Corrupted Bonds
Chapter 104: Operation Threadfall

Chapter 104: Chapter 104: Operation Threadfall

The hangar bay hummed like a sleeping god, low and thrumming, the metal bones of the room singing a vibration that wasn’t entirely mechanical.

Every surface—the polished steel grating beneath their boots, the reinforced walls streaked with ancient scratch marks, even the overhead lattice of strip-lights—seemed to pulse with a breath older than language.

The lights flickered in irregular rhythm, soft bursts of pale blue cutting long shadows across the rows of waiting launch pads. The air reeked faintly of ozone and scorched coil, thick with ion charge and an almost sacred anticipation.

It was the kind of quiet that didn’t ask for silence—it demanded it. The kind of stillness that settled in the chest and clung to the lungs like an oncoming storm.

Beneath the high, vaulted ceiling, eight resonance platforms glowed in a wide circle. Each platform was carved with glyphs that shimmered in rotating intervals—cyclic sigils from the original Rift decoding, now adapted to their own team’s resonance frequency. They weren’t just markers. They were promises.

And in the center of it all, like a heartbeat suspended in midair, the signal anchor spun slowly, ribbons of violet, white, and burning copper curling up from its rotating frame. The anchor pulsed like a heart lost between timelines—not beating, but remembering how.

Rowan stood closest to it. Silent. Still.

His black underweave suit clung to his frame, dusted with chalky streaks of ash and blood that hadn’t quite faded from their last battle.

At the wrists, his gloves twitched slightly—fingers brushing over the translucent console formed by the anchor’s resonance field. Each touch answered him with soft pulses of light, lines of data scrolling like breath across the surface.

But Rowan wasn’t reading it anymore.

His shoulders were locked, spine taut, every line of his body drawn in that quiet, focused tension of someone trying not to tremble. His dark hair, longer than it had been at the beginning of all this, was damp at the temples. The blue-white lighting bleached the color from his face, making the fatigue in his eyes look older than it should.

He was breathing shallowly. Too shallow.

Behind him, footsteps approached—unhurried, measured. Boots against steel. Familiar weight.

Lucian.

He didn’t announce himself—he never did anymore—but Rowan still knew it was him before the contact came. A quiet hand rested at the small of his back—warm through layers of material. Just that. A touch. Not grounding through force, but presence.

"You’ve been standing here for ten minutes," Lucian said, his voice low, hoarse around the edges. Still healing. Still stubborn. But present. Alive.

Rowan didn’t look away from the resonance field. "I’m reading the sync telemetry."

"You’re staring into space," Lucian countered, stepping closer, "and pretending you’re not nervous."

Rowan exhaled through his nose. "I’m not pretending. I’m—"

"—masterfully compartmentalizing," Lucian finished for him. "Yeah. You do that. It’s your favorite hobby, next to overworking and deflecting emotional vulnerability."

Rowan finally turned, one brow lifting. "You’re unusually perceptive today."

Lucian gave him a half-smile, eyes flickering with their usual controlled light—faint, but sharp. The lines on his face were more prominent now; new scars traced his arms, partially hidden under torn fabric and gauze. His torso bore the evidence of healing trauma—cuts across his ribs, bruises blooming dark and proud.

But his stance was solid. His presence anchored the room.

"You’re doing that thing with your jaw," Lucian said.

"What thing?"

"The one where you look like you’re about to lecture death into apologizing."

A beat passed.

"...That’s fair," Rowan admitted.

Lucian’s smile deepened just enough to soften the tension in the air.

For a moment, the rift-scarred hum of the chamber seemed to quiet around them.

They didn’t say it—but they felt it. This moment wasn’t just another deployment. It was a crossing. A line they’d step over and might not come back from. And still, they were here.

"Mission Team – Operation Threadfall." Rowan said it aloud, but mostly to himself. "We’re really doing this."

Lucian’s voice was a whisper. "Again."

