The air in the GORCI command center was thick with tension, so heavy you could almost cut it with a knife. It felt like a tightly wound spring, ready to snap. And it did, not with a bang, but with a soft, strange chime from Felix's console. He'd been secretly listening to a special OmniGen frequency, against orders.
"They're poking around the network", Felix said, his voice strained. "Julian's group. They're sending out a focused pulse. Not a weapon… more like a scout. They're trying to introduce themselves to the sphere network's brain."
The main screen showed the OmniGen site. A smooth, dish-like device was powering up. Julian Aris stood nearby, watching with the same coolness he'd use to review business reports.
"He's lost it", Rostova snapped, already hitting the general comms. "Julian Aris, back down now! You're messing with something we can't control!"
Julian's reply was calm and clear, way too calm. "Containing it is the same as giving up, Commander. We're starting a conversation." He gave a quick, dismissive smile. "OmniGen didn't become powerful by hiding from the unknown."
Back in the lab, Aris was the first to sense it. The tephra stone around his neck didn't just get cold; it turned freezing, a chunk of absolute zero against his skin. The hum in his head jumped into a clear note of warning. "He's not talking", Aris whispered, his eyes wide with fear. "He's shouting. He's throwing something completely new into a system that needs to be sterile."
Before Rostova could say another word, the Obelisk reacted.
It wasn't the crazy spinning of the sphere rain. This was deeper, more intense. A light, not reflected but coming from the Obelisk itself, pulsed once. It was like a wave of silver, spreading from its base. It went through the GORCI base, the forest, and the OmniGen area.
The change was immediate and total.
Every light in the command center died. The screens, the servers, the little status lights, it all went dark. Even the emergency generators didn't start. For a scary moment, there was just silence and darkness, like before humans had fire. Then, red emergency lights flickered on, covering the room in a dim, bloody glow. They were blind, deaf, and helpless.
"Total system failure!" Felix shouted, his fingers hitting a useless keyboard. "It's not an EMP! It's… a shutdown. It didn't destroy the electronics; it just told them to stop working. Forever."
But the real trouble was just starting. The main display, running on a backup battery, flickered back on, showing a thermal view of the forest.
The energy from the Obelisk's pulse had gone straight into the underground network. Lily's crayon lines now glowed with terrifying reality on the thermal image. The network, meant to take in and move life force, had been overloaded with strange power.
One of the sphere signatures on the map, dangerously close to the OmniGen site, started to flash red. Its stable pattern turned into chaotic, screaming signals.
"The sphere… it's overloading, Kaito said", his voice empty with dread. "He's messed up the growing cycle."
On the screen, the ground around the OmniGen dish burst open. Not with an explosion of dirt, but with a silent burst of silver light. The sphere didn't dig out; it moved through the soil, hovering a meter above the ground. Its smooth surface rippled like liquid metal, and from inside, the Siphon turned on.
It wasn't carefully drawing power anymore. It was a wild, out-of-control hunger.
The silver light spread in a blinding wave. It touched the OmniGen dish, and the strong metal simply… disappeared. It touched two of Julian's technicians. They didn't even turn to dust; they were removed from existence, their bodies vanishing into the bright light. Julian himself was thrown backward by the blast of energy, his expensive suit burning, his calm finally broken into raw fear.
The sphere, having eaten everything nearby, pulsed again and then stopped, a dead, grey ball falling to the burned ground. But it was too late. On the thermal map, two more spheres near the edge of the forest began to flash red, their stability broken by the chain reaction.
The Obelisk, for the first time, wasn't still. A deep rumble started to come from it, a sound of cosmic anger, of a system cleaning out a disease. The red lights in the command center flashed with the rhythm.
Aris stood in the middle of the chaos, the cold of the tephra stone going deep into his bones. He looked from the scared faces of his team to the terrifying new activity on the screens. Julian's ambition had not just caused a disaster. It had changed everything. The Obelisk was no longer patiently gathering power. It was awake, it was angry, and the early hatching of its spheres meant the countdown to total destruction had become impossible to predict.
The harvest had been terrible enough. Now, they were facing a plague.