“When authority arrives and the ground does not answer, the mission has already changed.”
- Unknown
Abraham Francis learned two things before the plane touched down in Frankfurt.
First: Division-9 did not send people anymore. It sent answers.
Second: he had been selected because he was very good at not asking why (one could call him the “perfect soldier,” another could call him a “bootlicker”).
The cabin lights were dim, the windows shuttered despite the city lights bleeding through the cracks. Everyone on board wore the same neutral expression—the kind that came from long service and short expectations. No insignia. No names. Just posture and silence.
Abraham sat with his hands folded, knuckles pale, listening to the low hum of the aircraft vibrate through his boots. His tablet rested dark in his lap. He hadn’t opened it yet. He already knew what it would say.
Multi-source interference.
Unstable authority model.
Non-compliant anomaly vectors.
Frankfurt.
The city had stopped behaving like a problem and started behaving like a question.
The wheels hit the runway harder than expected. A few heads shifted. No one spoke. The plane slowed, turned, and rolled into a hangar that wasn’t on any public map.
As soon as the engines powered down, the lights came on.
A woman in a gray coat stood at the front of the cabin. “You know the rules,” she said calmly. “No heroics. No interpretation. Observe. Record. Survive. If the city tells you to stop moving, you stop moving.”
A few nervous exhales.
Abraham nodded once.
They disembarked into a cold concrete space that smelled like fuel and wet steel. Armed personnel stood at intervals, faces obscured, weapons lowered but present. Somewhere deep in this facility, something heavy shifted—machinery or structure, Abraham couldn’t tell.
He followed his unit to a staging room where equipment waited in neat rows. Body armor. Environmental stabilizers. Sensors turned to read things that didn’t exist on civilian instruments. Each piece felt heavier than it should have when Abraham strapped it on.
Load, he thought.
That word had been floating through internal briefs lately. Not stress. Not force. Load.
A handler handed him his tablet.
“Read it now,” she said. “You won’t have time later.”
Abraham tapped the screen.
The briefing was short. That alone was unsettling.
Frankfurt had entered a state of layered instability. Not chaos—competition. Multiple anomalous presences exerting incompatible influence on the same environment. Attempts to suppress or prioritize one vector increased volatility across the system.
The city was no longer responding to authority.
Abraham scrolled.
One page stopped him.
FIELD NOTE: Personnel report sensation of being “observed” by infrastructure. Streets, buildings, and transit systems exhibit delayed compliance, hesitation, or selective failure.
Abraham swallowed.
He’d serve in Lima, in Jakarta, in a place Division-9 no longer acknowledged existed. He had seen buildings fold inward, gravity forget itself, people dissolve under forces that didn’t care who they were.
This felt different.
This felt like the ground itself was undecided.
They rolled out in unmarked vehicles, convoy moving slowly through streets that looked intact if you didn’t know how to look. Abraham watched from the back seat as streetlights flickered out of sync with one another. As sidewalks dipped and corrected like they were breathing. As people paused mid-step for no reason they could articulate.
The city was tired.
The convoy stopped abruptly.
“Why are we stopping?” someone muttered.
The driver didn’t answer.
Abraham leaned forward, peering through the windshield.
The road ahead was empty.
No obstruction. No visible damage.
Just… hesitation.
The sensors on Abraham’s wrist began to chirp softly, registering micro-distortions in distance and pressure. The air felt thick, sound arriving a fraction too late.
The handler’s voice crackled through the comms. “All units, dismount. Slowly.”
Abraham stepped out onto the street.
The pavement felt wrong under his boots—not unstable, but considering. Like it was deciding whether to hold him.
He froze.
The feeling passed.
They advanced on foot, weapons still lowered. Every instinct Abraham had screamed to raise them, to establish dominance, to remind the environment who was in charge.
Words, from earlier, kicked in harder.
Observe. Record. Survive.
They reached a small square where a kiosk leaned at an impossible angle, its shadow distorted unnaturally across the ground. Hazard tape fluttered without wind. The space felt crowded despite being empty.
Abraham’s visor lit up with overlapping readings.
Pressure spikes.
Rhythmic anomalies.
Structural memory accumulation.
“Jesus,” someone whispered. “What the hell happened here?”
Abraham knelt, placing a gloved hand against the ground.
The sensation hit him immediately.
Not pain.
History.
The ground felt dense with it—compression that hadn’t resolved, decisions that hadn’t been finished. He pulled his hand back sharply, heart racing.
