Chapter 468 - 467: What They Found Inside
Chapter 468: Chapter 467: What They Found Inside
Location:Seven Peaks — Subsurface Containment, Eastern Wall / The Liminal Observatory (dimensional screens)Date/Time:TC1855.06.12
Raven contacted Kairos at dawn through 7T9’s direct channel.
"I need you to see something," she said. "Activate your observation array on my containment level. Full analytical suite. Everything your instruments can measure."
Kairos’s response carried the clinical tone he used when he sensed the conversation was going somewhere he wouldn’t enjoy. "Define something."
"A parasitic organism that eats human brains, wears the body like a suit, and passes every detection system on this continent. We’ve captured two. I’m going to show you one."
Five seconds of silence. For a being who processed information at cosmic speeds, five seconds was an eternity.
"How long have you known about this?"
"Months."
The silence that followed was different from the first. Heavier. The silence of someone who’d been projecting to a mortal woman across dimensional barriers to discuss blind spots and growth rates and the nature of unprecedented threats, and had never once been told that her people were being eaten from the inside.
"I didn’t tell you because I had nothing to show you," Raven said. She’d expected this question. Had the answer ready because she’d been carrying the weight of not telling him for every projection, every shimmer on the wall, every conversation about the Sanctum’s expansion while the thing the Sanctum was producing walked the corridors of her mountain wearing her people’s faces. "The first one we encountered turned to ash — the organism, the host body, everything. Three to five seconds after death. Nothing left to study. No remains. No samples. I had data from a medical scan of a second confirmed case, but data on a formation slate isn’t something your instruments can analyze at dimensional resolution."
"You needed a live subject."