There were civilizations in the Multiverse-Z that believed progress meant leaving the past behind.

The Orkyos believed the opposite.

They believed progress meant becoming strong enough to carry the past with you.

Their Universe was called Vorakhan.

Ancient.

Violent.

Beautiful in ways that rarely appeared gentle.

Its stars burned behind vast nebulae the colour of blood and iron. Entire systems had been shaped by gravitational catastrophes, planetary collisions and stellar storms that had destroyed weaker worlds before life could ever rise upon them.

Yet life had risen.

Again and again.

And upon one of Vorakhan's hardest worlds had emerged one of its hardest peoples.

The Orkyos.

Their home was:

GHORVANN.

---

The Four Paths

To understand the Orkyos, one first had to understand something that many young civilizations misunderstood about the Cosmos.

Skuda and Futura were not descriptions of species.

They were paths.

A people could be born from the same blood and still divide culturally between them.

A single planet could contain both.

Even a single individual could embody elements of each.

Skuda looked towards what had survived.

Ancestry.

Sacred knowledge.

Ritual.

Mysticism.

Martial traditions.

Nature.

Arcane disciplines.

The wisdom carried through bloodlines and preserved because generations had learned that certain truths should not be discarded merely because they were old.

Futura looked towards what had not yet existed.

Science.

Engineering.

Cybernetics.

Artificial intelligence.

Advanced weaponry.

Space travel.

The belief that intelligence had an obligation to improve upon inheritance.

Neither was primitive.

Neither was superior.

There were Skuda civilizations capable of manipulating energies that Futura laboratories could barely detect.

There were Futura cultures capable of constructing devices that Skuda priests would have described as divine.

And then there were peoples like the Orkyos.

They refused the choice.

They carried both.

SKUDA-FUTURA.

An Orkyo warrior might enter battle wearing armour built by quantum engineers while carrying the skull of an ancestor upon his shoulder.

A warship might contain an artificial navigation intelligence and still refuse to launch until a ritual Keeper had blessed its hull.

A plasma cannon could be forged inside an industrial megaforge and engraved afterwards with the names of seven generations of warriors.

To outsiders, it could look contradictory.

To the Orkyos, it was obvious.

Technology told them how to survive tomorrow.

Tradition reminded them why survival mattered.

But Skuda and Futura formed only one axis.

There was another.

ORDO AND CHAOS.

And here too, outsiders often made a childish mistake.

They imagined:

Ordo = good.

Chaos = evil.

That was wrong.

Ordo represented:

structure,
discipline,
continuity,
control,
hierarchy,
purpose.

Chaos represented:

instinct,
freedom,
rupture,
mutation,
unpredictability,
transformation through conflict.

A peaceful society could become suffocating beneath excessive Ordo.

A revolutionary act of Chaos could destroy a tyranny.

Neither principle possessed morality by itself.

They described how existence moved.

And the Orkyos of Ghorvann had chosen unmistakably:

ORDO.

That surprised almost everyone who saw them for the first time.

Because the Orkyos looked like creatures born for Chaos.

They were enormous.

Broad.

Tusked.

Muscular.

Their voices sounded like rocks grinding beneath mountains.

Their warriors could enter states of combat fury so violent that lesser species had invented entire legends around them.

And yet the Orkyos considered uncontrolled rage shameful.

Any beast could become angry.

An Orkyo warrior was expected to do something far harder.

CONTROL IT.

---

NEROK

Nerok was very good at being angry.

He was even better at deciding when not to be.

That distinction had saved his life more times than strength ever had.

He stood almost two and a half metres tall, with shoulders shaped by decades of combat training and green-grey skin marked by ritual scars carved into him after important victories.

Across his torso ran pieces of heavy armour incorporating both ancient Orkyo steelwork and advanced Futura systems.

Hydraulic reinforcement supported his legs.

A targeting module rested beside one eye.

Energy conductors ran beneath ceremonial bone plates.

Across his back he carried a brutal two-handed blade.

At his hip hung a compact firearm.

