The altar never stopped moving. Its fissures widened like the gaping maw of a predator, and every slight shift sent gravity tilting in chaotic, unpredictable ways, as though the world itself were trying to throw them off balance. A faint, low buzzing emerged behind Lyra and Zyd's ears, like a distant machine awakening with irregular rhythm. The sound, or rather the pressure it exerted on their nerves, made them flinch involuntarily, hearts stuttering. Each micro-vibration resonated inside their skulls, bending perception without warning.
Lyra collapsed against the nearest rock, her breaths shallow and rapid. The Diver Harness she wore pulsed faintly, mirroring the chaotic rhythm around her, as if the Rift itself were feeding on her tension. Emotional Suppression dulled her instinctive fear, but replaced it with a mechanical panic—a stripped-down alert system that was foreign, colder, and far stranger than natural fear.
Her body fought against it, trying to regain autonomy, yet the Harness had begun adapting to the Rift's chaotic patterns faster than her mind could process. Her fingers twitched involuntarily, eyes wide, as though the ground beneath her had become an alien predator she could not predict.
Zyd pressed himself against a fragment of shattered stone, blood trickling from a split nose. His pupils flickered—an early sign that psychic pressure was starting to interfere with his nervous system. He tried to calculate the shift in gravity, but every angle contradicted the last; his Mark calculations spun uselessly. Desperation began to creep in, and with it, the faint echo of fear—a variable he hadn't allowed himself to feel in decades.
Meanwhile, Ren remained closest to the edge of the altar. His eyes were empty, a mirror to the Void itself, yet his body reacted with unnerving precision. Each micro-movement compensated for the altar's chaotic shifts, each muscle guided by Adaptive Reflex, a silent rhythm aligning him to forces no human mind could consciously follow. The Silent Pulse throbbed faintly behind his left ear, sending cold, ordered vibrations down his spine. He was both observer and instrument, an unnatural convergence of Vessel and anomaly. His mind did not process panic or dread; it cataloged movements, pressure, and micro-forces, executing them before awareness could intervene.
From the deep fissure of the altar, the first of many Void Crawlers emerged. Liquid shadows, vaguely human in shape but lacking structure—like figures sketched and erased before completion—crawled from the crack. Ten, twenty, dozens more, flowing like a tide of living darkness, all eyeless, faceless, yet unmistakably aware. They moved in perfect unison, synchronized to some rhythm invisible to every other Diver.
Zyd's voice broke the charged silence, tight with panic:
"Ren… they're reading your pulses… your body…"
Ren did not respond. The command inside his head—a mechanical hum, insistent and absolute—grew louder:
[SINK.] [FIND THE HOLE.] [SINK… SINK… SINK…]
His body obeyed. A single step forward. One step that made Lyra's heart lurch violently.
"Ren!" she screamed, forcing herself to push through the psychic waves crashing against her consciousness. An illusion flickered before her eyes—her mentor's face, smiling gently, whispering:
"You always fail. Why do you think you can save him? Let go. Rest."
Zyd clutched his head as visions of Kael and Cira—still alive in his memory—waved from the Void, taunting him with what he could not save.
"I—I don't want to remember… stop… stop!"
Ren's 27 Echo Noise, usually a protective buffer, became tainted by Lyra's panic and Zyd's remorse. Adaptive Reflex, designed to process the Rift as pure mathematical patterns, stuttered under the intrusion of emotional variables it had never accounted for. Every input from panic and sorrow was converted into corrupted data, yet Ren's body continued executing the steps as if preordained.
The Void Crawlers advanced, a dark wave of inevitability, converging toward Ren with single-minded purpose. Then the attack began.
They pressed into the fragile mental constructs of the remaining Divers, devouring memory and sanity. Marik, barely conscious until now, straightened with eerie calm, devoid of awareness. He walked toward the altar's edge.
"Marik! Don't!" Zyd shouted.
It was too late. Marik stepped into the void—no sound, no blood, only a sudden absence.
Lyra's body trembled violently.
"It's just us… just the three of us…?"
Ren's internal sensors cataloged every motion: Kael miscalculated rotation, Cira misread vectors, both failures resulting in immediate, fatal consequences. Their deaths were anomalies, data points in a vast system, stripped of emotion, only variables to be absorbed and processed.
The Rift Abomination advanced. Crystalline spikes flew with terrifying precision. Ren dodged instinctively; Echo Insight mapped each shard's trajectory like logarithmic curves, anticipating impact before it even existed. He twisted, shifted, and landed on broken stones, a conduit for Adaptive Reflex, cold, methodical, efficient.
Lyra, mouth agape, whispered:
"Is he… a Vessel… or something worse?"
Ren's body moved, guided by the foreign rhythm dominating him from the start—a rhythm that was not sound, not thought, but a mechanical command:
[SINK. FIND ABYSSAL CONVERGENCE.]
The command crawled into his spinal marrow. Logic protested; Adaptive Reflex obeyed. The void called, and his body answered.
Lyra saw it. Zyd felt it. Beneath the altar, distant ruins shifted, revealing a path to darkness impossible to calculate. The Silent Key waited.
Ren took the first step. Toward emptiness. Toward the void summoning him from the black maw of the Mind Chasm. Every micro-adjustment, every fragment of Echo Mira, every bit of Noise aligned mechanically. His body moved in perfect harmony with the Rift's rhythm.
The Rift trembled as though sensing his compliance, bending its laws around him. The Void Crawlers surged—but even their relentless convergence felt secondary to the rhythm of Ren's descent.
Lyra could only watch, her mind fracturing under psychic assault. Instinct screamed to pull him back, to interfere—but she knew instinct could not override the mechanical will guiding him. Fingers reached out, twitching in the air, yet incapable of touching the inevitable.
Ren did not falter. Every nerve, muscle, and Echo within him functioned at peak efficiency. Step by step, he descended into the abyss, a vessel of calculation, chaos, and controlled resonance. The Silent Key's pull was absolute, commanding the rhythm of his body, shaping his motion as surely as gravity itself.
And with that first deliberate step, the Mind Chasm acknowledged him—not as intruder, not as Diver, but as something else entirely. Something born to bridge the Rift itself.