The desert had long since gone silent.
The sun had fallen to a thin, dying line along the horizon, its final amber light stretching across the sand in slivers of gold and rust. The sky above faded from bruised indigo to black-violet, stars beginning to bleed through. Everything was still. Too still.
Lucien walked several paces ahead of the others, his silhouette long and sharp against the dying light. His pace was even. Unhurried. Calculated. Each step sunk half an inch into the cooling sand. His fingers flexed rhythmically, and with every moment, a subtle flicker of green thread-light shimmered across his knuckles, pulsing like a heartbeat.
Behind him, Max limped, one arm slung across Julian's shoulder. Max's jaw was tight, pain written in the lines around his mouth, but he didn't complain. Julian matched his pace with care, adjusting his grip every few seconds, eyes scanning the terrain, vigilant despite the fatigue weighing down his shoulders.
Further back, Isabelle and Kieran followed in silence. Isabelle's hair was loose, wind-tossed, her expression distant. She glanced at Lucien every few steps—searching for something in his posture, his silence, his unreadable calm. Kieran walked with his arms folded, ever the sentinel, every footstep exact. He hadn't said a word since they'd surfaced.
No one had.
The air was dry but heavy, like something waiting to break.
As they walked up a small slope, remnants of a cracked highway came to view. Stretched in a jagged line—its supports broken, its spine half-sunken into the earth. Faint outlines of rusted guardrails glinted under the sky's cold wash. The wind picked up—just enough to make Isabelle pull her jacket tighter.
Lucien stopped—it was sudden.
The group followed suit, all of them instinctively shifting their attention to him. Lucien's gaze was locked upward, into the deepening sky. His fingers flexed again. The green glow sharpened.
Julian's voice was barely a whisper. "Dad?"
Lucien didn't answer. His gaze still focused upwards.
Then-
A sound pierced the air. A shriek—high, unnatural, and splitting across the silence like cracks in glass.
Then a flash.
In an instant, a white-hot object streaked down from the sky, violet light unraveling in a spiral around it, bending the sky like warped glass. It wasn't falling. It was targeted.
Straight at Lucien.
Before anyone could react, Lucien had already moved.
In one breathless instant, his right hand shot forward. A torrent of green thread-light exploded from his palm, a spiraling cannon of force and light. The desert shook. The beam struck the falling object mid-air.
The impact caused a shockwave to burst outward, flinging sand like a tidal wave. The object shot sideways, crashing into the earth several hundred feet away, carving a trench of molten glass and dust.
Everything fell still again.
It was now that everyone else reacted to what had just happened.
Lucien stood motionless, his arm still raised, thread-light crackling around his fingers.
The dust began to settle.
A figure rose from the crater.
Slender. White. Inhumanly smooth. No face—just a blank surface, glossy and featureless. Its joints shimmered gold, mechanical and elegant, gleaming like polished brass beneath the moonlight. A pale skirt-like lower cape billowed slightly as it rose to full height.
Hovering above its palms: two floating objects—gears crossed with analog clocks, glowing with a pire, deep royal purple light. Almost like a hologram.
Julian's voice cracked. "T–that must be it! The thing the world is freaking out about! The alien."
Max coughed, pulling himself upright. "It came down like a warhead."
Kieran took a step forward. "Lucien… how did you-"
Lucien's gaze narrowed. He didn't blink. "Stay back. He's not done yet."
The alien didn't speak. Its hands rotated outward—slowly, mechanically, like clockwork.
With a soft, almost musical hiss, its hands shifted. The fingers folded inward. The wrists cracked. The white plating around its arms separated and morphed, reshaping themselves into two elegant, curved daggers. One reverse-grip. One forward.
Lucien didn't hesitate. The moment the alien started morphing, his armor started rethreading. Green light wrapped his limbs like silk, weaving over his chest, spine, arms, and legs in radiant arcs.
From his right hand, a long, double-bladed sword formed—green, thread-forged, and jagged.
Lucien raised his left hand without looking.
A shimmer passed over his companions—thin thread-formed hexagonal shields manifesting in the air before them, each fitted exactly to their size and line of sight.
Julian glanced down at his shield.
Lucien's voice was low, a command. "Stay back."
Suddenly-
The alien lunged forward, it tore through space like a slingshot being fired.
Lucien didn't hesitate, his body pulsed with a deep green flare, blinking out of phase.
In a blink, they both vanished.
***
They reappeared mid-strike, blades colliding with a thunderclap of raw force. Thread-light—green and violet—flamed across the air, tearing the atmosphere between them in a cyclone of distortion. The shockwave burst outward in concentric rings, flattening the sand beneath their feet, splitting the desert floor in fault-line fractures.