A chime echoed from the wall interface. One by one, the launch pads lit up, glyphs flaring to life in sync with the anchor’s pulse. The rest of the team would arrive soon. Already, faint bootsteps echoed from the upper gangway. Resonance signatures registered: Quinn. Ari. Mira. Ren.

But in this moment, it was just the two of them.

Lucian shifted, just slightly, stepping into Rowan’s space. "Hey."

Rowan met his gaze.

"You’re not alone this time."

Rowan’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

Instead, he lifted one hand and—without ceremony—laced their fingers together.

They stood that way for a heartbeat. Then two.

And the anchor continued to spin.

—

The rest of the team filed in gradually, footsteps echoing against steel and resonance alike—each one carrying the marks of survival in different forms. Scars not always visible. Wounds still bleeding beneath polished gear and half-slept eyes.

Ari and Quinn were first—side by side, as always, with that effortless sync that didn’t need announcing. Their movements mirrored each other, shoulder to shoulder, their halo flares whispering in tandem, twin arcs of soft green and pale gold that pulsed like steady breathing.

Quinn had a thermos clutched in one hand—matte black, dented, marked with a scratched-in "R" near the base. He held it out toward Rowan without breaking stride.

"Rowan. Coffee," he said, as if he were announcing salvation.

Rowan accepted it like a benediction. "You are the single best decision Ari ever made."

Ari made a sound between a laugh and a scoff. "Excuse you—I made that decision."

Lucian raised an eyebrow, deadpan. "And Quinn remade it every time you tried to storm out during arguments."

"Because someone—" Ari turned with a dramatic wave of her hand toward Quinn, "keeps weaponizing puppy eyes."

"I have no shame," Quinn said simply, taking a sip from his own cup. "Or morals, apparently."

"Or survival instinct," Ari added, bumping his hip with hers.

They were bantering. But under it, Rowan saw the same thing he always saw before a mission—the sharpened edge beneath the laughter, the way Quinn’s thumb tapped the thermos like a metronome, and the way Ari’s gaze swept the room, already assessing exits, angles, escape.

Next came Vespera, her boots almost silent, every step measured. Her black uniform shimmered faintly under the lights, her shoulders set back like a woman walking through a battlefield with no need for armor.

Her gaze moved from Rowan to Lucian and back again, calculating resonance levels with quiet efficiency, but when Rowan caught her eye, she gave a single, imperceptible nod. They understood each other in glances now.

Behind her, Mira, Zora, and Jasper entered as a loosely scattered cluster.

Mira moved with a stiffness that betrayed her exhaustion—there were half-moon shadows under her eyes and the faint tremor in her gloved fingers as she adjusted the strap on her rifle case. But her eyes were clear. Alert. Angry. Like she’d come looking for something to hurt back.

Zora was halfway through a protein bar he clearly hated. He bit it with the energy of someone holding a grudge. His free hand held a datapad, scrolling through last-minute terrain readouts.

And Jasper... Jasper looked like he’d just walked out of a meme folder. His armor had been customized—subtly, just a single etched sigil on his shoulder and a sticker on his flask that read: ANTI-RIFT JUICE – CONTAINS ONLY TEARS.

He held it up proudly as he passed Rowan. "For luck."

"I question your definition of luck," Rowan murmured.

"Mine includes surviving missions with all major limbs intact," Jasper said cheerfully. "So far, I’m batting a solid seventy percent."

Then came Ren, stumbling in as if the universe had tried to trip him at the door. His chrono gauntlet was half-open, displaying a flickering timeband readout that was entirely illegible to anyone sane.

He pushed a hand through his hair and muttered, "I just spent twenty minutes trying to convince the command AI that my chrono gauntlet wasn’t a smoothie blender."

Zora, deadpan: "Was it, though?"

Ren turned to him with a level stare. "Zora. I have been trapped in a loop with a vending machine before. Do not test me."

"Bet the vending machine won," Jasper whispered to Mira.

"I heard that," Ren snapped.

Mira cracked a tired smile. Just barely. But it was real.

For a few more moments, the tension lifted. The room warmed—not physically, but emotionally. This was what they did. Laugh before they bled. Mock the abyss until it blinked first. Family, forged in chaos.

