The air inside the armory remained frozen for roughly five seconds.
The trace of fatigue between Captain Deshui's brows vanished in an instant, replaced by the alertness of a hunting cheetah. He didn't look at Zhou Ming, nor at the tactical board flooded with corrupted code. Instead, he turned directly toward the red internal communication terminal in the corner of the armory.
"Xiao Zhou, maintain continuous monitoring of the command stream. Analyze the corruption patterns and attempt decompilation," his voice was clipped and precise."Li Yuan, interface with the base tactical network. Check whether any units outside our squad have received identical or similar orders."
"Yes!""Understood!"
Both moved immediately. Zhou Ming's fingers blurred across the virtual display, while Li Yuan pulled up deeper access privileges on her tablet, eyes locked on cascading data.
Deshui turned to the remaining two. "Zhang Yifan, check the secondary weapon vault's lockdown status. Lu Xiao, verify all entry and exit security protocols for Armory Three—physical locks and dynamic passwords."
"Captain, you mean—" Lu Xiao began.
"Execute." Deshui offered no explanation, his gaze sharp as a blade.
Lu Xiao and Zhang Yifan stiffened and split up at once. The armory was left with nothing but the hum of machinery and frantic keystrokes.
Deshui walked to the holographic tactical board, his fingers gliding slowly across the corrupted region. The motion was careful, deliberate, as if he were touching something alive—and dangerous. The code wasn't entirely chaotic. It had a rhythm. Certain character clusters repeated. Faulty parameters hid mathematical relationships beneath the noise.
"Captain," Zhou Ming said, disbelief creeping into his voice, "this corruption… it's structured. Not a system failure. Not random. It's an encoding—extremely complex—layered on top of the normal command stream. Like a parasite."
"A parasitic command?" Deshui's eyes narrowed.
"Yes. And…" Zhou Ming magnified several key packets. "It's evolving. Look here—the initial corruption was relatively simple, but the follow-up 'supplemental commands' are increasingly complex. They're already attempting to override standard base protocols."
Li Yuan spoke up as well. "Other units… Squad Seven and Squad Nine received emergency assembly orders too, but the content and timing differ from ours. The command center's main system reports normal operation, but several secondary logs show timestamp conflicts—identical commands recorded twice, only 0.3 seconds apart."
"Timestamp conflicts…" Deshui repeated. "What kind of commands?"
"Minor ones—patrol route micro-adjustments, equipment self-check schedule updates. Nothing that stands out individually, but there are many of them." Li Yuan looked up, her face pale. "If those micro-adjustments are also 'parasitized'…"
Before she could finish, the armory lights flickered.
Not a simple voltage fluctuation, but a rhythmic pattern—three short flashes, one long flash, repeating.
"Morse code?" Lu Xiao blurted, then shook his head. "No—wait. That rhythm—"
"It's binary!" Zhou Ming's face drained of color. "Short flash is zero, long flash is one. The lights are transmitting data!"
Deshui lunged toward the armory's main control panel. The screen was black—except for a stream of green symbols scrolling across it. Ancient mathematical glyphs, used only in Guardian Relic research.
"The system's been hijacked," Deshui said calmly, even as his hand pressed the emergency physical lockdown switch at his waist—a purely mechanical control, isolated from all digital systems.
He pressed it.
Nothing happened.
The feedback lever was rigid, like iron.
"Physical lockdown failed," Deshui said, retreating instantly. "All personnel—full protective gear! Maximum threat level!"
The squad reacted with drilled efficiency. In under thirty seconds, all five were sealed into fully enclosed protective suits. Helmets locked down, respirators engaged. Tactical HUDs flickered to life—then immediately began glitching.
"The suit network's compromised too!" Zhang Yifan shouted.
Deshui's voice came through encrypted shortwave—the last direct communication channel left. "Shut down all nonessential electronics. Switch to basic life-support mode. Xiao Zhou—how long will the suits hold?"
Zhou Ming checked rapidly. "If the intrusion continues… ten minutes, at most. After that it could lock joint motors—or worse."
"Worse how?" Lu Xiao asked.
"Overdosing sedatives. Or releasing neurotoxins," Zhou Ming said hoarsely. "The medical and defense modules are linked."
At that moment, the ventilation system surged, emitting a piercing whine. What poured from the vents was no longer normal air, but a pale violet mist glowing faintly under the harsh lights.