“Don’t touch anything,” he said hoarsely.
Too late.
A soldier near the edge of the square book took one more step forward.
The ground dipped.
Not collapsed. Just… yielded.
He stumbled, catching himself, eyes wide. “I didn’t—”
The space snapped back into place violently, throwing him sideways. He hit the pavement hard, armor cracking and scraping.
Abraham moved instinctively, grabbing the man’s arm and hauling him back.
The square went quiet.
The city seemed to hold its breath.
Abraham felt it then—the sense of attention. Not hostility. Not curiosity.
Awareness.
Something beneath Frankfurt was listening.
“Back up,” Abraham ordered, voice steady despite the pounding in his chest. “Slowly. No sudden movement.”
They retreated at once, steps measured, eyes scanning for threats that didn’t have shapes. The square relaxed incrementally as they withdrew, pressure easing reluctantly.
Back in the convoy, no one spoke.
The handler’s voice came through again, quieter now. “Status?”
Abraham swallowed, looking out at the city that refused to be categorized.
“Frankfurt is… responsive,” he said carefully. “But not to us. It’s responding to itself.”
Silence on the line.
Then: “Can it be controlled?”
Abraham thought of the way the ground had hesitated. Of the weight he’d felt pressing upward. Of the sense that the city wasn’t broken—just unwilling to obey.
“No,” he said finally. “I don’t think so.”
The handler didn’t argue.
The convoy moved again, slower now.
Above them, something vast adjusted its balance.
And Abraham Francis realized, with a cold certainty he hadn’t felt in years, that Division-9 hadn’t sent him to fix Frankfurt.
They had sent him to learn how to exist inside of it.
Authority Without Answer:
“When control arrives late, it mistakes silence for permission.”
- Division-9 Strategic Review
Roan noticed Division-9 the same way he noticed everything else now.
Late.
He stood on the roof of an unfinished office tower overlooking a stretch of Frankfurt that no longer resolved cleanly. Streets below him flickered between intention and habit. Traffic lights cycled out of sync. Distance bent subtly near intersections where too many decisions had been made without conclusion.
The Hole in the Earth was restless beneath him.
Not surging.
Shifting.
Roan folded his hands behind his back and listened—not to sound, but to response. The vast hollow beneath the city did not snap to attention as it once had. It moved like a council rather than a command, pressure redistributing in cautious increments instead of obeying singular instruction.
Division-9 vehicles rolled into the district three blocks away.
The city hesitated.
That was new.
Roan’s jaw tightened.
“They’re early,” he said.
They’re scared, Noah replied.
Roan ignored him.
The convoy stopped where the street should have accepted it easily. Tires pressed into asphalt that resisted long enough to be noticed. Sensors chirped. People dismounted too carefully, movements slow, deliberate.
Roan felt their presence register faintly through the Hole in the Earth—not as authority, but as weight added without understanding. The system attempted to account for them, failed to prioritize their influence, and shunted the excess pressure outward into surrounding structures.
A window cracked somewhere.
Roan exhaled slowly.
Division-9 did not know how to operate in a system that no longer obeyed hierarchy.
He turned away from the edge and descended the stairwell, boots echoing against concrete that remembered being unfinished. Each step felt slightly different from the last, the distance between landings misaligned by fractions that accumulated into irritation.
This was Gordon’s doing.
Not directly—not in the way Roan altered space or Rommulas anchored it. Gordon introduced dishonesty into the system by exposing assumptions. Load without relief. Stress without outlet.
Roan despised that kind of interference.
It couldn’t be reasoned with.
It couldn’t be overwritten.
It had to be isolated.
He exited the building onto a street where the air felt tight and metallic. A Division-9 report unit moved cautiously ahead, weapons lowered, visors glowing faintly with overlapping readings.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
They had already learned not to point guns at the city.
Good.
Roan stepped forward.
The Hole in the Earth stirred reflexively, pressure blooming beneath him—then faltering as the interference saturated the district. The compression did not propagate cleanly. It bled sideways, rattling signage and bending lampposts rather than asserting dominance.
Roan stopped.
Division-9 personnel froze, attention snapping toward him as the space reacted.
One of them—tall, broad-shouldered—raised a hand slightly, palm open. A de-escalation gesture.
Roan studied him.
The man’s posture was careful, not submissive. He stood like someone who had learned the difference between danger and authority.
He thought, “Reminds me of when I was in Division-9.” Whenever he thought of something, he pretended to scratch his nose to cover his mouth so no one would see him speak.
