Chapter 5: The First Hunt

Chapter 5: The First Hunt

The mission briefing was cold and brutally simple. "A Phantom nest has been detected in the derelict town of Oakhaven, five klicks beyond Aethelgard’s perimeter," Instructor Vorlag's voice had crackled over the comms. "Squad Seven will proceed to the location, engage the hostiles, and neutralize the nest. Prefect Seraphina leading. This is a live-fire test. Your performance is being monitored. Do not fail."

Squad Seven consisted of four Neophytes. Seraphina stood at the front of the armored transport, a pillar of rigid confidence. Two other students, a burly boy named Jax and a jumpy girl named Lena, clutched their standard-issue energy rifles, their knuckles white. And then there was Kaelen, the squad’s designated pariah, seated alone in the back. He had no rifle. His only weapon was the chaotic, terrifying power he barely understood.

The ride was suffocatingly silent. The Phobos System was a constant presence in Kaelen’s mind, its blue text overlaying the grim reality.

[Ambient Fear Level: 55/100 (Anticipation, Squad Anxiety)] [Objective: Neutralize Phantom Nest] [Personal Status: Suppressed Terror. Awaiting Combat.]

"Listen up," Seraphina’s voice cut through the tension as the transport slowed. "Jax, you’re on point. Lena, you provide cover fire from the rear. I will engage the primary threats directly. Vance…" she paused, her icy gaze finding him in the dim light. "You will stay back and do nothing unless I explicitly order you to. Your job is to not get in the way. Understood?"

"Understood," Kaelen muttered, the word tasting like ash. He was the emergency brake, the weapon of last resort they were all praying they wouldn't have to use.

The transport door hissed open, revealing the skeletal remains of Oakhaven. It was a ghost town in the truest sense, its buildings crumbling under a perpetual twilight cast by Aethelgard's shielded sky. An unnatural cold clung to the air, and a profound silence had swallowed all sound.

They moved in tactical formation, a diamond of terrified teenagers pretending to be soldiers. The first encounter was swift. Two Phantoms, smoky and indistinct as the ones from Vorlag's lesson, drifted from a collapsed storefront. Lena screamed, a high, thin sound, and fired a wild blast from her rifle. The energy bolt passed through the first Phantom with no effect.

"Hold your fire, you fool!" Seraphina snapped. "Conserve energy!"

She was already moving. In a flicker of distorted space—a [Blink]—she appeared behind the first Phantom. Her hand, shimmering with compressed spatial energy, plunged into its smoky form. The Phantom convulsed, its shape destabilizing as the space it occupied was violently warped. It dissolved with a faint, sighing sound.

Jax, emboldened, charged the second one, his own power manifesting as a layer of hardened, rock-like skin. He tackled it, his physical solidity disrupting its incorporeal form long enough for Seraphina to [Blink] over and dispatch it with another precise, brutal strike.

They cleared two more small nests this way, Seraphina's deadly grace a stark contrast to the others' panicked fumbling. Her claustrophobia-fueled powers were perfect for this: she moved without restriction, imposing her own physical laws on the enemy. She was a scalpel, and Kaelen felt a grudging respect for her skill. They were winning.

The mission was going too well.

The nest's heart was in the town's old church. The air grew impossibly cold as they approached, their breath pluming in front of their faces. The large oak doors hung open, leading into a gaping maw of darkness.

"This is it," Seraphina whispered, her confidence wavering for the first time. "Steady."

Inside, the church was a desecrated horror. But it wasn't a swarm of lesser Phantoms that awaited them. It was one.

It hung in the nave where the altar should have been, a monstrous parody of a celestial body. It was far larger and denser than the others, its form less like smoke and more like solidified, shifting obsidian. Tendrils of pure blackness snaked out from its core, stroking the crumbling pews, leaving behind trails of frost. This was not a simple echo of terror; this was an old and hungry god in its profane temple.

"Engage!" Seraphina commanded, her voice tight.

