The tension in the air thickened like storm pressure before a lightning strike. Every handler in the chamber was locked in—eyes scanning feeds, ears tuned to the networked alerts pouring in from all corners of the continent.
Aki stood at the center of the holographic array, her crimson eyes burning beneath the glint of tactical interface lights.
"We don't have time to wait for a stable pattern," she said sharply. "The mutations are escalating. The coordinated strikes across these regions aren't random—they're probing for something."
She looked to each handler.
"We deploy. Now."
A moment of silence—then Hyacinth Uganda of Foxtail stepped forward.
"Recovery squads will run extraction and reinforce collapsed zones. I'll send Cores 1 through 4 to the southern perimeter—particularly the Darnes Outpost. If even one more Veiler burns out from unstable resonance, we lose not just them—we lose stabilizer data."
Jannet Dwight of Spearhead nodded.
"My frontliners are already at threshold. They'll take the western corridors and sweep the fractured ruins before the next phase breach. If this is a containment push from the other side, I'll be damned if we let it cross into neutral sectors."
Ura Gintoki of Fallacy leaned on the railing, thoughtful.
"Playmakers can move into the flank routes—gather intel, track the humanoid mutation events, and start decoding those messages left behind. Someone left them to be found."
Hansel Fel of Asher Squadron, arms crossed, added:
"I'll send absorption squads into the lower layers of the Sichuan Rift. If they want to trigger core evolution, let's bait them with people who already walked the line between ignition and collapse."
Aki took all their words, eyes flashing between feeds. She raised a hand, and new zones lit up on the holomap—Zhenwan Arc, Lian Ridge, Yutakai Border, and Karkose Sinkline.
"We form tri-sector deployment units. No single squadron moves alone. We're deploying three-handler regiments per cluster—tactical, recon, and recovery. You don't leave the field until you have confirmed status of the mutated echoform presence and active resonance feedback."
She paused. Her next words were deliberate.
"Make no mistake—we're not fighting echoforms anymore."
"We're fighting the ones who learned how to control them."
The room remained quiet, then each handler responded with sharp affirmatives, voices crisp and resolute. Transmission lines began opening. Orders relayed.
Across the main display, icons began to spread: Veiler Squadrons Mobilizing. Regions Assigned. Core Data Linked. Handler Nodes Connected.
Aki keyed into her private feed—eyes narrowing as she locked into Seyfe's squad's trajectory through Sichuan.
"Hold out a little longer," she whispered to herself. "We're coming in behind you."
Then she turned to the full room again.
"Activate secondary war protocol. From this point forward, all Veilers operating beyond HQ perimeter are under high-mutation alert."
The air was humid with scorched ash and the rattling hiss of cracked machinery. As Seyfe's squad moved along the fractured highway cutting through the skeletal remains of Sichuan's industrial belt, a flicker of motion caught Jerome's eye.
"Wait—movement up ahead," he said, hand raised, Veiler badge pulsing dimly.
A squad stepped out from behind a ruptured rail barricade, their insignia bearing the markings of Unit 18-B, Fallacy Squadron. The lead, a woman with a crooked scar beneath one eye, raised her hand.
"Unit 12-A? You're part of Overseer?""Correct," Saline replied. "We're clearing path toward the sublayer rift. You?""Same. We've lost contact with another sub-unit beneath the southeast strata. We propose combining forces—strength in numbers."
Emi gave a short nod.
"Agreed. Let's move."
As both squads merged and pushed forward, waves of grade C echoforms kept emerging in smaller packs—each one a disfigured blur of muscle and metal, glowing pipes throbbing with unstable energy. Emi's ice cleaved through three in a single breath; Jerome burst a leaping one midair with a punch that sent its remains skidding like wet meat across concrete.
Seyfe moved behind them, slower now, his eyes not on the battlefield—but on the Veilers themselves.
His thoughts began to race.
Wait… these aren't core-stabilized Veilers… most of them are from the previous batch… batchmates that were barely half-synced during final evaluations.
Why send them here? Why not the ones with active sanctified cores already in combat trials?
He dodged a swipe from a mutated canine-form echoform, spinning past and cutting it down with his blade—but his eyes narrowed deeper.
And the echoforms… D- and C-grade, yes—but sovereign mutations are present. That green-laced slime. The combustion burst. The unnatural regrowth rate.
Then a pang hit him—deeper than combat awareness. A realization.
The echoforms are being manually mutated—by someone. On the ground. But not to kill us. Not immediately.
They want us to keep fighting… to fill our weaver cores rapidly… to reach overclock stages prematurely.
His steps slowed.
Once overclock hits, a Veiler's mind and soul begin to burn through resonance flux. Stability thins. Control slips. We don't die—we unravel.
He looked around at the young squads—at the way their runes flickered erratically. At how quickly they were burning through cycle thresholds.
"This isn't an assault…" he murmured aloud.
Ferez caught his expression. "What's wrong?"
Seyfe's eyes were cold now.
"We're being set up. Herded."
Jerome raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"
"We've been fighting echoforms of Grade D and C. All of them modified. None of us have faced a B or A variant yet."
Saline paused, wiping ichor from her gauntlet. "…So you're saying…"
"It's deliberate. They're escalating us up. Fatiguing us. And no one's noticed the one thing that's missing."
