EMBODIED

>> ZONAL AWAKENING

The twilight on the planet Isarix was slowly retreating, and kynite dust swirled above its cracked surface.

No one should have been outside at this hour — the planet’s energy surges and the glare of its twin suns would mercilessly strip a person of their skin… and soon after, their life.

At the edge of an artificially carved abyss, beneath a worn-out cloak scarred by ion radiation, sat a woman.

One of her eyes glowed faintly — a small, activated red cyber-lens. The other remained motionless, a souvenir from a long-past “exchange of views” with a prototype assassination robodiplomat.

From beneath her cloak, she watched three not-so-brilliant Erits far below, fumbling hopelessly with an extractor — a device meant to harvest the planet’s pulsing energy, the most valuable resource for light-years in every direction between sector 9-F and the Gregor-6 black hole.

“Wha–fuh… you got it yet?” grunted the fattest of the Erits, scratching behind his ears while hiding behind a giant toolbox.

“Fuff… I’m starving. And those suns’re gonna roast us alive any minute now. Toolbox and all.”

“Quit whining and help, you fuffin’ coward!” snapped the second one, drenched in sweat and grime. He stood over the third Erit, who was currently jamming a crowbar into the extractor.

The extractor was gently pulsing — which, to any intelligent creature, would’ve been an obvious sign to not touch it.

“Y’know… this one’s the newest model. Izeron X-9B. I don’t mess with these. I usually just stuff ’em in a bag and vanish.”

HA-HA-HA! The fat one burst into laughter, wheezing between chuckles.

“I knooow, I knooow… we’re Erits, right? The cleverest, sneak–ee–est thieves in the whole belt!”

“Well, except for the Blatnik gang… but they’ve got, uh… different methods,” mumbled the third Erit and took a sip from a dented bottle of nerve-tonic.

The leader — the one who tried very hard to look wise — responded quickly:

“Ha! Not just the cleverest — if we open this thing, we’ll be the richest! Maybe they’ll finally let us into the Central Guild… not just the sewer branch.”

And just as those words left his mouth, a faint click echoed.

“Uuh… what’s this little red… button-thingy?”

mumbled the crowbar-wielding Erit, stretching out a curious finger.

Those were his final words.

The explosion was so powerful, it felt as if the stabilizing layer of the planet’s core had ruptured, releasing the system’s raw energy.

Its discharge turned the heart of the abyss to ash, leaving behind only a scorched, blackened handle of the crowbar.

“Saw that coming,” muttered the woman under her cloak as she adjusted her cyber-lens for sharper vision. “Another group of geniuses thinking Izeron would just leave its tech lying around for idiots to play with.”

She grumbled something about “Erits being a shadow of their former glory since they started drinking cortex brew,” when her system suddenly lit up. Neural augmentations flickered—first faintly, then intensely.

Emergency detection: unidentified signal source — class unknown.

“Analyze,” she whispered. Her systems hadn’t activated like this in ages. The last time was during the raid on the satellite archive at Kallrak—a mission that ended in an unintended genocidal disaster, wiping out nearly an entire planet overnight.

She stood sharply. Dust spiraled. Her cloak expanded like the wings of a drone-vulture, releasing a protective field that shimmered with black-violet light. Her body instinctively dropped into an offensive-defensive stance—a reflex encoded in soldiers during the clan wars.

“What is it?” she murmured. “Another broken teleporter heading this way, or...” She trailed off, eyes locked on the image her detectors displayed.

In the distance, above the planet’s barren horizon, her systems registered something that resembled a light anomaly—flickers, like power outages. Not strong enough for the naked eye, but clear through her instruments. The systems scanned, measured, calculated, compared...

But with every cycle, her interface rang out the same dull tone: error, mismatch, unknown.

The anomaly’s power readings kept rising, yet its nature remained undefined. She waited motionlessly, in the stance hardwired into her neural bio-core from her E.A.R. (Evolutionary Adaptive Response) modification—one granted only to those genetically tailored for elite missions.

Enhanced sight, hyper-flexibility, high endurance. But not all received the expanded energy-field module, embedded in the ergonomic cloak synced to the nervous system.

Only operatives of the elite unit were given that.

This dark, narrow cloak with its hood—capable of shielding and cloaking its bearer—was their signature. E.A.R. was their essence.

No one truly remembers how it worked. The labs and their records were destroyed long ago. Those who possessed these gifts never shared their secrets. And now, none of that matters. Only the war crimes remain.

Emergency detection: class unrecognized — database incomplete.

“Maybe it’s a ruptured atmospheric reaction triggered by the extractor’s explosion,” she thought.

“Those things have become increasingly unstable with dwindling resources...”

