Up on the landing at the top of the stairs, Atiya looked around and found nothing useful.
The octagonal gate had sealed itself behind them, violet veins pulsing thick across its surface, locked from the inside or outside or both.
Below, Nongban stood holding the box without any apparent concern for the gravity that should have been crushing him flat.
Beside Atiya, Zelaine slumped against the railing with her chest wound still bleeding, her breathing shallow, her reservoir critically low.
"Bite me," Atiya said, his voice cracking at the edges. "Drink my blood."
Zelaine looked at him. Her eyes were glassy but still sharp enough to understand exactly what he was offering.
She leaned in without hesitating.
Her fangs sank into his shoulder. She drank just enough flowing warm blood to pull herself back from the edge, no more.
The wound on her chest began to clot slowly as her Yai recovery kicked back in at triple speed thanks to her second yaicraft.
Atiya winced and held her steady, one hand on the shoulder bite and the other pressed flat against her chest wound.
Below, Nongban cradled the black box in both hands as it was obviously something irreplaceable.
The silver alien twitched once against the floor, still pinned, violet eyes flaring weakly in the dim.
Correl took one careful step forward.
Nongban glanced up at him with the unhurried patience waiting for the commencement of the plan that would decided how the next five minutes would go.
"Five minutes," he said softly. "Let us begin."
Correl stood rigid, hands still slightly raised, eyes moving between Nongban and the black box cradled in his palm.
Correl spoke first, his voice steady despite the tremor running underneath it.
"You made sure all the combatants were gone beforehand. And thinking back on it now, you were the one who proposed the joint research. Then you conveniently fell sick, or pretended to."
Nongban's tight smile didn't move.
"Your goal was the box from the beginning. You have some kind of history with it."
Correl paused, his eyes narrowed as the pieces continued arranging themselves.
"But you couldn't touch it directly. I've seen you before, hovering around the enclosure, warping the space around it and getting nowhere."
"So you needed Sajibu brought inside without anyone noticing. And for that to work, Inteja and Zextire both had to be gone first."
Nongban's smile widened by a fraction.
"You sent the Yai-beasts to Wels," Correl continued. "All of it. The convergence, the butterflies, the blood circle, the slaughter at the crater. You built the external chaos specifically to pull every capable fighter away from the branch."
Nongban gave a small and genuinely appreciative nod.
"Splendid. How did you deduce it?"
"Because the theories and behavioral patterns of those Yai-beasts were all laid out in the unsubmitted draft of your thesis." Correl said it slowly, the pieces still settling as he spoke.
"You needed me to be the one explaining them to the others. So you could stay in the background unnoticed." He looked at Nongban directly. "And who else among the three of us with authority over this facility could have planted something in our systems without triggering a review. It had to be you."
He gestured toward the silver alien pinned on the floor.
"The butterflies outside this lab, that was a Yaicraft. And you planted someone among the researchers." Correl looked at the silver alien pinned on the floor. "That one. It carried Sajibu in, didn't it. Someone who could get past the security scans without triggering anything."
Nongban laughed softly, the sound carrying something almost like genuine warmth. "As expected, Professor. You know all of it." He tilted his head. "But our time is nearly up. Two minutes. Would you like to hear it from my end as well?"
Correl didn't answer.
One of his eyes moved upward, just for a moment, locking onto Atiya standing frozen at the top of the staircase with Zelaine slumped against him and blood soaking through both their clothes.
'It's your only chance, Atiya Pharsa.'
Nongban followed the direction of Correl's gaze.
The small polite smile returned.
"Two minutes," he said softly.
The black box in his hand pulsed once, faint violet light seeping out between his fingers.
Behind the pinned alien the portal flickered, its edges still distorted but beginning to stabilize with slow and patient persistence.
****
Two minutes earlier, Atiya's phone buzzed against his leg.
He glanced down at it, barely thinking straight.
'The system is back. Cerejeira must have taken the control room.'
The message was from Cornelius Correl.
"Kid. The scythe he is holding creates rifts between belts but requires specific conditions each time it is used. I believe he is using it now to open that portal. However there is a flaw built into the weapon's mechanism. Sajibu can only be activated when a single person is holding it. Find a way to touch the weapon when he moves to complete his final task."
Atiya stared at the message.
Then he looked down at Nongban standing twenty meters below, cradling the black box, the scythe hanging loose at his side, the portal behind the alien slowly steadying itself at the edges.
'Two minutes.'
He looked at Zelaine. She looked back at him, breathing shallow but her eyes clear enough.
He looked at his foot, still bleeding through his boot where the knife had gone through.
Then he looked at his three portals, five centimeters across, useless against a beam that size, useless against almost everything that had happened in this room tonight.
Almost everything.
Atiya stared at the screen.
'Fuck. Have I gone completely crazy. Even if I touch it, he will just kill me on the spot.'
But he kept waiting.
Below, Nongban spoke again.
"The reason I am doing all of this is to return to my world and end it."
Correl, still standing rigid near the gravity console, frowned. "Your world?"
Nongban's smile carried something almost wistful in it. "The 61st Belt. The forbidden belt. Ellejort. That is where I am from." He paused. "Truthfully I could have returned at any time. But I needed the Pandora box with me for what comes next. Is that not simple enough."
Correl's eyes narrowed. "You did all of this for that alone. What is the silver alien then."
Nongban glanced down at the figure still straining against the floor, tendrils flat, suit groaning under the weight.
