The victory over the Tortoise was the last moment of triumph. After that, the world began to change.
The horizon, which had been a flat line of gray, was now dominated by a sight that defied logic: The Chains of Silence Mountains.
They didn't look like natural formations. They looked like five hundred black spears piercing the heavens, arranged in a perfect circle that walled off the center of the world. The clouds around them swirled in unnatural vortexes, and lightning—red and silent—danced between the peaks.
"Victor…" Kyle's voice lost its usual arrogance. He stood on the deck, staring up. "Why do I feel… heavier?"
"Because you are," Victor replied, his voice tight, fighting the controls of the ship. "The gravitational constant is shifting. The laws of physics are thinning here. We are entering the domain of the Zero Gear."
The ship groaned. The reinforced glass of the cockpit began to develop spiderweb cracks. The pressure wasn't just physical; it was psychological. It felt as if the mountains themselves were glaring at them, a thousand eyes watching intruders.
[Warning. Hull integrity: 60%.]
[Warning. Reality anchor: Unstable.]
"The dials are spinning backwards," Victor muttered, smashing a malfunctioning gauge with his fist. "Technology hates this place. We are flying on sheer momentum now."
But the environment was not the only thing turning against them.
As the Silent Piercer drew closer to the black peaks, the "Abyss Radiation" began to seep through the hull. It started with headaches. Then, whispers. Then, the change.
Victor sat in the cockpit when the screaming started. He turned to see Chief Engineer Miller stumbling into the room. Miller's skin was turning gray and hard, like rust. His eyes were gone, replaced by spinning, chaotic gears that tore through his eyelids.
"The song…" Miller gurgled, black oil dripping from his mouth instead of blood. "The gears… they sing… we must join the machine..."
Behind him, the other four support crew members shambled forward. They were no longer human. They were fusing with their tools, their flesh twisting into metal. They raised wrenches and pipes, intent on tearing the ship apart to "free" the engine.
"Kyle!" Victor shouted.
Kyle stood between Victor and the mutated crew. He raised his hammer, but he hesitated. "Victor… that's Miller. That's Sarah. They... they are our people."
"They are gone!" Victor's voice was cold, sharper than a scalpel. "Look at them! They are the Abyss now!"
One of the mutants lunged at Kyle. Kyle shoved him back but didn't strike to kill. "We can fix them! You're the genius, Victor! Fix them!"
"There is no cure for entropy!"
Victor saw the hesitation. He saw the creatures swarming. If Kyle wouldn't do it, the mission would fail. The world would die. Victor didn't grab a weapon. He reached for the command console. His hand hovered over the [Emergency Airlock Purge] button.
"Victor, don't!" Kyle screamed, realizing what he was about to do.
Victor looked at his friend, his human eye filled with sorrow, his cybernetic eye cold and unblinking. "I am not killing them," he whispered. "I am saving them from what comes next."
He slammed his hand on the button.
HISS.
The rear cargo bay doors blasted open. The sudden vacuum screamed, sucking the air out of the room instantly. The five mutated crew members were yanked backward, flailing, sucked out into the toxic void of the mercury sea.
In seconds, the doors slammed shut. The silence returned.
Kyle stood up, breathing heavily. He looked at Victor with a look of horror and betrayal. "You... you flushed them like garbage."
Victor turned back to the controls, his hands trembling slightly—the only sign of his guilt. "We are close to the shore. Prepare for landing."
The blood was on their hands now. The hero's journey was over; the descent had begun.
The landing was not graceful.
The Silent Piercer, its engines choked by the atmospheric pressure, didn't land; it crashed. It skidded across the black sand of the coast, tearing a deep furrow in the earth before slamming into a massive obsidian boulder.
Victor kicked open the emergency hatch, stumbling out onto the black, pulsing sand. A pile of debris shifted, and Kyle emerged, dragging his hammer. But he wasn't the shiny titan anymore.
"My armor…" Kyle stared at his arm.
The obsidian armor, once indestructible, was rusting before their eyes. The polished black surface was turning into a flaky, orange powder. The atmosphere here was so corrosive to advanced technology that it was eating their gear alive. Victor looked at his own wrist computer; the screen flickered and died.
