Chapter 2 #3
“Easy! Shake it off!” Flash roared, forcing his own will into the flow, feeling North already there, reinforcing it.
His gaze flicked to the kid, an iron anchor.
“You fucking officers always have to outdo us enlisted, don’t you, sir?
” Flash growled. North’s faint smile was his only response.
“It’s attacking the connection! Don’t let it in! ”
North’s attention shifted as he navigated the collapsing floor, fighting to hold the ground steady beneath them. Fly’s weakened mind-voice broke through the noise. Null’s using fragmentation. The idea of us. The team. The brotherhood. Stupid fucker. He doesn’t know us.
Fly flickered faster now, his body almost transparent. They were losing him, running out of time. If he died here…
His gaze snapped to Fly. The moment their eyes met, Fly’s realization crashed through the hub. Flash, the assassins expected stable targets. Predictable movement. Human reactions. We aren’t fully human anymore, but they aren’t fully in the Veil either. We’re unstable, unpredictable together.
Fly, you fucking genius! Hang on!
“Link up!” Flash roared.
Without hesitation, his brothers moved. Even compromised by transformation, their training held. Easy and Shark formed a perimeter around Fly. Dagger and Brawler flanked the assassins, forcing them to split focus. Twister shifted constantly between healing and stabilization.
North didn’t move.
Flash reached again.
Golden light blazed between them, connecting each SEAL to the others, and suddenly their partial incorporeality synchronized. When Null struck at Fly, all seven phased at once. When Rupture tried to fracture the floor beneath North, the entire team slipped partially ethereal together.
The assassins had come to kill individuals.
Instead, they found themselves fighting a unified supernatural entity that thought and moved as one.
“Kiss our tactical asses. Adapt and overcome, fuckers!”
* * *
The earth was gone. But Fly’s intent telegraphed to him, and Flash’s interpretation struck him like a cold slap to the face.
North knelt on a shifting foundation, but beneath it, there was nothing.
The memory of solid ground, the unshakable trust of a lifetime, had been violated.
Rupture was a presence of pure disruption, and it was undoing the world around him.
The room dissipated, the edges blurring into a sickening purple haze.
Flash’s desperate commands crashed through the nexus. Easy’s despair shuddered through him. Fly’s life draining out of him made North dig deep. The frantic pull of unity fraying and reforming around him.
The ground isn’t holding.
His grandfather's words echoed in his mind. You were built to hold. The strongest oak is not the one that never bends, but the one that bends and remembers its roots.
But what if the roots were gone?
Rupture raised a hand, and the very air in front of North began to disintegrate. Flash was yelling about extraction, about getting out. But there was only the expanding, dissolving wrongness of this place.
No.
That was an illusion.
He closed his eyes, ignoring the phantom horns hugging his skull, the tearing pain in his shoulders. He reached past the violation, and the memory of sand that betrayed him.
He reached for what was real.
For the bedrock beneath the foundations. For the ancient, unshakable core of his beliefs, his tribe, and the planet. For the memory of what bonds were and always would be, no matter what Chaos did to them.
A low chant began in his chest. The words his grandfather had taught him. A prayer for strength in battle, for unity in struggle. It was solid. Real.
A flicker. A response. The barest hint of stability from a world away.
Rupture struck.
The floor where North had been a second ago simply vanished, but North was already moving.
He drove forward with his legs, the buffalo haunches propelling him away from the assassin, toward his brothers. He hit Easy and Fly, wrapping his arms around them, dragging them close.
"Now!" he roared, the word tearing from his throat. "On me!"
He poured every ounce of his will, every scrap of the tether to that distant, real ground, into one single purpose. Hold the line. Bring them home.
The world dispersed into a storm of purple light and tearing energy. Rupture's claws scraped against his back, a searing cold that tried to pull him apart, but the thick buffalo hide held. Null's invalid presence tried to swallow the sound of his chant. His brothers flickered and faded in his arms.
But he held.
He was the anchor. He was a fucking SEAL officer. They never fucking quit. Were never out of the fight.
He pulled.
With a final, guttural roar that was half his own and half something ancient and wild, he ripped them backward through the veil of wrongness, through the tearing fabric of the bubble, and threw them all into the blessed, solid, unyielding reality of the hotel hallway.
They collapsed in a heap on the carpet, gasping, whole, and alive.
Behind them, the hotel room shimmered, the purple haze and the two assassins trapped within, waiting for the next chance to strike.
North lay on his back, chest heaving, the fractured trident pulsing with a dull, exhausted ache. He had held the line, but as he looked at his brothers, he knew the truth.
The ground had given way once. Chaos would find a way to make it give way again.
Try it. I will hold.