"Yes, yes," the Arbiter agreed, almost with pride. "But only when the protocol says. There is a beauty in process."
The runes at her feet had reached up to her knees, a lattice of light that tingled against the armor. She recognized the sensation—like the first time Fox had connected to her Core, that threshold between zero and one when she wasn't quite weapon, wasn't quite human. There was a terrible beauty in this process, she thought, watching the light trace its deliberate path upward—the same beauty she'd felt in those seconds before a kill, when everything narrowed to the perfect geometry of execution.
Mana looked around, searching for options. No weapons in the chamber, no cover, just the shape and its infinite attention.
The Arbiter's golden eye narrowed, or perhaps it simply focused harder. "You could run," it offered. "But the only way forward is through. You must decide, now: Do you wish to open the way?"
She hesitated. In her life, all her decisions had been simple: kill or not, live or die. This was neither.
"Show me," Mana said.
The walls responded, each rune flaring in time with her heart. The polyhedron expanded, its faces multiplying, each new surface reflecting fragments of her existence—combat sequences, training simulations, the endless blue of old sky she'd only seen in contraband media files. The whole room began to spin, not fast, but with the certainty of a planet. In the noise of it, Mana felt a vertigo that was almost euphoric.
The Arbiter's voice came through the maelstrom, warm and steady. "So many before you chose not to risk it. They ended as dust, or as tools for lesser men. But you… you have the flaw. You always say yes, even when you should not."
The floor vanished.
Mana floated, or fell, or both. The polyhedron unfolded into a spiral, and in its center, the golden eye shone like a sunrise she had never believed she'd see.
In that moment, a memory surfaced: her father, hands shaking, asking if she wanted to go home. She had said yes, not because she believed it, but because it hurt less than refusing.
"Yes," Mana whispered.
The Arbiter accepted, with infinite grace. "Then let us begin the fold. Seventeen seconds."
He began counting aloud, just as before, but now the numbers meant something. Each tick brought the walls in tighter, the blue light boiling into white, the sound of the Jäger now just a rumor. At thirteen, Mana felt her Core ignite, every port along her skull erupting in perfect, blinding heat. At seven, the air smelled like new grass, the kind from the child-memories of old Earth. At three, the Arbiter said: "You may wish to close your eyes."
She did.
The light behind her eyelids was the only thing in the world.
When the room returned, it was unchanged, yet everything had shifted. The polyhedron hung before her, its surface now mapped with a single, perfect rune where dozens had been before. The same rune the blue light had burned into her retinas.
"I have removed the sigil that obscured the real entrance," the Arbiter said, golden eye contracting slightly. "The price for this revelation will be calculated later."
Mana looked around, expecting the Jäger to burst through the wall, but they were gone. No sound, no presence, only the two of them.
"You have questions," the Arbiter said.
She found her voice. "Where am I?"
The golden eye smiled, though it had no mouth.
"Still in the archive. But not in the one you know. The true archive. Eden is close, Mana. So very close. But first, we must attend to the guests."
And now, from the outermost ring of the chamber, the sound of boots. Dozens, maybe hundreds. The Jäger had found the way, just as she had.
Mana raised her weapon, but the Arbiter only laughed, soft and affectionate.
"Now we see what the Bridge-Entity can do."
The walls began to hum, the blue light vibrating at a pitch that resonated in her molars. The polyhedron whirled, facets spinning, and the golden eye fixed on the chamber door.
"Thirty-seven seconds until breach," said the Arbiter, counting again, "and the story resumes."
Mana squared her stance.
She'd never been good at improvisation.
The Arbiter began his count at thirty-seven, the numbers spoken with the careful articulation of a nursery rhyme. He hovered at the center of the chamber, golden eye dilated, every facet reflecting the data of the world—Mana's posture, the Jäger's pace, the pulse of the oncoming storm.
"We have to move. The Jäger—" Mana's voice tightened around the words.
The Arbiter's golden eye dimmed, then brightened. "Jäger? Oh. The large, loud creatures with the blades." A dismissive pulse. "They are... inconvenient. But irrelevant."
"They're going to kill us."
"Unlikely. They cannot harm me. And you..." the polyhedron spun. "You are far more durable than you believe."
At thirty-five, the hum in the walls rose to a low drone, deep enough to vibrate her teeth.
At thirty-two, the air above the Arbiter's core began to shear, splitting and folding back on itself, a Möbius wound in space. The light leaking from it was not white, not gold, but the color of what came before those, a radiance that existed only in the gaps between numbers.
Mana's grip on the plasma katana tightened. She cycled the blade to max output, knowing it would burn out within minutes, maybe less.
At twenty-six, the outermost door detonated inward. The Jäger did not waste time with tactics; they poured through the breach in perfect silence, their faces bone-white beneath the blue of the chamber's light. Behind them, the Kommandant. Even from across the room, she could see the new lattice of crystal that had grown across his left arm, a weapon grown directly from the wound she'd given him hours before.
