This place didn’t summon him. It had already made room.
Val opened his eyes. The ceiling wasn't the grime-streaked, industrial mess of the terraformed CERN.
It was sterile, bathed in a clinical amber light. He tried to sit up, his muscles screaming in protest, and looked down at his torso.
The black discoloration that had been climbing up his arm had receded. It was still there, a black marbled pattern under his skin, but the angry pulsing had stopped.
Val swung his legs over the side, dizzy as the gravity hit him.
‘It feels… heavier. Crisper,’ he thought, drawing a slow breath as the difference clicked.
“It's the air,” he whispered.
The infection wasn't gone; it was starving.
Val looked around.
A vast expanse stretched to an infinite horizon of soft luminescence.
He looked up. The scale of his new location became clear. Massive, translucent pillars of light arced toward a zenith mile above. At the hall’s far end, a lotus-like throne pulsed with energy, illuminating rows of identical white-clad statues standing in perfect alignment.
“Where...”
He wasn't alone. Hundreds of people were scattered across the expanse, looking like ants on a motherboard of glass.
Around him, people broke.
Some clawed at the floor in prayer, their foreheads hitting the glowing tiles with rhythmic thuds—convinced they had ascended to heaven.
Others stared at invisible screens only they could see, their eyes darting behind flickering blue HUDs.
Everyone was trapped in a private bubble of isolation.
Val’s attention shifted to two other individuals who stood out from the crowd.
One was a woman with the steady hands of a surgeon, comforting a sobbing teenager.
“It’s okay. We’re going to be alright. If you need anything, look for me. I’m Elena.”
The other was a man with the build of a laborer, cursing at the air—his fists clenched.
The atmosphere shifted. The white void curdled into violet light, the floor vibrating with a low-frequency hum.
“Look!” the teenager pointed; his voice shrill.
Three figures walked along the luminescent doorway.
Black leather mantle. Reinforced seams. Dark goggles that reflected no emotion.
‘Guards,’ Val thought. ‘Or something worse.’
Across the hall, another figure waited. The officer stood beneath a vertical column of white light. His frame was precise: symmetrical, immaculate, in stark white. Thin orange stripes along his quilted sleeves pulsed faintly.
“Hey suit! Send me back to Chicago!” The angry guy looked like he was ready to explode.
“You know who I am? Rafa 'The Ice-Cold Killer’ Moreno!”
Val stepped in before it escalated, “Hey. Calm down.”
Rafa jerked, half-turning, chest heaving. “Don’t patronize me boy...”
Before Rafa could take another step, Elena’s hand landed on his shoulder, halting his forward momentum.
“My mother used to say you can judge a man by what makes him angry,” Elena interrupted, her voice low but commanding.
She didn't flinch. “Are you an angry man, Rafa?”
Rafa glared at her. But something in her voice, in the precise timing of her movements, forced him to pause.
“Pfft. You sound exactly the same as my nana,” Rafa turned away while throwing his hands in the air.
“Grandmothers scare men like him more than guns do,” Elena whispered to Val, as Rafa blended into the crowd.
Their quiet exchange was cut short by a military trumpet signal similar to Reveille. A high-ranking officer had arrived in the vicinity.
“The perimeter is secure,” the guard reported as he reached the center of the expanse.
His voice was swallowed by the high leather collar, flattened into something rehearsed. Official.
The officer didn’t answer.
“All martyrs have arrived!” the guard proclaimed.
The officer finally turned his head toward the guard.
His eyes were tired. Not emotionally. Functionally.
Unease rippled outward. Someone whispered. Someone else started to panic.
Above his head, shards of emerald halo materialized. They looked like a floating crown of pressurized gems.
The gesture was small. Exact.
An azurine card object flashed into being within the center of his crystalline halo. Sigils locking in a resonant alignment.
[VERSE: GLOBAL SILENCE]
Sound ceased.
Not faded.
Not muted.
Gone. Silence slammed down like a sealed lid.
He stepped forward once. The chamber responded: lights shifting, floor markings illuminating beneath the assembled Martyrs’ feet.