Jax charged, a guttural war cry on his lips. One of the Phantom’s tendrils whipped out with impossible speed, not passing through him, but slamming into him with physical force. Jax flew back, his stone armor shattering like pottery, and crumpled against the far wall, unconscious.

Lena fired a volley of energy bolts, which sizzled and died inches from the Phantom's obsidian hide. It barely seemed to notice. Its attention was fixed on Seraphina.

With a defiant cry, Seraphina blinked, appearing above the creature and driving a compressed-space strike down into its core. Previously, this attack had been instantly fatal. This time, the Phantom's hide merely rippled. It let out a low, vibrating hum that shook the church to its foundations, and the space around Seraphina twisted.

Her [Blink] failed. She tried to teleport away, but her body only flickered, trapped in the distorted reality the creature was imposing. "It's… blocking me!" she choked out, a sliver of genuine panic in her voice.

A cage of shadowy tendrils erupted from the floor, ensnaring her. She erected a [Barrier], a shimmering pane of warped space, but the tendrils pressed against it, cracking it like glass.

The Phantom's core pulsed, and its faceless vortex focused on her. Kaelen watched in horror as the all-too-familiar process began. A shimmering, blue mist—Seraphina's life force, her very essence—was being pulled from her body, drawn toward the hungry void. Her struggles weakened, her face contorting in a silent scream of terror.

She was being unmade. Erased.

The sight struck Kaelen with the force of a physical blow. This was his deepest fear made manifest. Not his own erasure, but watching someone else be snuffed out, their story ending, their memory becoming a void. Athazagoraphobia. He was about to watch Seraphina be forgotten by the universe, right before his eyes.

His terror was a tidal wave, a screaming inferno in his soul.

The Phobos System exploded in his vision.

[FEAR LEVEL: CATASTROPHIC. LIMITS SURPASSED.] [ATHAZAGORAPHOBIA TRIGGER AT MAXIMUM.] [System Override: Unlocking Latent Potential.] [VOID REND has Evolved into VOID ERASURE.] [Cost: ALL AVAILABLE TERROR POINTS.] [Unleash?]

YES!

Kaelen didn't shout. He didn't move. He simply opened the floodgates.

There was no explosion. No shockwave of force. Only a profound and absolute cessation.

A wave of pure nothingness radiated from him. It wasn't black or white or any color at all. It was the absence of color, of sound, of matter, of energy. It was a command issued to reality itself: Cease to exist.

The wave washed over the monstrous Phantom. The low hum it was emitting cut off instantly, as if it had never been made. The tendrils holding Seraphina didn't retract; they simply stopped being there. The creature's obsidian form didn't dissolve or explode; it was deleted. One moment it was a being of immense power dominating the church, the next it was gone, leaving behind nothing but the cold, stale air.

The erasure didn't stop with the Phantom. The wave continued, striking the stone altar behind where the creature had hovered. The ancient rock vanished, not turning to dust, but simply gone. In its place was a patch of space about ten feet in diameter that was profoundly and disturbingly wrong.

Sound seemed to die before it reached the area. Light bent around its edges as if reluctant to enter. The very air felt thin and fragile, like a hole had been punched not through the church, but through existence itself.

The cage of tendrils around Seraphina vanished. She fell to the stone floor, gasping, her body trembling uncontrollably. She stared at the empty space, then her gaze, wide with a terror she had never shown before, snapped to Kaelen.

Lena, huddled by the door, was looking at him with the same expression. They weren't looking at a saviour. They were looking at a monster far more terrifying than the one he had just destroyed.

In a hidden command center deep within Aethelgard, Instructor Vorlag watched the scene on his monitor, his scarred face impassive. He saw the Phantom vanish. He saw the hole in reality it left behind. He saw the raw terror on the faces of the surviving squad members as they looked at Kaelen. His hand tightened into a fist, the golden lines of his own power flickering around his knuckles.

Kaelen had saved the mission. He had proven his power was effective. But he had also demonstrated something far worse. He didn't just kill the things that came from the void. He could create the void himself. And that made him an unstable weapon of unimaginable consequence.