The silence after the blast was unnatural.

  Gaia-9’s great inner sanctum, once a monument to hope, now pulsed with the eerie hum of emergency lights. Cracked walls oozed steam. Red indicators flashed across control stations. Half the ceiling was gone. Where Yuri had stood, only scorch marks and a few stray threads of his coat remained.

  Elias stood in the heart of the wreckage, unmoving, eyes still glowing dimly.

  No one spoke.

  Rizer reached for him, slowly. “Elias—”

  But Elias stepped away.

  Not out of fear.

  Out of control.

  His body trembled, not from exhaustion but restraint, teeth clenched against something deeper threatening to erupt again. The air around him shimmered with residual energy, like heat off a sunlit road. Commanders watched with wide eyes, hands never quite leaving the grips of their weapons.

  “He just… detonated a full-blood Odryix,” someone muttered.

  “No,” said Commander Yuna coldly, “He unmade him.”

  Rizer stood between them, his own powers burning quietly inside his chest, a migraine blooming from the strain of what he felt through the air. Elias hadn’t meant to kill Yuri. But the rage, the pain, the betrayal, it had pulled something out of him that none of them had expected.

  Something horrifying. Something Odryix feared.

  Something psionic.

  Rizer placed a hand on Elias’ shoulder. “You’re okay.”

  Elias’ voice cracked like glass. “No, I’m not.”

  That night, Gaia-9 held a vote in hushed chambers.

  The traitor Yuri had corrupted systems from the inside, allowing false communications, rerouted supplies, and setting multiple survivors up for quiet disappearances. The council had no idea. They didn’t want to admit it.

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  Rizer did.

  He stood before the frightened officials and made no speeches. Just one sentence:“Gaia-9 is no longer safe.”

  Three hours later, the Tartarus elite team evacuated with Rizer and Elias.

  Beneath Gaia-9, through forgotten underground railways that hadn’t seen use in decades, they escaped into the dark.

  Elias hadn’t spoken since.

  He gripped Rizer’s wrist the whole way. Not like a child anymore. Not like a brother.

  More like a fuse.

  They arrived through a pressure hatch, opened only by ancient codes passed down by Adelpha Rae herself.

  The door hissed open, and warmth hit them, not from light or comfort, but from life. The underground was alive. An entire ecosystem of resistance.

  Tunnels carved by hand and machine spanned in every direction. Flickering lamps ran on kinetic energy. Children laughed in a distant chamber, shielded by layers of silence insulation. Old tech was being rewired into new weapons. Schools operated with whispered lessons. History books were rewritten from memory.

  Adelpha Rae waited in the main atrium.

  Her presence was commanding. White hair in a braided coil. Grease on her knuckles. A long coat made from old army flags. She looked at Rizer not like a savior, but a weapon she’d waited decades to polish.

  “You finally crawled home,” she said.

  Rizer nodded. “We brought the storm with us.”

  Adelpha smiled faintly. “Good. Because we’ve got a goddamn plan.”

  In the weeks that followed, everything changed.

  Adelpha’s network had been building something in secret: Project Hollow Root, a plan to take Earth back, not in a single suicidal charge, but through every tunnel, city ruin, comms relay, and human left breathing.

  They weren’t hiding anymore.

  They were planting themselves.

  Every lesson Rizer learned on Tartarus, he now passed to new recruits, many of whom had lost siblings to Odryix harvesters. He taught them psionic focus, survival in shifting terrain, and weaponry salvaged from old tech fused with new alien scrap.

  And Elias?

  He barely slept.

  But when he did, his dreams began to echo with voices, not words. Pulls. Directions. Shapes of things he hadn’t seen yet. Adelpha studied him quietly. Sometimes she recorded his sleep-talk.

  Sometimes she didn’t dare.

  One night, Rizer found a scrap of a drawing tucked under Elias’ cot.

  A burning tree.

  But the roots weren’t dying.

  They were reaching up.

  Elsewhere, far above, Lord Ankura stirred.

  His advisors whispered of a new threat rising underground. A name, carried like a sickness on intercepted transmissions.

  Rizer.

  The sky burned purple as Ankura stood from his obsidian throne.

  “Then let the roots come,” he said coldly. “We’ll scorch the soil.”