Chapter 2 #2
Dagger hit with heat shimmering off him, his skin flushed and burning, something rising beneath it then collapsing back in on itself, his jaw clenched so tight it looked like it might crack.
Brawler dropped last, and when he hit the ground, it was with a force that cracked through the room.
His spine arched, muscles coiling and bunching as if something wild clawed at him from the inside.
The sound that tore out of him wasn't entirely his, deeper, layered, a howl trapped in a human throat.
K9 handler…merging with Beast. Pack instincts collided with human reason, neither willing to give way. His hands curled into huge, white paws.
Fly stared, disoriented, his vision still splitting and sliding, but there was no mistaking what he was seeing.
They were all fighting it. Fighting their own bodies.
The same strain that was tearing through Fly ripped through them in waves, distorting movement, breaking rhythm, making every instinct unreliable.
The room lurched again, angles shifting, sound slipping just out of sync, and for a second Fly couldn't tell where any of them ended and the rest of it began.
This was happening to everyone, a phenomenon, something beyond his interpretation…for now.
A chill passed over his aching body, a presence…no two.
They'd been waiting, and now they had all of them.
The nausea hit him again, sharper this time, dragging his attention away from his brothers, who had come for him and North. Compromised in ways his mind refused to process.
The room shifted again. This distortion was different from before, focused and directed. The two entities split, the second presence moving toward North, separate from what held him frozen, something that felt like tearing rather than dissolving.
Fly turned, forcing his body to follow the motion even as his balance failed him, his vision sliding out of alignment.
The space between him and North stretched and compressed at the same time, like distance had stopped behaving.
He couldn't define a presence that didn't belong to any shape his mind could hold on to.
The first entity drew closer. The noise in his head changed, growing quieter until it felt like it occupied the same space as his thoughts, like it was what had distorted physics when he was surfing in that shimmering otherworldly moment when all his skill had just gone…null.
The floor beneath them split with a crack that ran sideways instead of down, black fractures ripping across the floor and climbing the walls like the room itself had begun to come apart.
North’s violent stagger was arrested, his face set with his determination to hold against Rupture.
The floor dropped several inches beneath him before snapping back into place hard enough to launch him into the wall.
“Move!” Flash barked.
The command worked through Fly's spiraling perception for half a second.
Despite the obvious agony tearing through him, Easy’s response was instant. He prowled toward North, shifting between a man and cat, just as the distortion beside him folded inward and something stepped through it.
A too-tall, thin outline fractured constantly, pieces of it appearing before the rest caught up.
Then it moved. One second it stood several feet away. The next it was directly in front of North.
But North wasn't there anymore.
Easy had tackled him sideways, both men hitting hard as the entity’s, Rupture's, strike carved a groove through the air where North's chest had been. The wall behind them simply ceased to exist for three feet in every direction.
"Twister!" Flash's voice cracked with command and desperation.
Twister was already moving, his elongated neck retracting as he crawled toward the fallen SEALs, partial wings slapping against the uneven floor while every healing note took its toll, his skin growing more translucent by the second.
Instead of reaching with his hands, he opened his mouth and released a sound that shouldn’t have been possible from a human throat.
At first, the vibration penetrated bone and muscle, knitting, realigning, restoring.
Then it went discordant, jarring. Twister phased violently, his face contorting in agony as the damage he healed transferred into him.
That's when the second presence materialized directly in front of Fly.
The entity, Null, didn't step through reality like Rupture had. It simply became, as if the absence of something had taken shape. Fly found himself staring at a vacuum that wore the suggestion of human form, darkness so complete it seemed to pull light from the room.
"Flynn Gallagher," it whispered, and the sound came from everywhere at once. "The Visionary. The pattern-reader who failed to see the only pattern that matters."
Fly tried to scramble backward, but his body flickered, phasing between solid and ethereal. Null's strike passed through him, the void-hand emerging from his chest without touching anything vital.
"Interesting," Null mused. "Half in Reality, half in Veil. Chaos didn’t anticipate this."
It struck again, faster, and this time caught Fly's shoulder as he materialized.
Pain exploded through him, not just physical but something deeper, as if the wound tried to drain meaning from his thoughts.
Flash roared, launching himself at Null despite his own flickering state. His fist passed through the entity's head, but Flash adapted instantly, spinning to shield Fly as Null's next attack carved through the space where his brother had been.
"Ah, perfect. The key has taken the bait," Null observed with something like satisfaction. "Efficient."
Flash and Fly solidified, and the entity’s cold, killing thoughts were clear as it surged toward them.
Dagger's skin blazed with heat, steam rising from his sweat. Fire blazed from him, but Fly felt no heat, nothing except a barrier made of living flame. Null’s blade bounced off multiple spots. "Can't get a solid hit on something that isn't solid," he snarled as his attacks were hit-and-miss.
Across the room, Rupture raised its fractured hand toward North.
Easy threw himself between them, taking the reality-tearing strike across his ribs.
The wound simply...wasn't. Part of Easy ceased to exist for a moment before snapping back into being, leaving him gasping and whole but somehow diminished.
Where Twister’s swan song touched Easy, the wrongness faded. The missing pieces of reality reformed, wounds sealing as if they'd never existed.
"I can keep fixing this," Twister gasped between notes, his voice still distorted by his partially transformed throat. "But not forever."
Shark had found his feet, moving with predator instincts even as his skin shifted between human and something rough and gray. He circled behind Null, testing the entity's awareness. The air churned and turbulence disrupted the entity’s attacks.
Brawler's hands had fully shifted to massive white paws, his spine arched as pack instincts fought human reasoning. Beast materialized beside him, the dog's form flickering between physical and spectral, but his growl was pure menace.
“Do your job!” Null screamed.
Rupture turned his attention away from North. Pressure formed in Fly’s skull until it was almost unbearable. With an explosion of force, Shark and Dagger were blown away like flies.
"Pattern this, Gallagher," Null whispered, and suddenly it was everywhere at once, striking from multiple angles as reality bent around its attacks.
Fly flickered rapidly between states, each phase-shift saving him from annihilation by microseconds. But he was weakening. Each transition cost him energy he couldn't spare. Eventually, he would be solid and he would die.
A new horror bloomed in Fly's mind, slicing through his grief for Mei. This wasn't just about killing them. He looked at the shimmering, unstable air of the room, at the way his own hand seemed to fade in and out of existence. The walls were melting.
He looked toward the room’s exit where the edges solidified, sealing them in. This was a…bubble, he realized, the thought sharp and cold. This space is killing us.
He tried to shout a warning, but his voice was a hoarse croak. He caught Flash's eye, trying to project the knowledge, the pattern he'd just seen. We have to get out. We're being unmade.
* * *
Fly’s realization hit Flash not as words, but as a spike of cold terror.
This place is killing us.
The transformations, the unreality, the shifting physics. The assassins were only part of it. Chaos had trapped them inside something designed to pull them apart.
“We’re in the Veil!” Flash barked, parrying a strike from Null that felt like it was draining warmth straight from his bones. “We have to get out!”
He reached for the golden thread, connecting them all. He needed formation. Coordination. A way out.
The glowing strands jerked violently in his grip, fraying and knotting at the same time. Twister’s healing agony poured through him, Easy’s hunting instincts snapping at the edges of his control, North digging for something solid beneath the unraveling world. The ties held, but barely.
Across the room, Rupture drove a reality-tearing fist toward North. Easy moved to intercept, but his coordination slipped for half a second. The strike grazed him and Easy cried out in horror, staring at his shifting hands and emerging paws like they belonged to someone else.