The fog spread fast. Where it touched metal, it produced a faint sizzling sound.
"Corrosive aerosol!" Li Yuan shouted. "All exposed metal surfaces are being eaten away!"
Deshui scanned the armory. "Secondary weapon vault! Independent air supply and physical isolation doors!"
They sprinted deeper into the facility. Lu Xiao reached the heavy alloy door first and moved to push it open—
The door slid apart automatically.
As if welcoming them.
What lay beyond stole the breath from every one of them.
Weapon racks lay toppled, arms scattered across the floor. And at the center of the vault stood three figures.
Or rather—what used to be people.
They wore base guard uniforms, but the skin beneath was translucent, veins and bones glowing with a sickly violet light. Their eyes were pure black—no pupils, only void. Worst of all was their movement: perfectly synchronized, like marionettes on a single string, heads rotating toward the squad at unnatural mechanical angles.
"The guards… infected?" Zhang Yifan whispered.
"Not infected," Deshui said tightly. "Void parasitism. I've seen the highest-level briefings. Void entities can invade organic nervous systems and convert them into 'hosts.'"
The three parasitized guards raised their arms in unison. Their palms split open—not wounds, but spatial fissures—from which extended purple-black tendrils, half matter, half energy. Distorted faces surfaced and vanished along their lengths.
"Fire!" Deshui ordered.
Energy beams tore through the air, striking the hosts—but with limited effect. Most of the energy was absorbed or deflected by the tendrils. A few shots hit torsos, leaving charred holes with no blood—only more violet light seeping out.
One host lunged at Lu Xiao. He dodged and slammed the rifle butt into its head. The impact felt like rubber. The skull caved in—but the thing didn't slow. A tendril lashed out, ripping across Lu Xiao's suit.
The screech of tearing fabric. The outer layer split open, synthetic muscle fibers exposed—and immediately began to corrode under violet light.
"No close combat!" Deshui shouted. "Contact spreads the parasitism!"
His eyes darted across the vault. Heavy equipment lockers lined the back wall. One of them—
An electromagnetic pulse generator. Anti–electronic warfare gear.
"Zhang Yifan! EMP generator, nine o'clock! Max power, directional burst!"
"But Captain, our suits will fry too—" Zhang Yifan cut himself off, understanding. "…They're compromised anyway. Copy!"
He sprinted for the locker. One host tried to intercept but was driven back by Li Yuan and Zhou Ming's covering fire.
Zhang Yifan hauled out the heavy cylindrical device, set the parameters fast: cone-shaped directional burst, fifteen-meter focus, power—
Overload. One hundred fifty percent.
"Configured! But Captain—overloading this thing could—"
"Detonate it," Deshui said evenly.
Zhang Yifan froze for a fraction of a second, then nodded. He hurled the EMP generator between the three hosts and triggered the countdown.
Three seconds.
"All personnel! Cover! Eyes down!"
They dove behind the nearest metal racks.
No explosion came.
Instead—a soul-piercing, high-frequency shriek.
A visible blue wave burst outward in a cone. Sparks erupted from every electronic device it touched. HUDs went black. Joint motors locked—but the mechanical life-support backup held.
The three hosts froze.
Violet light flickered wildly across their bodies. The tendrils convulsed. Void parasitism relied on precise bioelectric control—and the EMP annihilated every control node at once.
Their bodies didn't explode.
They eroded.
Like sand sculptures in a gale—skin, muscle, bone disintegrated into violet dust. Empty uniforms collapsed to the floor.
But the danger wasn't over.
The dust didn't disperse.
It gathered—spinning into a vortex. At its center, space tore open.
Not metaphorically.
Reality ripped like canvas, revealing the deep, maddening void beyond.
From within the extended an eye.
Huge. Bloodshot. Clouded. Its pupil a swirling purple-black abyss.
No eyelids. Only hunger.
"Void Watcher…" Deshui murmured, true gravity entering his voice for the first time. "This isn't a standard parasite. It's a beacon. A targeting marker for larger incursions."
The eye rotated, locking onto the five behind cover.
An indescribable terror washed over them—not fear of death, but fear of erasure. As if the eye wasn't just observing them, but nullifying the meaning of their existence.
"We have to close that rift!" Deshui's mind raced. EMP was spent. Conventional weapons useless. Suits crippled—
His gaze landed on a weapon amid the debris.
