Chapter 4: Scientific Inquiry

The command center of Nova Terra glowed with cold light, a fortress of glass and steel rising above the restless city. Inside, the air carried the weight of unease, humming with the sound of machines that never slept. Large screens displayed patrol reports, grainy surveillance footage, and maps streaked with red zones where anomalies had been recorded. Soldiers whispered in clipped voices, their faces taut with fatigue.

No one spoke of it aloud, yet the tension that gripped the city was clear: something was moving in the shadows, and the military did not yet understand what. Dr. Elena Ramirez stepped through the sliding doors with the presence of someone who had walked into war zones before, though her battleground had always been in the lab. Her dark hair was tied back, her white coat traded for a reinforced field jacket, and her eyes carried the weary sharpness of a woman who had been summoned too many times to confront disasters born from science.

She ignored the curious stares of the soldiers around her and walked straight to the central display, where the body of the fallen soldier was shown in rotating scans. “Extreme hypothermic trauma, internal tissue burns, and no external injuries,” she said after a long silence. Her voice was calm, but the silence that followed her words spoke louder than panic. “Whatever touched him was not bound by the physical.” General Armitage, a man whose presence filled every room he entered, studied her closely. “We are dealing with an enemy we cannot see.

I need you to tell me what it is.” Dr. Ramirez turned away from him, her eyes fixed on the flickering images pulled from the surveillance feed. A translucent outline lingered on the grainy footage, its edges rippling like disturbed water. She felt her pulse quicken, though her face remained unreadable. “Not an enemy,” she said finally. “At least, not in any conventional sense. Look here.” She pointed to the distortion that shimmered on the recording. “That is interference within the electromagnetic spectrum. Whatever we are looking at is interacting with energy fields directly. The cold is a byproduct of rapid displacement, the burns are caused by overload.” “English, Doctor,” Armitage growled. She drew a slow breath. “What killed your soldier was a presence made of energy and decay. Something that feeds on us by disrupting the very systems that keep us alive. The electromagnetic disturbances across the city are not random malfunctions. They are warnings.” The room was still. A soldier coughed softly, his eyes darting toward the darkened windows. On the streets below, Nova Terra pulsed with neon light, but shadows clung more heavily to every corner now, as if the city itself had grown afraid. Ramirez turned to the General once more. “If my readings are correct, the disturbances originate beneath the city. Something buried has awakened. And it is bleeding into our world.” The General said nothing for a long time. His jaw tightened, his eyes locked on the map. Finally, he spoke with a voice as cold as the steel around them. “Then we find it. And we put it back in the ground.” Ramirez did not respond, but her silence was not agreement. She was already thinking ahead, the pieces forming in her mind with growing unease. Field Observation Hours later, she stood in the gutted remains of a subway tunnel, escorted by a squad of armored soldiers. Their boots crunched over broken glass and dust, the beam of their lamps cutting through the heavy dark. The tunnel smelled of rust and damp stone, though beneath it lingered another scent, sharp and metallic, like the tang of charged wires. Ramirez raised her handheld scanner, watching the device pulse with irregular waves. The frequency was not stable; it climbed and fell as though alive. “Readings are strongest here,” she whispered. The soldiers spread out, weapons raised. The air grew colder, their breath visible in the beams of light. Static whispered faintly in their comms, a dry crackle that seemed almost like words but dissolved whenever anyone tried to listen closely. A soldier ahead of her froze. “Ma’am,” he said softly. “Do you see that?” Ramirez followed his gaze. At the far end of the tunnel, shadows wavered unnaturally, stretching and contracting against the wall with no source. For a moment, she thought they were tricks of the light. Then one of the shadows detached itself and drifted forward, thin and translucent, as if made of fractured glass and smoke. The scanner in her hand spiked violently, shrieking with distorted readings. Ramirez’s skin prickled, her heart hammering as the figure moved closer. Its form flickered between human and inhuman, one instant showing the faint outline of a soldier in uniform, the next unraveling into something hollow and jagged. The soldier nearest to it raised his weapon, but Ramirez stopped him with a sharp gesture. “Don’t fire. Look at it. It is trying to resonate.” The figure trembled, its edges stuttering in and out of existence. For a heartbeat, Ramirez swore she heard a voice beneath the static, faint and broken, like someone calling from deep water. Then the tunnel lights failed. Darkness swallowed everything. The temperature dropped so sharply that ice formed along the walls. Panic rippled through the squad as weapons clicked and safeties were disengaged. In the pitch black, Ramirez kept her eyes on the glowing screen of her scanner. Lines of code scrolled rapidly across the display, not generated by the machine but imposed upon it, symbols she had never seen before. Then, without warning, the tunnel lights snapped back on. The figure was gone. Ramirez lowered the scanner slowly, her hand trembling. She had not imagined it. The device still displayed alien symbols, and deep in her mind a whisper lingered, a voice that had not come from her own thoughts: we are not forgotten. She exhaled, steadying herself. Around her, the soldiers exchanged nervous glances, waiting for orders. Her conclusion, though unspoken, chilled her more than the encounter itself. These anomalies were not random energy events. They were remnants of something older, something that had been waiting beneath Nova Terra for far longer than anyone had guessed. And now, they had found a way to speak. The sun slouched low in the sky, a molten disc bleeding its last light across Nova Terra. Its glare clung to the glass towers like a feverish wound, bathing the metropolis in copper fire. Heat still coiled in the avenues, trapped between steel and stone, carrying the scent of hot iron, exhaust, and dust from the ruined foundations below. The wind offered no relief, whispering through the streets in restless gusts that stirred banners and rattled the bones of forgotten statues in the Old Quarter. From above, the city appeared vibrant, alive with neon veins and the hum of traffic, yet in the underlayers, silence thickened like oil. The ruins beneath carried a different atmosphere stagnant air tinged with the musk of damp earth, faint mineral bitterness, and the stale cold of chambers that had not been opened in centuries. Dr. Elena Ramirez felt all of it press against her as she descended with the squad. The soldiers’ boots rang against the old concrete, echoing into the dark like unwanted announcements of their presence. Their weapons, sleek AR-57 pulse rifles fitted with spectral stabilizers, glowed faintly along their barrels, the blue light cutting narrow wounds in the black. Every movement was measured, deliberate, the weight of their exo-suits grinding softly as gears flexed against their bodies. The culture of Nova Terra lingered even here. One soldier, lips dry, muttered an old saying his grandmother had drilled into him since boyhood: When the air freezes without wind, the dead are walking with you. The others stiffened at the words. It was an indigenous belief passed down from the time of the ruins, when shamans whispered that the gods who lived in stone could slip through cracks in the earth. Soldiers denied belief in daylight, but here, in the bowels of the city, the saying clung to them like a curse. The tunnel yawned into a forgotten subway chamber, its vaulted ceiling fractured by roots of stone that glistened with dripping condensation. Rusted rails stretched into shadow, warped like bones twisted under heat. A colony of black-winged scavenger birds watched from the beams above, their feathers bristling in the lamplight. They did not caw, did not stir, only fixed their oily eyes on the intruders with unnatural stillness, as though awaiting a signal. The air shifted. A cold, unnatural cold, heavy and sharp as a blade drawn across skin. Breath crystallized before their faces. The temperature fell so suddenly that gooseflesh prickled along their arms beneath the armor. Ramirez felt it in her marrow, a chill not of climate but of presence, as though something unseen brushed against her flesh with fingers made of static. Her handheld scanner flared to life, a shriek of signals and distorted frequencies flooding the screen. The data bled into impossible symbols, curved lines and jagged runes that moved like living script. Her skin prickled as the symbols twisted, folding into words her mind should not have been able to interpret. We are not forgotten. The shadows on the far wall thickened, writhing like liquid tar against the concrete. They bled forward, pooling and stretching into a shape. It flickered in and out of existence, one heartbeat revealing a humanoid outline, the next collapsing into shards of fractured light. Its form rippled with decay, skin peeling in translucent sheets, bones shimmering faintly beneath as though trapped between flesh and energy. The squad froze. Fear settled on them like frost, tightening throats, drying tongues, making every heartbeat thunder against their ribs. Their rifles rose as one, trembling slightly despite iron discipline. Ramirez alone stepped closer. Her scanner pulsed in her grip, vibrating violently as the entity advanced. The figure’s edges crackled like broken glass under strain. For an instant she saw a soldier’s face. pale, sunken, eyes wide with endless pain. The next instant, it stretched into a jagged mask of light and shadow, inhuman and hungry. The comms erupted with static, then broke into a whisper that seeped directly into their thoughts, bypassing ears entirely.