And embedded beneath his armour were systems capable of injecting stimulants directly into his bloodstream during combat.

Nerok was a:

BARBARIAN.

But among the Orkyos, that word did not mean savage.

The Orkyos had elevated Rage into a martial discipline.

They called it the Red State.

A warrior entering the Red State accelerated heartbeat, muscular response, aggression and pain tolerance until the body functioned at levels that should have become self-destructive.

The difficult part was not entering it.

The difficult part was:

remaining yourself while inside it.

Young warriors were taught:

Rage is fire.

Fire held within a forge creates weapons.

Fire released into a forest creates ashes.

Nerok had spent most of his life becoming a forge.

---

The First Reports

The first rumours from Kryndor sounded ridiculous.

Nerok heard them inside a military chamber beneath the fortress-city of Khar Ghor.

A representative displayed fragmented intelligence gathered through restricted inter-universal channels.

Something had happened on Drokhar.

The Minas had discovered invisible spiritual entities feeding upon their population.

At first Nerok thought this sounded like one of the exaggerated stories Futura civilizations occasionally produced when confronted with phenomena they could not immediately measure.

Then the representative showed them the recordings.

Minas lying alive inside medical chambers.

No wounds.

No disease.

No neurological damage.

Yet spiritually hollow.

Then came something worse.

Footage of creatures.

Physical creatures.

Ugly.

Winged.

Malformed.

Different shapes.

Some quadrupedal.

Some humanoid.

Some crawling.

Some enormous.

All apparently created from the same unknown origin.

The Minas had classified them under a provisional term:

RAPAX.

Predators.

The first mass incursion had occurred weeks after the spiritual draining began.

Hundreds of them had simply appeared throughout parts of Drokhar.

And unlike the entities that had preceded them...

these creatures had bodies.

That meant the Minas finally had something they could shoot.

They did.

The battles were horrific.

But conventional weapons worked.

Rapax died.

Buildings burned.

Minas Fighters fought them street by street.

Eventually the incursion was repelled.

But victory created another mystery.

The Rapax had not attacked infrastructure.

They had not attempted to conquer territory.

They had ignored several strategic facilities.

Instead...

they had collected bodies.

Hundreds.

Minas killed during the fighting simply disappeared.

Rapax dragged them away.

Some wrapped corpses inside biological membranes.

Others carried them physically.

Several even abandoned tactical advantages merely to retrieve a dead Minas before retreating.

And whenever a Rapax was cornered while transporting a body...

it fought with extraordinary desperation.

Nerok stared at the projection.

“Why steal the dead?”

Nobody answered.

That was the first question everyone asked.

There was no ransom.

No communication.

No ritual.

No occupation.

They invaded.

Killed.

Collected bodies.

Vanished.

Why?

---

What the Minas Did Not Yet Know

Far beyond Drokhar, spiritual entities had continued feeding.

Not only upon Minas.

Across other Universes.

Quietly.

Slowly.

Different species.

Different planets.

Different forms of life.

The energy was being accumulated.

The beings responsible still could not properly enter physical existence themselves.

They were too weak.

They belonged predominantly to another state of existence.

Matter resisted them.

They could observe it.

Drain it.

Influence it.

But they could not yet permanently inhabit it.

So they did something else.

They learned to create.

Not true civilizations.

Not yet.

Bodies.

Servants.

Predators.

Crude biological vessels constructed from stolen energy, copied genetic patterns and experiments performed somewhere no civilisation of the known Cosmos could see.

THE RAPAX.

The Rapax were not the masters.

They were the first hands the masters had learned to place inside physical reality.

And Silence, the creature that had destroyed Tara's family on Asaka, was only one form among them.

There were others.

Some were designed for speed.

Some for infiltration.

Some for slaughter.

Some for capture.

Some for surviving environments where ordinary life could not.

Different nightmares for different purposes.

But almost all shared one disturbing behaviour:

THEY TOOK BODIES.

The reason remained unknown.

