His.
Flash went down first, one knee and one hand catching him before his balance failed, his shoulders jerking as something moved beneath his skin, the outline wrong, shifting, like it couldn't decide what shape it was supposed to take.
Instructor Easy staggered beside him, dropping to all fours with a guttural sound, feline features trying to break through, impossibly sharp teeth, claws, his muscles bunching as his body tried to fold in on itself.
Shark slammed into the marble and rolled, clawing at his throat as his breath hitched and stuttered, his skin taking on a rough, gray cast before snapping back.
Twister curled in on himself, arms drawn tight, his neck elongating, reaching out blindly before recoiling like the movement itself hurt, a broken note trapped in his throat, the surge with nowhere to go.
Dagger hit with heat shimmering off him, his skin flushed and burning, something rising beneath it then collapsing back in on itself, his jaw clenched so tight it looked like it might crack.
Brawler dropped last, and when he hit the ground, it was with a force that cracked through the room. His spine arched, muscles coiling and bunching as if something wild clawed at him from the inside. The sound that tore out of him wasn't entirely his, deeper, layered, a howl trapped in a human throat. K9 handler…merging with Beast. Pack instincts collided with human reason, neither willing to give way. His hands curled into huge, white paws.
Fly stared, disoriented, his vision still splitting and sliding, but there was no mistaking what he was seeing. They were all fighting it. Fighting their own bodies. The same strain that was tearing through Fly ripped through them in waves, distorting movement, breaking rhythm, making every instinct unreliable. The room lurched again, angles shifting, sound slipping just out of sync, and for a second Fly couldn't tell where any of them ended and the rest of it began.
This was happening to everyone, a phenomenon, something beyond his interpretation…for now.
A chill passed over his aching body, a presence…no two.
They'd been waiting, and now they had all of them.
The nausea hit him again, sharper this time, dragging his attention away from his brothers, who had come for him and North. Compromised in ways his mind refused to process.
The room shifted again. This distortion was different from before, focused and directed. The two entities split, the second presence moving toward North, separate from what held him frozen, something that felt like tearing rather than dissolving.
Fly turned, forcing his body to follow the motion even as his balance failed him, his vision sliding out of alignment. The space between him and North stretched and compressed at the same time, like distance had stopped behaving. He couldn't define a presence that didn't belong to any shape his mind could hold on to.
The first entity drew closer. The noise in his head changed, growing quieter until it felt like it occupied the same space as his thoughts, like it was what had distorted physics when he was surfing in that shimmering otherworldly moment when all his skill had just gone…null.
The floor beneath them split with a crack that ran sideways instead of down, black fractures ripping across the floor and climbing the walls like the room itself had begun to come apart.
North’s violent stagger was arrested, his face set with his determination to hold against Rupture.
The floor dropped several inches beneath him before snapping back into place hard enough to launch him into the wall.
“Move!” Flash barked.
The command worked through Fly's spiraling perception for half a second.
Despite the obvious agony tearing through him, Easy’s response was instant. He prowled toward North, shifting between a man and cat, just as the distortion beside him folded inward and something stepped through it.
A too-tall, thin outline fractured constantly, pieces of it appearing before the rest caught up.
Then it moved. One second it stood several feet away. The next it was directly in front of North.
But North wasn't there anymore.
Easy had tackled him sideways, both men hitting hard as the entity’s, Rupture's, strike carved a groove through the air where North's chest had been. The wall behind them simply ceased to exist for three feet in every direction.
"Twister!" Flash's voice cracked with command and desperation.
Twister was already moving, his elongated neck retracting as he crawled toward the fallen SEALs, partial wings slapping against the uneven floor while every healing note took its toll, his skin growing more translucent by the second. Instead of reaching with his hands, he opened his mouth and released a sound that shouldn’t have been possible from a human throat. At first, the vibration penetrated bone and muscle, knitting, realigning, restoring. Then it went discordant, jarring. Twister phased violently, his face contorting in agony as the damage he healed transferred into him.
That's when the second presence materialized directly in front of Fly.
The entity, Null, didn't step through reality like Rupture had. It simply became, as if the absence of something had taken shape. Fly found himself staring at a vacuum that wore the suggestion of human form, darkness so complete it seemed to pull light from the room.
"Flynn Gallagher," it whispered, and the sound came from everywhere at once. "The Visionary. The pattern-reader who failed to see the only pattern that matters."
