Fera did not dwell on the darkness's oddness. She turned her attention back to the green drakes clustered around the smooth box.
One of the researchers stepped forward from the small cluster and spoke without taking his eyes off the box.
"Your Highness, the surface reacts to touch. It creates a ripple, like a faint animation that spreads from the contact point."
"Show me," Fera ordered.
The researcher who had been studying the box raised his hand and let his scaled fingers press against the smooth surface. The moment skin met stone, a soft wave of light crawled out from under his hand. Lines of faint luminosity spread across the panel and then faded.
"Keep your hand there," Fera instructed after a pause.
"Let it rest. I want to observe the reaction longer."
The volunteer nodded and did not pull back. He held his hand flat against the box. Around them the other soldiers leaned in; their orbs drifted closer to give clearer light. The ripple traveled outward slowly, crossing panels and joining with older traces until the entire face of the box showed the same moving pattern. Several seconds later, a new ripple began at the contact point and rolled outward again, mirroring the first.
"Remove your hand now," Fera said, watching him closely.
"We don't know what repeated triggers will do."
The volunteer moved to pull his hand free. His fingers tightened and he took a forceful tug, then froze. His scaled hand would not budge. He tried again, harder, but his hand stayed glued to the surface. The animation on the box continued to crawl and shimmer beneath his stuck palm.
Seeing the volunteer's horrified expression, Fera understood at once that something was terribly wrong. Before he could call out, she moved. She dashed forward across the scattered glow of the orbs, closing the short distance to the pyramid structure in two quick strides. Reaching the volunteer, she raised her energy sword and aimed a precise slash at the drake's arm to sever the contact and free him. Her blade hummed with stored power as she brought it down.
However, it was already too late. The second wave of the box's animation completed and, like a switch flipping after an age of silence, the ancient system woke. An unseen pulse detonated from the box and propagated outward in an instant, traveling along the floor, walls, and ceiling until it filled the entire place. The pulse carried a force they could not sense in the usual ways; it passed through armor, scale, and air and consumed whatever lay in its path. As it moved, it halted motion at every point it touched. Everything inside the place, sound, movement, and the very flow of energy, stopped.
To an onlooker, the halt was absolute. Every drake stood motionless in the posture they had held the instant the pulse struck: some leaning forward, some frozen mid-breath, others with mouths open. The floating orbs held their positions exactly where they had been hovering, casting a locked pattern of light across the room. Expressions of surprise, shock, and fear were frozen on faces, and Fera's own features had tightened into a serious line. Her energy sword hung only inches from the volunteer's trapped arm, sword-tip still descending when motion ceased. The fighters who had been turning toward the commotion were caught mid-turn, figures stranded like mannequins in a display. Time itself seemed to have been cleaved, the chamber trapped in a single, suspended moment.
It was then that a robotic, mechanical voice reverberated through the place. The tone was flat and devoid of inflection, the cadence of an automated system running checks. The sound seemed to originate from the box itself, each phrase announced with deliberate clarity:
"Power grid ON…,"
"Initializing data…,"
"Detecting network…,"
"Failed to connect to the Heaven's pathways…,"
"Commencing Protocol Omega."
The voice left no pause for argument, only the cold progression of a machine coming to life after a long sleep.
While that series of mechanical announcements played out, Fera found herself isolated inside a private, internal world. She tried to reach for her senses and felt only a blunt, empty resistance.
'I can't sense anything,' she thought.
Her mental voice was immediate and sharp, the only active thing she could locate. She could not feel the weight of her armor, the beat of her heart, or the pull of her muscles. At the same time, a faint awareness told her she was not dead: a distant, intangible confirmation that her body still existed. Her sight had collapsed into total blackness; even the orbs' lights registered to her as nothing more than a memory. Sound reduced to the echo of her own inner commentary, no footsteps, no voices, only the loop of her thoughts. The state was like waking inside a dream that offered full consciousness of thinking but no control over the body; she knew she was suspended, and she knew she could not wake herself.
That realization sharpened into urgency. Fera understood that she was still alive but cut off by an external force that prevented her senses from reconnecting to the present. If she failed to break through, the others trapped with her would die. The idea moved through her with cold logic and immediate clarity, and with it came a hard flare of determination. Her will to survive sparked and gathered strength. A strange energy, one she had been bestowed from her birth, began to rise inside her. It pushed at the edges of the restriction the unknown force had imposed, not violently, but steadily, like pressure building behind a sealed door. The feeling was slow at first, then more certain; she could sense that, even in that suspended space, something in her was pushing back.
With the hidden power rising inside her, Fera's brown eyes shifted to a hard, metallic gold. The irises caught the dim light and glowed from within as if a lamp had been lit behind them. Her eyes moved first, scanning and locking on; her mouth set into a determined line. Her suspended body began to tremble as the strange energy swelled and collided with the external force holding the chamber. The clash sent visible sparks crawling across the air, tiny arcs of electricity and streaks of raw energy that snapped and popped around her. Light flared in short, jagged bursts where the two powers met. Though her limbs remained fixed in the posture they'd been frozen in, her mind cleared and her consciousness returned fully to the reality of the chamber.