Even Silence, the Rapax that had slaughtered Tara’s family on Asaka, had been sent with the same purpose. His mission had not ended with killing Tharan, Lira, Mina and Saya. He had been expected to recover their Sapiens bodies and return them for whatever experiments were being conducted beyond the known Cosmos.

But Tara had fought back.

She had wounded Silence badly enough to force the creature to abandon the mission and flee before the bodies could be collected.

Tara would never know it, but in those final desperate moments—blind, broken and surrounded by her murdered family—she had denied the enemy one last atrocity.

Their bodies remained with her.

And somewhere beyond Asaka, something had been waiting for Silence to bring them home.

---

The Arrival on Ghorvann

The Orkyos received the warning from Kryndor.

They prepared immediately.

That was Ordo.

No panic.

No denial.

No debate over whether a distant civilization's problem could possibly reach them.

The military council analysed everything.

Cities revised defensive procedures.

Spirit Keepers were placed alongside Futura engineers.

Orbital systems began searching both physical and spiritual spectra.

Weapons were recalibrated.

Barbarian clans were mobilised.

Nerok approved of almost all of it.

Except for one detail.

He stood before a tactical projection while an engineer explained their planetary defensive grid.

“If anything with physical mass enters the atmosphere, we will detect it.”

Nerok stared at the map.

“And if it has no physical mass?”

The engineer hesitated.

“We are integrating spiritual detection.”

“From whom?”

“The Keepers.”

Nerok glanced towards the old Orkyo shaman standing nearby.

The Keeper smiled.

“You spent your youth mocking our crystals.”

“I spent my youth mocking you.”

“An important distinction.”

Nerok grunted.

Skuda and Futura.

Exactly as it should be.

---

They detected the first entity four days later.

Not in orbit.

Not crossing the atmosphere.

Inside the city.

It stood in the middle of a weapons foundry.

Invisible to ordinary sight.

Present only as a faint spiritual distortion.

The Orkyos responded differently from the Minas.

The engineer teams activated suppression fields.

The Keepers began ancient binding rituals.

Nerok arrived with six Fighters.

He saw nothing.

Only the sensor marker hovering inside his visor.

ENTITY PRESENT.

Three metres ahead.

He raised his blade.

“Can it hear us?”

The Keeper beside him whispered:

“It can hear more than us.”

Nerok frowned.

“What does that mean?”

“It is drinking.”

Then Nerok felt it.

Not pain.

Weakness.

As though something had reached inside him and slowly begun pulling warmth from somewhere deeper than flesh.

His armour showed no damage.

Vitals normal.

Yet he felt suddenly exhausted.

A spiritual reading dropped.

98%.

96%.

94%.

Nerok's eyes narrowed.

His heartbeat accelerated.

The first pulse of Rage entered him.

The Keeper grabbed his arm.

“No.”

Nerok looked at him.

“It feeds on energy.”

Another drop.

92%.

“Then I will give it something difficult to swallow.”

The Red State began.

Muscles tightened.

Respiration increased.

Aggression flooded his bloodstream.

But his mind stayed absolutely controlled.

He swung.

The enormous blade passed straight through the entity.

Nothing.

Nerok struck again.

Nothing.

The spiritual signature remained in the same place.

For perhaps the first time in his adult life, Nerok encountered something that simply ignored strength.

The entity moved through him.

His spiritual energy fell another eight percent instantly.

He staggered backwards.

Then it disappeared.

The entire encounter had lasted less than thirty seconds.

Nerok stared at the empty space.

His hands trembled.

Not fear.

Fury.

The worst possible kind.

Useless fury.

---

The Orkyos Begin to Empty

The Hollowing reached Ghorvann within weeks.

Orkyos warriors collapsed during training.

Children stopped responding to parents.

Factory workers became emotionally absent.

Elders forgot rituals they had performed every day for seventy years.

Doctors could find nothing physically wrong.

Keepers described the same phenomenon:

the body remained.

The spirit weakened.

The Orkyos had fought wars of flesh.

Wars of machines.

Wars of ideology.

They had never fought a war in which the enemy consumed the part of a person that could not be replaced.