The officer’s gaze passed over the room, measuring alignment and spacing. His attention paused for half a second longer on Val.
“Then,” he lowered his voice, “let the processing begin.”
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Heavy pneumatic gates hissed open, exhaling a gust of recycled air. The array of swirling fluorescent lights illuminate the processing center.
Val moved with the crowd, a river of civilian jackets, nervous coughs, and the smell of cold sweat.
“Next! Move it up!” a short guard barked, his voice hoarse from a day of shouting at terrified teachers and accountants.
Almost in sync with the order, the sweaty guy in front of Val vomited. It splattered inches from Val’s shoes.
No one stopped. The line moved as if nothing had happened.
Val stepped forward, his eyes tracking the movement of the mechanical arms at the stations ahead. The room was a cavern of polished white polymer, dominated by glowing ring-shaped apertures.
Each station was centered around a high-backed chair that looked like an interrogation device.
Robotic limbs equipped with high-res scanners and micro-lasers dangled above the chair.
Every few seconds, a hiss echoed through the hall, followed by a grunt of pain. When it was Val’s turn, he was shoved into a chair.
A technician, eyes glazed with the fatigue of a thousand procedures, didn’t even look him in the face. The man wore a heavy, wrap-around visor. Hexagonal status windows floated across it, displaying vital signs and surgical checklists.
“Stay still. Don’t tilt your head,” the tech muttered.
Before Val could draw a breath, a heavy cuff clamped over his neck. The machine whirred, a high-pitched whine, and then—snap. Three thick needles driven by pneumatic pressure pierced his cervical spine, anchoring the device directly into his marrow and neural pathways.
Val’s vision blurred into white agony.
‘They're hard-wiring into the central nervous system. They're turning our spines into antennae!’
Above his head, a rotating disk glowed a soft, menacing grey. It was more than a GPS; it was a tether to a cosmic surveillance.
“Your halo is ready,” the tech said, already looking past him. “If you ever need to activate it just whisper halo; verbally or internally. Move.”
He was pushed into a holding area where the air felt thinner. Val found a seat next to a lady who looked like she was vibrating out of her skin.
A shadow fell over him, heavy and unmoving.
Val looked up to find a man of calculated composition . While the rest of the room was a blur of frantic refugees and shouted orders, he stood like a pillar of rebar. A jagged scar clawed its way from his scalp down to his jaw. A permanent reminder of a world that had tried to break him and failed.
"I'm Marcus. Mind if I sit here?"
Val just shrugged, though a cold ease settled in his gut.
“What happened to us…” Marcus began, his voice a low. "It reminds me of the Rapture. The stories from the holy books."
“Rapture Protocol?” Val repeated the term, carefully noting the veteran's mechanical efficiency.
Marcus nodded slowly, his eyes searching Val's face for a shred of sincerity, “I think it's connected to whatever you were doing in that facility.”
"Do you happen to know anything about this, Scientist?"
"Only what I saw on the news," Val replied. He adjusted his stance, instinctively trying to hide the CERN logo on his tattered lab coat.
“I'd like to dig into that,” he just leaned in slightly. His eyes held for a beat too long. "But it's too much noise in here. So I'll let it go."
"For now."
Sensing the unspoken threat, Val looked away, refusing to give Marcus the satisfaction of a reaction. He needed to change the subject, to focus on the mechanics of survival rather than the guilt of the past.
Val visualized the command the technicians had mentioned—the key to their new existence.
‘Halo.’
As soon as he focused, a glowing screen formed in the air before him.
[MARTYR 0996]
Name : Valentin Voss
Health : 150/200
Stratum : Thrall I
Path : Unregistered
Halo Type : Phaistos
‘Interesting… This projection screen is coming directly from inside our skull. An advanced form of Frey Effect, perhaps?’
His fingers didn’t pass through a hologram. They met resistance.
The blue screen bent under his touch like a stretched film.
‘It’s not light,’ Val realized, a chill creeping up his neck. ‘Solidified energy. Hard light with mass.’
