“Fuck you,”
- Abraham Francis
Abraham Francis had stopped counting minutes.
Time behaved badly down here. It stretched, folded, disappeared whenever he tried to hold it. The corridor he crouched in felt longer every time he looked away from it, metal walls breathing softly as heat traveled through them in waves. Emergency lights pulsed overhead in slow, sickly intervals—red, then nothing, then red again—just enough illumination to remind him where he was hiding. Just enough to remind him he could still be seen.
He pressed his back flat against the wall, rifle hugged tight to his chest, finger resting near the trigger but never on it. Sweat ran down his neck despite the cold. The air smelled sterile and wrong, like a hospital that had been abandoned mid-procedure.
Zero was somewhere in the facility.
That was the problem.
Not footsteps. Not noise. Not pressure. Just presence—a wrongness in the air that made Abraham’s skin itch and his teeth ache. The Fracture didn’t just announce itself. It erased expectation. Sound dampened near it, not fully silenced, just blurred—like hearing the world through water.
Zero.
Minimalist.
Subtractive.
Confirmed lethal.
Abraham swallowed and shifted his weight carefully, boots scraping just a fraction of an inch against the grated floor.
He froze.
Nothing happened.
That was worse.
The Division-9 outpost a few miles out from Frankfurt had gone dark less than twelve minutes earlier. Internal lockdown engaged automatically, sealing bulkheads and dropping blast doors that now hung half-melted or warped open like peeled scabs. Abraham had been part of the response team sent to secure the lower levels.
He was now the only one responding.
His comm crackled softly at his shoulder—dead channel, looping static. He’d shut off the speaker to avoid noise, relying instead on the faint vibration against his collarbone whenever the device tried to receive something.
It hadn’t tried it in a while.
Abraham slid his hand to the knife at his belt—not because he planned to use it, but because touching something solid helped keep his thoughts aligned. The rifle was good at range. The knife was honest about what would happen if things went wrong.
A shape shifted at the far end of the corridor.
Abraham didn’t move.
He watched.
The light pulsed again, briefly illuminating the space ahead. The corridor looked empty—no bodies, no damage, no obvious breach. But Abraham knew better. What ever Zero was, it didn’t leave messes.
Zero removed.
The shape shifted again, closer now.
Abraham exhaled through his nose, slow and controlled, counting heartbeats instead of seconds. One. Two. Three.
He edged backward, careful to keep his boots aligned with the wall, minimizing sound. The corridor behind him opened into a maintenance junction—narrow, cluttered, full of vertical piping that could block line of sight.
If Zero needed line of sight.
That was still unclear.
Another pulse of red light.
Something stood in the corridor now.
Not fully formed. Not moving.
Just… there.
Abraham’s stomach clenched.
Zero looked
(almost)
human if you didn’t stare too hard—average height, slim build, posture relaxed to the point of carelessness. Its clothing was unremarkable, monochrome, edges soft as if reality itself didn’t want to commit to its outline.
Its face was the problem.
Featureless.
Not blurred. Not hidden.
Absent.
Like someone had erased a drawing’s face and did nothing with the space where it should have been.
Abraham raised his rifle slowly, suppressor already attached, sight lining up with the center mass of something that might not have a center.
He squeezed the trigger.
The shot landed clean.
Zero didn’t react.
The bullet didn’t ricochet. It didn’t spark. It simply… vanished. No impact. No sound beyond the muted pop of the rifle.
Zero tilted its head.
Abraham didn’t wait.
He bolted.
The moment his boots left the corridor, the world bent. Sound folded inward, the echo of his footsteps swallowed mid-stride as if the facility itself had inhaled sharply.
Abraham ducked into the maintenance junction, slamming his shoulder into a pipe hard enough to bruise. He didn’t care. He crouched behind a generator unit, heart hammering so hard it threatened to give him away all on its own.
He waited.
Nothing.
No footsteps.
No pursuit.
The silence stretched, thick and suffocating.
“What the fuck is going on?” he whispered.
Zero hunted differently.
It didn’t chase. It didn’t rush.
It occupied.
Abraham forced himself to think. The briefing flickered through his mind in fragments—Fractured behavior, containment theory, last known engagements.
Zero nullified escalation by removing contrast.
No peaks. No spikes. No panic.
Everything flattened.
Which meant fear wasn’t an alarm.
It was camouflage.
Abraham closed his eyes briefly and focused on something else—the feel of the metal floor under his gloves, the ache in his knees, the steady weight of the rifle. He needed to stay specific. Zero fed on generality.
A soft vibration hummed through the pipes beside him.
Abraham opened his eyes.
The generator unit behind him was… thinner.
Not damaged.
Less.
Material shaved away at the edges, like someone had taken a blade to reality itself and scraped gently.
Zero was close.
