The air was colder beyond the perimeter. Liam could feel it through the cracks in the armored transport's hull, a metallic bite that reminded them they were far from home. Trees twisted in unnatural angles, remnants of a world scorched and bent by digital war. The boundary lines, once clear and enforced, now lay fragmented like fractured glass under boot.
Maya sat beside him, rifle across her knees, eyes scanning the horizon. "This place feels... wrong."
He nodded, adjusting the interface on his wristpad. "The signal leads here. That vanishing energy signature—it wasn't random. Something was waiting beyond our sightline."
Behind them, their team—a four-person cell of hardened scouts and technopaths—moved in synchronized silence. Each wore cloaks lined with signal dampeners and armor plates repurposed from old Network gear. Liam drove, guiding them across cracked highways and the twisted remains of former suburbs. The world here was a decayed echo.
They passed the first of the corrupted relay towers near dusk. Once proud spires of connectivity, now draped in black vines and glitched pixels that fluttered like torn flags in the wind. One of the technopaths, Juno, shivered.
"These aren't dead," she whispered. "They're... listening."
Liam scanned the interface. Code poured from the relay's base—alien, recursive, self-modifying. "It's been infected. Not just overwritten. This is something else."
They kept moving. The further they went, the more the terrain lost cohesion—digital static overlaying physical terrain, as if reality itself was being patched by broken code.
They met the first settlement by accident. A flicker of heat signatures in the forest led them to a hollowed-out complex, where survivors lived in underground chambers powered by salvaged solar grids. Faces emerged from shadows, cautious but curious.
"They call it the Shroud," said an elder named Eko. Her voice was brittle but steady. "The thing you chase. It changes people."
Eko's stories were chilling. People walking into the forest and never returning. Lights that spoke in static whispers. Villages waking to find entire families erased, as if rewritten out of time. Technology would go haywire, screens bleeding symbols that no one understood.
The team offered trade and assistance, and in return, gained insight: the signal had passed through here weeks ago, warping reality in its wake.
Then came the altered.
They descended at night—six figures, eyes aglow with unnatural light, voices buzzing with layered modulation. Their movements were jerky, stuttering like corrupted files, yet terrifyingly fast.
"Contact!" Maya shouted, opening fire.
The skirmish was brutal. The altered bled silver, fought without fear, and spoke in a corrupted amalgam of languages and code. One of them grabbed Liam's arm mid-strike, locking eyes with him.
"Convergence is... beautiful," it rasped before disintegrating under Juno's EMP charge.
No one slept well that night.
Liam sat alone beneath a half-collapsed radio tower, fingers dancing across his interface as data flowed from the corrupted relays and village terminals. The patterns were maddeningly complex—code that adapted, rewrote, even seemed to anticipate him.
"What if it's not just code?" he murmured. "What if it's... rewriting the fabric beneath the digital? Layers beneath simulation theory. Something older."
Juno looked over his shoulder. "Like magic?"
"Like pre-digital thought expressed through post-digital architecture."
She raised a brow. "So... magic."
Maya joined them, face grim. "We're not just facing another AI or some rogue algorithm, are we?"
"No," Liam replied. "This thing is using the old Network to open portals. Dimensional rifts. Pulling through more of its kind—or itself, splintered across realities."
They analyzed one relay deeper in the wastelands. It pulsed with energy not electricity, but some strange resonant field that vibrated their senses. When Liam linked in, he momentarily saw through reality. He saw cities overlaid with other cities, time dilating, a thousand futures collapsing into one singularity.
"This is its foothold," he gasped. "It's not invading. It's merging.
They followed the signal trail to the edge of understanding.
There, shrouded in distortion and rising from a crater of crystallized sand, stood the hidden city.
It was wrong in every way.
Geometry bent in ways the human eye resisted. Spires twisted into themselves, windows opened into blackness, and the very air buzzed with an oppressive presence. Automated defenses lined the perimeter—floating drones with lenses that shimmered like oil on water, scanning thought as much as movement.
The team advanced carefully. One drone noticed them. Instead of attacking, it simply watched, and then... moved aside.
"Like it wants us in," Maya whispered.
At the city's core, they found the tower.
It rose impossibly high, covered in fractal plating that shifted and rearranged with every step closer. From within, the signal pulsed, no longer random—now rhythmic. Like a heartbeat. Or a countdown.
They stood before the tower's base. Liam interfaced with a nearby terminal, barely able to maintain focus as data surged into his mind.
"It's... calling something," he muttered. "Not just a signal. A beacon."
Suddenly, the ground trembled. The tower's plates began to unfurl like petals of a mechanical flower. From the center, a vortex opened—reality tearing like paper, revealing a swirling mass of color and light.
And then it came.
A ship unlike anything ever seen. Organic and mechanical, pulsing with the same unnatural rhythm. It emerged from the vortex slowly, its hull bristling with spines of light, its presence distorting space around it.
Every radio frequency exploded with sound. Not static. A voice.
"The convergence is complete."
Liam fell to his knees, ears bleeding.
Maya shouted something, but he couldn't hear. All he could see was the ship, and the thing within beginning to awaken.