"Before careful brat that thing currently within her isn't easy to deal with," Wonko screamed within Elijah mind .
The warning was less a thought and more a verdict — the kind of conclusion that arrives not through deliberation but through the accumulation of evidence so overwhelming that deliberation becomes redundant. It sat in the architecture of the Orrhion chip the way a stone sits at the bottom of a river, unmoved by the current flowing over it.
The cheeky behaviour. The provocations. The mimicking of her tone back at her. The are you all this nugging delivered mid-combination as though the entity wearing Tyla's body was a sparring partner at a gym who needed to be reminded of their limitations. All of it had been feeding something — not the fight, not the frequency, but the attention of whatever was inside her. And attention from something like that was not neutral. It accumulated. It found the seams. It pressed against them with the patience of water finding cracks in stone.
It is going to begin eating at him, Wonko noted.
The observation carried no alarm. No urgency. Just the grim satisfaction of someone whose predictions had the unfortunate habit of arriving exactly on schedule, regardless of whether anyone wanted them to. The chip's processing continued in the background — data streams, frequency analyses, threat assessments — but the core of Wonko's attention remained fixed on the fight unfolding in the parking structure above.
Wonko looked at what Elijah was doing — the patterns of his movement, the escalating risk in his choices, the way he kept talking when silence would have been safer — and composed his transmission.
You spectacular idiot.
The words took shape in the chip's output channel, encoded for the sound interface that connected to Elijah's auditory processing. Then they were sent.
I hope the floor is comfortable.
---
Elijah threw several blows of which Tyla countered with her own making the clash to be frustrating evenly matched between them, and Elijah careless underestimating the enemy let to him being given a blow to the face and another that sent him flying and falling to the ground .
The concrete was not comfortable.
He received the transmission the way he always received Wonko — as a voice arriving slightly to the left of his own thoughts, distinct enough to identify, close enough to feel internal. It was not hearing, exactly. It was something closer to awareness — the sense of words forming in a space that was inside his head but not of his head, like a radio playing in another room whose volume had been turned up just enough to make out the lyrics.
He didn't respond immediately.
He was busy doing a rapid structural assessment of the situation, which currently read as: horizontal, blood in his mouth, entity above him, options narrowing. The concrete pressed against his back, cold and unyielding. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, their amber glare making everything look sick. The entity — Tyla's body, but not Tyla — stood over him, her shadow falling across his face.
Working on it, he sent back.
The response was terse. Automatic. The kind of acknowledgement a person gives when they are focused on other things and do not have the attention to spare for elaboration.
You were warned, Wonko replied.
The words came with a quality that might have been satisfaction — or might have been exhaustion. The distinction was difficult to parse through the chip's emotional translation layer.
Still working on it.
---
She had gone still above him.
Not the stillness of hesitation. The stillness of something that had detected a variable it had not accounted for. Her head tilted — a small, precise movement, no more than a few degrees — and when she spoke, the layered voice carried something new beneath its surface. Not suspicion. Identification.
"We sense another presence."
The words arrived slowly. Each one weighted, as though the entity was tasting them before releasing them into the air. The resonance of her voice pressed against the concrete walls, against the broken light fixtures overhead, against the dust on the floor.
"Not you. Within you." Her eyes moved across him the way a frequency scanner moves across a signal — searching, isolating, cataloguing. "But it is not of our kind." A pause. The tilt of her head shifted to the other side. "How daring and disgusting a mere human dares to take the part of our race ,we will kill you and then extract that soul within our race artifact.
She said it without alarm. Without urgency. The way a person notes the weather — as a fact, a piece of data, neither good nor bad, simply present. The layered voice carried no fear in it, no concern. Just the flat acknowledgment of a thing observed.
Then her expression resolved back into what it had been before.
The composure returned. Not that it had ever left — it had simply been joined by something else, and now that something else had receded, leaving the stillness intact. Her hand came down toward his face. Not as a punch. Not as a strike. As something more deliberate. More personal. The kind of movement that intends not to damage but to end. To reduce. The intent behind it was the compression of a thing that wanted the space where his face currently existed to be reclassified as empty.
Elijah was not there when it arrived.
He moved — not away, not backward — through. The distinction mattered. Moving away would have conceded ground. Moving backward would have acknowledged her momentum. Moving through denied both. He rolled to the side, his shoulder taking his weight, his hip following, his legs finding the floor. He came upright in a single motion that carried the weight of someone who had learned that survival was not a thing you thought about but a thing your body remembered.