He also tested his dull grey Phaistos Halo hovering above his head to meet the same sensation. Unlike the Officer’s intricate crown, this was a featureless, solid platter of matte-grey energy. It felt like a heavy, unwritten page waiting for a pen.
On the furthest tab, something bled to static.
A wound in the interface: edges frayed, the text beneath it stuttering between legitimate and corrupted.
[Z?O?H?A?R? ?T?R?E?E?]
Val didn't touch it. He leaned closer instead, tried to analyze the anomaly.
The other tabs were system-clean. Formatted. This one looked like it had been added by something that didn't share the same architecture. Something that had forced its way into the structure and refused to be formatted out.
'This isn't a broken tab,' he thought slowly. 'This is a different system wearing the same skin.'
Every instinct told him this was a point of no return, but curiosity got the best of him.
A new notification erupted:
[INSIGNIA RECEIVED: ABYSSAL CHILD]
[CLASSIFICATION: FORBIDDEN]
He read the word twice. The bruised violet light flickered once, and in that flicker, a memory surfaced uninvited.
The fangs. The golden light. The way time had stopped working correctly.
He remembered the interface that had appeared previously: [CRITICAL ERROR: DUAL-ORIGIN DETECTED]
At the time, he hadn't had the luxury of analysis. But now, in the sterile quiet of the processing hall, with a FORBIDDEN tab still pulsing violet at the edge of his vision. It felt like evidence. The Rapture Protocol had recognized something in him that didn't belong to it. Something that was answered from a different origin.
Val's eyes moved back to the insignia.
[INSIGNIA: ABYSSAL CHILD]
CLASSIFICATION: FORBIDDEN
PRIMARY EFFECT Cast [ABYSSAL REPEL]: Triggers a localized gravitational inversion. Flings Abyssal entities within a 2-meter radius backward. Cooldown: 12 Hours.
GRAFT: "Of the millions branded Martyr, you are the first whose roots drink from the Void. Grow well, little anomaly. The Divine Throne is watching."
The word 'Abyssal' made sense. It was the entropy, the corruption, the shadow of CERN that lived in its marrow.
'The Divine Throne is watching...' the final line of the graft felt like a physical blow to his sternum.
"I see," he whispered into the sterile silence. "You didn't just give me a weapon. You gave me a collar."
A needle-like sting lanced through his nervous system.
Simultaneously, the room’s lights shifted to a blood-red pulse. A siren began to wail.
The disk on his neck began to spin frantically, [ZOHAR TREE] data dissolving into a high-priority alert.
[!] WARNING: SECTOR CALIBRATION INITIATED [MANDATE: ENTER THE WORMHOLE] [REWARD: 30 RUBAL]
TIME REMAINING: 28s... 27s...
FAILURE PENALTY: BIOMASS RECLAMATION
The center of the hall didn't just open; it imploded.
A sphere of absolute nothingness blossomed, ringed by a fractured gravitational lens. Beside Val, a woman screamed, but the sound was a distant ghost. He was staring at the event horizon, the boundary where reality surrendered to the unknown.
“What's with the long face, Scientist?” Marcus grinned. “Never seen a wormhole before?”
Val didn't answer.
He wasn't paralyzed by fear; he was paralyzed by awe.
Trillions of dollars and decades of human labor at CERN had only ever produced a microscopic spark; here was a stable, macro-scale bridge across the cosmos. It was beautiful. It was efficient.
The woman beside him scrambled away in terror. She didn't see a survivor; she saw a man who had already traded his soul for a set of equations.
Suddenly, Val’s knees buckled. A white-hot heat flared in his palm.
The horizontal seam was salivating. The obsidian veins were gorging on the leaking radiation.
03s… 02s…
The countdown burned in his vision, but Val was already leaning into the pull. Val took one breath and crossed the threshold.
For the first time in years, the static in his chest went quiet.
Val didn't jump for survival. He went home.
CHARACTER ART: RAFA & ELENA (WITH PHAISTOS HALO)
