Jonathan scrambled desperately through the temporal wake's sideways gravity toward another sealed threshold hinted in Grandfather's residual echoes. Behind, assimilated firewall defenses forged from Daniel's sacrificed squad comrades screeched metallic against crumbling deck plating giving chase.
Just then blaring proximity klaxons warned of dimensional fissures gap-toothed with ravenous force beyond quantum uncertainty snarling nearby. Reed yelled frantically toward Daniel's own stumbling figure racing neck and neck against the possessing annihilation just microseconds behind searing taloned limbs...
Both men dove headlong through the shimmering portal arch, tumbling roughly into flickering cubes temporarily stabilizing pocketed reality less than 20 meters across. Reed grasped Daniel's trembling shoulder firmly as they caught urgent breaths.
"We secured brief reprieve before intersecting nodes reconfigure beyond survivability parameters-" Jon offered hesitantly through gulping lungs before foreign shouts echoed from the obscured periphery. Suddenly powerful spotlights blinded forward progress revealing seven silhouettes wearing advanced hazard EVA armaments etched strangely with occult runic symbols. Ozone flooded Reed's nostrils as weapon capacitors whined ominously.
"Halt by authority of the Cabal!" one figure barked amplified through faceless helmet. "Lay down arms and submit to reconciliation firmware installation!" Despite near delirium Jonathan recognized secret police elite executing Enigma leadership directives with merciless surveillance outfitting their flex armor. Survival likelihood rated zero confronting this death squad alone and unarmed.
Just as Jon reached mitigating palms up, Daniel lunged suddenly with a savage scream past him, prosthetic claws rending savagely into Cabal armor releasing contained anti-reality munitions pointblank with tortured wail only semi-human! The chamber shuddered violently as conflicting multidimensional states clashed explosively distorting underlying foundations. Bodies and predicates unraveled equally amidst a sanity-shattering spectacle ...
Reed shielded horrified eyes from an impossible holocaust until a blazing supernova imploded outright dragging little left standing or breathing or connected still to tattered flesh. Only Daniel remained hunched low breathing labouréd against blood fountaining from countless shrapnel wounds. Rictus's grin of Pyrrhic victory split his ragged face meeting Jon's hollow appraisal at the outrageous sacrifice buying them still only breath pinned between grinding cosmic ages...
From the whirling debris manifested signature Enigma commando armor despite crazed damage alongside ghosts more personal...Reed quaked breathlessly seeing his grandfather's antique chrono-hex mesh insignia badge dangling from a counterintuitive chain now blade-sharp in the dying starlight. Hacked Cabal telemetry warned the entire localized dimension now collapsed outright separating them onto disparate relativistic paths between worlds blinkering shut.
Somehow Daniel's kamikaze gambit had severed controlling bonds to the Harvester puppeteers but left the duo marooned fighting duped Cabal fanatics across fragmenting terrain. Jon's mind reeled as he grasped the Cabal commander's shoulder to shake delirious confessions from his predecessor's imperiled legacy bound up with clandestine dangers.
"Who wears this damned pedigree embroiling my family across forbidden lore and twisted dimensions?!" Jon cried hoarsely. But only static hissed through rent coupling nodes of the featureless helmet as arsonic discharge consumed its wearer into carbon silhouette...Enigma secrets died again with nameless footmen.
Jon collapsed against bloodied bulkheads corroding base reality itself as howls from abandoned squadmates still merged grotesquely with the Proteus symbiote echoed now from a distant nightmare. He turned away with a crushed spirit too exhausted even lifting Daniel's wound-broken body to imagined haven. Grandfather's glittering badge winked knowingly up from the swirling madness embracing its next victims toward merciful black. Both outcast souls now pulled against their shared tether favoring gravity's timeless void..."Explain why localized chronal distortion engines can't accelerate cultural correction Telemetrics beyond projections?" Commander Ezekiel Mills paced tensely under minimalist shelving housing neatly stacked turn quarterly reports from regional directive execution Centres. Scarred fists clenched processing lagging metrics, the very air seeming thick with gathering storm forces against their closet Utopian agenda.
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Veil Of Shadows
Science FictionDr. Jonathan Reed, a brilliant but introverted scientist who graduated from Harvard, is haunted by the mysterious disappearance of his brother. He carries the weight of guilt, believing he could have prevented it. Determined to unravel the truth, he...