...Or someone is developing a new weapon. A new war.

But her detectors would have read its makeup. They contained the patterns of every known particle and every cloned variant in this universe.

Unless...

Her thoughts slowed, uncertain. Because now—

she saw it.

The anomaly took shape.

A luminous orb, surrounded by an electrostatic field that pulsed like a living organism. Its form hollow, its core swirling with energy unknown to Isarix.

Unless... it didn’t belong to this dimension at all.

That was the only explanation that made sense. And the only one that demanded action.

She had been genetically engineered for one reason—to serve in the elite reconnaissance unit. Not just for assassinations, infiltration, and stealth.

They were made for espionage. Silent, lethal shadows.

Despite her system’s desperate attempts to hold her back, she moved.

Ran a final distance calculation to the nearest safe point, a location where she could observe the object from the best possible angle while still maintaining relative safety.

She knew the risk. Even now, the object was disrupting atmospheric stability.

To complete the mission, she had to shut down her protection system.

And she did.

She was trained, programmed, and built for this.

To face death head-on.

The energy anomaly began forming strange, bristled tendrils. The whole structure spun rapidly around its axis. It looked as though the tendrils would tear away—yet they drew everything within reach closer.

It began sucking in Feilum—the breathable substance for all life on the planet—along with remnants of the long-dead civilization: charred plant fragments, twisted metal, and scattered relics.

Everything it touched broke down into microscopic particles, instantly absorbed by the core.

The more it consumed, the brighter it glowed, the faster it spun.

Once the former elite operative had secured a vantage point, the object began pulling in shards of Kynite—the planet’s signature mineral.

Kynite forms under intense heat and ion radiation. The surface shifts polarity, causing Kynite dust to float a meter above ground, mixing with Feilum. It then crystallizes, clumping into rough geometric nodules that bind together.

The anomaly’s field disrupted that delicate balance, drawing the crystals in with violent force.

This revealed the immense power of the forming entity, still far from the surface.

The twilight on Isarix faded.

The sunlight was brutal now — twin suns pouring raw, merciless light across a scorched landscape. Nothing could survive out here without serious protection. Even Feilum shimmered with heat.

Only the towering mechs remained upright, massive limbs stretching into the sky beyond visual reach.

Their purpose: crush, sort, destroy.

They roamed the surface with thunderous clamor, collecting wreckage and grinding defunct robots into twisted remnants—bodies reduced to charred steel bones under the heat.

The demolition titans were still far from the anomaly. For now, safe.

But with every piston strike and every grinding gear, their noise was slowly swallowed by the rising hum, the sinister howl of the spinning energy that devoured space.

The orb grew. Its core pulsed, now erratic—but with each pulse, it gained mass and presence.

It no longer broke matter apart. Instead, it lifted it.

Kynite shards. Plant fragments. Metal debris. All hovered in perfect suspension around the entity.

Frozen. As if waiting.

As if obeying.

The deep, low hum—a sound like planetary breathing—intensified.

Static electricity danced between the object and the ground, like bolts of silent wrath.

The orb began to descend. Slowly. As though pushing against an invisible resistance.

But in truth, its gravitational dominance was overwhelming.

The tension thickened—a burning pressure, a vibrating field, a ripple through dimensions.

Then—just above the ground—it stopped.

And all at once, it ceased spinning.

It pulled in its energy—and in an eternal instant, it touched the surface.

Then came the blast.

Static energy erupted in a cataclysmic discharge.

Feilum imploded—then exploded outward.

A shockwave burst in every direction like an invisible demon.

Colonial systems short-circuited. Sensors fried. Electronics liquified. Anything unanchored was flung, snapped, or erased.

And this wave...

...was exponentially more devastating than the extractor explosion caused by the bumbling Erit trio.

What once seemed catastrophic now felt like a spark from a frayed wire beside this eruption of raw cosmic force.

That was just the prelude.

This—was the symphony of annihilation.

And then—absolute silence.

Even the crushing machines of the great towers halted.

Only the swirling dust remained, slowly settling over the fractured ground like a shroud of forgetting.

And there—at the epicenter of contact, amid ash, ruptures, and disrupted space—lay a figure.

Dark blue. Motionless. Humanoid.

It rested on a subtly electrified surface.

Kynite dust fell slowly, in the rhythmic hush of unraveling air.

It began to settle on her body, as if trying to bury her, hide her, reclaim her.

But she remained visible.

Until the last speck of dust fell, the lines on her body still pulsed—thin white-blue pathways, like veins of living light.

They moved. They breathed.

Every flicker lit her silent, still body.

A body that radiated absolute, inevitable power.

Something had been born.

Something not of Isarix.

Something not of this universe.

Something that had finally arrived.