The days leading up to the third mission were a slow-motion torture of anticipation. Mark was a man living on a countdown. Every time he blinked, the translucent timer in the corner of his vision reminded him of his own transformation.
[SCANNER OFFLINE... REBOOTING IN: 26 HOURS, 14 MINUTES]
He was in a state of hyper-awareness. Being "the day before" the full awakening made him feel like he was vibrating, his nerves tuned to a frequency no one else could hear. He spent his hours in the lab going through the motions, his hands moving over botanical samples while his brain was miles away, deep in the mangroves of the coast or the ironwood groves of the interior. The "Shadow" wasn't just a hum anymore; it was a physical weight, a presence that seemed to be reorganizing his very thoughts into categories of efficiency and structural integrity.
The Growing Obsession:
"Turner! If you stare at that moss any harder, it's going to catch fire," Grace snapped, walking past his station with a stack of data-slabs. "What is wrong with you? You've been twitchy for three days. You're making the rest of the team nervous."
Mark rubbed his eyes, the filtered air of his mask feeling suddenly claustrophobic. "Just... acclimation, Grace. The dreams are getting more vivid. I'm seeing the world in grids. Maybe it's the link-training."
Grace paused, her expression softening behind her visor. "The forest gets in your head, Mark. You're human, but your brain is trying to sync with a world that operates on a much higher frequency. It's called 'transcendental shock.' Go talk to Chacon. Get out of the lab and breathe some recycled air that hasn't been near a Petri dish."
Mark didn't rest. He went to the hangar. He found himself standing under the massive, oily shadow of a Scorpion Gunship, staring at its twin intake fans. Even without the System active, he was "tracing" the machinery in his mind, imagining those turbine blades repurposed as submerged thrusters for a heavy-lift hull. He was fan-boying over the sheer industrial power, wondering how it would feel to marry that raw human force with the graceful, buoyant biology of Pandora.
The Third Mission - The Shadow Basin:
The next morning, the timer hit the final stretch just as they reached the Shadow Basin.
[00:01... 00:00]
[SYSTEM ONLINE. ALL SENSORS ACTIVE.]
The air here was heavy, smelling of ancient decay and cloying nectar. Trudy couldn't land; the root systems were too jagged and unpredictable. She hovered the Samson at ten feet, the downdraft whipping the giant ferns into a green frenzy.
"I'm staying on the stick!" Trudy's voice crackled through the headsets. "The thermals are trash in here. Ten minutes, Grace. Not a second more, or I'm pulling the plug!"
Mark and Grace dropped into the waist-high ferns, their exopacks hissing as they regulated the intake of Pandoran air. They moved toward a massive Obe'way tree to collect its polymer-rich sap. Mark knelt by the roots, but as he reached out, a sudden, violent red strobe flashed in his vision—a warning so bright it felt like a physical blow.
[THREAT DETECTED: APEX PREDATOR]
[TARGETING... LOCKED]
"Grace," Mark whispered, his blood turning to ice. "Don't move. Don't even breathe."
Across the clearing, the shadows detached themselves from the trees. A Thanator stepped into the light. It was a nightmare of black muscle and armored plates, its six legs moving with a terrifying, liquid grace. It let out a sound that wasn't a roar, but a high-pitched scream of pure aggression that vibrated in the marrow of Mark's bones.
"Run!" Grace screamed.
They scrambled, but the Thanator was faster. It lunged, its massive weight snapping saplings like toothpicks. In a moment of pure, white-hot terror, the System screamed into Mark's consciousness:
[COMBAT OVERRIDE: KINETIC ASSIST ACTIVE]
[TARGETING WEAK POINT: BRACHIAL PLEXUS]
Mark's body moved with an unnatural, jerky speed. He snatched a heavy, sharp-edged sampling probe from his belt and hurled it. But he was sliding on the slick moss—the timing was off by a fraction of a degree.
The probe didn't bury itself. Instead, it skimmed the creature's neck, tearing a shallow furrow through the hide as sparks flew off the natural armor plating.
The Thanator let out a gargling shriek, its leap faltering as it hit the ground. It was winded, gasping for air, but it wasn't down. The creature's head snapped toward Mark. Its sensory quills flattened. It ignored Grace entirely, its yellow eyes locking onto the man who had dared to draw blood.
"It's coming for me!" Mark yelled. "Grace, get to the ladder! Go!"
Mark didn't look back. He sprinted in the opposite direction, leading the beast away from the extraction point. He dove into a tangle of massive, arched roots, sliding through the mud.
The Thanator was a shadow behind him, its breathing a rhythmic, wet huffing. As Mark scrambled to duck under a thick, obsidian-hard root, a massive paw swiped through the air. A claw, long as a combat knife, caught the side of Mark's thigh.
"AGH!"
