tive.
Siara regained consciousness without pain.
That was the first sign something had gone wrong.
Her body lay on a smooth metallic surface, temperature-controlled, vibrationless. The air smelled filtered, recycled too many times to belong to the outside world. No alarms. No weapons raised. No voices.
She was alone.
The room itself was small—too small. No doors she could see, no seams in the walls. Just a dim overhead strip casting uniform light, and a faint distortion in the air around her, like heat haze without heat.
She sat up slowly.
Her vitals felt normal. No burns. No impact trauma. No residual radiation or plasma exposure. Whatever had moved her here had done so with absolute precision.
This was not Phantom tech.
This was Richard.
Elsewhere—far beyond this room—space folded back into its natural shape, leaving behind only one thing: residual curvature.
Narrator
Richard Solace's ability was never teleportation.
Teleportation implies relocation—point A to point B, movement through distance, however brief. What Richard did bypassed movement entirely.
His technique manipulated distance itself.
Space, at its most fundamental level, is not empty. It is elastic—capable of stretching, compressing, and stacking upon itself. Under sufficient force, distance can be expanded infinitely without increasing physical separation.
Richard's power exploited that elasticity.
When Omega partially surfaced, his body generated chrome energy—an anomalous output that did not project outward, but pressed inward on spacetime. Instead of tearing holes or opening portals, it applied infinite subdivision to the space between objects.
The result was paradoxical:
No matter how close something appeared, it never truly arrived.
No matter how far something was, it could be made adjacent.
Tanya's Explanation (earlier, recorded log)
"If you try to touch him, you don't stop," Tanya had said during analysis. "You just… never finish arriving."
Her diagram showed two points separated by a line. Then the line subdivided. Again. And again. And again—each division smaller than the last, approaching zero but never reaching it.
"That's what his field does. It inserts infinite distance into finite space."
Not a barrier.
A conceptual buffer.
Anything approaching Richard was forced to cross an endless amount of space without moving an inch closer.
Bullets slowed, stalled, then hung motionless. Plasma dispersed. Kinetic force dissolved into irrelevance. The attack didn't fail—it simply never completed.
And when Omega chose to reverse the effect—
Narrator
—distance collapsed.
Not violently. Not explosively.
Elegantly.
Siara had not been pushed away from Richard.
The space between her and Luna had been reduced to zero.
For a fraction of a second, the universe allowed two separate locations to occupy the same coordinate. When the pressure released, spacetime reasserted itself—and Siara was no longer where she had been.
No tunnel. No jump.
Just reassignment.
Siara stood now, pacing the small chamber, eyes tracing the distortion still shimmering faintly near the center of the room. It pulsed slowly, like the echo of a heartbeat.
Residual infinity.
She reached toward it—
—and stopped.
Her instincts screamed not danger, but impossibility. Touching it wouldn't hurt her. It simply wouldn't end.
Somewhere beyond this room, Richard was fighting.
Not as Omega.
Not as himself.
But as something caught between—a human body exerting pressure on laws that were never meant to bend.
And this room—
This room was proof that he had chosen, even unconsciously, to save one thing instead of himself.
The distortion faded.
Space relaxed.
And far away, something ancient took note of the fact that Richard Solace had begun to reshape distance without fully understanding the cost.