"The Abyss rejects complexity," Victor realized, tearing off his smoking white coat to reveal tattered clothes underneath. "It strips us down. It wants us naked."
They looked at the ship—their only way home. The hull was already groaning, the metal turning soft and brittle like wet cardboard.
"We are walking," Kyle said, his voice hollow. He tried to lift his hammer. It was heavier now. Much heavier. "The tech assists in the suit are dead. I have to carry this weight with my own muscles."
"No ship. No crew. No tech," Victor said, his voice grim, looking at the towering pass ahead. "Just us and the mountain."
The walk through the canyon of twisted metal felt like an eternity. The air tasted of copper and old electricity. Every step required a conscious effort of will. Kyle, the once-proud warrior who had leaped across leviathans, was now hunched over, dragging his feet.
"Victor…" Kyle grunted, leaning against a wall. "This hammer… it weighs a ton. Did the gravity change again?"
"It is not the gravity, Kyle," Victor rasped, pointing at the shimmering air. "It is the Abyss Field. It doesn't just pull on mass. It pulls on intent. It weighs down the soul. Drop it. If you want to live, drop it."
Kyle stared at him, offended. "Never. I am the Breaker. Without this... I am nothing."
"Without that, you are still Kyle," Victor interrupted. "With it, you are just a corpse waiting to fall."
Kyle looked at the hammer, then at the dark path ahead. With a roar of frustration, he didn't drop it—he lifted it back onto his shoulder. "I carry my own weight, Victor. Let's finish this."
The canyon ended abruptly, opening into a vast, circular crater. In the center stood The Gate.
It was a colossal ring of shifting light and solid darkness, suspended between two obsidian pillars. No guards. No turrets. Just a hum that made their teeth ache.
"The field is the guard," Victor said, stepping up to the control panel—a slab of matte black stone. He placed his hands on it.
Agony.
White-hot pain shot up his arms. The machine didn't just want a password; it demanded a toll.
"Stay back!" Victor screamed as Kyle stepped forward. The blue veins in Victor's hands glowed blindingly bright as he force-fed his own bio-energy into the lock. He could feel his nerves burning. He could feel the sapphire lens of his cybernetic eye cracking under the pressure.
[Access: Granted.]
[Cost: Calculated.]
With a final, sickening pop, the lens of his left eye shattered. Blood leaked from underneath his glasses.
"It's open..." Victor gasped, clutching his bleeding eye. His vision on the left side was gone, replaced by static and pain.
The massive ring of light stopped shifting. But from the parted darkness, footsteps echoed. Clank. Clank. Clank.
A figure emerged.
It stood ten feet tall, a humanoid made of seamless white ceramic. It had no face—just a smooth, blank surface with a single vertical slit glowing with pale gold light. Six metallic wings, sharp as razors, floated detached behind its back.
[Entity: Mechanical Angel.]
[Class: Zero.]
[Protocol: Purge.]
The Guardian didn't speak. It simply raised a hand.
"Kyle, move!" Victor shouted.
But Kyle didn't move away. He moved forward. "You hurt my friend," he roared, his eyes bloodshot with rage. He activated the Max Mode on his suit, the rusted servos screaming as he forced the last dregs of power into his muscles.
"BREAKER STYLE: WORLD CRUSHER!"
The hammer descended like a meteor toward the Guardian's head. The Guardian didn't dodge. It simply raised one finger.
CLANG.
The sound was deafening. The massive gravity hammer, forged from star-metal alloy, hit the Guardian's finger… and stopped dead. The Guardian tilted its head slightly. Then, it flicked its finger.
CRACK.
The shaft of the legendary hammer shattered. The head of the weapon spun away, embedding itself deep into the wall. Kyle stood there, holding nothing but a broken handle.
"Impossible…"
The Guardian didn't wait. It stepped forward, blurring with speed. Its white hand clamped around Kyle's armored forearm. SQUEEZE. The sound of bone snapping tore through the crater.
"AAAAHHH!"
With a casual motion, the Guardian yanked Kyle's arm, tearing muscle and armor alike, throwing him backward like a ragdoll. The man who had laughed in the face of death was now curled up, gasping, reduced to a broken child.