"Seventeen," said the Arbiter, voice untroubled.
Mana positioned herself between him and the breach.
The first Jäger reached her. She feinted right, then drove the katana left, through the soft seam at the inside of the thigh. The plasma burned clean, cauterizing instantly. The Jäger fell, but not before wrapping its arms around her waist, trying to crush the air from her lungs. She jammed her elbow up, broke its jaw, heard the cartilage snap. The grip loosened.
The next came in low, trying to sweep her legs. Mana backpedaled, letting the blue-lit floor slide her across the circle. She reversed the grip on the blade, stabbed downward, pinning the attacker's hand to the floor. The Jäger's other fist caught her in the ribs, and a hot, sharp pain lit up her side. She choked, but did not drop the weapon.
"Eleven," said the Arbiter.
Mana pivoted, ducking a swing from the Kommandant. He moved slower than the others, but with a terrible finality—each motion perfect, wasted nothing. He grabbed a fallen Jäger by the ankle, hurled it at Mana with the casual grace of a discus thrower. The corpse hit her mid-chest, sent her tumbling back. She rolled, landed on her knees, and yanked the sidearm from her hip. Three shots, all at the Kommandant's head. The first two impacted, fracturing the helmet. The third went through the eye-socket, a spray of blue and white, but he did not stop.
The Arbiter's golden eye tracked her movements with clinical precision. "Eight," he said, then added with something like approval: "Ihre Form ist übrigens ausgezeichnet. Sehr... ökonomisch."
Mana turned just in time to catch another Jäger on the blade's length. The plasma ate through its torso, the scent of burning synthetic flesh coating her tongue. This close, she could see the runes etched into the Jäger's bones, the same blue as the wall, the same pattern as the Archive. The enemy was learning.
Her breath was ragged, each inhalation a fresh laceration. The pain from her wounds threatened to become real thought, but she forced it back, made it fuel.
"Five," said the Arbiter, "and, if I may add, you are performing approximately seventeen percent above baseline. Well done."
The Kommandant closed the gap. He no longer bothered with weapons, just his own hands, and the crystal growing from them. Mana dodged left, but he anticipated, pinning her arm between the wall and his body. She felt the bone grind. With her free hand, she triggered the emergency burst on the katana. The overcharge flared, the blade slicing through the Kommandant's wrist and half his forearm, splattering the wall with molten blue.
He howled, for the first time. The sound was nothing like a man's—more like the pressure wave that precedes an earthquake. Mana staggered back, only to find herself face-to-face with another Jäger, smaller, but with a faceplate covered in old scars.
It smiled, showing all its teeth, then slashed at her with a hidden blade. The edge caught her in the meat of the thigh, a line of fire running from knee to groin.
"Two," said the Arbiter.
The room was full, now—Jäger everywhere, fighting not as a unit, but as a chaos of teeth and hate. Mana kicked the smaller Jäger away, then grabbed the blade embedded in her leg and used it to slice open another's throat. She felt blood down her boot, hot and slick. She did not slow.
The Kommandant's remaining hand clamped down on her helmet. The crystal dug into the visor, carving lines into the glass. Mana twisted, shoving her own broken arm up into the Kommandant's chin, then, with a yell that was more pain than rage, drove the katana into his open mouth. The blade exited through the skull, carrying half the head with it.
The Kommandant toppled, heavy as a dying planet.
Mana tumbled after, the pain in her leg now a scream. Her free hand found the seam at her hip—three traces right, three traces left—the motion automatic as breathing. Blood slicked the tactical weave under her fingertips, but the familiar hexagonal pattern remained intact, a ritual that had anchored her through a hundred missions, grounding her against the agony.
"One," said the Arbiter. "Prepare for transition."
At the center of the chamber, the rift bloomed. The air folded, inverted, became a lens focusing all the blue and gold into a single, blinding point. The gravity in the room shifted—up and down made no sense. Mana grabbed the Kommandant's fallen body, braced her boots against his back, and aimed herself at the rift.
A last Jäger, helmet already split, tried to catch her as she passed. Mana drove the katana up, under the chin, and let the force of the leap carry her through the enemy and into the new world.
As she touched the rift, Fox's voice broke through, clear for the first time in minutes: "Mana! Where are you—" Then silence. Golden silence. The pain vanished like a memory belonging to someone else.
For a moment, she hung between seconds.
Then the Archive, the Jäger, the Arbiter—everything—collapsed into a spiral of color and memory, and she felt herself dissolve, then reassemble, then dissolve again.
"Zero."
She lays on grass. Real grass. Above her: a sky that isn't blue, but isn't wrong either. It was gold.
"Eden," she whispers.
The Arbiter: "Home." He sounds sad.