Lucien's sword met the alien's daggers with a screaming grind of force, each blade shimmering with detail—joined at the hilt by a core of green thread-light. Every spin—every twist, carried momentum and raw power.
He used the full length of his weapon—spin it behind his back, deflected a low slash, then twirled it over his shoulder and slashed in a wide arc—driving the alien backward. With a twist of his wrist, he reversed the momentum and swept the lower blade behind his legs, catching the enemy off-guard.
The alien vanished with a sudden rewind, flickering backward twp steps as if the last seconds had never happened.
In a blink, Lucien lunged forward.
So did the alien.
They reappeared behind each other—then again, before each other—then again, this time farther from one another.
The air bent with their motion.
Julian flinched behind his shield, eyes wide. "Are they… moving backwards?"
Max pressed a bloodied hand to his side, watching as each movement fractured into four, then five ghost-trails.
The alien dashed forward, its arm transforming mid-motion into a gleaming spear. It lunged for Lucien's chest, but Lucien intercepted the attack mid-swing—catching the shaft with both ends of his rotating blade, locking it, then twisting his weapon to snap the spear in half.
He used the break to spin the double-blade vertically, lifting it overhead and crashing it down like a hammer. The alien sidestepped, but Lucien continued the arc—using the built-up momentum to chain into a low reverse sweep, clipping the alien's legs and sending it tumbling sideways.
Within a second, the alien had already reformed his footing, leapt, and crossed his arms—
Lucien's eyes flared.
The alien's arms snapped outward in an X-shape.
A radial shockwave exploded from its core—a sphere of violet distortion pulsing out with devastating force. The shockwave hit Lucien like a train—his armor cracked at the ribs, boots skidding backward across the sand in a shallow crater of blown debris.
Lucien roared, planting his foot, and slamming both fists together.
His own shockwave detonated outward—green thread-light radiating in a furious wave, slamming into the alien's field. The two forces collided, fought for dominance—rippling like thunder tides—until both imploded in a vacuum-snap, sucking sand skyward in a spiral.
The alien used the confusion to vanish again.
Lucien turned just in time to catch its foot slamming into his side. He flew across the desert—hit a slope of sand and carved a trench through it with his body.
The alien followed, blades reforming.
Lucien blinked up from the trench and met the blade head-on—his weapon rotating into a high guard, both ends deflecting the incoming strike. He pushed upward with force, sending the alien back.
He spun the double-bladed sword in front of him like a shield, blocking a barrage of dagger strikes, then pushed forward with a burst of speed—his body flowing around the spinning weapon like it was an extension of his.
Lucien ducked, kicked, spun, slashed—every motion was brutal and fluid. He used his blade's reach to its fullest—high sweeps to blind, low arcs to force the alien to reposition. One blade blocked while the other attacked, alternating seamlessly.
Their weapons clashed again—this time, the alien's gear-hand caught one end of Lucien's sword. Lucien twisted the shaft, disengaging it with a burst at the contact point, then slammed the opposite blade down into the alien's shoulder, creating a sharp crack of energy.
The alien fell back, retreating with a flicker of violet thread-light.
Lucien advanced. Each step forward launched his weapon in a spinning blur—vertical, horizontal—never pausing, never giving ground.
Lucien feinted left, then blinked mid-strike to appear above, flipping his blade vertically in a reverse grip. He crashed down—blade first.
The alien caught it. But just barely.
Their weapons locked. Thread-light of green and violet screamed in the air between them.
Lucien twisted his wrists—breaking up his weapon into two single blades.
The alien's head tilted.
Lucien didn't wait.
He launched back in—twin blades now, striking from every angle.
***
The air split again as Lucien's twin blades clashed with the alien's daggers. Sparks of thread-light—green, and violet—erupted around them, casting rapid-fire shadows across the torn sand.
The alien's palm twisted mid-strike—morphing back into a hand, its hovering gear-clock rotating backward in a stuttering rotation.
Lucien's blow connected—then reversed—then connected again, only with air now.
The alien vanished from the path of the attack before the impact, blinking a half-second into the past.
Lucien didn't flinch.
He rotated one blade in his palm, stepped backward, and rewound himself in perfect sync—mirroring the alien's tactic with eerie precision. The moment replayed again—this time, it connected. Not as fatal as the initial strike.
To any observer, it looked like 3 rapid movements.
Isabelle stared at the sky around them—warped. Threads of green and violet light overlapped, curled, and snapped—like time itself couldn't decide which version of reality was true.
Lucien and the alien flickered in and out of visibility—both trying to rewrite the same moment.