Victor, overwhelmed by cold logic and fear, reached into his coat for a forbidden weapon—a Singularity Grenade. "I'll erase this whole coordinate!"
But before his thumb could release the trigger, a cold, ceramic hand clamped over his entire face. Victor was lifted off the ground by his skull. Through the gaps in the fingers, he saw Kyle on the ground, bleeding out.
They weren't heroes. They were just bugs who had crawled too close to the fire.
The Guardian did not crush his skull. Instead, a voice transmitted directly into their nervous systems.
"ANALYSIS COMPLETE."
"Subjects: Victor Cain. Kyle Varg."
"Status: Irregularities detected. Potential for Evolution: High."
"Protocol Update: Death Sentence... Rescinded. New Protocol: EXILE. PENALTY: REGRESSION."
The Guardian opened its other palm, revealing a dark, spinning vortex—a Siphon.
Red beams of light shot out, striking both men in the chest. It wasn't extracting blood. It was extracting Essence.
"AAAAHHHHH!"
Kyle's scream was a sound of pure biological horror. His god-like muscles deflated. His bone density dropped. His height shrank. The "Breaker" was being carved down into a mere mortal.
Victor fared no better. The bio-electricity that allowed him to control machines was ripped out. His mind, once a supercomputer, began to fog. Equations vanished. Memories dissolved into static.
[Warning. Neural Link… Severed.]
[Warning. Rank 7… Downgrading to Rank 1.]
[Warning. Memory Storage… Corrupting.]
The Guardian dropped Victor. He hit the ground hard, drool dripping from his lip. "My… my mind... I… I can't remember the formula..."
"Sentence: Executed."
The ground beneath them opened. A massive, rusted disposal chute swallowed them.
Victor and Kyle slid into the darkness, tumbling down the throat of the world, falling from the realm of gods to the realm of rats.
Victor fought the unconsciousness. The memory wipe was taking hold. He grabbed Kyle's limp arm in the dark, squeezing it with his last ounce of strength.
"We will forget," Victor choked out, tears streaming from his good eye into the roaring wind. "We will forget the mountain. We will forget the power. But... we will return. I promise you, brother… we will return."
Then, the darkness swallowed them whole. The memories of the "Celestial Navigator" and the "World Breaker" faded into black.
Pain.
That was the first thing Victor felt. Then came the smell—a thick, suffocating stench of rust and sulfur.
Victor gasped, sitting up violently. He wasn't on a ship. He wasn't in a golden palace. He was lying on a mound of wet, jagged scrap metal in a cavernous, industrial hellscape.
"Where..."
He touched his face. Fingers covered in grime. He touched his left eye. It hurt. It felt… damaged. He patted his chest; his coat was now a heavy, oil-stained rag. He found a pair of cracked glasses in his pocket and put them on. The blurry world sharpened slightly.
A groan came from beside him.
"Ugh… my head..."
A large man sat up, rubbing his neck. He looked at his arm—it was bandaged with dirty rags, aching as if it had been broken recently.
"Kyle?" Victor said. The name tasted familiar, but distant.
Kyle looked at him, blinking stupidly. "Victor? Why does my body feel like I got run over by a train?"
"I… I don't know," Victor muttered. He tried to access his internal database, but found nothing. No schematics. No star charts. Just… basic mechanics. "Did we… drink too much last night?"
"Must have," Kyle grunted, standing up shakily. "Back to the grind, I guess. The foreman will kill us if we're late."
Kyle didn't remember the hammer. He didn't remember the Guardian. He just thought he was a laborer who had taken a bad fall.
Victor stood up too. He felt a phantom pain in his chest, a longing for something he couldn't name. He looked up at the ceiling, where darkness hid the world above.
I promised something, Victor thought. But what?
His gaze fell upon a massive ventilation fan embedded in the wall nearby. It was silent, clogged with rust. Victor sighed. The grand questions vanished, replaced by the immediate need to breathe. He walked over to the fan, pulling a wrench from his belt he didn't remember owning.
"My head hurts..." Victor whispered, adjusting his cracked glasses. "It feels like I fell from the sky."
He looked back at Kyle. "Come on, Kyle. Let's fix this scrap before we suffocate."