(POV: Kara)
Hope is a fragile thing. For the last hour, it had existed as a steady, green light on a diagnostic rune outside Quarantine 7. A quiet hum from the containment barrier. The rhythmic, sleeping breath of our friend.
Then the alarm blared.
It wasn't a shout; it was a scream. A high-pitched, continuous wail that sliced through the quiet of the infirmary. Drake was on his feet beside me in an instant, his hand on the hilt of his blade. Inside the transparent ward, the healers scrambled as every rune above Luna's bed flashed a violent, chaotic red.
Luna was convulsing. Her body arched on the diagnostic table, her back rigid. The black crystal embedded in her shoulder was no longer inert. It was pulsing. A sickening, rhythmic beat of black light, like a corrupt heart. With every pulse, a new, fine web of crystalline veins spiderwebbed further across her skin, down her arm, up her neck. It wasn't just growing anymore. It was feasting.
"Do something!" I roared at the barrier, my voice raw.
One of the senior healers, a grim-faced woman named Elara, shook her head, her eyes wide with a professional terror that was far more frightening than my own panic. "Her life force is in flux! Anything we project will just be more fuel for it!"
Just as I was about to slam my fists against the impassable barrier, the doors to the infirmary burst open. Xander, James, and a deathly pale Professor Everhart rushed in, their eyes locking onto the horrifying scene inside the ward. The abstract lore of their archive had just collided with our brutal reality.
(POV: Xander)
My mind processed the scene in horrifyingly logical steps. 1) The alarm indicates systemic failure. 2) Luna's convulsions match the rhythmic flashing of the crystal. 3) The diagnostic runes show a cascading, exponential drain of her Ki.
"It's not a steady growth," I said, the words tumbling out of me as my brain connected the data points. "It's feeding. It's found a rhythm, a frequency, and it's consuming her life force at an exponential rate."
The pieces snapped together. The archive. The pulses. The key.
"Resonance," I said, turning to Everhart. "The archive said it 'dampens' and 'harmonizes.' The Lithophage is metabolic. It has a rhythm. What if we can introduce a counter-frequency? Something to disrupt its feeding cycle?"
Everhart immediately saw the terrible flaw in my desperate hypothesis. "We don't know the frequency, Xander! We don't have a Waystone to guide us! The wrong harmony could amplify it, strengthen it beyond recovery!"
He looked past me, through the barrier at Luna, whose struggles were growing weaker as the crystal grew stronger. He knew. We both knew. We were out of options.
"A makeshift plan," the Professor said, his voice now a low, urgent command. He turned to the healers. "Can you modulate the containment field's frequency?"
Healer Elara nodded numbly. "Theoretically. To what?"
Everhart's gaze fell on James. "We have a Living Waystone. James will be the source. He'll produce a stable, calming hum of energy—the opposite of a projective blast. We will use the barrier to try and 'tune' his energy, to find the disruptive frequency by feel."
It was a scientific shot in the dark. A desperate prayer offered to a god we didn't understand, using a power we couldn't control.
(POV: James)
I stood before the shimmering, golden wall of the quarantine field. My own reflection stared back at me—a ghost with wide, terrified eyes. My fault. This was all my fault. Now, they were asking me to use that same flawed power to fix it.
I placed my palms flat against the barrier. It was warm to the touch, humming with contained power.
"Not a projection, James," Everhart's voice was a firm anchor in my sea of guilt. "Don't throw anything. I want you to create a tone. A single, perfect, unwavering note inside your soul. Picture the quiet energy you felt from the Waystone. A still lake. A silent forest. Hold that image. Be that quiet."
I closed my eyes. I pushed down the roiling chaos of the Nexus, the guilt, the fear. I searched for that feeling—the sense of harmony, of stability. I found a tiny, flickering ember of it and nurtured it, letting it grow until it became a low, steady hum in the core of my being. I let that hum flow through my arms and into the barrier.
For a moment—a single, beautiful, miraculous moment—it worked.
A low, harmonic tone filled the room, pure and clean. Inside the ward, the violent pulsing of the crystal on Luna's shoulder began to slow. The chaotic red of the diagnostic runes softened to a steady, manageable orange. Her convulsions eased.
A collective breath was held. Kara's hand was over her mouth, tears in her eyes. It was working.
But I couldn't hold it. My control was a novice's grasp on a master's tool. A single flicker of my own fear—the terror of failing her again—caused the frequency to waver for less than a heartbeat. The harmony broke.
The result was a physical and psychic explosion.
The low hum shattered into a piercing, electronic shriek that made everyone clap their hands over their ears. The enchanted lights in the ceiling burst in a shower of sparks, plunging the infirmary into the emergency gloom of its backup runes. The quarantine barrier itself visibly warped, bowing outward as if struck by a battering ram, and a spiderweb of frost instantly spread across its surface from where my hands were pressed.
A wave of negative energy erupted from Luna, throwing me violently backward. I hit the far wall with a grunt, a searing, unnatural cold lancing up my arms. I cried out more from the freezing shock than the impact.
On the bed, Luna went still. The alarms fell silent.
The crystal had stopped pulsing. It had now completely encased her left arm and shoulder in a solid, unmoving sheath of black, starless stone. It was smooth, perfect, and hideously beautiful. From her collarbone, where moments before there was only skin, now jutted a single, perfect, razor-sharp shard aimed directly at her throat.
We hadn't just failed to stop it. We had fed it, strengthened it, and forced it to evolve.