But as the last of the chuckles died down, that familiar stillness crept in again. Heavy. Cold.

Like the universe inhaling. Waiting.

Rowan moved slowly through them—checking gear, offering hands to steady, fingers to clasp, touches that were more than routine.

He nodded once to Mira, who gave the faintest, grateful exhale.

When he passed Vespera, she touched his arm lightly—an unspoken exchange: Keep them steady. I’ll keep you standing.

Then came Kira.

She stood near the far edge of the room, shoulders slightly hunched, arms crossed tightly over her chest as if holding herself together with sheer will. She hadn’t spoken since entering. Her hood was pulled down low, obscuring part of her face, but the tremble in her jaw was visible.

Rowan stepped toward her—careful, quiet—and offered his hand.

Her fingers didn’t move at first. Then slowly, like lifting weights underwater, she took his hand in hers.

She didn’t speak.

But her lips parted, just slightly. Then closed again.

It was Jasper who, quietly, took a step closer and slid something into her hand. A crumpled wrapper from her favorite energy bar. From before.

She didn’t look at him. But she held on.

A long breath passed through the room.

No one dared break it.

And then, as if it had all been choreographed—they moved.

Together.

Rowan turned toward the console, fingers brushing over the launch pad interface. Lights flared across the chamber. Resonance glyphs lit like wildfire.

Operation Threadfall was ready to begin.

Command Assembles

Evelyn, Sharon, and Elias stepped into the luminous ring cast by the stabilizer—light shearing across their forms like holy fire against the cold steel of the hangar.

They didn’t need to speak to command attention. Their presence cut through the gathering haze like a blade, grounding the moment in the sharp contrast between command and chaos.

Leaders. Witnesses. Survivors of too many endings.

Evelyn stood at the head, spine straight, her black coat trimmed with silver threading that shimmered faintly under the stabilizer’s field. She looked carved from resolve—cheekbones high, lips pressed into a thin line, eyes sharp with everything she wasn’t saying.

Her presence alone steadied the air, like gravity had just remembered its purpose.

Sharon moved beside her, slate already in hand, fingers a blur over the glowing surface. Her hair was half-pulled back, a pencil still wedged behind one ear, as if she’d just stepped from the war room without pausing for breath. As she tapped a final command, the air before them bloomed with light.

A 3D map burst into view—an organic spiral of rooms, layers, and corridors that twisted in on themselves like a heartbeat caught mid-pulse.

"Threadfall’s internal structure is layered, like a collapsed lung inside a mirrored hallway," Sharon said, her voice clinical, but too fast. Too tense. "Spatial drift’s already destabilized. Expect echo lag and visual folding. What you see might not be what’s there."

Elias—broad-shouldered, expression lined with recent grief—nodded from her other side, arms crossed over a rust-colored coat scuffed with field wear. His voice was low, measured, and solid as bedrock.

"Temporal flutters confirmed," he added. "Don’t trust your memories down there. Not even the good ones."

Lucian’s jaw flexed.

Quinn shifted, visibly unsettled. "So we’re going in blind."

Evelyn’s gaze swept across the assembled strike team like a quiet blade. "No. You’re going in prepared."

Then her eyes landed on Rowan—and stayed there.

"This is no longer a recovery mission," she said. "This is close-and-contain. If we fail, we risk another recursion spiral that could rupture containment grids across three districts. Maybe the entire east sector."

Quinn’s voice cut through the heavy quiet. "And if we succeed?"

She hesitated—just a moment. Then gave the answer not to him, but still to Rowan.

"Then the tether resets. And maybe..." A breath. A heartbeat. "Maybe the world stops bleeding."

The map rotated slowly, casting ghost-light across their faces. The glyph rings pulsed behind them, syncing calibration patterns like a countdown.

As final checks rolled through the system, Sharon and Elias began issuing gear—resonance modulators, sync stabilizers, personal signal dampeners for each squad member. They snapped onto wrists, over sternums, behind necks. Sleek and cold, until they lit to each wearer’s pulse.

