Awakening Through Fracture

Boum-tak. Marisol's rhythm beats against my ribs. I keep this cadence to fend off the cold in the basements of the Obsidian Sector. Stability buried its Data Necropolis here, under tons of frost. Rows of servers standing like tombs.

Before me, fifty of the Forgotten vegetate on their feet. Smooth smiles. Clear eyes. They traded the blows, the hunger, and the mourning for this anesthesia of comfort. A peace of docile corpses.

My right arm rises. The obsidian hoards the Flame. I plunge my fist into the middle of the Silica Heart.

The thermal shock shatters the room. The glass explodes into a swarm of sharp fragments that gash my neck and shoulders, letting the machine disgorge all the horror it kept locked away since the last cycle. Decades of filth. Crushed revolts. Mothers mourning kids taken in the night. All our dirty memory.

The entire room goes into convulsions.

A woman collapses, clawing at her cheeks to tear off that artificial smile. An old man vomits on his worn boots. They turn their heads toward me. Their stares spit a magnificent, ferocious hate, so organic that it warms me far more than the core of INTI.Δ. They curse me for dragging them out of their stupor.

Burn, I tell them, sweeping the space with a wave of heat. Accept the bite.

Up above, in the evacuation passages, Lio grips his iron bar until his knuckles turn white while Malik scans the interception frequencies near Jolanda, and we all intimately know that Adaptation demands this passage through the strictest brutality. Pain certifies that we still inhabit our flesh. Without the blood of our histories, the Seven Who Reign would treat us as livestock.

A siren slices the silence in the upper levels. Red sweeps paint the walls. Correction squads are already descending through the access shafts. These newly awakened souls have only seconds to draw upon their Chaos and force their own Mutation, or perish bearing the weight of what they just reclaimed.