9:45 PM – Ridge Collapse Zone
The split sky groaned.
The ashglass layer buckled inward, its edges sparking with lines of corrupted light.
Then—
It tore open.
They came through all at once.
Twisted shapes, wrong against the world's geometry, fell from the breach. Half-human, half-programmed error. Flesh stitched to broken cybernetics. Static pouring from their mouths like screaming code.
Killforms.
Relics of Division Zero's earliest experiments—left to rot beyond reality.
Now the fracture had given them a doorway back.
Ryoji shielded his eyes against the rippling distortion.
"Miura! Hostiles inbound! Non-standard types—fast!"
Miura was already moving, rifle at her shoulder, scanning the falling figures.
"This isn't an attack squad. This is a harvest swarm."
The first Killform landed hard—snapping its own legs on impact—then rose up again, bones reforming wrong under its twitching skin.
It sniffed the air.
Zeroed in on Aiko.
And screamed.
A raw, electric howl.
The swarm followed.
Dozens of Killforms, pouring through the breach like water through a shattered dam, racing across the broken Ridge toward her.
Aiko didn't flinch.
She could feel it—the new Seal alive beneath her skin, resonating with the pulse of the broken sky.
Not as prey.
As a beacon.
As a target.
They wanted her signal.
Wanted to consume her and become real.
Ryoji leveled his pistol, jaw tight. "Orders, boss?"
Aiko's fingers flexed. Circuits glowed along the lines of her bones.
Her voice was steady.
"We hold the line."
The first wave hit.
A Killform lunged—
—and Aiko met it midair, her palm striking its chest.
The Seal reacted.
Light flared outward in a spiral, shredding the creature into smoke and memory fragments.
But more were coming.
From the treeline. From beneath the broken soil.
From inside the ashglass reflections themselves.
Miura dropped three with precise bursts to the head—but even as they fell, their bodies melted into puddles of living static, trying to reassemble.
"This isn't sustainable!" Miura yelled over the gunfire. "They'll overrun us before extraction gets here!"
"No extraction," Aiko said.
She turned toward the breach.
The sky above the tear wasn't empty anymore.
A new shape was forming.
Huge.
Massive enough that the smaller Killforms were only its first breath.
A living fortress of ashglass and broken memory.
A warform—seeded long ago beyond the edges of reality.
And now it was waking up.
Ryoji's knuckles went white around his gun. "You're seeing that too, right?"
"Yeah," Miura muttered grimly. "Bad news."
Aiko's eyes narrowed.
The Seal along her spine pulsed, sending out ripples of counter-signal—weak at first, but growing with every heartbeat.
Override Dominion.
The Ridge Collapse Zone was no longer a battlefield.
It was about to become a front.
And the war for reality had just begun.
9:48 PM – Ridge Collapse Zone / Active Breachfront
The warform finished assembling itself.
It rose out of the breach like a tower—an amalgamation of fallen soldiers, dead tech, shattered divisions of memory and weaponry fused into one impossible mass.
Limbs. Guns. Eyes.
All stitched together by blackened neural wiring that oozed ashlight.
It looked at them.
Or rather—every part of it looked, hundreds of twisted gazes locking onto Aiko as the prime signal.
The ground trembled beneath its weight.
**> WARNING: Reality Sync Drift exceeding threshold.
WARNING: Cognitive hazard active.
WARNING: External Override Presence detected.**
Aiko felt the Seal burning under her skin.
Her body wanted to collapse.
Her mind wanted to shatter.
She made it stay still.
A pulse from the warform struck like a hammerblow.
Reality rippled.
The Ridge bent sideways—trees flattening into two-dimensional shapes, then snapping back into splintered wreckage. Gravity itself faltered.
Miura stumbled, catching herself against a jagged rock.
"Reality drift! It's folding local physics! We need to fall back—"
"No!" Aiko said sharply.
Ryoji was already moving without hesitation, sweeping behind Aiko's flank, scanning for firing angles.
"Give me a shot," he barked. "Just give me something I can kill."
The warform opened its torso.
Inside—nested rows of corpse-wrapped turbines spun into life, generating a vortex of broken signal.
It wasn't just physical.
It was rewriting the battlefield.
Static creatures surged from its base like command errors, racing toward them.
Aiko pushed forward.
Each step sent waves of counter-signal from her Seal, carving temporary "real zones" in the distortion. Small safe havens where gravity worked, where bullets would still fly true.
"We carve a path," she ordered.
"Straight through."
Ryoji grinned—blood at the corner of his mouth, half-wild with the rush.
"Now we're talking."
Miura reloaded, breathing hard. "God, you two are crazy."
The next instant—the assault began.
—
9:49 PM – Ridge Collapse Zone / Breachfront Combat Zone
Ryoji moved first.
Sliding low under the gravitational churn, he fired three rounds—dead-on shots to the heads of the leading static beasts.
Each one burst into clouds of screeching ash.
Miura covered the flank, stitching a line of suppressive fire through the densest swarm.
Aiko surged ahead.
The circuitry in her body glowed brighter, her hands cutting the air—projecting arcs of stabilizing force. Where her Seal's pulse touched, the corrupted creatures froze mid-charge, breaking apart into harmless echoes.
But the warform adapted.
It recalibrated.
New appendages unfolded—cannons grown from broken memory, engines that sang in forgotten languages.
And it fired.
Screams, impossible to hear with human ears, tore across the field.
Reality buckled again—
—and Aiko was flung sideways, slamming into a fallen tree with a crunch of broken bark and bruised ribs.
Ryoji skidded next to her, hauling her up without pause.
"You still breathing?"
She coughed once. Blood in her mouth.
Still alive.
"Breathing. Fighting."
They shared a glance—unspoken understanding locking into place.
No surrender.
Never.
They pushed together into the storm.
Aiko's Seal began shifting—evolving—not just a signal, but a weapon.
She reached into the ashglass breach with her mind—
—and dragged out the buried codes Division Zero had once hidden there.
Commands written in dead languages.
Override Dominion Core.
She screamed the command with her heart, not her voice—
//BEGIN COUNTER-INCEPTION.
The Seal flared.
And the battlefield flipped.
The warform howled in confusion as Aiko tore a piece of reality back under her control.
Not enough to kill it.
But enough to expose its core.
A bright, pulsing node deep in its shattered chest.
Ryoji caught the opening instantly.
"Cover me!" he barked.
Aiko raised a shield of signal distortion as Ryoji sprinted, faster than the eye could follow, a combat knife in his right hand, death gleaming in his eyes.
Straight at the warform's heart.
Straight into the breach.
—
9:50 PM – Ridge Collapse Zone / Breachfront Core Strike
Ryoji reached the warform.
He drove the knife into the exposed node with a furious shout—
—and for a split second, the entire world went silent.
The breach screamed.
The warform imploded, collapsing inward in a cascade of broken dreams and shattered memories.
Ashglass rained from the sky like snow.
The Ridge steadied.
Reality stitched itself halfway back together.
For now.
Ryoji stumbled back toward Aiko, bloody, grinning like a wolf.
Miura caught up, panting. "Tell me that's the last of them."
Aiko didn't answer.
She was staring at the breach.
It hadn't closed.
It was still open.
And worse—
On the other side, deep beyond the ashglass veil—
Something bigger was waiting.
Something Division Zero had locked away for a reason.
The real enemy.
TO BE CONTINUED in Chapter 68...