Whispers in the Core

Setting: Interior of the abandoned Echo Base

POV: Kaela

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The hallway reeked of scorched metal and rot.

Kaela's boots echoed in the empty dark as her saber cast a pale white glow across the crumbling walls. Rusted panels hung off their hinges. Old monitors flickered with ghost data—loops from decades past, looping broken logs, sometimes repeating names.

Names like "Lia." Like "Zeyren."

She said nothing. But her breath caught.

Arin strode beside her, less careful, his gauntlet-arm pulsing with soft energy. "So this was the legendary Echo Base, huh? Thought it'd be more… I don't know. Alive."

"It was," Riven's voice came from behind, hollow and calm. "But now it sleeps. And in its sleep, it remembers."

A screen flickered to life just ahead—unpowered a second before.

They stopped.

It showed a recording. Static. Then slowly, it cleared—revealing a woman.

Short dark hair. Eyes full of sorrow and fire.

Kaela whispered, "...Ada?"

The message was old—corrupted—but the voice rang clear:

> "If you're hearing this… we're gone. Or worse. The Genesis Event wasn't the end. It was a door. And someone—something—wants to walk through it."

Arin took a step closer, heart pounding.

> "If Zeyren's final plan succeeded, you'll find this world changed. Less human. More hollow. The skies lie, and not everything that moves in the dark is alive."

The screen shorted out with a hiss.

Then a sound behind them—a soft, wet dragging.

Kaela turned, sabers humming.

From the corridor came a figure—once human, now stretched, eyeless, covered in shifting, twitching tendrils of flesh and wire. A twisted amalgam with a pulse like a dying machine.

It smiled without lips.

Kaela's hands tightened.

"Back."

The creature screeched, the hallway trembled, and two more like it slithered from the vents, moving in jerks like broken puppets.

Riven stepped forward calmly. "First-generation Wraithborn. Failed Echo prototypes."

"Failed?" Arin raised his arm. "They look pretty happy to see us."

They attacked.

Kaela moved—sabers flashing in tight arcs. The creatures were fast, too fast, but not coordinated. They moved like they were hearing a different rhythm—responding to a song none of the team could hear.

One pinned Arin to the wall. Its face opened in layers like a flower of bone. He screamed, then blasted it back with a surge of raw plasma.

"They're learning!" he shouted.

Kaela felt her blade sink into one, but it didn't fall. It writhed around it, flesh sealing shut, and hissed into her face.

Before it could strike, Riven surged forward, stabbing it with a light-thread directly into its skull. The creature spasmed—then melted into black fluid.

Silence returned.

Kaela breathed hard.

"What were those?" Arin asked, wiping ichor off his chest.

"Experiments," Riven said. "Echo wasn't just about weapons. It was about evolution."

Kaela stepped forward, looking deeper into the ruin. The dark shifted in the distance, and she could swear she heard someone calling her name.

Not someone alive.

She clenched her sabers tighter.

"Let's keep moving. Whatever's waiting for us… it's not just from this world."