The day was unusually cloudy, the kind that carried a heavy calm. It was one of those rare rest days granted to the squad after a long and grueling raid. The air smelled faintly of rain and metal, the aftermath of the city's morning cleaning drones. Nathaniel stood on his balcony with a mug of coffee, watching the neighborhood below come alive. The chatter of merchants, the distant hum of traffic, and the occasional laughter of children all wove into a soft rhythm that felt too normal for someone like him.
He took another sip and sighed. Restless boredom crept in, but beneath it was a stirring curiosity that never left him for long. He looked up at the sky, eyes narrowing slightly as the clouds thinned in the wind. The subtle pulse of energy around him began to draw his attention, and his irises shifted, taking on the refractive traits of the peacock mantis shrimp.
The world sharpened into impossible clarity. He could see every trace of uratsu and ura in motion—the vibrant spectrum of power that surrounded all living things. Streams of energy flowed through the streets, twisting around buildings, curling over rooftops, and branching into the upper air. Each person below carried a faint glow, a signature of their inner energy, flickering like the embers of small fires.
When he turned his gaze outward, he saw more. The land itself breathed with light. The ura moved beneath the surface like veins of molten silver, linking the city to the wider world. Farther still, two moons glowed on the horizon, pale and steady, their auras visible to him like halos of slow-moving mist. Even the sun carried a current he could sense, immense and constant, its pressure brushing faintly against his consciousness.
For a moment he felt insignificant, a speck suspended in something ancient and endless. That awareness did not frighten him; it grounded him. He smiled faintly and set the mug on the railing.
Without another thought, he stepped off the balcony. Horus' segmented cape bloomed open, its plates aligning into a smooth pattern that caught the light. Gentle jets of Hellcharge ignited along its edges, propelling him forward in a quiet burst that carried the faint growl of thunder. He moved beneath the clouds, gliding above the treeline until the city gave way to the forest below.
He landed in a clearing that felt untouched. The cape folded in on itself and broke apart into motes of fading light. Nathaniel took a slow breath and sat cross-legged on the damp earth. The stillness felt natural here.
Closing his eyes, he reached inward and began to shut down the flow of uratsu in his body. His heartbeat slowed. The faint luminescence in his veins dimmed. His irises shifted from silver to dull onyx, and then to black. Every sense quieted until there was only the low hum of the world around him.
he was silent for a few moments remembering the feeling of holding on to one of the ura crystals when he fought the nemesis delta as his senses searched his environment ant the stable flow of natural ura around him so insignificant that not even a low level biome would manifest.
Nathaniel steadied his breathing, allowing his body to settle into the rhythm of the planet beneath him. Each inhale drew faint traces of energy from the air, the ground, and the forest around him. The purged stillness within him began to fill, slowly at first, until a low concentration of ura threaded through his system. It moved freely, unimpeded by the usual reactivity between ura and uratsu. The sensation was familiar, almost nostalgic.
He exhaled, voice barely above a whisper."This feels… comforting."
His eyes opened, glowing faintly with a pale amber light before dimming again as he directed the new flow of energy toward his palms. He focused, expecting the interface to react or display some form of feedback, but it remained silent. That silence was curious, and a little unnerving.
Nathaniel pushed harder, forcing more of the purified ura to converge in his hands. The light grew warmer, the glow like filtered sunlight breaking through leaves. It took immense concentration to hold it together. Any lapse in focus made the energy waver and slip from control.
He sat there for several minutes, watching the orb form between his palms, its surface rippling like liquid glass. It gave off a faint warmth that reminded him of a fireplace on a cold night. Encouraged, he attempted to compress it — a small test, just enough to see if the energy could be stabilized under pressure.
The result was immediate. The sphere convulsed, cracking apart with a sharp sound as its color bled into a deep, wicked crimson. The light shrank to the size of a smoldering ember, flickering erratically at the tip of his palm. Its behavior was unstable, erratic, alive.
Nathaniel's instincts screamed. He pulled back, trying to suppress the reaction before it destabilized, but the energy twisted violently. A frightened doe burst out from the tree line, startled by the rising tension in the air.
Then came the release.A dull flash of crimson light rippled outward, soundless yet heavy, forcing Nathaniel off balance and sending him skidding across the clearing. He caught himself with a hand in the dirt, his breath ragged. His irises glowed faintly, the same crimson traces of the unstable energy burning through his vision.
When he finally looked up, the world was still.The air shimmered faintly with distortion, and there — suspended mid-step in the clearing — was the doe. Its body looked perfectly intact, eyes bright and alive, but unmoving. Frozen in place. Time, or something like it, had stopped around it.
Nathaniel rose slowly, his heart pounding. He approached the creature, half-expecting it to collapse or vanish. He reached out and pushed gently against its shoulder. It didn't move. No resistance. No reaction.
The forest was silent again, but the silence felt wrong this time — heavy and expectant. The faint crimson glow in his eyes pulsed once, dimming as he stared at what he had done.
Nathaniel's pulse quickened. The air was too still, too quiet. The doe's body remained suspended in mid-motion, a perfect image itself.
He swallowed hard and took a step closer, his voice breaking the silence."No... no, no, that's not—"
He reached out again, pressing his hand against the creature's fur. It was warm, soft, yet it wasn't breathing faintly against his palm, yet there was no life behind it. The heart wasn't beating. The breath wasn't moving. The body was, but the moment wasn't.
He drew his hand back and stared at it. The faint traces of crimson still pulsed beneath his skin like veins of light, flickering up to his wrists before fading. His mind scrambled to rationalize what he was seeing — a spatial lock, an energy feedback loop, temporal distortion, something. Anything that could be measured.
