The fall through the rift was not like falling through air or even through vacuum. It was falling through the spaces between thoughts, through the gaps where reality forgot to exist. Emma's consciousness flickered in and out as her body tumbled through layers of non-space that her enhanced senses couldn't process. Colors that had no names burned across her vision while sounds that predated language echoed in dimensions her ears weren't designed to hear.
Gravity became a suggestion, then a demand, then a screaming imperative as something vast and solid rushed up to meet them.
The impact came in stages. First, the bone.
Emma's body struck what felt like polished marble but gave off the hollow ring of ancient calcium. Her ribs creaked under the force, her enhanced physiology the only thing preventing complete skeletal collapse. Around her, she heard the sickening thuds of her teammates making their own violent introductions to this nightmare realm.
The surface beneath them was not ground in any recognizable sense. They had crashed onto what appeared to be a colossal vertebra, its surface worn smooth by eons of exposure to whatever passed for weather in this place. The bone stretched away in both directions, forming a bridge between floating islands of femurs, ribs, and skulls that defied every law of physics Emma had ever learned.
Above them, the sky bled.
Not metaphorically. The starless void above wept streams of crimson that fell upward, defying gravity to spiral into wounds in space itself. Where the blood-rain touched the bone surfaces, it hissed and steamed, leaving behind stains that seemed to shift and writhe when viewed directly.
Emma's flight systems, barely functional during the fall, sparked back to life with desperate urgency. Her Questmind interface, which had been a chaos of error messages and static during their plunge, suddenly snapped back into focus with crystal clarity.
[Questmind: Auren - Systems Restored. Location: Veilweaver Dominion (Fractured Multiverse - Chaos Tier 10). Warning: High Titan Chaos Saturation. Environmental Hostility: EXTREME. Recommend Immediate Shelter. New Objective: Find Sanctuary.]
"Gray!" Emma called out, spotting his prone form near the edge of the bone bridge. He was conscious but dazed, blood streaming from a gash on his forehead where his scanner had struck him during impact. Beyond him, Aisha lay crumpled against what looked like a section of ribcage, her tactical armor cracked and smoking.
Emma's flight systems responded to her desperate need, golden light blazing around her as she lifted into the hostile air. The sensation was different here, wrong in ways that made her inner ear rebel. The Dominion's atmosphere was thick with energies that seemed to actively resist her passage, turning simple flight into a battle against the very concept of movement.
[Flight Stability: 33%... 31%... 29%... WARNING: System degradation in hostile environment!]
"Emma!" Markus's voice cut through the grinding ambiance of the bone island. He was helping Lucas to his feet, both men bloodied but functional. "Whatever you're going to do, do it fast. This place feels like it's trying to digest us."
Emma swooped low, her unstable flight making the maneuver more controlled crash than graceful descent. She grabbed Gray under his arms, his weight nearly overloading her damaged systems, and hauled him away from the edge just as a section of bone crumbled into the void below.
[Flight Stability: 25%... CRITICAL! Landing recommended!]
She managed to deposit Gray near the others before her flight gave out entirely, dumping her onto the bone surface with bruising force. The impact sent shockwaves through her already strained body, but she forced herself upright. They were all together now, wounded and disoriented but alive.
The bone island around them stretched for what looked like kilometers in each direction, a vast skeletal landscape that defied comprehension. In the distance, other islands floated at impossible angles, connected by bridges of vertebrae or simply drifting free in the bleeding void. Some were pristine white, others stained black with substances Emma's enhanced vision couldn't identify.
"The air tastes like copper and grave dirt," Chloe groaned, pressing a hand to the negation wound on her torso. The injury had stopped spreading, but the edges still flickered with that terrible static, reality uncertain about whether the flesh should exist or not.
Gray struggled to activate his equipment, his scanner flickering between normal readings and displays of pure chaos. "Gravitational fields are... I can't even describe this. We're standing on the inside of a sphere while simultaneously falling toward seven different centers of mass that exist in overlapping dimensions."
The sensory assault was relentless. The grinding of bone against bone as the islands shifted in their slow dance. The constant, low-frequency scream of the void between them, a sound that seemed to emerge from tortured space itself. And underneath it all, the smell: ancient decay mixed with ozone and something metallic that made Emma's enhanced senses recoil.
"We need to move," Lucas said, his scarred face grim as he surveyed their surroundings. "This place is wrong in ways that go deeper than physics. It's like being inside the digestive system of something that feeds on reality."
That's when the first Witch appeared.
The reality tear opened silently this time, but the effect was no less nauseating. One moment the bone surface was empty, the next a creature of living static occupied the space, its form flickering between states of existence with epileptic intensity.
[Titan Chaos - Shiftis: Instantaneous spatial violation detected. Threat level: HIGH.]
More rifts opened around them, disgorging Witches whose forms seemed more solid and terrible here in their native environment. The chaotic energies that saturated the Dominion fed them, made them stronger, more real. Their masks caught the bleeding light from above, reflecting it back in patterns that hurt to process.
Gray, desperate to contribute something to their defense, activated his wrist-mounted projectors. Golden light blazed as his enhanced technology interfaced with his 15% WoodDust enhancement.
[Power Intro: Techsynth - Energy Shield Manifestation]
Barriers of solidified energy snapped into existence around the group, their surfaces crackling with defensive algorithms and structural integrity fields. The shields hummed with power, their golden surfaces inscribed with flowing patterns of data and protective equations.
For a moment, Emma felt hope.
Then the nearest Witch simply walked forward, its negation claw extended.
The effect was immediate and horrifying. Where the Witch's essence-devouring appendage touched Gray's shield, the energy construct didn't break or crack. It simply ceased. A circular section of the barrier was out of existence, leaving behind not even empty space but a concept-hole that made Emma's enhanced vision water when she tried to focus on it.