Futura medicine could replace organs.

Skuda healers could mend damaged spiritual patterns.

Neither could replenish whatever was being stolen fast enough.

Ghorvann was becoming a feeding ground.

---

Then the Rapax arrived.

---

The Night of Teeth

They came during a storm.

Thousands.

No ships.

No atmospheric entry.

One moment the defensive grid reported nothing.

The next, physical creatures appeared inside multiple population centres.

Alarms screamed across Khar Ghor.

Nerok was already armed before the first emergency transmission finished.

The footage showed monsters pouring through industrial districts.

Some resembled gargoyles.

Others moved upon six limbs.

Some had armour-like skin.

One species opened its torso to reveal dozens of smaller predatory organisms.

Another spat biological acid capable of dissolving composite armour.

The Orkyos responded exactly as expected.

They attacked.

This time...

the enemy had flesh.

Nerok smiled for the first time in weeks.

“Finally.”

---

He entered the streets with the Red State burning through him.

The first Rapax leapt from a rooftop.

Nerok cut it in half.

Black fluid exploded across the wall.

Another attacked from behind.

He caught it by the throat and drove it into the ground hard enough to fracture the pavement.

A third opened its jaws.

Nerok fired directly into its mouth.

The creature's head vanished.

This was an enemy he understood.

Blood.

Bone.

Velocity.

Weakness.

The Orkyos fought magnificently.

Barbarians charged alongside mechanised infantry.

Keepers created protective wards around evacuation routes.

Futura artillery targeted concentrations of Rapax.

Ancient war-horns sounded beneath orbital bombardment.

Skuda.

Futura.

Ordo.

Together.

Exactly as Ghorvann had been built to fight.

And yet something was wrong.

The Rapax did not seem interested in victory.

They ignored strategic positions.

Ignored government structures.

Ignored power centres.

Again and again, Nerok saw them stop beside fallen Orkyos.

Not to eat them.

To take them.

One creature lifted two dead warriors and attempted to retreat.

Nerok chased it.

“PUT THEM DOWN!”

The Rapax ran.

Nerok fired.

One leg exploded.

The creature fell.

It still refused to release the bodies.

Nerok reached it and buried his sword through its spine.

The creature convulsed.

Dead.

He looked at the two fallen Orkyos.

Then towards the larger battlefield.

Other Rapax were doing the same thing.

Collecting the dead.

Nerok's fury faded into something colder.

“This isn't an invasion.”

The warrior beside him looked over.

“What?”

Nerok stared across the burning city.

“They're harvesting.”

---

The Body Pits

After fourteen hours, the Orkyos regained control of Khar Ghor.

Thousands were dead.

Many more wounded.

But the Rapax had suffered catastrophic losses.

Militarily, the Orkyos had won.

Then casualty teams began counting.

And discovered:

hundreds of Orkyo bodies were missing.

Not alive.

Dead.

Taken.

Nerok walked through one of the temporary casualty halls.

Families moved between rows of covered bodies.

Some found who they were looking for.

Others did not.

Those families faced a particular kind of grief.

Their loved one was dead.

Probably.

But there was no body.

No final rite.

No ancestral marking.

No return to the earth of Ghorvann.

Among the Orkyos, this mattered enormously.

The body of a fallen warrior belonged to the clan.

The names of the dead were carved into ancestral steel.

The ashes were returned beneath the mountains.

Now hundreds had been stolen.

Nerok stood beside an empty ceremonial platform.

A mother waited there.

Her son had died defending the eastern district.

Witnesses saw it happen.

Then a Rapax carried his corpse away.

She asked Nerok one question.

“Why would they take him?”

Nerok had no answer.

And he hated the enemy for that almost as much as he hated them for killing him.

---

The Question

Days passed.

Captured Rapax bodies were dissected.

Their biology made little sense.

Some possessed organs with no obvious purpose.

Some structures appeared temporary, as though their bodies had been assembled rapidly rather than evolved naturally.

Genetic analysis contained fragments reminiscent of multiple unrelated species.

Parts looked copied.

