The wind cut across the wasteland like a blade of glass. Black sand hissed against the team’s armour as they trudged through what was once the eastern corridor of the continent—a dead zone left behind by the Facility’s last purge.
Ethan led the group, his eyes on the horizon where the faint silhouette of a spire broke the darkness. It rose from the earth like an obsidian fang—silent, ancient, and pulsing with faint blue veins of power.
“The Obsidian Array,” Dr. Myles murmured, pulling her cloak tighter. “I thought it was dismantled after the first Elysium breach.”
“It wasn’t,” Hannah said, scanning the dunes through her rifle’s scope. “Facility must’ve kept it alive for remote backups. If that’s true, the data inside could rewrite everything we know.”
Maya shivered beside Ethan. “Or de