Interesting.
Roan didn’t speak to them.
He didn’t need to.
The Hole in the Earth shifted again, quieter this time, its presence registering Roan’s restraint as an input rather than a command. The pressure eased reluctantly, leaving the street intact but tense.
The Division-9 handler spoke into his comms, voice low and controlled. “We have a visual on subject I.R.”
Roan turned away before they could finish.
He was not here for them.
He moved through side streets, following the interference as it thickened toward the river. The city hesitated him in small ways—doorways narrowing imperceptibly, sound lagging behind motion—but it still responded when pressed carefully.
Carefully.
That was the lesson.
He reached a plaza where the ground bore scares that refused to heal cleanly. The Hole in the Earth stirred uneasily here, its influence fractured by weight and refusal layered into the stone. Roan felt Rommulas’s presence nearby—not physically, but structurally. The ground remembered him.
Roan closed his eyes.
This was the mistake.
He had treated Rommulas as an anomaly that would stabilize and fade, just as he had when he was nothing but a shard. Treated Katie as noise, just as he did with Noah. Treated Gordon as a variable to be excised. There were others, like Gale and Mira, although he didn’t really care about them.
They were not variables.
They were models.
Roan opened his eyes and stepped into the center of the plaza.
The city leaned back.
He issued a directive—not to compress, not to dominate, but to clarify. The Hole in the Earth responded cautiously, pressure threading through the ground in measured increments. The distortion rose—
—and stopped.
Again.
Roan felt the stall like a physical blow.
Noah inhaled sharply. It’s not refusing. It’s waiting.
“For what?” Roan asked.
For consensus.
Roan’s hands curled into fists.
Consensus was inefficiency masquerading as morality.
He tried again, this time narrowing the scope—isolating a single vector of influence, attempting to privilege certainty over consequence and refusal. The Hole in the Earth responded with a partial surge that immediately refracted, pressure dispersing into surrounding structures instead of collapsing inward.
A statue at the edge of the plaza cracked, stone splitting along an old fault line. Within it, there were very small purple flames (only Noah noticed this). People shouted and ran.
Roan released the directive immediately.
The plaza held.
Barely.
He stepped back, heart pounding—not with fear, but with calculation.
This was untenable.
Division-9 would escalate. Gordon would continue adding load. Katie’s refusal would disrupt rhythm wherever people pushed back. Rommulas would anchor harder to prevent collapses, increasing rhythm inertia. Mira would be that stupid emotional support for literally everyone that Roan despised.
The Hole in the Earth could not reconcile all of them indefinitely.
Something would break.
Roan turned sharply as movement registered at the edge of his awareness.
Rommulas stood across the plaza, partially obscured by shadow.
They did not speak.
They did not move toward one another.
The city responded to their proximity immediately, pressure thickening between them without collapsing. The Hole in the Earth trembled, caught between incompatible instructions.
Roan met Rommulas’s gaze.
“You’re destabilizing the system,” Roan said quietly.
Rommulas did not raise his voice. “You built it unstable.”
Roan scoffed. “I gave it direction.”
“You gave it ownership,” Rommulas replied. “That is different.”
The words landed harder than Roan expected.
Katie’s laughter echoed faintly from somewhere off to the sider—not mocking, just present. The rhythm of it snapped briefly through the air, disrupting the tension without escalating it.
Roan felt Gordon then, distantly—like a structural fault being widened somewhere he couldn’t see. Load added. Assumptions exposed.
Division-9 sirens wailed in the distance, closer now.
“Fuckin’ Division-9,” Roan said—
—and froze.
The words didn’t sound like him.
They hadn’t come from him.
Noah Vale had spoken through him.
Roan was shocked, though his body did not indicate that whatsoever.
Instead, he exhaled slowly.
This was no longer a matter of control.
It was a matter of survival—of the system, of the city, of himself.
“You’re forcing equilibrium,” Roan said to Rommulas.
“Yes,” Rommulas replied. “Because you won’t stop pushing.”
Roan looked around the plaza—the cracked stone, the flickering lights, people watching from a distance with expressions caught between awe and fear.
For the first time, Roan felt something dangerous creep into his certainty.
Doubt.
He crushed it immediately.
“This ends one way,” he said. “Either the system resolves, or it collapses.”
Rommulas nodded. “And you still think you get to choose.”
The Hole in the Earth stirred violently beneath them, pressure and heat spiking as the system strained under incompatible demands. The city groaned—not breaking, but bending further than it ever should have.