His voice dropped.
"When was the last time any of us faced… a broken layer phase?"
Silence rippled over the group like a shiver.
"There hasn't been one since this siege began," Emi whispered. "That's not normal."
"No," Seyfe muttered. "It's not."
A moment passed before a distant tremor cracked the air again—more echoforms, more corrupted spawn.
But now, each of them moved forward with something deeper than caution.
Suspicion.
Seyfe stood amidst the charred remains of metallic echoforms, their spines still twitching as green slime hissed into the dirt. The squads gathered close, breath ragged, core runes flickering with residual charge.
But the silence that came wasn't peace.
It was the kind that whispered too much.
His jaw clenched.
"Something's not right…" he muttered, voice low but sharp enough to catch Saline's attention."What do you mean?" she asked, glancing over.
He looked out at the dozens of squads battling through the region.
"Why deploy so many Veilers with unactivated weaver cores?" he said, more to himself than anyone. "Why aren't any of the awakened ones here?""You're right…" Emi's brows furrowed. "Those with sanctified cores were all assigned to low-threat zones or kept back at HQ."
Jerome paused mid-recalibration of his knuckle weapon. "But that's backwards. If these are Sovereign-affected zones, we should have had full-power reinforcements."
"Exactly." Seyfe's gaze darkened. "From the start—not a single awakened Veiler has been deployed here. Just us. Half-synced, untested… forced into overclock."
"We're being pushed."
The realization came cold and fast, like a wire pulled tight through their nerves.
The air suddenly warped—space itself shimmering like heat above asphalt. An eerie hum vibrated through the concrete beneath their boots. Their skin prickled.
Saline looked up.
"The hell is that—?"
The clouds didn't just swirl—they bent, drawn into a spiraling funnel. Thunder rolled—but it wasn't natural.
It didn't rumble.
It screamed.
A gravitational pulse slammed into the ground a kilometer away, crushing a column of debris into a flat disc. The wind convulsed sideways, tearing banners and fractured walls into the sky.
"Shit…" Jerome hissed. "That's not a storm. That's—"
"—a Breaking Layer Phase," Seyfe finished grimly. "And it's descending now."
A faint distortion flickered above the ridge—like reality tearing, folding in on itself.
"Hold on!" Ferez shouted, drawing his blade and digging in his feet. "Brace!"
FWOOOOM—
The gravitational storm detonated in the distance, and then it moved—surging outward like an expanding ripple, tearing through old infrastructure and sentries alike. Echoforms caught in the edge were sucked into the tear—imploding mid-roar, their forms dissolving in flashes of violet dust.
Veilers staggered, some pulled forward, others thrown back—barely shielded by their half-synced cores.
Seyfe's feet slid across gravel, his arms braced over his face as debris hurled past.
This isn't random.Someone planned this.Someone waited for us to be at our weakest.
And now the rift had awoken.
"God, I don't want to be sucked into another dimension for eight hours," Jerome muttered through clenched teeth, crouching behind a half-shattered barricade, his grip white-knuckled on his gauntlet.
The storm howled as it descended—an eye of fractured skies twisting with violet light, like a wound bleeding gravity into the world.
Then it paused.
Just for a second.
Like the world held its breath.
Then—
WHAM—
A gravitational pulse slammed downward.
The earth caved in a dozen meters ahead of them, craters forming instantly under invisible pressure. Dust exploded upward into needle-thin spears. They had barely registered the impact when the storm pulled back—a force that ripped sideways like a living tide.
"Push—pull—push—pull—what the hell is this?!" Saline shouted, body vibrating as her boots scraped backward over the fractured terrain.
Their entire squad rumbled and shook, bodies thrown forward then wrenched back. Buildings groaned under the alternating stress, some collapsing in slow, aching folds. Cracks opened beneath them like hungry mouths, glowing faintly with eldritch runic flickers.
"Seyfe, we have to move!" Emi's voice cut through the chaos as her silver hair whipped in every direction, eyes focused but trembling. "We're too close to the epicenter!"
"No—wait!" Seyfe called out, planting his foot down with every ounce of will, his teeth grinding from the pressure. "Something's inside it—can't you feel it?!"
The gravitational pulses intensified—
Push—pull—push—PULL—
It was no longer just pressure. It was rhythm. Deliberate.
Like breathing.
Or calling.
And then from the heart of the storm came a sound—not a roar, not a screech—but a chant.
Dissonant.
Foreign.
Wrong.
"Ala maki siya mau hula…"
The words weren't spoken—they were etched into the pulse itself, echoing in their skulls, in their bones.
"Nope." Jerome was already backing up. "Nope nope nope—screw this cult-ass dimensional rift stuff!"
"Hold!" Ferez growled, shielding Saline from a rain of splinters as a nearby outpost exploded from gravitational backlash.
"How do we even fight this?" Saline muttered.
"We don't," Seyfe replied grimly. "We survive it—and then we find whoever's laughing on the other end."
The storm began to slow… but the clouds didn't settle.
They opened.
A vast, fissured corridor of void beyond light and time began to stretch down into the world.
The Breaking Layer Phase had fully arrived.