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We were built to endure. We were built to remain. The soldiers stumbled back, rifles twitching toward the apparition. One swore loudly, another’s teeth chattered audibly through the helmet mic.

The air itself felt alive, charged with invisible current, pressing into their skin like millions of invisible insects. Ramirez’s vision blurred.

For a moment, the chamber was gone. She stood instead in a colossal hall lined with containment pods, each glowing faintly with pale fire. Within each pod floated a figure, half-flesh, half-machine, their faces slack with agony, their eyes open and watching her. They did not move their mouths, but their voices merged into one, filling her skull with unbearable clarity. You will open the way.

Flesh was not enough. We needed more. You are the key they left behind. She gasped, stumbling back as the vision fractured, reality snapping once more into the damp subway chamber.

The figure was gone. The birds stirred overhead, wings rustling all at once, filling the air with a storm of black feathers before vanishing into the cracks above. Her scanner was dead, the screen charred black. Her hands trembled. She looked at the soldiers, their faces pale, their eyes wild behind their visors. “We’re leaving,” she said, voice steadier than she felt. “Seal this chamber.

Whatever is below us isn’t gone. It’s waiting.” As they climbed back toward the surface, the city above them glowed with artificial light. But to Ramirez, every lamp, every screen, every hum of electricity carried the same thought, the same whisper. The Flicker born had seen her. And they had marked her.

Chapter 4: Scientific Inquiry (Flicker Born)