Agent 714 had seen warzones before. Iraq. Vladivostok. The coastal siege of Hainan.

But this was different.

The Grimm Estate – once a pristine English manor atop carefully trimmed hills – now looked like God had struck it with both hands and laughed. The upper grounds were gutted, foundations cratered, the iron gates twisted like vines. What hadn't been reduced to ash had been turned to something far stranger.

Gold.

Not coins. Not bars. Not wealth. Wounds.

It ran through the wreckage like infection – veins of gleaming metal split the earth where fire had once bloomed. Gilded branches jutted from blackened tree stumps. A clawfoot bathtub had been fused sideways into the trunk of an oak, its porcelain peeled open like a flower, rimmed in gold.

A fallen statue – or what might've once been a statue – lay face-down in the rubble. It was shaped like a peacock, its feathers so finely rendered in hammered gold they caught the light even through the ash. The eyes had no pupils. Just cold, convex mirrors.

But stranger still were the weapons.

Long spears of gold jutted from the ground at unnatural angles – some impaled through the wreckage of walls, others arcing skyward like molten lightning frozen mid-strike. She paused near one and studied it.

The metal wasn't forged. It was grown – spiralled, layered, like it had erupted from the ground itself. The tip was barbed, beautiful, and cruel. One was still humming faintly, heat shimmering off it.

She crouched.

It wasn't just gold.

It was something trying to imitate permanence. Like a god's version of steel. Artifacts of violence left behind not by man but by something that thought it was greater.

Something that believed beauty meant obedience.

She crouched behind a fallen column, scanning the landscape through blacked-out thermal goggles. No visible heat signatures near the front. But in the ruins of the old manor's foundation, smoke still curled. Fire still smouldered.

It hadn't gone cold.

She adjusted the scarf around her lower face and pulled the hood lower. The uniform she wore was cobbled together from three sources: British disaster relief, Grimm Institute medic, and one of her own suppressed-ops loadouts. Blended perfectly. Official, but forgettable.

She moved like shadow.

Past the twisted remains of a limousine – windows shattered, wheels melted into the flagstone. Past the remains of what might've once been a marble statue, now a puddle of gold with a stretched, screaming face frozen on its surface.

The Institute's "front" was dead.

But its back – the part no one saw – was still alive.

She made her way around to the far slope, eyes scanning the treeline. There, half-sunken into the earth like an unearthed sarcophagus, was the buried entrance shaft. The real one.

And the military-grade construction site growing around it.

Barbed wire. Two mobile floodlights. Camouflaged fencing pretending to be brush. A generator hummed somewhere behind a hill. The path down was flanked by two guards in unmarked white Armor, rifles hanging low but fingers tight on the grip.

She watched from above as a team of men in exoskeletons dragged scorched debris away from a partially collapsed access tunnel.

They weren't salvaging. They were building.

Beneath it all – the collapsed stone, the gold-flecked wreckage, the dead – someone had ordered a reconstruction. Not to restore the Institute's public image.

To bury something deeper.

She needed to get inside.

Agent 714 turned, vanished into the woods, and re-emerged five minutes later in a different posture, a different walk. Shoulders loosened. Back straighter. She clipped a white band around her arm – printed with a falsified Institute crest and construction clearance badge – and stepped onto the site like she'd been summoned there.

One of the guards turned toward her.

She didn't blink.

"Late dispatch. Logistics review from Scotland. Ten-minute window. Don't get in my way."

She didn't wait for approval. Just walked past.

People who shouldn't be there never asked for permission.

She descended into the slope as the gold-flecked rubble closed behind her.

…………………

The descent grew stranger the deeper she went.

What had once been clinical and modular – prefab steel tunnels, airlock doors, security checkpoints – now looked like a buried skeleton trying to claw its way free. Entire corridors had collapsed inwards, girders twisted like bone, red emergency lights flashing intermittently through clouds of dust. The air grew damp. Metallic. Cold.

Agent 714 passed a rusted elevator shaft and followed the fallback path deeper into what her stolen maps had labelled "Core Research Vault – Black Clearance Only."

