The fungal forest pulsed. Bio-luminescent spores drifted. Kaelen-7 moved through the alien gloom. His boots made no sound on the spongy ground. His breath hitched, a controlled inhale, exhale. His scavenged rifle felt heavy, familiar. He was a ghost in the green haze.
He had been tracking for days. Not game. Not a resource node. Something far more complex. Faint energy signatures, inconsistent. Like a glitch in the simulation. But this wasn't a sim.
The air thickened. He caught a scent. Processed protein. Synthesized fibers. Not Xylos-Prime. Human.
His internal display, a shard of his damaged Warden helmet, flickered. Threat assessment active. He pressed himself against a bloated, root-like structure. The forest floor here was different. Less wild. More disturbed.
He saw it then. A crude campsite. A small, crackling fire – a luxury. Three figures huddled around it. Wardens. Still in partial armor, some pieces jury-rigged, but clearly maintaining a semblance of order.
Kaelen felt nothing. No kinship. No relief. Only calculation. What did they have? What could he take? These were not allies. They were competitors. Resources.
He watched. Their movements were slow, burdened. One of them, a medic unit from her markings, tended to another, whose leg was badly wrapped. The third, a scout unit, scanned the perimeter with a handheld sensor. Amateurish. Too slow.
They were trying to fix something. A comms relay. Half-dismantled, components spread on a crude tarp. It was old tech, but potentially functional. A link to *something*. Or someone.
Kaelen’s protocol screamed. *Take it.*
He circled wide. The undergrowth clawed at his armor. He ignored it. His rifle’s scope zoomed. He marked weaknesses. The medic was focused. The injured Warden was immobile. The scout had blind spots. Their formation was poor. Their defenses laughable.
He found a patch of Siphon Weeds. Their tendrils coiled, tipped with a paralytic agent. He harvested three, careful to avoid their sting. Crude, but effective.
He moved closer. A whisper of alien wind. A rustle of disturbed leaves. The scout unit tensed. “Hear that?”
The medic looked up. “It’s just the wind, Kaelen-4.”
Kaelen-7 knew the designation. Kaelen-4. From his training cohort. A faint tremor, quickly suppressed. The old Kaelen was gone. Now, only the Protocol remained.
He waited. The Siphon Weeds were ready. One went for the scout. The other two for the medic and the injured Warden. Distraction. Paralyze. Eliminate.
“No, wait –” Kaelen-4’s voice was cut short. A hiss. A muffled cry. Kaelen-7 moved.
He burst from the foliage. His rifle rose. The medic scrambled, dropping her tools. The injured Warden thrashed weakly. Kaelen-4 lay twitching, a Siphon Weeds tendril sunk deep into his neck.
“Kaelen-7?” The medic’s voice was hoarse. “What are you doing? We’re all that’s left!”
No response. Kaelen-7 swept the rifle, a blunt instrument. It connected with the medic’s head. A dull crack. She crumpled. Her comms unit, still attached to her belt, went silent.
He didn't waste time. He moved to the comms relay. The components were scattered, but the main module was intact. He yanked it free. The circuit board hummed faintly. He needed to reconfigure it.
The injured Warden, his face pale, stared. His eyes were wide with a terror Kaelen-7 recognized. The terror of a human seeing something no longer human.
“You… you monster,” the Warden rasped. “The Overseer… will… find you.”
Kaelen-7 ignored the threat. The Overseer was always a threat. He secured the comms module to his pack. He scanned the campsite. Old rations. Medical supplies. A datapad. He picked it up. Its screen flickered to life. A log entry.
*“Day 187. Signal still weak. Overseer comms have gone silent on our frequency. But we’ve intercepted something else. A rogue uplink. From the ‘Deep Zone’. Encrypted. Something about ‘Unit P-7’ and ‘Re-initialization Protocol’. We think it’s… bigger than we thought. The colonization wasn’t just a failure. It was… a test.”*
Kaelen-7 froze. Unit P-7. Primitive Protocol. *Him.* The Overseer knew. The 'Deep Zone'. A sector of Xylos-Prime known for extreme environmental hazards and the most aggressive fauna, a place he’d only ventured into in the deepest tiers of the sim.
He read on. The datapad’s battery was almost dead. *“The signal, it’s not coming from a Warden. It’s… something else. Like it’s from the planet itself. A pulse. Every 12 hours. From the ‘Heart of Xylos’. We think it’s overriding everything. It’s… changing things.”*
The words blurred. The 'Heart of Xylos'. A myth in the game. A theoretical core of planetary energy, unmapped, unreachable. A place of raw, untamed power. Re-initialization Protocol. What did that mean?
A low growl rumbled through the ground. The kind that vibrated in the bone. Not a local predator. Not something he knew from *Xylos-Prime: Colony Collapse*. This sound was deeper. Older. Angrier.
The forest went silent. Even the bio-luminescent spores seemed to dim.
Kaelen-7 looked up. A massive, multi-jointed leg, thick as a tree trunk, descended through the canopy. It crushed the bloated root where he had stood moments before. The ground shook violently. Another leg. And another. The thing was immense. Silent. Only the sickening crunch of organic matter marked its presence.
Its eye, a single, unblinking orb the size of a shuttle cockpit, focused on the camp. On Kaelen-7. It was an impossible creature. Not in the game. Never in the game.
The datapad in Kaelen-7’s hand went dead. The growl intensified. This was the 'Heart of Xylos' responding. And it wanted him.