Abraham rose in one smooth motion, pivoting around the generator and firing three quick shots in a tight spread—not at Zero, but at the pipe cluster above it. The rounds shattered supports, sending a cascade of heavy metal crashing down into the space between them.
The noise was deafening.
For half a second.
Then it wasn’t.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
The sound cut off abruptly, swallowed mid-collapse.
Zero stood on the other side of the fallen debris, untouched.
Abraham’s pulse spiked.
“Fuck,” he muttered. “New plan.”
He turned and ran deeper into the facility, boots pounding as he sprinted through a series of narrow service tunnels. Emergency lighting flickered erratically now, red replaced by a sickly white glow that made everything look flat and unreal.
He burst into a laboratory space—wide, open, full of reflective surfaces and hanging equipment. Too exposed. No cover.
Bad.
Abraham skidded to a stop anyway.
He spun, rifle raised—
—and Zero was already inside.
Not entering.
Present.
Abraham fired again, emptying half the magazine in controlled bursts. The bullets disappeared into the space around Zero, vanishing without impact.
Zero stepped forward.
Not fast.
Not slow.
Inevitable.
Abraham’s mind raced.
Containment rules. Environmental disruption. Non-Fracture weapons.
He reached into his pack and pulled a small, unassuming device—last-resort hardware, never meant for frontal engagement.
A localized null pulse.
Short range. Single use.
Abraham thumbed the activation switch and threw it hard at Zero’s feet.
The pulse detonated silently.
For a split second, the room returned.
Sound snapped back. Air pressure equalized. The world sharpened.
Zero staggered.
Abraham didn’t hesitate.
He lunged forward and drove his knife straight into where Zero’s chest should have been.
The resistance felt wrong—like cutting through memory instead of flesh—but the blade sank in.
Zero screamed.
Not audibly.
Conceptually.
The scream bent the air, collapsing the edges of the room inward as Zero convulsed, its form flickering violently.
Abraham held on.
“You don’t get to erase us,” he snarled, driving the blade deeper. “We remember each other.”
The Fracture shuddered.
Its form destabilized, edges tearing away as if reality itself was rejecting it now that contrast had been forced back into the system.
With a final violent convulsion, Zero collapsed inward on itself—folding, compressing, disappearing in a way that left a hollow ache behind.
The room went still.
Sound returned fully.
Abraham fell to his knees, gasping, knife clattering to the floor as adrenaline drained from his system all at once.
He stayed there for a long time.
Eventually, he laughed—a short, shaky sound that bordered on hysteria.
“Fuck you,” he whispered to the empty room.
His comm vibrated faintly against his chest.
This time, it didn’t stop. Abraham closed his eyes and answered.
“Francis,” he said hoarsely. “Target neutralized. Area… unclear.”
Static crackled.
Then a voice—distant, cautious, real.
“...Copy, Fran… Head ba… Frankfurt.”
Abraham leaned back against a lab bench, staring up at the flickering lights.
He was alive.
Again.
And whatever was happening to the world outside—whatever Fractures were learning to do—
He knew one thing with absolute certainty.
They weren’t invincible.
They just needed to be cornered.
The Deepest Region:
“BUILDINGS FALL BUT WE REMEMBER,”
- Unattributed Mural, Miami
The city didn’t break.
It gave up.
That was the difference Roan felt first after he went back to the museum—not resistance snapping, not systems screaming—but a long, exhausted yielding, like something that had been holding itself together long past any obligation to do so.
The ground below the St?del Museum fully softened.
Not cracked.
Not shattered.
Softened—stone losing its argument with gravity as the Hole in the Earth exhaled and simply took.
Roan stood at the edge of it. The museum sank fully now without collapsing, its walls sliding downward as if being filed away by an unseen hand. Whatever windows that were left imploded inward. Columns folded neatly, swallowed whole.
No debris.
No explosion.
Just absence growing.
Roan watched without blinking.
The Hole in the Earth responded to him now with frightening precision. It no longer surged blindly. It didn’t thrash or scream. It opened—a vast, patient geometry unfurling beneath the city, pressure and heat working together to unmake rather than destroy.
He stepped forward.
The ground accepted him.
From the museum, the sink began to spread—slow at first, then accelerating as the Hole in the Earth learned the shape of the city’s weaknesses. Streets sloped inward, asphalt stretching before slipping free. Buildings leaned, not toppling, but sliding toward the growing mouth like tired men choosing rest over resistance.
Frankfurt screamed.
Sirens wailed too late. Evacuation orders overlapped. Bridges with buses filled with people trying to escape warped, their anchors dragged downward as the Hole in the Earth expanded laterally, carving a path through old foundations and newer lies alike.
From the St?del to the K?nigsbrünnchen, the earth unstitched itself.
Roan moved with it.
Every step he took clarified the path, the Hole in the Earth responding as if it had always been waiting for someone to walk this far. Pressure deepened beneath his feet, heat rising not violently but insistently, like a furnace brought to steady operating temperature.
