Chapter 4

I walked out of that laboratory, trailing the scent of destruction, while the guards in the corridor didn't even dare to meet my eyes. They retreated instinctively, their guns lowering, as if facing a predator that had transcended the hierarchy of species. The icy, sinister aura radiating from me turned the very moisture in the air into fine, frozen ice crystals.

I didn't kill them. I didn't have the time for it yet.

A digital directive projected directly onto my retinas. It was from Director Herbert. The tone was that sickening, manufactured "professional" warmth: "Thorne, your performance in the lab was 'impressive.' Since you’ve demonstrated such excellent stability, we have one final command—go deep into the wasteland and 'reclaim' Code: Ember."

I let out a low, grim chuckle.

In the depths of the wasteland, that wasn't a reclaim mission at all. That was an "Abyssal Annihilation Pivot." BAC headquarters had already installed strategic-grade space-collapse bombs in that sector. They wanted me to drag that most dangerous beast into the blast zone—they were packing me up alongside all the remaining "uncontrollable factors" to be erased from this dimension entirely.

"Understood," I whispered. My voice echoed through the empty ventilation ducts with the sound of grinding metal.

I drove the modified, rust-covered heavy off-road vehicle into the gray wasteland. The sky here was permanently a sickening shade of orange—the long-term erosion caused by the Abyssal Rift.

When I reached the target zone, the silence was agonizing. "Ember" stood in the center of the plains. It possessed a torso as jagged and scarred as a meteor crater, rippling with lava-like light, each breath sending heat waves that warped the very fabric of reality. It was the alpha of the sector; every low-level beast hid from it like an ant beneath a boot.

I stepped out, the roar of the engine sounding deafening in the silence.

BOOM!

A snipe-cannon fired from the distant heights. It was the Bureau’s remote cleanup squad—they hadn't planned on waiting for me to engage the beast; they had intended to initiate the annihilation sequence the moment I reached the designated coordinate.

The orange clouds above split as a pale, incinerating ion beam fell from the heavens—the telltale sign of space-collapse.

"Ember" roared in terror, sensing the energy that could atomize it at a subatomic level. It lunged at me instinctively, its blade-like claws carving a lethal arc through the air.

I didn't dodge.

I simply stood there, undoing the last mental shackle in my mind.

It wasn't resistance, nor was it a seal. I stopped building defenses; I opened the rift of my soul completely to this beast. In an instant, the rampaging monster ground to a halt less than three meters from me. Those enormous eyes, burning with volcanic fury, suddenly flickered with a strange, anthropomorphic sense of fear—and submission.

Because what it saw was no longer a Gatekeeper trying to imprison it, but an consciousness far deeper and hungrier than the abyss itself.

I raised my right hand, making no move to attack, just a gentle gesture of dismissal.

The white light of the collapsing space descended, but to the observers on the distant ridge, a sight emerged that made them freeze in horror: that gravity collapse, capable of leveling half a city, moved within ten meters of me before it simply vanished, swallowed whole by the crawling black mist spilling from my fingertips.

The black mist condensed into a bottomless vortex, tearing the white beam apart and drinking it dry.

I turned to look at the horizon. Beyond that ridge, a fully armed cleanup team was hiding, waiting to "send off a hero" in exchange for a hefty bonus and a commendation.

I gently patted "Ember’s" iron-hard spine, as if calming a homebound puppy.

"Go," I nodded calmly. "Go tell them—the door isn't locked, but the Gatekeeper... is finished guarding it."

The behemoth didn't hesitate. It turned, and with a fury capable of shredding steel, it charged toward the Bureau's ridge. The earth trembled beneath its claws, and I, lighting a discarded cigarette I’d swiped from the maintenance pit, watched silently as the funeral pyre custom-ordered for me transformed into a doomsday of their own making.