He felt the searing heat before the pain hit—a white-hot iron brand across his leg. He rolled into the hollow of the roots just as the Thanator slammed into the wood above him, its weight shaking the very earth. Mark looked down. His tactical trousers were shredded, and a deep, jagged gash ran down his thigh, weeping blood that looked dark and oily in the twilight of the basin.
[INJURY DETECTATION: LACERATION - LEFT QUADRICEP]
[ADRENALINE SHUNT: ACTIVATED]
The pain suddenly dulled, dampened by a chemical surge from the System, but as he tried to push himself up, his leg buckled. The muscle was shredded. He couldn't run. He could barely crawl. He was trapped in a wooden cage, and the lock was about to break.
The Thanator was over the root now, crouched and ready to finish him. Above the roar of the creature, Mark heard the screaming whine of turbine engines. The Samson banked hard, coming in so low that the rotor wash flattened the ferns to the ground.
"Contacts! Clear the line! Clear the line!" yelled Lyle, the door-gunner, his voice distorted by the comms.
Mark looked up. Through the ferns, he saw Lyle gripping the M60 mounted door gun. The barrel was already tracking, vibrating with the power of the helicopter. But Mark realized with a jolt of horror that from the soldier's angle, he was right in the center of the spray zone.
[DANGER: FRIENDLY FIRE TRAJECTORY DETECTED]
[CALCULATING IMPACT ZONE...]
[SUGGESTED EVASION: VECTOR 270]
Mark didn't hesitate. Ignoring the scream of his nerves and the mangled state of his leg, he threw himself into a desperate, agonized roll, tumbling away from the root and into a shallow, muddy depression filled with stagnant water.
A split second later, the world exploded into thunder.
The heavy thud-thud-thud of the M60 erupted. Tracers tore through the air like streaks of lightning, chewing the obsidian-hard root into splinters and stitching a line of fire exactly where Mark had been lying a moment before. The Thanator shrieked as the high-caliber rounds slammed into its shoulder and chest, the kinetic force knocking the massive predator backward, flipping it onto its side.
The beast scrambled for footing, black blood spraying the moss as it realized the "prey" now had teeth of iron and fire. With one final, pained roar that echoed through the entire basin, it vanished back into the impenetrable blackness of the jungle.
"Get him up! Go, go, go! We've got more signatures closing in!" Trudy screamed.
The Samson dropped to its minimum hover height, its belly nearly scraping the roots. Grace reached out from the bay, her eyes wide with terror behind her mask. With his good leg and a surge of adrenaline, Mark lunged for the rope ladder. Grace and Lyle grabbed his vest together, hauling his dead weight into the cabin.
Mark collapsed onto the metal floor, the smell of cordite, jet fuel, and his own blood filling his mask. The silence that followed the gun's cessation was deafening.
"You idiot," Grace panted, dropping the med-kit and ripping open his pant leg to reveal the gash. It was deep, the edges ragged. "You led it away. You almost got yourself killed for a few grams of sap."
Lyle stayed on the gun, his hands still trembling on the spade grips as he scanned the receding green for any sign of pursuit. "I almost took your head off, Doc. Why'd you move? I had him centered."
Mark looked at the floor, watching a bead of sweat drip off his chin onto the cold metal. His vision was swimming with blue text, but one line stood out, pulsing slowly.
[THREAT EVADED]
[BIO-DATA RECORDED: APEX MUSCULATURE]
"I saw your aim, Lyle," Mark whispered, his voice cracking with exhaustion. "I just... I knew where the bullets were going. I saw the line."
The Synchronization:
As the Samson climbed, leaving the oppressive gloom of the Shadow Basin behind, the adrenaline began to taper off. The dulling effect vanished, replaced by a white-hot, pulsing agony in Mark's thigh. He clutched the edge of a floor-bolt, his knuckles white, as Grace worked frantically to stanch the bleeding.
But his focus wasn't on the pain. It was on the bottom-right corner of his field of vision. A new bar appeared—a glowing cyan line throbbing in perfect sync with his racing pulse.
[BIOLOGICAL INTEGRATION INITIATED...]
[CALIBRATING NEURAL OVERLAY TO HOST SENSORY ARRAY]
The bar crept forward with agonizing slowness. With every decimal point, the "Shadow" in his mind solidified. The world began to peel back its layers; he could suddenly hear the microscopic stress on the rotor bearings and see the structural fatigue in the airframe's rivets highlighted in amber.
[1.8%... 1.9%...]
The cyan light intensified, drowning out the cabin until a final message scrolled across his vision in a sharp, authoritative script:
[SYNCHRONIZATION STAGE 1: COMPLETE]
[CURRENT STATUS: 2.00%]
[SYSTEM STABILIZED]
The bar froze. The glowing wireframes vanished, and the cooling sensation snapped shut. Mark was left gasping in the sudden silence of his own mind, his eyes wide as the medical bay lights of Hell's Gate appeared in the distance. If only two percent allowed him to see the hidden blueprints of the world, he was terrified of what he would become when the bar finally finished its journey.