Zora fumbled with his too quickly. It blinked red once and shot off like a slingshot, bouncing off the side panel with a loud metallic ping.

Everyone turned.

Zora held up his hands. "I was, uh. Testing gravitational inertia."

Jasper, already halfway into his own gear, didn’t miss a beat. "You’re about to get inertia in the face."

Vespera gave the faintest smirk, adjusting her resonance cuffs with quiet precision. "Should’ve had coffee like Quinn."

"I had coffee," Mira growled from the side, aiming her rifle with intent. "I still want to shoot something."

Lucian gave a half-laugh, but his eyes were already scanning the team, stopping on her just long enough to assess. "She’s ready."

Rowan nodded, tone quiet. "We all are."

Ren was crouched beside one of the interface nodes, adjusting his chrono-device with the care of a bomb technician. He didn’t look up when he spoke.

"If we don’t come back..."

Ari cut him off, voice firm and grounding. "We will."

Quinn, beside her, repeated it—gentler, but no less sure. "We don’t leave anyone behind."

There was a moment of stillness then—one Rowan didn’t rush. He looked at them all, one by one. His team. His family.

Ari’s eyes—sharp, brilliant, unyielding.

Quinn’s—soft but burning, like a calm fire refusing to die.

Vespera—quiet storm, unreadable, but steady.

Mira—coiled tension with purpose carved into every line.

Zora—unshakable despite his sarcasm.

Jasper—laughing on the outside, grieving on the inside, and still moving forward.

Ren—shivering but holding the timeline together with both hands.

Kira—fragile in posture, indomitable in soul.

Lucian—scarred, remade, and still burning.

And then Rowan, standing among them like a star drawn to its center.

He drew in a breath—and spoke the words Evelyn had once given him in a whisper, when he’d still been broken and half-afraid.

"We walk together. Or we don’t walk at all."

The platform beneath their boots hummed to life.

Light spilled up from the floor like water made of sound, crawling up their bodies—syncing to heartbeats, neural pathways, emotional signatures. The resonance web activated in a slow, luminous cascade that spun outward like spider-silk, locking each of them to the launch ring and to each other.

The glyphs flared.

The stabilizer core at the center of the room pulsed once—deep and thunderous—and then Evelyn’s voice rang out over comms:

"Operation Threadfall is green. Strike team, deploy."

Rowan reached for Lucian’s hand—and found it already waiting.

Lucian squeezed once, steady and sure. "See you on the other side."

Kira gave a short nod, jaw clenched.

Vespera closed her eyes and murmured, "Let’s make it count."

Ren muttered, "I still hate this plan."

Quinn smirked. "And yet, here you are."

Zora cracked his knuckles. "I brought snacks."

Jasper squinted. "You did not."

Mira rolled her eyes. "Everyone shut up."

The ring pulsed—once, twice—and then shattered upward in a column of light that swallowed them whole.

They vanished in a ripple of color and sound—leaving only silence behind.

And a hope.

A desperate, fragile hope...

...that this time, the story might finally reach its end.

The Descent

The world peeled open.

Not with light.

But with silence—total and absolute.

The kind of silence that presses in behind the eyes and lives between the beats of your heart. The kind of silence that swallows thoughts before they form.

The deployment ring completed its cycle with a final pulse—and suddenly, the strike team wasn’t falling, or walking, or even moving in any familiar way.

They were being inverted.

Not downward. Not forward.

But inward—folded through a dimension that shouldn’t exist, the kind of space that yawns wide in a nightmare where time forgets how to behave.

It felt like slipping between thoughts, like being exhaled from a memory too old to have a name.

One moment: steel grating underfoot, the hum of stabilizers beneath the boots, mission comms alive with breath and signal.

The next—

Elsewhere.

A reality unspooled around them, slow at first. Like drifting through a cathedral sunken beneath some ancient sea of static and glass.