He came up already moving forward.
The frequency rose with him.
It was not elegant. That was the first thing that could be said about it, and the most honest. The Spartan in him — the part of his combat identity that did not negotiate with distance or angle or the careful geometry of trained fighters — came forward with the blunt, accumulated force of something that had decided engagement was the only acceptable answer. The attacks did not flow. They pressed. Shoulder first, weight behind it, each strike thrown with the full commitment of a man who had concluded that holding anything in reserve was a form of dishonesty he couldn't afford.
The frequency of Mars — that ancient, grinding, iron-red fury — did not announce itself in light or spectacle.
It announced itself in sensation. The air around him thickened at the edges, growing heavy and close, the way air thickens before a thunderstorm. The ground near his feet accepted the frequency like a tuning fork accepts a note — vibrating in microtremors that spread outward from each footfall, a low seismic resonance that had no visible source and no visible edge. It moved through the concrete and into the bones of anyone standing on it.
Lucian felt it first.
He was standing against the far pillar, his arms still folded, his expression still locked in that cold assessment. But something changed in his face when the frequency reached him — a compression in his sternum, sudden and involuntary, as though the air had briefly decided to weigh more. His hand went to his chest before he could stop it. His fingers pressed against his sternum as if checking that his heart was still beating.
Gerry felt it in his jaw.
The resonance found the fillings in his teeth, vibrating them against the enamel. His molars ached. His jaw clenched, then unclenched, then clenched again. Something primal in the base of his skull sent up a signal that read, simply and completely, as do not be in the path of that.
They were not in the path of it.
They were also not capable, in this moment, of doing much more than existing at the periphery of it and accepting that some forces were not things you stood adjacent to without consequence.
---
She met him.
The sound of their collision was not a sound you heard. It was a sound you absorbed — a concussive exchange that the parking structure's concrete walls received and threw back at half-volume, the echo arriving a fraction after the impact like an afterthought. Her attacks carried in them the signal of the entity's frequency — a high, resonant shriek at the edge of each strike, the sound an alien hull makes when stressed against atmosphere. Something between a tone and a pressure. Felt in the sinuses before it was processed as noise.
She hit him and he moved with it but did not go far.
His body absorbed the impact the way a tree absorbs wind — bending, swaying, but holding. The Martian frequency at his edges pulsed brighter for a moment, compensating, redistributing the force across a wider surface.
He hit her and the aetherflux at her surface buckled and reformed.
The shimmer around her body dimpled at the point of contact, like a pond surface disturbed by a thrown stone, then smoothed itself back into place. The entity's frequency architecture was resilient — designed to absorb and redirect, to take damage and redistribute it across multiple channels. But each hit left a mark. Each impact thinned the shimmer by a fraction.
He was overwhelming her in moments. Not dominating — overwhelming. There is a difference. Domination implies control. What he was doing was closer to insistence — the raw, accumulated insistence of a frequency that did not know how to be less than what it was — and she absorbed it with the limitless durability of the thing inside her, but the absorption was costing something now. The bruising on her face was deeper. The split at her lip had widened, a thin line of dark blood tracking down toward her chin.
She spoke through it.
"Though you wield the mark of the Veyrath Confluence—"
The layered voice carried the words between exchanges, unhurried, as if the fight was happening in a different time signature from the conversation.
"—the alignment brand you bear on your frequency — you carry it without understanding it. Without lineage."
"What is it?" Elijah asked. Not rhetorically. Genuinely.
A pause.
Her fist came toward his head. He ducked. Came up with an uppercut that caught her under the ribs. The shimmer there buckled. She stepped back half a pace, reset, came forward again.
"You expect us—" The voice shifted into something that on a human face would have been incredulity. "—to illuminate you on the ancient architecture of sealed gates and planetary thresholds, brat?"
The tone sharpened. The layered resonance tightened, the harmonics stacking more closely together.
"You should be spending this moment considerably more concerned with your current situation."
A beat. Her eyes moved past him, toward the far wall, toward the pillars, toward something beyond the immediate geometry of the fight.
"And with what is coming for your companions. For the ones in your orbit,like the naive humans we tricked to be our dummies,Cael was it .The others."
The layered voice moved through the names like weather moving through a forecast — inevitable, already decided. There was no malice in it. There was no pleasure. Just the flat certainty of a thing that had processed the data and arrived at a conclusion.
"They are being assessed. Catalogued. There are those among us who have already begun identifying which of them will serve best as vessels when that day—"
Elijah stopped moving.
