"When the abyss stares back, sometimes the only answer is to paint it a different color. Even if the paint is your own soul."
The roar wasn't sound. It was absence given voice. A vibration that bypassed the ears and gnawed directly at the soul, a bass note of pure negation that made the rain seem to slow, the light dim, and the very air turn thin and brittle. The ground beneath the fallen oak didn't collapse; it unwove. Soil, roots, decaying leaves – all dissolving into a swirling vortex of absolute, lightless grey. Not a hole, but a wound. A tear in the Veil of Amnesis, raw and bleeding Oblivion.
From the nullity, the shapes coalesced. Three of them. Not Echo-Eaters. These were different. More.Corruption Avatars.Manifestations of the Oblivion-Corruption itself, drawn through the rent torn by Leo's desperate, resonant backlash against the HY-Dampener. They weren't scavengers. They were soldiers. Harbingers.
They pulsed with the same sickly grey light that stained Lily's skin, but amplified, concentrated. Their forms were amorphous, shifting – one moment suggesting multiple grasping limbs, the next a blind, questing maw, then a column of swirling, devouring static. Where they touched the ground, the vibrant green of trampled ferns bleached to monochrome ash in an instant. Raindrops hissed and vanished before hitting their forms. They radiated a profound, chilling unreality, a zone where existence itself frayed at the edges.
Lily's scream cut through the unnatural silence following the psychic detonation. Pure, primal terror. The fragile stability Leo had bought with the golden resonance and defended with chaotic fury shattered utterly. The grey corruption on her temples and cheeks surged, spider-webbing down her neck, across her collarbones. Her features flickered violently, blurring into a stranger's face for agonizing seconds before snapping back, twisted in agony.Assimilation: 67%. The Scanner, half-buried in mud beside Leo, screamed static, its screen a mess of oscillating grey chaos.
The grey man (Grey, Leo thought with grim detachment) staggered back from the van, his face a mask of shock and genuine terror, the sidearm momentarily forgotten in his hand. He stared at the Avatars, his usual clinical detachment obliterated by the sheer, impossible wrongness of their presence. This wasn't suppression. This was annihilation.
Priorities shifted.The Silence weren't the immediate threat anymore. The abyss was opening. And Lily was being pulled into it.
Leo moved. Pain, exhaustion, the devastating cost of his recent Resonance expenditure – all shoved aside by adrenaline and a terrifying clarity. He couldn't fight the Avatars. Not directly. Not yet. He had to save Lily. Or what was left of her.
He lunged for the satchel, yanking it free of the mud. The stabilizer rods clanked. He ignored them. His fingers closed around the cracked Scanner. The golden waveform of Elara's riverbank echo flickered weakly beneath the static, a drowning star. He slammed his palm onto its casing, pouring a desperate plea into it: Find her! Anchor her!
The Scanner sputtered. Its damaged processors struggled. The chaotic, grey-dominated signature of Lily pulsed violently on the screen. But within the storm of dissolving self, the Scanner's strained algorithms, tuned to Elara's pure resonance, detected a faint, fading pulse. Not Lily's core identity anymore, but the imprint of the golden peace Leo had forced into her unraveling mind. A tiny spark of borrowed serenity, drowning in the grey tide. Residual Echo: Golden Imprint. Strength: 2% (Fading).
It was a thread. Thin. Slippery. But it was there.
Leo scrambled towards Lily, slipping in the mud. The nearest Avatar, a shifting pillar of hungry grey static, turned its non-face towards him. A wave of profound indifference washed over him. Not numbness. Apathy so deep it threatened to snuff out his will to move, to care, to fight. Why bother? Everything faded. Everything ended. Grey was inevitable.
NO! The denial roared from the hollow where his defiant anger had once lived – the facet eroded by his last attack. He clung to the fading image of Elara's face, to the echo of her peace in the Scanner, to the fact of his love, even if the feeling was muted. He poured that stubborn, factual remembrance into a psychic shove against the Avatar's aura.
It was like pushing against a mountain. The apathy pressed down, crushing. But it stuttered. The Avatar's form rippled, the grey light flickering. Leo's desperate, memory-anchored refusal to yield created a tiny, unstable pocket of resistance in the field of oblivion. He stumbled forward, breaking through the worst of it, reaching Lily just as another wave of assimilation wracked her body. The grey corruption now covered half her face. 68%.
"Lily!" Leo yelled, grabbing her shoulders. Her skin felt unnaturally cold, papery. Her eyes, wide and terrified, flickered with faint recognition, then dissolved back into panicked static. "Look at me! Hold onto the *gold*! The light by the river! Remember!"
He held the cracked Scanner screen towards her face, the faint golden pulse fighting the grey static dominating the display. He focused everything he had left – his frayed will, his factual love for Elara, his desperate need to preserve this one life – into channeling the Scanner's faint golden echo into Lily. Not a shield this time. A lifeline.