Above them, where sky might’ve been, a cracked mosaic dome arched overhead. Not sky—but reflection. Mirrors of thought and memory, shattered and stitched together by streaks of lightning and veins of grief, glowing with unspoken histories.

The light here had no source.

It just was.

Molten gold pooled midair in long, trembling droplets—hovering like suspended tears of thought. Crimson flickered across the horizon like a sunset drawn in reverse, light bleeding backward into shadow.

The ground defied logic.

Half obsidian, slick and glistening with black resonance that pulsed beneath them like living nerves. Half dust, swirling and reforming with each step, creating prints that vanished the instant you looked away. The surface beat with something ancient.

Something beneath. A hum—not heard, but felt in the bones.

A heartbeat.

Slow. Deep. Wrong.

Ren staggered, blinking rapidly. His voice cracked as he whispered, "This place is... curved."

Kira was already scanning the space, her resonance module blinking amber. "Spatial recursion," she muttered. "We’re not walking in lines—we’re walking on the edge of a loop. The space is trying to swallow itself."

Mira lifted her rifle, already locked into combat readiness. Her eyes narrowed. "I can’t set coordinates. Origin point resets every time I blink."

They looked up.

High above, within the fractured mirror-dome, a shard flickered to life.

It showed Rowan.

Standing alone.

His reflection stared down at them from the broken sky—older, hollow-eyed, face carved by exhaustion no one remembered him living through.

Then it was gone.

Lucian inhaled sharply. He moved closer to Rowan, his hand hovering just a few inches from his back—not touching, not yet. But close enough to catch him.

"Stay close," he said, voice low and iron-wrapped.

"I don’t like this."

Rowan turned toward him, breath caught in his throat.

"It’s not a rift," he murmured. "Not really."

He looked around again—at the flickering light, the impossible air, the way reality twisted at the edges like a photograph curling in fire.

"It’s... a thought. A memory that dreamed it was a place."

Quinn muttered, "Well, that’s just comforting."

They walked on.

And with each step, the terrain grew stranger.

Trees began sprouting from empty air—trunks half-formed, bark lined with etchings like scars that shimmered with the glow of long-forgotten handwriting. Some bled black fluid, thick and oily, trickling upward instead of down. Others hummed softly, vibrating with whispers—half-heard voices breathing words in a language just outside of understanding.

A corridor jutted from the side of a cliff—pristine, untouched.

It looked exactly like a hallway from Zarek HQ, complete with wall panels and light fixtures.

It did not belong here.

And yet, it was perfectly placed, like it had been stolen, copied, and pasted into the Rift’s skin.

Ari stepped closer, trailing her fingers along the wall.

The moment her fingertips touched—

She jerked back, eyes wide.

"I felt—" Her voice broke. "I felt Juno’s voice. Like it was still here."

Everyone stilled.

Zora whispered something sharp in another language and tightened his grip on his gauntlets.

Vespera moved next to the wall, gaze solemn. "This entire place is a construct. Built on resonance bleed. Emotional imprint. That’s why it feels like we’ve been here before."

Lucian turned to Rowan again.

His voice was softer now, tinged with dread. "Does it feel like Site V9?"

Rowan nodded. Pale. "Worse," he whispered. "Site V9 was reactionary. This is... deliberate. It knows we’re here."

Beneath their feet, the ground rippled again.

But this time—it breathed.

A slow, shuddering exhale echoed across the terrain. Dust shifted. Obsidian cracked and reformed. The air pulled tight like a drawn bow.

Something was alive.

Watching.

Jasper spun in a slow circle, scanning every direction. "I don’t know where from... but it is. Watching."

Then—

A shriek tore across the horizon.

But it didn’t come from ahead. Or behind. Or above.

It came from everywhere. All at once.

A sound made of machine wire and meat. Part scream. Part metal shearing through time. Part... human.

The sound didn’t just hurt the ears.

It rattled the spine, pried open instinct from reason.

Above them, the mosaic dome—so still before—began to ripple violently.

One by one, the shards of broken memory began to shimmer.

And something—

Something began to crawl through.

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