He felt powerful.
Not euphoric.
Aligned.
This was what it meant to stop pretending.
Inside him, the silence held.
Noah did not speak.
Not because he couldn’t—but because Roan had sealed him beneath layers of compression so dense they bordered on absence. Guilt couldn’t surface. Fear had nowhere to gather.
Only intent remained.
The Hole in the Earth widened again, swallowing a block of residential buildings in a smooth, horrifying descent. People ran, some screaming, some frozen, but the city did not pause to accommodate them. The ground dipped and took, geometry rearranging itself around Roan’s movements.
He raised a hand slightly.
The descent accelerated.
“Enough,” he said—not as a plea, but a calibration.
The Hole in the Earth obeyed.
Roan laughed softly.
Above him—far above, on a rooftop that should not have still existed—Summer Breeze stood with his hands in his pockets.
He was smiling.
Not wide.
Not cruel.
Interested.
The wind curled lazily around him, untouched by heat or pressure, his silhouette clean against the rain-darkened sky. He watched the city sink the way one watched a slow-motion collapse on a screen—detached, appreciative, utterly unafraid.
“So that’s what you do with it,” he murmured.
Roan did not hear him.
Noah did not feel him.
Summer Breeze tilted his head as the museum vanished entirely, the Hole in the Earth’s edge passing beneath streets that now sloped like drained water. The K?nigsbrünnchen trembled, its historic stone pulled downward as the Hole in the Earth reached greedily toward it.
“Still messy,” Summer Breeze said. “But honest.”
The ground lurched violently as a section of roadway tore loose and dropped wholesale into the darkness below. Heat flared, purple light spilling upward in a dull glow that painted the undersides of buildings like hellfire reflections.
Roan stepped closer to the center.
The air grew heavier here, pressure stacking not outward but inward, gravity itself bending subtly toward the Hole in the Earth’s core. Sounds distorted. Sirens warped into low, drawn-out moans before vanishing entirely.
He felt it then.
Depth.
Not size.
Depth.
The Hole in the Earth wasn’t just wide—it was deep, layers of layers collapsed space folding into one another like a throat swallowing the city piece by piece. The deeper it went, the less the surface mattered.
Roan felt drawn—not compelled, not dragged—but invited.
“This is where answers live,” he thought.
He descended.
The ground beneath him sloped sharply now, but he didn’t slide. The Hole in the Earth shaped itself to his movement, steps forming where none should have existed. Heat thickened, pressure compressing his chest just enough to remind him he still had a body.
Above, Summer Breeze leaned forward slightly.
“Oh,” he said softly. “You’re going in.”
The K?nigsbrünnchen cracked and sank behind Roan, stone sliding away into the abyss as the Hole in the Earth completed its path. The surface city howled, fractured, half-submerged—but Roan barely noticed.
The deeper region swallowed sound.
Light dimmed to a low, purple glow that pulsed in time with the Hole in the Earth’s movement. The walls around him weren’t walls at all—layers of compressed space, folded streets and foundations pressed together into something that resembled anatomy more than architecture.
Roan walked.
The Hole in the Earth walked with him.
This was no longer catastrophe.
It was transition.
Inside the silence, something shifted.
Not Noah.
Something older.
He felt memory echo—not personal, not human—residual impressions of weight and pressure and collapse layered over decades, centuries, the city’s buried history folding into the present. He saw glimpses of foundations laid over graves, tunnels dug through forgotten rivers, structures built on promises that had never been meant to last.
“This is what you were hiding,” Roan whispered.
The Hole in the Earth responded with a low, resonant hum.
Agreement.
Far above, Summer Breeze’s smile widened just a fraction.
“He thinks it’s a truth engine,” he said. “Cute.”
Roan reached the deepest point.
There was no bottom.
Only convergence.
Pressure here was immense, but balanced—heat and gravity coiled together in a stable configuration that felt almost… calm. The Hole in the Earth wasn’t trying to consume this space.
It was this space.
Roan stood at the center of it, purple light reflecting off sweat-slick skin, Rottweiler coiled just beneath the surface of his shadow, flame licking eagerly at the edges of existence.
He spread his arms slightly.
“This is mine,” he said.
The Hole in the Earth answered—not with obedience, not with submission—but with resonance. The space around him tightened, aligning around his presence like a system locking onto a dominant frequency.
For the first time since Miami, Roan felt truly alone.
No Noah.
No city.
No opposition.
No organization to exploit.
Just depth.
And power that no longer needed to pretend it was justified.
Above, Summer Breeze turned away at last, interest satisfied—for now.
“Let’s see how long that lasts,” he said, stepping off the rooftop and vanishing into the rain as if gravity had never applied to him.
The city continued to sink.
The Hole in the Earth continued to open.
And Roan stood at its heart, ready—finally—to stop reacting and start choosing what the world would be allowed to keep.