Certain areas, small areas, seemed to melt.
Roan stepped back.
Not retreat.
Recalibration.
Division-9 units flooded the edges of the plaza, weapons still lowered, movements cautious. Abraham Francis stood among them, eyes sharp, posture steady. He met Roan’s gaze for half a second—long enough to register recognition, not challenge.
Roan turned away.
He did not belong on anyone else’s board.
Then—
—his body acted on its own.
No, it was Noah Vale.
Rottweiler tore free.
It erupted from Roan’s shadow in a burst of heat and motion, a living surge of flame and mass. Fire spilled across the environment in an instant—uncontrolled, indiscriminate. Division-9 units screamed as the first wave was consumed.
Gunfire followed.
It didn’t matter.
Bullets passed through flame and shadow alike, punching holes in something that refused to stay solid. Rottweiler lunged, tearing through the unit with feral efficiency. One by one, they fell—burned, crushed, erased—until one remained.
Abraham Francis.
Rottweiler stopped.
Control slammed back into place like a snapped bone.
In the sudden quiet, Roan stared at the destruction—at the bodies, the scorched stone, the space where authority had stood seconds earlier. His hands trembled for the first time since Miami.
This wasn’t strategy.
Not certainty either.
It was panic.
He ran.
The city followed reluctantly, its response slower now, heavier with consequence. The Hole in the Earth moved beneath him like something waking from obedience into something more complicated.
It felt like there was something inside it now.
Something living.
Something watching.
Behind him, Rommulas anchored.
And Division-9 learned—far too late—that Frankfurt was no longer a place to be controlled.
It was a place that answered violence with memory.
Some time passed, and Roan had stopped running. It wasn’t because he was tired, it was because the city stopped letting him.
The street ahead of him narrowed—not physically, but functionally. Distance stretched just enough to make forward motion feel like pushing through wet cement. His breath came sharp and fast now, lungs burning as heat bled off his skin in uneven waves.
He braced his hands on his knees and bent forward.
Behind his eyes, something snarled.
“What the fuck was that?” Roan hissed.
No answer.
“Don’t ignore me,” he snapped, straightening. “You did that. You moved me.”
Still nothing.
Roan laughed once, sharp and hollow. “Oh, don’t fucking do that. Yuh—you don’t get to go quiet after—after that.”
The streetlight above him flickered, then steadied. The city felt heavier here, less responsive, as though cataloging what had just happened instead of reacting to it.
Roan pressed his palms to his temples.
“I didn’t authorize that,” he said aloud. “That wasn’t even—”
They were going to shoot us.
Noah’s voice cut through him, sudden and raw.
Roan froze.
“You burned them alive,” Roan said. “You burned everyone. Just like you did to that woman back in Miami before I was able to get the Quiet Order to take over.”
They were aiming at us.
“That doesn’t make it oh—oh—okay! You fucking puppetereed my body!”
It makes it necessary, “Jet Pilot." You wanna talk about puppeteering, what about all those fucking synthetics you made? Did you forget that’s how Left to Right became a shard? Not to mention, you’re in my fucking body! What kind of weird fucking voodoo shit is that? You commanded all these people in the past, they ditched you when you died. They fucked me, they fucked you. And, let’s not forget we were gonna die. I SAVED you.
Roan’s hands curled into fists. Heat flared reflexively along his arms, then receded as he forced himself to breathe.
“That wasn’t defense,” Roan said. “That was panic.”
Noah didn’t deny it.
That was worse.
Roan staggered sideways and leaned against a brick wall that felt warm beneath his touch, mortar softening slightly before stiffening again. The Hole in the Earth churned beneath him, pressure and heat rolling in uneven pulses.
Something inside it shifted.
Roan swallowed hard.
“Did you feel that?” he asked.
Yes.
“What is that?”
Noah hesitated. I don’t know.
That, more than anything, scared Roan.
The Hole in the Earth had never been uncertain before. It had obeyed, had responded, had answered. Now it felt… occupied. Like a space that had been opened and never closed properly.
Roan dragged a hand down his face.
“You hijacked me,” he said. “You took control.”
You froze.
“I recalibrated.”
You hesitated.
Roan laughed again, this time bitter. “You don’t get to judge me for hesitation when you’re the one who lost it. Was this typical when you were alive, schizo?”
Silence pressed in around them, thick and uncomfortable.
Somewhere nearby, glass crunched under slow footsteps.
Roan snapped his head up.
Across the street—half-hidden by shadow and a warped storefront window—someone stood watching.