Briefly oblivious to the mechanical voice still intoning in the background, Fera fixed her gaze on the volunteer's trapped arm and let out a single, fierce command that split the silence.
"LET GO!!"
Her draconic roar underscored the shout, and it cut through the chamber's stillness as it overlapped with the machine's announcements. She poured everything into her arms, will, energy, and muscle, forcing movement through the barrier. At last her body obeyed. She surged forward, the energy sword completing its arc, and the blade met the pinned arm. The weapon passed clean through; the arm was severed in a single, brutal slice. Fera stared at the cleanly cut limb, stunned by the sight: even though she had freed it from the volunteer's body, the detached piece hung motionless in midair, preserved by the suspension that gripped the place. It did not fall or twitch, same with the volunteer who didn't have any reaction after being cut, everything remained frozen except for her.
"What's happening…?"
Fera's voice was small inside her head, edged with shock and confusion. For the first time since they entered the place, she faced a situation that outmatched her resolve; everything around her had stopped, frozen in impossible stillness. The certainty that had carried her through the tunnel wavered; the sharp focus and steady pressure she had maintained began to fray at the edges. That brief failure of nerve drained the strange energy she had summoned. The internal flame that had turned her gaze gold and pushed back the suspension, so its current slackened. The world around her blurred at the edges, and her golden eyes dimmed, the light in them receding like a tide.
"No, no… there should be a way out of here," she thought, and the thought jolted her.
Sensing the loss, Freya forced herself to refocus; she tightened her breathing, drew what remained of her inner strength inward, and began to push again against the invisible lock that held them.
This time she made a conscious choice to conserve what energy she had. She stopped attempting full physical motion and held her body still to avoid wasting the fragile power keeping her conscious. Instead she turned her attention outward, narrowing it until the box became the single point of her intent. Only then did the mechanical voice register clearly in her mind; the phrases had been present before, but now she could pick them out as originating from the structure. The sound was alien, its vocabulary and cadence unfamiliar and garbled to her ears, as if filtered through static. The words meant nothing to her. She considered the researchers around the box. If they were not frozen, there might be someone among them who could understand that ancient language, someone who could translate the commands or warnings and offer a clue. The thought sat in her like a small, necessary plan. If any of them could speak that tongue, they could still have a chance.
But before Fera could even summon the strength to act again, the pitch-black chamber erupted in light. The brightness hit suddenly, so intense that she had to reflexively squeeze her eyes shut to protect them from the glare. The white illumination burned into her vision, forcing her to blink repeatedly as her eyes adjusted. When she finally opened them fully, the entire chamber revealed itself in stark clarity. The space was enormous, roughly thirty meters across and forty meters tall. The walls were unnervingly smooth, without carvings, decorations, or markings, save for the splits on the floor they had noticed before. Shadows formed only where the light could not reach, but the chamber's scale was immediately clear, and the pyramid structure at its center dominated the space.
The invisible force that had frozen them began to loosen its grip. Fera could feel her body regain some freedom; movements felt lighter and more fluid, as though she were shedding layers of invisible weight. She cautiously flexed her fingers, feeling the motion respond without resistance. Then, the mechanical voice spoke again from the box, sharp and commanding.
"Protocol Omega: ON."
"Unauthorized access detected!"
"Scanning for intruders…"
"Intruders detected! Annihilate all foreign entities!"
Fera's gaze snapped to the box, her mind trying to understand its intent. As before, the language made no sense to her; the meaning was entirely alien, incomprehensible. But the sequence of declarations barely ended before the chamber changed again, this time violently. Red light flooded the space, washing over every surface. Fera's eyes widened in shock. She looked around in disbelief: every person, every floating orb, was suddenly bathed in a vivid blue glow, sharply contrasting with the crimson that engulfed the walls, ceiling, and floor. The color shift was sudden, disorienting, and total, leaving her momentarily breathless as she tried to process the scene.
A sense of foreboding hit Fera immediately. The sharp contrast of colors, the blue coating over her comrades and the red flood covering the rest of the chamber, felt unnatural, threatening, and deliberately designed to unsettle. The shift had been so fast, so precise, and so systematic that she had barely a moment to form a plan or gather her thoughts. Her mind was spinning, trying to reconcile what she was seeing with the reality she had just regained control over.
"AAahhhhh!!"
Then a sound tore through the chaos: short, piercing, and horrifying scream from a distance. Fera's head snapped toward the noise, and her heart sank. The cry came from the soldiers, specifically their captain, who had gone to scout the chamber's edges earlier. She watched in frozen terror as a bluish-white beam, solid and blinding, materialized from nowhere and engulfed them entirely. The scream cut off abruptly, leaving the chamber in a suffocating silence once again. The scene struck her like a physical blow, the beam's efficiency and suddenness showed no mercy, no hesitation, and no escape.
The sight forced Fera to confront the cruel reality of their situation: the chamber, the box, and whatever force it commanded were lethal, precise, and utterly indifferent to their lives. The danger was immediate, overwhelming, and beyond anything she or her soldiers had faced before.
...