The battle was not a clash; it was a dialectic of annihilation.
Wolfen was a theorem of force, every movement a proof of cosmic law. When Maya unraveled the air he breathed, he simply forged a new atmosphere from the Umbralite in his blood, a bubble of temporary, breathable order in her wake. When she turned the floor beneath him to a pit of dissolving nothingness, he met it with a geyser of white plasma that flash-vaporized the entropy, leaving a crater of glass behind.
Maya was the antithesis. She was the living embodiment of the universe's eventual heat death. Her power was not an attack, but a gentle, inexorable persuasion that existence was a flawed concept. She didn't block Wolfen's obsidian shards; she convinced them they had never been formed, and they would fizzle into black dust inches from her face. She didn't dodge his plasma constructs; she introduced the idea of entropy into their very core, and they would collapse inward on themselves with a silent sigh.
They were a perfect, terrible stalemate. He was the unyielding hammer of creation. She was the immovable anvil of oblivion.
The building around them was the canvas for their argument. One moment, a corridor would be a pristine, black-crystal palace forged by Wolfen's will. The next, it would be a featureless, grey void, smoothed into non-existence by Maya's passing. The sound was the worst of it—a constant, teeth-jarring vibration that was the sound of reality itself being stressed to its breaking point, a frequency below hearing that rattled their bones and frayed their nerves.
Wolfen, for all his ancient power, was being forced to expend energy at a rate he hadn't known in millennia. Containing her effect, countering it with an equal and opposite force, was a relentless, draining calculus. Maya, fueled by the consumed Regulator and her own fractured psyche, seemed to draw power from the very silence she created. The quieter the world became, the stronger she grew.
He saw an opening. She had just dissolved a massive support column to avoid a lance of Umbralite, leaving her momentarily off-balance in the cloud of her own making. It was a microsecond, a flaw in her perfect serenity. It was all he needed.
Abandoning defense, Wolfen poured everything into a single, focused point. He didn't create a massive explosion or a giant weapon. He compressed a sun's worth of plasma into a sphere the size of a marble, a point of such intense, ordered energy that it screamed against the silence, a single, piercing note of defiance. He didn't throw it. He placed it in the space she was about to occupy.
Maya, her senses tuned to the grand, sweeping waves of noise, didn't register the infinitesimal, screaming singularity until it was too late. She stepped into it.
The effect was not explosive. It was implosive. The tiny star detonated inwards, a vacuum of force that sucked all sound, all light, all matter from its immediate vicinity. It was a punch not to her body, but to the field of entropy that protected her. The perfect silence was violently, brutally shattered.
For the first time, Maya screamed. A raw, human sound of shock and pain that was instantly swallowed by the vacuum. The dark aura around her flickered and died. The unnatural grace left her limbs, and she crumpled to the glassy, cratered floor like a marionette with its strings cut.
But the victory was not without cost. The release of such concentrated power, in such direct opposition to her nullification field, created a feedback loop of catastrophic proportions. The last thing Wolfen saw was the world twisting in on itself, a kaleidoscope of broken physics. A shard of his own, rebounding Umbralite, lanced through his side, a cold fire that was somehow both freezing and burning. The shock to his system, combined with the monumental energy expenditure, was too much. The ancient entity known as Wolfen Welfric felt the embrace of a darkness deeper than any he could create, and he fell into it.
---
Consciousness returned to Wolfen not as a sunrise, but as the slow, stubborn glow of embers. He was lying on his back. The first sensation was the cold, deep ache in his side where the Umbralite shard had struck. It was a foreign feeling—pain. He had not truly felt pain in centuries. The second sensation was heat on his face.
He opened his eyes. He was in a different part of the ruined city, sheltered in the ground floor of a structure whose upper floors had been sheared away. Night had fallen, and the lavender sky was now a deep, star-dusted violet. A small, controlled fire crackled a few feet away, its light dancing over the faces of the others. It was the fire's warmth he felt.
He did not move. He simply observed, a predator assessing its new environment.
Derek was pacing, his movements agitated, his mercury-sheened eyes flicking between the fire and the darkness outside. "We shouldn't have left her there," he muttered, for what was likely the tenth time.
"And what were we supposed to do, Derek?" Leo's voice was rough, exhausted. He was sitting with his back against a wall, cradling his arms. The biopolymer filaments still gleamed, but erratically, like faulty wiring. "Carry her? After what she did to us? After what she tried to do to you? She was turning you into dust!"
"We don't know that was her!" Derek shot back, the desperation clear. "That was the… the thing inside her. The thing the Architects made!"