The deeper chambers had clearly burned – not with fire, but something hotter. Chemical? Plasma? One wall had collapsed outward, metal and rock fused into a single sheet, like it had melted and hardened mid-collapse.

And then came the tech.

Panels lined the walls – tall, floor-to-ceiling slabs of black glass and polymer, some shattered, others flickering. Data streams and symbols drifted lazily across the surfaces. Some were green. Some red. Some changed colour depending on how she looked at them.

She paused in front of one.

A perfect, circular crack spidered through the screen like it had been struck from inside. And behind the glass, a light pulsed, slow and sickly – not mechanical, not rhythmic. Organic.

She didn't like that.

She kept moving.

The hallway opened into a collapsed research theatre – a wide, domed chamber filled with rows of curved workstations and reinforced observation platforms. The centre of the room was a pit, surrounded by cracked glass barriers and blackened terminals. It looked surgical. Religious.

And at its edge – a body.

She approached.

Male. Late twenties. Burnt lab coat. The left side of his face was scorched nearly to the bone, but the right was untouched – mouth locked in a perfect, open scream.

One eye bulged. The other was missing. Not gouged, but gone.

As if something had eaten the space where it had been.

Beside him, a tablet lay cracked and buzzing with static. She crouched low, tapped the screen. It flickered to life.

Half the display was unreadable – corrupted video logs and fragments of system readouts. The interface was custom. Experimental. Not military. Not civilian. Something built in-house.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Something built for secrets.

She tapped through the remaining files.

—LOG 223F-B // Date Corrupted— "Soulfield Breach – External Interference"

She frowned.

Another file loaded.

ALERT – SYSTEM FAILURE WARNING: Site Compromised Subsurface Tether Reaction Detected DOORWAY UNSTABLE // RETREAT ORDER OVERRIDDEN

She scrolled faster. There were words, not terms — phrases like "independent energy behavior," "psychogenic mirroring," and "containment refused."

Refused?

She whispered aloud, almost to steady herself.

"What the hell kind of research were you people running down here?"

Another log appeared, blinking slowly.

Subject Containment: FAILED Entity Form: UNKNOWN Reaction Type: Cognitive//Reality Warp Detected Stabilization: Impossible

She looked back at the body.

The scream.

The way the tech seemed to defy rules she'd spent a lifetime enforcing – structure, control, reason.

And then, the line that stopped her cold.

"Tether breach initiated from inside containment. External force unknown. Field failed to bind target soul."

She stared at it.

Read it again.

"How the hell do you breach a field meant to bind the soul?"

Her voice echoed in the stillness, then vanished – like even the air refused to carry it.

She stood slowly. The panel beside her flickered once, briefly shifting colour – a pattern she'd seen before. On no language. No machine.

A shape.

A mark.

A name.

MAMMON.

Then it vanished.

…………………

She followed the pulsing light.

The corridor behind her groaned as systems sparked back to life in her wake – motion-triggered or sentient, she couldn't tell. Ahead, a side door hung half-melted on its hinges. She pushed through into what looked like an old surveillance bay – now half-flooded and reeking of scorched metal and rot.

Dozens of screens lined the curved wall, some shattered, others dark, a few flickering to life as her presence activated motion logs. A black chair sat crooked in front of the central control desk, ash-caked and empty.

She slid into the seat, keyed the cracked interface with a repurposed Grimm ID chip, and held her breath.

The screen coughed static.

Then: RESTRICTED DATA ARCHIVE – INCIDENT: BURROW BREACH ACCESSING: INTERNAL FEED // TRI-SECTOR RECORDING #MΔ-42

A feed began to play.

No sound. Just footage. Glitching every few seconds.

It started in a mirrored corridor – the walls pristine, the glass oddly reflective. But something was off. The reflections didn't match.

Agent 714 leaned in.

The feed showed a woman – blonde, mid-thirties – staring at herself. But her reflection didn't move with her. It turned a second too late. Then, it smiled.

She froze the frame.

The smile on the other side had teeth that were wrong. Too many. Too sharp. Too familiar.