"That creature is a failed experiment I needed to discard of." He looked back at Correl with genuine ease. "You helped me with that. Thank you."
He lifted Sajibu slightly, the red crescent blade catching the dim emergency light along its edge.
"Now the time has come. Let us meet again—"
The incomplete portal behind him flared. Its violet edges steadied and began tearing wider with each passing second, stabilizing toward something functional.
For the final push he needed one clean downward swing.
He brought Sajibu down in a perfect vertical arc.
A portal snapped open five centimeters across at Atiya's left hand on the top landing.
A hand shoved through it, bloodied and trembling, and grabbed the shaft of the scythe mid-swing.
Nongban's eyes flicked upward instantly.
Atiya stood at the railing with his left arm extended through the portal and his fingers locked around the shaft of Sajibu. His face distorted into a laughable sight.
His jaw was clenched hard enough to ache. Pain radiated from his impaled foot and from the shoulder bite and from every other place the last hour had found him, but his grip did not move.
Nongban went completely still for one heartbeat.
'This was never written in the Book of Fate.'
Then something happened that Nongban had not accounted for.
Sajibu trembled in his grip.
A faint violet pulse ran up the blade, then reversed direction, flowing backward into Nongban's hand instead of outward through the arc of the swing.
The incomplete portal behind him stuttered, its edges collapsing inward, shrinking instead of widening.
Nongban's tight smile disappeared entirely.
Atiya's voice came down from the landing, shaky but clear.
"You said only one person can hold it."
He tightened his grip.
The scythe pulsed again, brighter this time. Nongban's hand spasmed involuntarily.
Violet energy arced between them along the shaft, the metal glowing and burning both their palms in the same moment.
Nongban hissed through his teeth. "You little—"
The portal behind him collapsed completely, violet light winking out with a sharp clean pop.
The black box in his other hand flickered. A hairline fracture split across its smooth surface, glowing faintly at the edges.
Correl stood near the gravity console and stared.
'He actually did it. He actually touched it.'
Zelaine, slumped against the railing with blood soaking through her shirt, managed a weak and genuine laugh. "That's my idiot boyfriend."
Atiya's Yai reservoir hit fifty percent, the portals flickering and draining steadily from the extended range.
His shoulder was still bleeding. His palm was burning where the scythe's energy was arcing through the shaft and into his skin.
He didn't let go.
The scythe began vibrating in both their grips with a frequency that traveled up through the bones of Atiya's arm.
Something was breaking.
"Do you realize what you have done!"
It was the first time Nongban's voice had cracked. He turned his eyes to the remnants of the portal, the incomplete violet rift that Atiya's grab had interrupted mid-activation.
The remnants were not dying quietly.
They pulsed with a violence that had nothing controlled left in it, edges fraying outward like torn fabric caught in a gale.
Violet light bled into white-blue cracks that split and spread with each pulse, energy coiling and snapping between the frayed edges like live wires pulled apart from each other.
Correl's face drained.
He moved immediately, crossing the chamber floor at a sprint and throwing himself behind the nearest reinforced console, pressing his back flat against the metal.
'This is not what I calculated,' he thought, breathing hard. 'I did not account for this.'
"There is going to be a spatial explosion!!!"
The remnants expanded.
In less than a second the rift tore open in every direction at once, numerous threads of mixed light lashing outward like whips of raw spacetime, violet bleeding into white bleeding into blue bleeding into gold, each thread snapping and coiling with no coherent direction left in them.
Inside the glass cage at the chamber's edge, the creature beneath the blanket stirred.
Every eye across the white folds opened wide, gleaming with something that looked unmistakably like ecstatic joy.
'My lord. Your rebirth is upon us.'
The explosion's glow intensified, white-blue so pure and total that every sensor saturated at once, screens flashing error red before going completely black.
Then the silence broke.
The blast hit first as nothing, a perfect and absolute absence of sound, and then as everything, a detonation that swallowed the room whole and left no frequency unaffected.
A pure flash of white consumed the chamber entirely.
Atiya's vision went blank. He felt Zelaine's hand slip from his shoulder as the force arrived and there was nothing he could do about it.
Zelaine's crystalline shell cracked under the pressure like glass dropped on stone, the runes flaring one final time in a desperate blaze before shattering into nothing.
Correl threw his arms over his head and pressed himself as flat as he could against the console.
Nongban staggered backward, still clutching the black box and Sajibu, his face twisted into something that had never appeared there before.
Disbelief, raw and unguarded, was plastered over his face.
Then the light faded.
The chamber was gone.
In its place hung a perfect sphere of warped space, twenty meters across, its edges shimmering like heat rising off summer ground, the floor and walls folded inward as though reality itself had been crumpled up and set aside.
No scattered remains of anything that had been in the room moments before.
Just the sphere, suspended in the void where the lab had stood.
Inside it, faint silhouettes drifted. Atiya, Zelaine, Correl, Nongban, the silver alien, all suspended in zero gravity, unconscious or stunned, turning slowly in the distorted bubble with no surface to orient against.
The black box floated near Nongban's limp hand, its surface cracked wider now, violet light leaking from the fracture in thin and steady threads, the way blood moves when there is no longer any pressure to contain it.
The creature's cage was gone, shattered or simply consumed. But a whisper moved through the silence anyway.
'Rebirth.'
Then it began to shrink.
Very slowly. Pulling everything inside toward its center, inevitabily draining everything.
Atiya felt it before he understood it. The same sensation as the portal creation trial, the moment he had stepped into the world of colors and found nothing solid in any direction.