They weren’t tense.
They weren’t hiding.
They weren’t afraid.
The figure leaned casually against a railing that should not have supported his weight, head tilted slightly as if observing a performance already in progress.
Summer Breeze.
Roan felt it instantly—not as threat, not as pressure, but as absence of fear. The man stood inside the fractured city like it owed him nothing and could take nothing from him.
“What the hell,” Roan muttered.
Summer Breeze didn’t acknowledge him at all.
His attention wasn’t on Roan at all.
It was on the city.
More-specifically—on the way the ground still held near the plaza, the way certain distortions had stabilized instead of cascading. On the invisible anchor Rommulas had left behind like a thumb pressed into wet cement.
Summer Breeze smiled faintly.
“Oh,” he murmured to no one. “That’s new.”
Roan felt Noah stir uneasily.
He’s not reacting, Noah said.
“Why would he?” Roan shot back. “Nothing ever scares him.”
Summer Breeze’s gaze drifted, passing briefly over Roan—not lingering—before settling somewhere deeper, somewhere Roan couldn’t see.
Rommulas.
Recognition flickered across Summer Breeze’s expression,
(Interest)
Roan not quite being able to figure out what it was.
“Congrulations,” he said softly, voice barely audible over the city’s hum. “You finally made something that doesn’t break.”
Roan pushed off the wall. “Hey.”
Summer Breeze glanced at him, eyes sharp but amused. “You’re loud tonight.”
“Funny,” Roan said. “I don’t remember inviting you.”
“You didn’t,” Summer Breeze replied easily. “But the city did.”
He gestured vaguely with one hand. Around them, the air shifted slightly—not in response to him, but around him, like water flowing past a rock.
Roan felt the Hole in the Earth recoil instinctively.
Summer Breeze noticed.
“Oh,” he said again, quieter this time. “So that’s what you’re doing now.”
Roan clenched his jaw. “You got something to say?”
Summer Breeze shrugged. “Not yet.”
And then—just like that—he stepped back, melting into the distortion of the street as though the city itself had decided he was background noise.
He was gone.
Roan stood there, chest tight, pulse hammering.
“What the fuck was that?” Roan demanded.
He wasn’t afraid, Noah said finally.
“No shit.”
No. Of anything.
Roan exhaled slowly.
“Focus,” he said. “We need to talk about what you did.”
We need to talk about what you didn’t.
Roan turned away from the street, pacing now, agitation bleeding into movement. “I was handling it.”
You were losing it.
“I was recalibrating!”
You froze while they raised their weapons.
Roan stopped dead. “So your solution was to take over my body?”
My body. Don’t forget you took it.
The correction landed like a slap.
Roan’s vision blurred for half a second as heat flared again, uncontrolled this time. The brick wall behind him blackened, mortar bubbling before snapping back into solidity.
“No,” Roan said through gritted teeth. “Don’t do that. Don’t rewrite this.”
You don’t get sole ownership over my body anymore, Noah said. Not after everything.
Roan laughed bitterly. “You think I wanted this?”
You wanted control.
“I want order!”
At any cost.
Roan staggered, pressing his back against the wall. His head throbbed now, pressure building behind his eyes.
“And you?” he demanded. “What do you want?”
Noah was quiet for a long moment.
I died once already. I—I don’t want to die again, he said.
Roan’s anger faltered.
“...You think I do?” Roan asked.
You’re willing to risk it.
Roan swallowed hard.
In the distance, the city shifted again—sirens echoing, structures groaning, Division-9 scrambling to reassert something they no longer understood. The Hole in the Earth pulsed beneath it all, hotter now, heavier, crowded.
Rommulas’s anchor held somewhere out there, invisible but undeniable.
Summer Breeze watched from somewhere Roan couldn’t track, already bored, already recalculating.
And inside Roan’s own head, Noah waited—no longer a passenger, no longer content to be silent.
“This can’t happen again,” Roan said softly. “You don’t get to take control without warning.”
Then don’t freeze, Noah replied.
Roan laughed weakly. “That’s your solution?”
That’s reality.
The city hummed around them, unsettled but intact, as if acknowledging the argument without taking sides.
Roan closed his eyes.
For the first time since Miami, he felt truly divided—not fractured by power, but by intent.
“I miss having a fake fracture, fuck. Aerials was easier to control than this shit.”
Whatever had awakened inside the Hole in the Earth wasn’t choosing between them.
It was listening.
And next time, it might answer the louder voice.