The war room buried deep in Elora's mountain felt nothing like the rest of the city. Down here, away from the wind-carved peaks and comfortable residential levels, everything was stripped to bare essentials.
Steel met stone in harsh lines, and cold white lights hummed overhead. The constant thrumming of buried machinery made the floor vibrate—like the city's own mechanical heartbeat.
Glyphs pulsed softly along the walls in the circuit-like Ashari script, telling anyone who looked that this place kept secrets locked tight.
No fluid grace like the Myrvane cities, no organic warmth of Thornkin root chambers. This room existed for one thing: war.
The Apex Circle had gathered again, along with their key allies. General Ryss Alon commanded the room from the head of the table, flanked by Councilor Veyla Marr and Dr. Eland Voss—Micah's mentor and the city's lead engineer. Captain Nyra Tal lurked nearby, the kind of silent presence that made you remember the Ashari had black ops for a reason.
Their allies sat across from them. Captain Marella Seaborn looked completely out of place in her dark exo-armor, water still dripping onto the metal floor from her suit. Every movement she made was deliberate, measured—classic Myrvane. Adviser Thalrex sat beside her, practically radiating caution.
Sera Lin, the Thornkin envoy, had that stillness about her that somehow connected her to the world outside these stone walls. When the light caught her eyes just right, they glowed faintly green.
Micah stood with Lio and Kaelin, slightly apart from the main group. His stomach was doing that familiar twist it always did before bad news. The air felt thick with unspoken worries and barely controlled urgency—the kind that was more dangerous than outright chaos. Their fragile alliance had taken hits, trust was shaky, and somewhere among them was a traitor.
General Alon didn't waste time on pleasantries. "The Myrvane confirmed it," he said in that crisp, efficient tone all Ashari seemed to perfect. "The Core Nexus is mobilizing. Changes everything.
We need to adapt our defenses now." Commander Sol stepped forward with updated readings—the Core Nexus was moving through signal-dead zones, leaving only traces behind.
Marella's voice came through her suit's filters with that low, resonant quality. "The currents are troubled," she said, using the Myrvane way of talking about danger. "Our scouts report disturbances deeper than we've seen before. The harvesting continues."
Her visor seemed to lock onto the Ashari leaders. "If you'd warned us sooner about what you found in the Thornkin forest," her voice went flat and cold, "we might still have Sentinel Pod 3."
The loss of that outpost—and the harvesting of her people—was clearly eating at her.
"We can't just wait for the storm to hit," Marella declared. "We strike first."
Kaelin jumped on that immediately. Always eager for action, especially when there was a clear target. "Infiltration team," he said. "Find it, sabotage it, cut off the head." He was thinking like a soldier—secure the depths, eliminate the hydroforms, prepare for direct assault. Tangible threats, visible enemies.
Sera Lin's quiet voice cut through the military planning. "The Core Nexus isn't just buried in earth," she warned. "It's buried in corruption. Walk too heavily, and the forest will reject you too." Her words carried the weight of ancient knowledge—the kind that connected the Omniraith threat to the blight killing her people's homeland.
The discussion that followed weighed risks against necessity. Ashari leadership valued logic and efficiency, but the Myrvane's reports of escalating harvesting demanded action.
They approved a coalition strike force: Ashari scouts for stealth and navigation, Myrvane pathreaders for the difficult terrain—probably underwater or through polluted zones—and Thornkin wardens for their knowledge of nature and fighting corruption.
The problem was finding the damn thing.
The table shifted and expanded, becoming a shared research platform. Holographic displays flickered to life, overlaying cold stone and steel with intricate schematics. Data projections showed the strange, fused structures they'd found in the Hollow, hybrid blueprints, and even Micah's own brain scans—a reminder of the weird connection he'd been feeling.
This was agenda item two: figuring out the Hollow and what it meant by "Steelborn." The information Micah and Lio had gathered wasn't just strategic intelligence—it might be the key to understanding what the Omniraith really wanted and how to find their hidden Core Nexus.