Lucien growled under his breath, "Fine."
He surged forward, this time, he didn't rewind.
The alien rewound again.
Lucien anticipated it, blinked with it, and caught the alien in its post-rewind stance with a blast of green thread-light.
The impact was explosive—sand blasting outward in a perfect ring.
But the alien caught itself mid-air, twisting and landing in a crouch.
Its hands crossed again.
Lucien's eyes widened. "Damnit—"
The alien's chest emitted a low harmonic hum—then detonated a violet radial shockwave. The force erupted in a perfect sphere, distorting the air like a pebble dropped into molten glass.
Lucien threw one arm up and mirrored it.
A green shockwave exploded from his body in response.
The two waves colliding again—spirals of opposing light tearing into one another, compressing, rippling outward in distortion rings that carved concentric craters into the sand. The wind howled in every direction at once.
Sand lifted into the sky and froze mid-air, for half a breath—then came crashing down in a cascade of roaring impacts.
The alien blinked again—reappearing far off to the left.
But this time, it didn't go for Lucien.
It turned sharply and charged the others.
Kieran shouted, raising his shield. Julian stepped in front of Isabelle.
The alien blurred toward them like a streak of violet light.
In a flicker of green, Lucien intercepted the alien mid-dash—tackling it mid-air and slamming it into the ground so hard the impact cratered even deeper.
He roared, blades igniting with energy, and hammered both ends of them downward in a brutal slash.
The alien blocked with crossed arms—but the impact drove it half a meter into the earth.
Lucien didn't stop.
He picked the alien from his neck, blinking with it upward, and flicking it over his shoulder, sending it skidding across the ground.
Before it could stand, Lucien had already blinked again—reappearing above where it had cratered, holding a green thread-woven glaive at the ready.
With a violent flash of green thread-light the glaive went flying, aimed directly at the alien's core.
But before it could land.
The alien lunged backward, blinking from his stance at the ground, reappearing on-top of the ruined highway, standing loosely on his fractured feet.
Lucien quickly reacted, blinking backward toward his companions. The impact from his glaive tearing the earth apart in the distance.
***
The gear-clock planted at the alien's palm began to spin.
Not backward this time. Forward.
Smooth, accelerating rotation—blurring.
A sharp, oscillating hum filled the air, vibrating the air like a tuning fork. The alien raised both palms, outstretched them, and from the center—where the violet gear-clocks resided, a beam began to gather.
A sphere of unstable energy formed—radiant, pulasting, terrifyingly dense.
Space around it twisted, the desert light fracturing like glass. Dust lifted into the air. Stone began floating.
Lucien's eyes widened.
His blades, armor, and his companion's shields quickly dissolved.
In an instant he slammed both of his palms into the ground.
Thread-light erupted outward in jagged glyphic lines—racing across the desert in a fractal pattern, anchoring deep into the sand.
Six colossal monoliths burst upward in sequence. Green stone, layered with thread-light veins, each forty feet high.
Julian gasped. Max threw an arm in front of Isabelle. Kieran froze in place.
The alien fired.
The beam was instant.
A roar of violet annihilation shot forth from the gear-clock's core—straight as a razor, wide as a house, and dense with enough force to tear time itself.
The first monolith exploded. So did the second, and the third.
The next three all followed, all exploded, then melted.
The beam tore through all six like paper.
A tidal wave of dust, light, and debris flooded the space behind them.
For a moment, nothing was visible.
Only silence.
Then—
The wind shifted. The dust parted.
There was no one there.
No Lucien. No companions.
Just a crater so wide it could be mistaken for a meteor.
A blink later—Lucien reappeared above the alien, mid-fall, both hands gripping a reforged double-bladed sword. His body trailed streaks of green thread-light as gravity and time bent to his motion.
The alien looked up. Then his head stopped moving.
Lucien's voice cut the air. Quiet. Preise.
"Remember this moment, this is how you die."
He came down like judgement.
His blade struck in perfect vertical descent—cutting through the alien from helm to hip. The impact was silent—tight and forceful.
The alien split—perfectly.
Two symmetrical halves falling in mirrored grace, then vanishing into violet mist before they even hit the ground.
Lucien landed hard, driving one end of his blade into the asphalt beneath. His boots cracked the pavement. His breath jagged.
Behind him, the faint shimmer of thread-light collapsed—revealing his companions, all safely relocated, untouched.
Julian exhaled. Isabelle starred in disbelief. Max was now on the ground. Kieran just stood frozen in place.
Lucien stood over where the alien vanished, green thread-light flickering across his shoulders.
And for just one second—the entire desert was silent again.