Adapted.

Recombined.

One scientist showed Nerok a tissue sample.

“This section resembles Minas cellular architecture.”

Nerok stared at her.

“Minas?”

“Not exactly. But close.”

Another sample.

“This resembles Orkyo tissue.”

Nerok became very still.

“From the bodies they took?”

“We don't know.”

That sentence again.

We don't know.

The phrase that seemed to follow this enemy everywhere.

Nerok looked at the remains of the Rapax.

“What are they building?”

The scientist said nothing.

“What do they need our bodies for?”

Nothing.

Nerok leaned closer to the specimen.

For the first time, he understood something that frightened him more than the invasion itself.

The Rapax might not be the experimenters.

They might be:

THE EXPERIMENTS.

Which meant somewhere beyond Ghorvann...

someone was learning.

---

The Enemy Behind the Enemy

The spiritual entities returned after the battle.

Fewer.

Stronger.

Their signatures had changed.

Where previously they could remain detectable only briefly, some now persisted for minutes.

They had gained energy.

From Drokhar.

From Ghorvann.

From other places nobody yet knew about.

They still could not properly materialise.

But they were getting closer.

Nerok watched one through a Skuda-Futura detection array.

It stood beyond reinforced glass.

A distortion.

Barely a shape.

The Keeper beside him whispered:

“It is becoming heavier.”

Nerok looked at him.

“Physically?”

“No.”

The old Orkyo's face tightened.

“Existentially.”

Nerok hated mystical answers.

This time he understood exactly what the Keeper meant.

Whatever these things were...

they were becoming more capable of existing here.

The Rapax had allowed them to touch physical reality without entering it themselves.

The stolen bodies perhaps represented the next stage.

---

Nerok placed one huge hand against the glass.

The entity appeared to turn towards him.

“Who are you?”

No response.

“What do you want?”

Nothing.

“Why our dead?”

The spiritual distortion moved closer.

The instruments began registering energy drain.

Nerok did not move.

99%.

98%.

97%.

The entity watched him.

And for a moment Nerok experienced a thought that did not feel entirely his own.

Not language.

Not words.

An impulse.

A concept.

BODY.

Then another.

LEARN.

Then:

ENTER.

The connection vanished.

Nerok stumbled backwards.

The entity disappeared.

The Keeper caught him.

“What happened?”

Nerok stared through the glass.

His face had lost all colour.

“They're not stealing bodies because they need food.”

The Keeper waited.

Nerok whispered:

“They're learning how to become us.”

---

The Orkyos still had no name for the beings.

Neither did the Minas.

Across distant Universes, other civilizations were beginning to encounter the same ghosts.

The same draining.

The same impossible predators.

The same stolen dead.

Each world believed it was facing an isolated horror.

None yet understood that all of them were witnessing different stages of the same emergence.

Somewhere beyond the known structures of the Cosmos existed a forbidden Universe.

And within it, entities that had spent an unknowable length of time unable to enter physical reality were finally accumulating enough energy to change that.

They had learned to feed.

They had learned to create the Rapax.

Now they were studying bodies.

Biology.

Weapons.

Species.

Civilisations.

They were preparing.

The word Sumaya had still not entered the languages of Ghorvann.

But eventually it would.

And when it did, Nerok would remember the night he first understood the truth.

The monsters were not invading.

They were practising.

The bodies were not trophies.

They were research.

And the Rapax were not the enemy.

They were only the first creatures the enemy had learned how to make.

Nerok tightened his grip around the hilt of his enormous sword.

Rage began moving through him.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

Controlled.

The Red State.

But this time the anger was different.

It was not directed at the Rapax.

It was directed towards something he could not yet see.

Something without a body.

Something that thought his people were material.

Resources.

Experiments.

Nerok looked towards the stars of Vorakhan.

“Learn everything you want.”

His voice was almost a growl.

“Because one day you'll finally build yourselves bodies.”

He smiled.

There was nothing kind in it.

“And when you do...”

Nerok drew his blade.

“...you'll finally give me something I can kill.”