Beijing Megacity, 2997 CE
Skirmish Site: Jinrong Ruins, Former Financial District
The Terra Novan commando’s breath came in ragged gasps, face inches from the glowing visor of the Psyclade soldier who, despite the gash in his thigh and leaking streaks of luminous azure, showed no signs of fading. The Terra Novan’s blade—standard issue from the moss-tempered jungles of Terra Alta—quivered in his grasp, not from fear, but from the tremor of sudden doubt. He’d been told these men weren’t human anymore.
They weren't wrong.
The Psyclade’s gauntlet snapped up, catching the commando’s wrist mid-plunge, crushing tendon and bone in one fluid twist. The helmet's surface flashed with cryptoglyphic runes, and something unspoken passed through the space between them—like an invasive thought, like a warning.
All around them, the battle howled, fractured by staccato gunfire and dimension-blurring bursts of Foldshock ordnance. The skyline twisted unnaturally in the upper atmosphere—evidence that the OCGM had deployed a low-grade Foldveil compressor above Zone 12-C, which meant the Psyclade units were preparing to anchor the entire temporal zone.
But something was wrong.
The Terra Novan’s eyes rolled up—just briefly—as a low, harmonic pulse sang through the street. The light in the Psyclade’s chestplate dimmed. Fold compression... interrupted. The air shimmered, refracted as if reality itself had cracked a tooth. A third figure stepped into frame.
Cloaked in irregular timeweave, barefoot over cracked neon signage, her face unreadable beneath a cracked ceramic mask shaped like a crescent moon—Glyphtec.
Not OCGM. Not Terra Novan.
She raised her hand, not in threat, but in silent decree.
Both soldiers froze—held not by force, but by a moment splintered from causality.
Then she spoke.
Only one word, but enough to shatter the street:
“Abridge.”
And everything began to fold inward.
The word echoed—Abridge—as though it had been spoken not once, but an infinite number of times across a lattice of slightly diverged instances. The sound bled through metal, through blood, through memory itself. Buildings sagged inward as if crushed by gravity that no longer respected dimensional restraint. Graffiti flickered between languages. Neon signs rewrote themselves in Nexan-deni, in Ancient High Mandarin, in Altaic Xanthini. One sign simply read "Neverborn."
The street cracked—not physically, but temporally. Segments of pavement began jittering backward and forward in time: one moment they bore the ash of a bombing run; the next, untouched concrete; the next, smooth black glass never built by human hands.
The Terra Novan's body surged with panic. His own HUD was weeping errors, chronometric alarms howling with irreconcilable logics. But the Psyclade soldier? Still, as if he had waited for this. His visor flared thrice—blue-white, orange, then red in pulsing milliseconds, a dying star orchestrating its own carefully sequenced resurrection. Only then did he dare to speak his first words.
“Anchorpoint confirmed. Protocol: Recursive Entwinement.”
A light burst from his wound—azure plasma no longer behaving like liquid, but like script. It crawled up the side of his armour, pulsing with symbols not meant for flat time. The Terra Novan screamed—not in pain, but in recognition.
He’d seen those glyphs before. In the ruins of Axiom Spire's Centerbelt City. In the shatterpoint vaults of Orasht. In dreams fed to rebels by forbidden broadcasts. Glyphs left behind by someone calling herself the Shattercast.
Then the street gave out—not falling, not rising, but being rewritten. In place of the shattered roadway came an ancient marble floor; in place of the war-torn skyline, cathedral-like arches built of bone and solar metal. A Foldveil chamber—a transient waystation outside chronology.
And in the middle of it, the masked Glyphtec.
“You were never meant to fight each other,” she said, voice layered in triadic resonance.
“You are echoes... meant to meet. This is a confluence.”
The two soldiers floated now—no longer bleeding, no longer bound by cause or consequence. The Terra Novan’s knife and the Psyclade’s grip both hovered between them, unmoving, irrelevant.
“We’re being... stitched,” the Terra Novan muttered, disbelieving.
The Glyphtec looked to the ceiling—where no stars shone, but where whole epochs turned like gears.
“You are being braided.”
The chamber had quieted.
The air, if it could be called such, tasted like distilled memory—like the moment before a name is forgotten. Bitterly fragrant copper. The Glyphtec was gone. Not vanished, but unlayered—like a film peeled from perception. In her place remained only a shimmer, a suggestion of motion in a direction that no map acknowledged.
The Terra Novan floated inches above the cold surface of the Foldveil floor, the serrated edges of pain replaced with dull confusion. His limbs trembled, more from the unprocessed trauma of temporal violation than from the loss of blood. His hands were empty, his knife gone—unmade in the unspooling.
Across from him, the Psyclade Battalion operative—designation unknown, call-sign not recorded—lowered his hand from where it had gestured toward the absent Glyphtec. The light around his armor dimmed, blue pulse fading to a stable, grounded rhythm. His boots touched down gently as the chamber began reintegrating into the outer world, the walls crumbling into digital geometry.
And then... silence.
He walked. Slow, unhurried. Past the Terra Novan. Past the memories they might have shared, if time had worked differently.
But halfway through his exit, he stopped.
His back remained turned for a moment. A tilt of the head. A shift of posture. Something unreadable stirring behind the helmet’s glassy faceplate.
The Terra Novan, still prone and broken, stirred—weakly. One eye swollen shut, the other flicking about as if still catching up to reality’s new shape.
Then:
“Hey.”
Not shouted. Not sneered. Just spoken. With a tilt of mirth, even.
The Psyclade turned, gaze now directly meeting the rebel’s. He stepped forward—not briskly, not mechanically, but like a man remembering something long ago suppressed.
He stopped a few feet away. Tilted his head again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Almost genuinely.
Then, without ceremony—without tension—the sidearm came up.
A single plasma bolt.
Bright as first light in a newborn dimension.
The Terra Novan's body twitched once, then sagged—eyes wide open, not in fear, but in disbelief. Not at death, but at the choice.
The Foldveil chamber finished collapsing, its columns melting back into the undercity ruins of Beijing Megacity, now smeared in scrawled graffiti and ashfall.
The Psyclade holstered his sidearm. A tone crackled in his helmet. Foldspace link reestablished. Orders incoming.
He looked up once, toward where the Glyphtec had stood.
“Braided. Huh.”
Then he walked on.