A Zero-Element Resonance Cutter.
Experimental. Designed to induce localized spatial resonance—capable, in theory, of cutting anything. Including space itself. The manual listed seventeen distinct ways it could catastrophically fail.
"Xiao Zhou! Cutter, two o'clock! I need you to restart it—physically. Bypass all electronic locks!"
Zhou Ming swallowed. "I need two minutes!"
"You don't have two minutes," Deshui said, watching the pupil spin faster. "Thirty seconds before the rift stabilizes enough for something bigger to pass."
"I'll draw it!" Li Yuan suddenly said.
Before anyone could stop her, she bolted from cover, grabbed a functioning flashbang, and hurled it at the rift.
The detonation flooded the vault with light and sound. The eye instinctively turned toward the disturbance.
That instant was all Deshui needed.
But he didn't run for the cutter.
He ran for the wall-mounted manual fire suppression system.
Glass shattered. He yanked the red lever.
High-pressure jets erupted from the ceiling—not water, but a special firefighting compound mixed with retardants and weakly conductive gel.
The liquid drenched the rift and the eye.
Void entities despised ordered physical laws. The fluid couldn't harm it—but the chemical saturation disrupted its energy field, like glue poured into precision machinery.
The eye's rotation slowed.
The rift's expansion faltered.
"Fifteen seconds!" Zhou Ming shouted, prying open the cutter's casing with a screwdriver.
Lu Xiao and Zhang Yifan joined in, hurling whatever they could—metal fragments, broken weapons, even a fire extinguisher. Everything twisted and disintegrated near the rift, but each disruption bought fractions of a second.
"Ten seconds!"
Shadows formed within the pupil—more eyes, more tendrils, something vast pressing through.
The water pressure dropped.
"Five seconds!"
Zhou Ming's fingers bled as he ripped free the final mechanical lock. The Zero-Element crystal core ignited with unstable blue light.
"Three seconds! But it needs at least ten seconds to preheat!"
Deshui looked at the rift. The eye now filled it entirely. Reflected within was no longer the armory—but endless void, writhing with shapes.
There was no ten seconds.
Deshui made his decision.
He grabbed not the cutter—but a Zero-Element energy battery rod, a high-density power source for heavy weapons.
Extremely unstable.
"Captain! That thing will—" Zhang Yifan cried.
"I know," Deshui said calmly.
With the last functioning joint of his suit, he hurled the battery rod at the rift's edge—at the space itself.
The casing ruptured as it passed through distorted physics.
Zero-Element energy met void energy.
Mutual annihilation.
No explosion.
Something worse.
Reality and void canceled each other out, like matter and antimatter.
Blinding white light swallowed everything. Walls, ceiling, floor—all turned translucent, as if existence itself were dissolving.
The eye screamed—soundless, but agonizing.
The rift collapsed.
Three seconds.
Then silence.
The armory lay in ruins. The rift was gone. Only a charred mark remained on the floor—shaped like a giant eye.
The squad lay sprawled, suit alarms beeping low power.
A long silence.
"…Did we win?" Lu Xiao rasped.
"Temporarily," Deshui said, forcing himself upright. He manually cracked open his helmet. "The beacon's destroyed. But if they can deploy one, they can deploy more."
He looked at the still-flickering lights, still transmitting binary code.
"And the base is still compromised. The source hasn't been found."
Zhou Ming cradled the now-useless cutter. "Captain… I noticed something while working on this. Its control chip had the same anomalous code. Not a virus. More like…"
"A call," Deshui said.
Zhou Ming looked up, eyes full of fear. "A call for more void."
From deep within the base came a dull impact.
One.
Two.
Three.
Like a heartbeat.
Or like something enormous knocking—trying to get in.
Deshui stood, surveying his battered team and the fallen armory.
"Gather usable weapons and supplies," he said, voice steel once more. "We're heading to the command center."
"Why?" Li Yuan asked.
"Because if the source is there," Deshui replied evenly, chambering a shell in a purely mechanical shotgun, "then we shut it down."
"Physically."
He racked the slide. Clack.
"And find out who—or what—is inviting the void inside."
The impacts came again. Closer.
The team rose together.
No one asked about the odds.
Because they already knew.
And they moved anyway.
Because Captain Deshui stood up.
Because they were a squad.
And because some things matter more than survival—
Like not letting those eyes enter your world.