She skipped forward.

Chaos.

The feed fractured, jumped. Screams. The Mirror tearing itself through walls, phasing, shattering containment. Not fleeing. Hunting. She caught glimpses of it – a flicker of faces, always changing, warping into what its victims feared.

Impossible.

One frame froze on a teenage girl in a medical pod – half-hidden behind a collapsed platform. Cryogenic stasis confirmed by the overlay. The girl's hair was silver-blonde. Her heartbeat monitor was redlining.

ELIZABETH JAEGER – PRIORITY CONTAINMENT

Agent 714 made a note.

Then the feed surged. Cameras across the site began to fail.

Then – he appeared.

The timestamp glitched once, then went blank.

The corridor camera picked up a man stepping through what looked like a vertical rupture in the air itself – a hole in reality, just wide enough for a figure to walk through.

He wasn't dressed for war. No armour. No insignia. He wore a royal robe torn at the collar, boots of hammered gold, and his hair was a flowing mass of ancient grey, like smoke made regal. His skin glowed faintly with an internal heat. Eyes unreadable.

A golden crown hung just above his brow – floating. Not resting.

He looked like a king carved from memory and nightmare.

The feed labelled him automatically: UNKNOWN ENTITY // HOSTILE ANOMALY // LEVEL 7

She watched as a wave of heat flared out around him, melting two agents into liquid gold. He raised one hand – and an entire section of the building bent outward, walls folding like paper, as he stepped through.

Another jump.

The next frames were fire.

A man – no, a figure wrapped in fire – met the king mid-corridor. Agent 714 paused the footage.

The fire moved like it had a mind. Crawled across the walls, carved into the metal. He moved faster than the camera could track, striking with fists wreathed in blue flame.

UNIDENTIFIED ENTITY – MATCHING: SUBJECT MAX JAEGER?

Agent 714 blinked.

She scrubbed forward – the footage now a strobe of violence. The golden king conjured spears from the ground, tearing through floors and ceilings. Max responded with flame so hot the feed broke into red static. The building collapsed from three angles. Rooms vaporized. Liz's pod was launched clear – seen tumbling through the air, sealed, bouncing off metal as debris swallowed everything.

The final frame was static.

Then:

ARCHIVE END INCIDENT CLASSIFICATION: OMEGA LEVEL INVESTIGATOR'S NOTE: "This was not a breach. This was a reckoning."

Agent 714 sat back, throat dry.

A shapeshifting entity. A god-king of gold. A man made of fire. A girl in a pod. No backup. No orders. No explanation.

She didn't know what it meant.

She copied everything she could onto her private drive, slotted it into a lead-lined chip case, and stood in silence.

Outside, the ruins still smouldered.

She felt like she was walking through the wreckage of a war no one knew had started.

…………………

It took her nearly five minutes to force the door open, despite her enhanced strength and abilities.

The lock wasn't mechanical. Or electronic. It had symbols carved into the panel, deep cuts etched in silver wiring that shimmered faintly under her flashlight. The symbols twisted when she looked at them directly, like they weren't meant for her eyes.

But nothing physical stopped her.

The metal peeled back with a groan, and Agent 714 stepped into what had once been Dr. Helmut Grimm's private chamber.

It was not what she expected.

There was no desk. No data pads. No rows of monitors or mission briefings.

Instead, the space felt ritualistic.

The walls were black concrete, floor polished obsidian. A rusted chandelier of bones hung from the ceiling, each joint wired with copper and tiny humming devices she didn't recognize. Runes were carved into the walls – not in ink, but with heat, the blackened edges still faintly glowing in the dark. A long leather scroll sat unfurled on the floor, pinned under steel daggers. It wasn't written in any language she'd seen before. The characters moved when she wasn't looking.

In the centre of the room was a single table – real wood, old, ringed with sigils. On it: a stack of journals, an open laptop, and a silver case.

She didn't hesitate.

She pulled out her drive and began copying files from the terminal.