"It is her now," Jordan stated flatly. He was cross-legged, meticulously cleaning the Umbralite katana with a scrap of cloth. The blade drank the firelight, reflecting nothing. "The data is clear. Subject M-1 has undergone a complete psychological and physiological fusion with the Regulator entity. The 'Maya' variable, as we knew it, is a deprecated component. The entity is the primary operational consciousness."
"Stop talking about her like a report!" Derek snarled, rounding on him. "She's Maya! She's our friend!"
"Was," Leo corrected softly, looking at his malfunctioning arms. "The friend I knew wouldn't have tried to unmake me from the inside out." He flexed a hand, and a spark of corrupted energy flickered across his knuckles. "She called me 'unresolved anger'. Maybe she's not wrong."
"That's the point!" Derek insisted, running a hand through his hair. "She's sick. She's hearing things, seeing things… we can't just abandon her. We failed Zane. We can't fail her too."
The mention of Zane hung in the air, a ghost at their council.
"It is different," Eva's voice was quiet but firm. She sat closest to the fire, her gaze locked on the flames. The gash on her arm was now only a faint, silvery line. "Zane chose his path. He hardened his heart into a weapon against us. Maya… her mind has been broken and rewired. She is a weapon, but one that doesn't know it's being aimed."
"She aimed it just fine at us," Leo grumbled.
"But why?" Derek pleaded, stopping his pacing to look at them all. "Why did this happen? Why her? Why did she get… that?" He gestured vaguely in the direction of the battlefield.
Eva looked up from the fire, her strange eyes meeting his. "The Architects were not just making soldiers, Derek. They were exploring the extremes of post-human potential. Leo represents perfected physical obedience. Jordan represents optimized tactical logic. You… you represent enhanced sensory and emotional capacity, a tool for understanding and manipulating other survivors." She said it without malice, a simple statement of fact. "But Maya… and Wolfen… and I… we are something else."
All eyes turned to her. Even Wolfen, from his feigned unconsciousness, listened intently.
"The Regulator they put inside Maya was more than a monitor or a dampener," Eva continued. "It was a seed. A seed for a consciousness that could interface with reality on a fundamental, almost conceptual level. They wanted to create a being that could literally reprogram the world. They just couldn't control what it would reprogram it into. In her case, it interpreted the chaos of existence as an error. It seeks to debug the universe. To silence the noise."
"And what are you?" Leo asked, his voice low. "You said 'Prime'. What does that mean?"
Eva was silent for a long time. The fire popped and crackled.
"I don't know everything," she admitted. "But my biology… it doesn't integrate foreign DNA. It subsumes it. It forces it to conform to my original pattern. I am not a hybrid. I am… a baseline that cannot be altered. A constant. The Architects saw that not as a failure, but as the ultimate success. A being that cannot be corrupted. A perfect, stable template."
The implications settled over the group. They were all weapons, but Eva was a standard. A ruler by which all other weapons would be measured. And Wolfen was… something else entirely. An outside context problem.
"This is why we cannot separate again," Derek said, his voice gaining a new, hard-won conviction. He looked at each of them. "Look at us. Alone, we're just… broken pieces. A sensory mess, a glitching weapon, a heartless calculator, and a… a world-ending silence. But together…" He gestured to the fire, to the makeshift shelter. "Together, we survived the Laboratory. Together, we survived the desert. And together, we just survived a fight between two things that might as well be gods."
Jordan looked up from his katana. "The logic is sound. Our individual survival probabilities decrease by an average of 78.3% when operating alone. Our combined skill sets offer complementary defensive and offensive capabilities."
"Besides," Leo added, a grim smirk touching his lips as he looked at his sparking fists. "Who else is going to understand what it's like? Who else is going to be able to watch my back when my own arms decide to short-circuit?"
Eva nodded slowly. "Derek is right. The Architects didn't just release us. They started the final trial. They are watching to see which of their creations is the fittest. Which ideology of power will dominate. Wolfen's creation. Maya's silence. Or…" she looked around at their small, battered group, "…or something else. Something they didn't plan for."
Their conversation lulled, the weight of their decision and their newfound understanding pressing down on them. The fire was the only thing that seemed real, a tiny point of warmth and light in a cold, insane world.
It was then that Wolfen decided to stop pretending. He let out a low groan, a convincingly pained sound, and shifted his weight, his hand going to the wound on his side.
Four pairs of eyes snapped towards him. Instantly, the dynamic shifted. Leo was on his feet, fists raised despite the glitching. Jordan's hand went to the hilt of his katana. Derek took a defensive step forward. Eva simply watched, her expression unreadable.
Wolfen pushed himself slowly into a sitting position, his movements stiff, his face a mask of strained nonchalance. He glanced at the concerned, wary faces, then down at the bloody tear in his side.
He looked back at them, his golden eyes glinting in the firelight.
"Well," he said, his voice dry as dust. "This is new."