It lasted less than a second. In the architecture of a fight, less than a second is a geological age.
"What day," he said.
The joking register was gone. Completely and without ceremony. What replaced it was something quieter and considerably more serious — a voice from a different part of him, a part that did not perform, did not deflect, did not use humour as armour.
Her expression did not change. But something in the layered voice smiled.
"You think we would give you that?" The voice had moved into something almost conversational. Almost friendly. The intimacy of a predator playing with its food. "You think we would hand you the shape of what is coming because your face is interesting and your tongue moves quickly?"
She stepped toward him.
"I don't like that tongue."
Her hand moved. Not fast. Not slow. At the speed of certainty.
"I have been watching it since you opened your mouth in this structure and I have been cataloguing the many ways I would prefer it—"
Her hand closed around his face.
Not a strike. A grip. The fingers spread across his jaw and cheek with a pressure that was controlled and purposeful, the thumb pressing against one temple, the middle finger against the other. His feet left the ground by several inches. His hands came up immediately to the wrist — pulling, twisting, finding no give in it. The entity's grip was absolute, immovable, the product of frequency reinforcement rather than muscle.
The fingers at the edges of her grip pressed inward with the slow, exploratory patience of something that was deciding how it wanted to proceed and was not in any hurry to decide.
The layered voice arrived very close to his ear.
"—removed."
---
The arrow came from across the level.
It was not announced. There was no whistle, no warning, no dramatic shift in the air. One moment the parking structure was still. The next, an arrow was crossing the space between Gerry's position and the entity's face, its trajectory flat and true.
She turned her head at the sound.
Not startled. Not alarmed. Simply — aware. Her free hand came up in an arc that was almost lazy, and her fingers closed around the shaft between the fletching and the tip, stopping it completely. She looked at the arrow. Then looked at Gerry, who stood at the far end of the level with his bow still raised, his expression unreadable.
"Human."
The layered voice moved across the distance without raising itself. It did not need to raise itself. The resonance carried it effortlessly, filling the space between them.
"For the puniest thing I have laid eyes on in this current age—"
The resonance stretched around the word, pulling it into something that was not quite contempt but was its immediate neighbor. Not hatred. Something closer to dismissal — the way a person might regard an insect that had landed on their arm.
"—you are certainly dar—"
The arrow's head cracked.
The canister inside it fractured. The gas came — not in a cloud, not dramatically, but in a spreading, colourless dispersion that found her face before she had finished the sentence. It moved with the patience of something that did not need to be fast, because it was already where it needed to be.
The cough that followed was not the cough of a human body reacting to irritant.
It was something between that and a system encountering unexpected interference — a disruption in the composure that had been absolute until now. The layered voice broke across the cough in fragmented harmonics, the resonance stuttering, losing its coherence for a fraction of a second. Her eyes, when they came up, found Gerry across the level with an expression that had abandoned everything except the specific, focused fury of a thing that had been made to cough against its will.
The cursing arrived in a frequency that did not translate into language but was understood by every person in the structure as precisely what it was.
She began to move toward him.
Elijah's hand closed around her ankle.
It was not strategic. It was not positioned or leveraged or the beginning of a technique. It was the grip of a man on the ground reaching for the one option available to him — desperate in the way that honest things are desperate, without performance, without pretense. His fingers locked around the joint and his weight went into it and he held.
She looked down at him.
The kick came from the free leg — a single, full-weight, full-frequency impact to the side of his head that did not ask permission and did not leave room for interpretation. The sound of it was a wet crack, the sound of bone meeting force at an angle that neither had been designed for.
His grip released.
His body slumped sideways, his head coming to rest against the concrete, his eyes open but unfocused. The Martian frequency at his edges flickered — dimmed — went out.
Across the level, Gerry had not moved.
Could not move.
His face had arrived at the place faces arrive when the body has assessed the situation and concluded that movement is something that happens to other people in other circumstances. His bow hung at his side, the string slack, the next arrow not nocked. His eyes were fixed on Elijah's prone form with an expression that was not quite horror — was not yet horror — but was the ground in which horror grows.
Lucian stood beside him.
The expression on his face was the one that lives past fear — the one that arrives when fear has been processed and what remains is the clear, cold understanding of helplessness. Of watching something unfold in a space you cannot enter and could not change. His hands were at his sides, clenched into fists, the knuckles white. But he did not move. Because there was nowhere to move to. Nothing to move toward.
The echo of the impact moved through the concrete and faded.
And the level was very quiet.
---