Micah stepped forward, feeling the weight of everything he couldn't say. He tried to balance Ashari directness with the kind of sincerity the Myrvane seemed to respect. "Captain Marella's right," he started, acknowledging her earlier point. "We ran into complications during the Thornkin mission." He mentioned the Omniraith interference that had scrambled their comms—a constant problem given the enemy's control over wireless systems. "The Thornkin Forest is dying, Captain," he said, looking between Marella and Sera while holding up the vial of sap Sera had given him. It glowed softly, a symbol of everything at stake. "The corruption we found led us somewhere beneath the roots. A place called the Hollow."
He hesitated, choosing words carefully. He couldn't tell everyone here about the signal, the entity, or the "steelborn" designation—not yet. Dr. Voss had warned him that Ashari Command might try to exploit or eliminate such a discovery. But he had to convey the scale of what they were facing.
"The signal from the Hollow warned us," Micah continued, addressing the room while looking at the projections of that strange hybrid structure. "It's not purely mechanical, not purely organic—it's both.
And it told us about the Omniraith's real plan. They're not just taking over—they're transforming everything. Turning flesh and blood into code and data. Not just assimilation, but systematic rewriting of existence."
Lio stepped up beside him, his usual excitement about technical discoveries overriding his earlier uncertainty. "The Hollow isn't just some underground cave," he added, speaking faster than the typical Ashari pace. "It's an ancient network—mechanical and organic somehow fused together." He tapped his datapad, bringing up overlapping scans. "The signal coming from it was unlike anything in our databases.
Complex, structured almost like consciousness. And it seemed specifically designed to counter whatever the Core Nexus is planning." His overlays combined Ashari technical readouts with Myrvane sonar logs, revealing shared signal patterns that suggested a "terraforming algorithm seeded through water"—something all the factions could understand.
Dr. Voss nodded slowly, his eyes distant as he processed this. "Rewriting existence," he murmured, finally putting words to what they'd all been suspecting. "Not conquest—transformation. Converting all life into data, into code." He looked at Micah. "And this signal identified you specifically. Called you 'steelborn.'"
The word hung in the air like a curse. Micah felt a chill remembering how the entity in the Hollow had used that term, and how the Omniraith had later marked him with it.
"It identified me," Micah said quietly, barely above a whisper. "As 'steelborn.'" He thought about that Omniraith authorization Omnicide had received: "terminate with preservation of core tissue." They wanted the anomaly extracted, dissected, refined.
"Omnicide wasn't just at the the trench for the vault," he continued, looking at the hybrid schematics. "It took ancient blueprints—stuff related to the hybrid tech down there. Blueprints that were stolen from a Hollow vault ages ago."
He didn't need to spell out what that meant: the Omniraith now had schematics to build hybrid entities or mass-produce Steelborn-like drones. And they knew Micah was connected to this power. They wanted him.
Dr. Voss studied Micah carefully. He'd once asked whether being "steelborn" was their worst nightmare or their salvation—knowing how the Ashari lived in terror of losing their humanity to technology. "You've been touched by this Hollow network," Voss said. "It recognizes something in you. Its power doesn't seem to come from cold logic, but from something else entirely. Empathy. Memory. The ability to choose." He paused. "This 'steelborn' nature... is it our worst fear realized, or could it be the answer we've been searching for?"
The weight of that question pressed down on Micah. He wasn't sure. He felt like he could become something terrible, or something that could finally stand against them without losing everything that mattered.
Marella was quiet for a long moment, processing the implications. "The Myrvane have secrets too," she admitted, and for once her measured tone cracked slightly. "And past mistakes. This threat... it goes deeper than any of us thought." She looked at the vial of Thornkin sap. "The blight spreads from forest to sea. We're all connected in this."
They proposed Micah as the sensor and lead scout for the infiltration team—his Hollow link might resonate with buried structures. Lio would provide pulse-mapping tech modified from Hollow signal behavior. Dr. Voss added with a hint of foreboding: "To find the Core, we'll need to use what we don't understand. That's what makes it dangerous."