He spread his fingers, inhaled sharply, and tried to re-channel the residue left in his palms. The glow reignited, weaker this time but unstable. It hummed with that same faint vibration, and when he brought his hands toward the doe, the air distorted again. He forced the ura to flow outward, trying to undo whatever he had done.
Nothing happened. The energy refused to obey.
"Come on," he muttered through clenched teeth. "Move. Breathe. Do something—"
He poured more power into his hands, ignoring the rising burn in his veins. The cyan traces of uratsu began to seep back through his system uninvited, reacting violently with the ambient ura he had drawn in earlier. The two energies clashed in his bloodstream, creating a deep ache that crawled up his arms and into his chest.
The clearing darkened. Small flecks of crimson static rippled outward from his palms, corroding the light around them. Nathaniel's breathing became shallow, each exhale shuddering with effort. He felt his focus slipping, mind fracturing between logic and instinct, thought and panic.
He slammed his palms together, forcing the opposing energies to collapse into a single pulse. The shockwave cracked through the clearing, scattering leaves and dust. His vision flashed white, then black.
When his sight cleared, the orb was gone — so was the light. The doe was still there, still frozen, but the distortion around it had thickened. A faint red halo hung over its outline, like an afterimage burned into his vision.
Nathaniel stumbled back, gripping his head. His irises flared, rippling between amber and crimson, and for a heartbeat, he felt it — a hunger in the energy itself, something ancient and familiar pressing at the edge of his mind. It wasn't the forest. It wasn't ura. It was him.
He fell to one knee, gasping."This isn't right. What did I__"
The words dissolved into static breath. His thoughts scattered into fragments,.
He clenched his fists, forcing the noise away, dragging his breathing back under control. The glow in his eyes dimmed, leaving only the faint silver behind.
When he finally stood, his hands trembled. The doe remained frozen, an untouched sculpture of life suspended in an impossible moment. Nathaniel stared at it for a long time, fear and fascination twisting in equal measure.
He whispered to no one,"I didn't just break it… I stopped it."
.
Nathaniel looked at the doe, at the faint sparks of red crawling over its static form. He took a slow breath, forcing his thoughts into order as the tremor in his hands began to fade. The energy still hung in the air, subtle but restless, like static before a storm. He exhaled and placed a hand gently on the creature's side.
He focused, letting his senses open again. The moment stretched thin as he tried to decipher what he had done. His eyes closed, and the world around him shifted into a washed-out grayscale. Inside that small pocket of stillness, he saw it — the metaphysical circuits of ura branching and flashing across the suspended form. Lines of power overlapped like a living blueprint, each pattern pulsing in an unnatural rhythm.
He traced the flow of energy with his mind, searching for a point of interference. Then he saw it — a small symbol woven into the circuit, a shape that resembled a pause icon, embedded at the core of the construct. The realization struck him immediately.
"So that's it," he murmured, and his eyes opened, glowing with that same dull, wicked crimson as the pattern responded to him.
The matrix around the doe flickered. The pause symbol dissolved, the circuits unwound, and the faint hum in the air vanished. A moment later, the creature's body moved — a twitch of muscle, a startled blink — and then it bolted back into the forest, as if nothing had happened.
Nathaniel stood there breathing hard, sweat trailing down his temple. He looked at his palm, still faintly warm from the energy discharge, and let out a quiet, disbelieving laugh.
"Fifteen minutes… for one reaction," he muttered. "At least it worked."
Nathaniel sighed, staring at the space where the doe had vanished. His thoughts drifted to the possibilities of what he had just done. The potential applications were staggering. If ura could be manipulated directly without interference from uratsu, then what else could be altered? Could time itself, or perception, be bound by such a principle?
He frowned, rubbing his thumb across his palm where the faint warmth still lingered. There was no record of anyone using ura this way — not even among the upper-tier Knights. Humanity had always relied on uratsu as the medium, the bridge that made raw energy usable. No one could draw from ura directly. Not without losing their mind or burning out their body.
Yet he had done it. Accidentally, yes, but still… he had done it.
He let out another breath, his expression caught between awe and unease. "So either I just stumbled into something completely new," he muttered, "or I just broke a rule no one was meant to touch."
Nathaniel stood in silence for a few moments longer, then drew in a slow breath. The air still carried faint ripples of disturbed energy from the reaction. He extended his will outward, channeling a concentrated wave of the ambient ura that drifted naturally through the forest. The energy spread like mist, flooding the clearing until it blurred and diluted every trace of what had occurred.
By the time he finished, the scene felt untouched — just another quiet patch of earth beneath the two moons. The anomaly's signature was gone, buried beneath layers of environmental noise.
Hours later, a woman arrived at the clearing. She looked like she had just left the office — pressed suit, hair tied back, the faint scent of perfume still lingering on her wrist. Yet the way she moved was too deliberate, too silent for someone ordinary.
She stopped where Nathaniel had stood earlier, her gaze sweeping across the empty space. The faintest residue of ura still hung in the air, like smoke clinging to the edges of an extinguished flame. A slow smile touched her lips. The glow in her eyes deepened, catching a brief reflection of the two moons above.
"I see…" she whispered, tasting the air as though savoring a hidden flavor.
The expression that followed was almost fond — familiar, even — the kind of smirk one might give a troublesome pupil. Her sclera darkened, veins of shadow bleeding outward as faint lines of sigils and glyphs lit beneath her skin, crawling along her collarbone and neck like living script.
The glow in her eyes intensified. She turned toward the faint trace of where the energy had dispersed and smiled."He's active. The vessel is active."