It took time – the system was encrypted, messy. Like it had been rushed. As if Grimm had left mid-thought. Some files were raw research. Others read like diary entries. Ramblings. Schematics for something he called a soul lattice. Reports on "entity instability." Handwritten margins said things like "Some Lords resisted structure. Mammon embraced it."

She paused at that name.

Mammon.

It matched what she'd seen. The golden tyrant. The floating crown. The weapons.

Classified: LEVEL 7 ENTITY – REALITY DISRUPTIVE POTENTIAL: EXTREME

She continued digging.

Folder: FIELD INTEL – DEEP THREAT MONITORING Subfolder: ASIA – PRIORITY RED

Inside was a partial briefing. It looked like a draft.

"Subject: VERRINE" "Status: Unconfirmed Entity – Presumed ACTIVE" "Type: Unknown (Speculated Dimensional Anchor)" "Classification: LEVEL 7 – Parallel to Mammon" "Current Touchpoint: Mainland China – Strategic Command Layer" "Human Host: General Wang, PLA – Verified 58% Certainty" "RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT ENGAGE. EVACUATE. REPORT TO PRIMARY."

Agent 714's fingers froze over the keyboard.

She blinked. Re-read it.

General Wang.

Her commanding officer. Her handler. The face of China's military presence across three continents. The man who signed her operational orders.

She felt a rush of cold sweep through her spine. Like a thread being pulled too tight.

She scanned the metadata again.

Verrine.

Same classification as Mammon.

But this entity wasn't gold and fire and screaming collapse.

This one was quiet.

Hidden.

Inside the system.

Inside her system.

Her hands moved quickly now, copying everything. She backed out of the local terminal, burned the log. No trace. She slipped the silver drive into a pouch behind her plate carrier and sealed it shut.

She stared one last time at the screen.

GENERAL WANG HOST? VERRINE – GATEKEEPER CLASS [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [ENTITY UNKNOWN. DANGER UNKNOWN. ESCAPE UNLIKELY.]

She didn't say a word.

She just turned and walked out, fast, silent, heart pounding.

For the first time in years, Agent 714 didn't know who she was working for.

And worse – she didn't know what she might be protecting.

…………………

The satellite feed was never supposed to reactivate.

Buried in the shell of an abandoned Chinese military node once tethered to Site 3rd Heaven, the surveillance array had long since been marked corrupt: unrecoverable signal degradation, chronal desync, unreproducible sensor drift. Officially retired. Quietly forgotten.

But something in the wreckage below — a pulse from the Burrow, maybe, or the reactivation of a buried subroutine — brought it back.

Camera H-Δ61 flickered to life, lens jittering as it locked onto a column of vehicles threading their way through the mountainous scrubland just outside Chongqing. They moved fast – a convoy of eight armoured transports cutting southwest through what should have been restricted PLA territory.

Destination: Chengdu.

At the centre of the formation, encased in titanium-plated restraints and held within a temperature-stabilized stasis rig, was a pod.

White. Seamless. Coffin-shaped.

The feed zoomed closer.

Inside, her breath was visible only by the faintest motion of a condensation patch on the interior glass. Hair floating around her like smoke suspended in jelly. Elizabeth Jaeger.

Still unconscious. Still dreaming.

Readouts crawled across the outside of the pod, etched in hardened code only a few Institute subroutines could parse. Symbols burned faintly in blacklight-reactive ink, layered with optical warping seals.

The pod didn't hum. It didn't emit light. But it pulsed – a silent metronome tapping out the rhythm of something ancient and still becoming.

As the convoy passed under a rock shelf, a data tag stencilled on the lead truck came briefly into view:

OPERATION: GATEWAY VECTOR CHENGDU RITUAL STAGING – PHASE 2 SUBJECT TRANSFER: L. JAEGER – STABILIZED

The satellite began to flicker.

A single frame caught just before the signal cut: the pod's biometric monitor momentarily spiked. No sound. Just a blip.

Like she had dreamed of being seen.

Then the feed broke – corrupted. Warped pixels. A scream of static.

A final line blinked across the dying interface before total shutdown:

62 Days Until Dimensional Event Ritual Completion

Then, darkness.

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