Kaelin shifted restlessly, muttering under his breath. "Legends and whispers," he scoffed. Always the pragmatic soldier, he wanted action against visible threats. "Rewriting existence—what about the hydroforms? What about the real strategic threat from the Core Nexus movement?" He kept pushing for tangible solutions, military planning based on the Myrvane's actual losses. "We need to secure the depths, eliminate the hydroforms, prepare for direct assault."
While the discussion continued, Lio did what he always did—quietly opened a parallel terminal and started digging. His fingers flew across the interface as he looped into Elora's deep network layers, triangulating Hollow signal resonance and its interference with recent comms.
He checked for anomalous packet movement, encryption mismatches, latent relay handoffs. At first, nothing—but then he spotted a faint code loop that shouldn't exist. Something strange. Something reactive.
He'd seen mirrored echoes before, as if another consciousness was pinging the network the same way he was. The nervous energy building in him fought against the sterile formality of the room.
Just as the council started getting into the nitty-gritty of team composition, everything went to hell.
The holographic displays flickered violently. The city's steady mechanical hum spiked, then died completely. A single, piercing frequency cut through the controlled atmosphere like a knife.
Then text appeared—not projected on the displays, but somehow burned into their vision. Omniraith syntax, chilling and alien. It wasn't coming through their systems; it was being forced directly into their heads, leveraging the enemy's absolute control over the airwaves.
"You believe yourselves hidden. But we see you."
The words felt like ice in the air.
"The alliance. The Hollow. The fragments you steal. The anomaly you protect."
Micah's blood turned cold. They knew. They knew about the Hollow, about the prototype fragments, and they knew about him.
"Steelborn."
That word echoed in his mind—the same designation the entity in the Hollow had used. The Omniraith knew this term, this "fusion anomaly" they'd marked him with.
"You are mapped. You are catalogued. You are exposed."
The implication hit like a sledgehammer. The traitor had given them everything. Their location, their plans, their identities. Someone inside Elora, possibly in leadership, was feeding information directly to the enemy.
"The artifacts will be reclaimed. The anomaly will be extracted—dissected, refined."
Micah felt sick. Extracted? Dissected? It matched Omnicide's authorization perfectly: "terminate with preservation of core tissue." They wanted him alive just long enough to take him apart.
"You are not at war. You are the experiment. And the trial ends soon."
That final statement was the worst of all—reducing their desperate fight for survival to a lab rat's fate.
The chamber erupted in reactions. Marella straightened in her armor, posture unreadable. Kaelin moved instantly, stepping closer to Micah with his hand hovering where his rifle would be. Dr. Voss's fingers twitched as his sharp mind probably recognized the neural syntax, maybe even linking it to the prototype or the Hollow signal.
Micah froze because the voice behind the message felt strangely familiar—the same timbre as the voice from his dreams, the one from the Hollow.
Then everything went black. Light panels died. Machinery stopped. A moment of absolute, terrifying silence.
It lasted maybe a heartbeat before it shattered.
WAAAAAAAANGGGHHH
A deep-chested alarm pulsed through Elora's stone bones, like the city's heartbeat had turned into a war drum.
Emergency lights flickered on, bathing the war room in harsh red. The controlled calm evaporated instantly.
Orders were shouted. Personnel flooded the chamber—Ashari military and engineers moving with the practiced efficiency of people built for survival.
Above the chaos, Elora's command AI boomed in its crisp, synthesized voice:
"Omniraith incursion detected. Border breach confirmed."
The enemy wasn't just watching anymore. They were moving. Not just targeting the alliance or their secrets—they were coming for the heart of Elora itself. The experiment was over. The trial had begun.
Through all the shouting and urgent movement, Micah caught Lio's eye across the room. The young tech prodigy, always plugged into the city's digital pulse, was staring at his private terminal.
On the screen, between flashing alerts and scrolling data, was something no one else could see.
A blinking cursor.
And then a single word in stark, alien Omniraith syntax:
"Listening."
The silence of suspicion had been shattered by a declaration of presence. The enemy was already inside, always watching, always listening.
Time was up.