Remember the light…
He felt the drain. Not the violent rupture of a specific memory, but a deep, cold leaching. It felt like the colour bleeding from his vision, the warmth leaving his hands. He was siphoning his own vitality, his connection to the present moment, feeding it into the Scanner to amplify its fading signal, to push the golden echo against the crushing grey within Lily. He was paying with his now to buy her a future.
The golden pulse on the Scanner flared weakly. Lily gasped. Her eyes snapped to the screen. For a split second, the terror receded, replaced by that borrowed dazed serenity. The spread of the grey corruption halted. Assimilation: 68%... HOLDING.
A shriek of rending metal tore the air. Grey, the operative, had recovered enough to fire his sidearm. Not at Leo. At the nearest Avatar. The bullets passed through the shifting grey form like smoke, leaving no mark, vanishing into the nullity. The Avatar didn't react. It simply extended a pseudopod of swirling grey towards Grey.
Grey screamed. Not in pain, but in pure, existential horror. As the grey tendril touched his arm, the fabric of his dark tactical suit didn't tear. It faded. The material lost its texture, its color, becoming translucent, then simply… gone. Beneath it, his skin didn't bleed; it bleached, losing its vitality, turning papery and grey, the corruption spreading visibly up his forearm. He dropped the gun, stumbling back, clutching his dissolving arm, his eyes wide with a terror far beyond physical pain. He was experiencing assimilation firsthand.
The distraction was minimal, but it was enough. The Avatar focused on Grey, its nullifying touch consuming his resistance, his identity, bite by bite. The crushing apathy field around Leo and Lily lessened slightly.
Leo seized the moment. He couldn't fight. He couldn't sustain the lifeline much longer. He had to move.
"Run!" he rasped at Lily, pulling her up. She stumbled, her movements clumsy, disoriented, but the dazed calm held. The grey corruption on her skin remained static, held at bay by the golden thread Leo fed through the Scanner. 68%.
He dragged her away from the dissolving ground, the roaring vortex, the consuming Avatars, and the screaming Grey. He didn't head for the gardens' exit – the Silence van was there, and who knew what reinforcements were coming? He headed towards the densest part of the thicket, towards the steep slope leading up to the abandoned observatory hill – rough terrain, cover, and hopefully, distance from the tear.
Behind them, Grey's screams cut off abruptly, replaced by a chilling silence. Leo didn't look back. He knew what he'd see: not a body, but a fading outline, dissolving into the hungry grey. Assimilated.
They crashed through soaking rhododendrons, thorns tearing at clothes and skin. Lily stumbled often, her coordination failing, her consciousness flickering. Leo half-dragged, half-carried her, the satchel banging against his hip, the Scanner clutched in his free hand, its golden pulse his only guide, his only weapon against the grey tide within her. He poured his dwindling vitality into it, feeling colder, emptier, more detached with every step. The world seemed less vivid, sounds muffled, colors dimmer. He was paying the cost in real-time, bleeding his present into Lily's fragile hold on existence.
They reached the base of the observatory hill. The old service road was washed out, a muddy torrent. The woods offered scant cover. Leo risked a glance back. Through the lashing rain, he saw two of the Avatars still near the vortex, their forms pulsing, the tear seeming to stabilize, the grey swirling slower. The third Avatar was gone. Or… not gone. Moving. A patch of unnatural greyness, like a walking void, was flowing silently through the gardens towards them, bleaching the vibrant greens and browns into monochrome ash in its wake. Hunting.
Panic threatened to drown him. He couldn't outrun it. He couldn't hide from something that consumed the very ground it walked on. Lily slumped against him, her breathing shallow, her eyes fluttering closed. The grey corruption on her face seemed darker. Assimilation: 69%.The golden pulse on the Scanner flickered dangerously.
He looked up the steep, muddy slope. The old observatory, a dark silhouette against the storm-lit sky, offered the only high ground, the only potential refuge, however temporary. It was a desperate gamble.
He hooked Lily's arm tighter around his neck, gritted his teeth against the cold leaching through his soul, and started climbing. The mud sucked at his boots. Rain blinded him. The weight of Lily, the satchel, and the cost he was paying dragged him down. Every step was agony. Every glance back showed the pursuing patch of nullity drawing closer, leaving a trail of bleached earth.
He was climbing towards a vanished sky, dragging a fraying soul, pursued by oblivion, paying for each ragged breath with fragments of his own diminishing light. The rent in the world was open, and the grey tide was rising. The cost of saving Lily might be everything he had left, including the strength to remember why he was fighting. The golden thread stretched thin, a lifeline spun from borrowed peace and vanishing vitality, leading them up into the storm.