Gray recoiled with a gasp of pain, his neural interface sparking as the feedback from his destroyed construct sent shockwaves through his augmented nervous system.
[Auren: Techsynth shields ineffective against Titan Negation! Recommend immediate tactical withdrawal!]
"They're cutting through our defenses like they're not even there," Gray panted, blood trickling from his nose where the feedback had triggered minor hemorrhaging.
"Because they're not," Aisha said grimly, forcing herself to her feet despite her injuries. Her tactical mind was already working, analyzing the threat and calculating their rapidly diminishing options. "These things don't just ignore our attacks. They deny the fundamental reality that allows our attacks to exist."
Emma watched in growing horror as more Witches materialized around them, their forms stabilizing in the chaos-rich environment of the Dominion. They moved with that same stuttering, impossible speed, but here it seemed more fluid, more natural. This was their element, their hunting ground.
"We can't fight them all," Markus said, his earth-shaking power useless against enemies that could simply negate the geological forces he commanded.
That's when Aisha moved.
[Power Intro: Kineticvance - Speedvance: Faster-Than-Light Combat Velocity]
She became a blur of blue-white motion, her enhanced physiology pushing beyond the boundaries of physics into the realm of pure kinetic impossibility. To Emma's enhanced perception, Aisha appeared as a streak of compressed lightning, her passage leaving ionization trails in the hostile air.
The first Witch she reached had no time to react. Aisha's fist, moving at relativistic speeds, should have atomized the creature and everything within a kilometer radius. Instead, her punch connected with a sound like reality hiccupping, and the Witch's form dispersed only to reform milliseconds later.
But Aisha was faster. She struck again, and again, each blow a thunderclap of kinetic energy that sent shockwaves through the bone island. For a brief, glorious moment, it seemed like raw speed might be the answer to the Witches' reality-bending abilities.
Then one of them did something that froze Emma's blood.
It didn't try to match Aisha's speed. Instead, it simply existed where she was going to be.
The Witch had anticipated not her velocity, but her path, her intention, the future moment when her trajectory would intersect with its position. It waited with the patience of entropy itself, its negation claw extended.
Aisha ran straight into oblivion.
[Titan Chaos - Negation: Reality Erasure Contact]
The scream that tore from Aisha's throat was unlike anything Emma had ever heard. It wasn't just pain; it was the sound of someone experiencing their own existence being questioned at a fundamental level. The Witch's claw had caught her left arm just below the shoulder, and the limb simply... stopped.
Not severed. Not destroyed. Stopped being.
Where Aisha's arm had been, there was now a perfectly smooth absence that curved around her shoulder in a way that violated every principle of anatomy. The edges didn't bleed because there were no edges; there was only the place where Aisha existed and the place where she definitively did not.
Aisha collapsed, her superhuman speed deserting her as shock and system failure overwhelmed her enhanced physiology. Her tactical armor flickered and sparked where it tried to interface with systems that no longer existed. Her face was a mask of agony and incomprehension as her brain struggled to process sensory input from nerves that had been edited out of reality.
"AISHA!" Emma's scream echoed across the bone island as her power spiked in response to seeing her captain, her friend, mutilated by forces beyond understanding.
[WoodDust Enhancement: 30% - Emergency Activation]
[Flight Stability: 51% - Combat Configuration Engaged]
Golden light blazed around Emma as her enhanced physiology pushed beyond its previous limits. Her flight systems, stabilized by the surge of desperate energy, lifted her into the bleeding sky with newfound grace and power. She dove toward Aisha's position, Stormgleam energy crackling around her hands in preparation for the desperate rescue attempt.
The Witches moved to intercept her, their forms flickering through space with nauseating speed, but Emma's enhanced flight allowed her to weave between their attacks with growing confidence. She reached Aisha just as another Witch materialized beside the fallen captain, its negation claw reaching for what remained of her body.
Emma's Stormgleam blast caught the creature center mass, the purity energy forcing its chaotic form into temporary cohesion long enough for her to grab Aisha and haul her into the air. The captain's weight, reduced by the horrific amputation, made the maneuver possible, but Emma could feel her friend's life signs flickering as shock threatened to overwhelm her enhanced constitution.
"Stay with me," Emma whispered, her voice barely audible over the grinding cacophony of the Dominion. "Stay with me, Aisha. We're getting out of here."
But even as she spoke, Emma could see the hopelessness of their situation. More Witches were materializing around them, their forms growing bolder and more aggressive in the face of effective resistance. The bone island itself seemed to be reacting to their presence, cracks appearing in its ancient surface as chaotic energies built toward some terrible crescendo.
Above them, the bleeding sky pulsed with malevolent intelligence, and Emma realized with crystal horror that the Dominion itself was aware of them. Not just as intruders, but as prey. The very environment was participating in their hunt, reality itself turning predatory under the influence of forces that should never have been allowed to exist.
They were cornered, wounded, and facing enemies that could erase them from existence with a touch. Aisha's breathing was growing shallow, her enhanced physiology struggling to maintain function when so much of her body's infrastructure had been negated. The other Seedkeepers were rallying below, but Emma could see the desperation in their movements, the growing realization that their powers might not be enough.
In the distance, through the maze of floating bone islands, Emma caught a glimpse of something that made her enhanced vision recoil. Structures that hurt to look at directly, geometries that folded in on themselves in ways that space wasn't meant to accommodate. And moving between them, figures whose very presence made the air around them shimmer with barely contained chaos.
The Dominion was vast, hostile, and utterly alien. And somewhere in its depths, the true architects of this nightmare were waiting.
Emma tightened her grip on Aisha's unconscious form and tried to find the strength to keep fighting, even as the bleeding sky above them began to weep tears of liquid darkness that fell like rain across the bone islands of hell.