156 White Collapse

I pressed the detonator.

The click was soft, followed by the flashbang detonating with a noise that punched the air out of the room. It was the same flashbang I hurled at Continuity moments ago, designed to break the power limit and temporarily taking away Continuity’s strange power. I threw myself behind the couch, burying my face against my arm. Amelia shifted back into human form mid-jump, scrambling behind a splintered column, her hair whipping in the blast pressure.

Even with my eyes covered, the light stabbed at my vision like a burning needle.

Good. That meant it worked.

The flashbang wasn’t just light and noise; its core was a null-charge tuned to disrupt Continuity’s “law-field”, the invisible structure that allowed him to reshape cause and effect like clay. I didn’t need to break his power. I only needed to break his influence on his subordinates.

Glitch reacted first.

His form flickered with static, pixelation, and then a sudden rubber-banding of his limbs as his powers fought themselves. It was a result of the Bunny virus attached on the flashbang.

He screamed. Not tough-guy theatrics. Pure panic.

“W-Wait—WAIT—DON’T—! I DON’T WANT TO DIE! Please! Please, boss—!”

His body jittered like a scrambled video frame, jerking in and out of existence as if the world couldn’t decide he belonged in it.

A voice whispered from everywhere and nowhere.

“Don’t fight it, Glitch,” Bunny murmured, almost gentle. “If you resist, I’ll have to make it painful. Just stop struggling…”

Glitch’s voice fractured into a howl.

Then he vanished.

Gone. Along with Bunny.

I stood slowly, scanning. Continuity was still there, but wrong. His eyes were unfocused, lids drooping at uneven angles, one pupil blown wide. Drool dripped from the corner of his mouth. His sniper rifle clattered from his hands as he dropped it without noticing.

Then he began hurting himself.

His fingers clawed at his face. Not like a man choosing to harm himself. More like someone whose mind had slipped out of alignment and couldn’t find its way back to center. His fingernails raked down his cheeks, drawing thin red lines.

“No…” he rasped hoarsely. “No, no, no… we shouldn’t have done that… we shouldn’t have done that—”

He slammed his head against the desk.

Amelia rose, stepping beside me with caution. Her claws were half-drawn, her breathing steady. She shook off the remaining dizziness from the flashbang and squared herself like the trained cape she was.

She cleared her throat and spoke with rigid authority:

“Continuity. You are under arrest for murder, conspiracy, and illicit experimentation on capes. You have the right to—”

Her voice cut abruptly.

Because Continuity began laughing.

A high, broken cackle. The laugh of someone who had seen the end of the world and mistook it for a joke.

He twisted toward us, smile hanging crooked on his half-ruined face.

“You… fools…” His words slurred, but the meaning was crystalline. “You have doomed us all…”

And then—

Everything turned white.

No transition. No fade. Just a blink, and the room ceased to exist.

The office from its walls, furniture, and shadows were gone. We stood in an identical space but drained of color and depth, every surface ivory-smooth, seamless, impossible. A reality without texture. No shadows formed from our bodies or the objects around us. Light came from everywhere and nowhere.

Continuity melted.

His body drooped, skin sliding downward like hot wax spilling from a candle. His face pooled first, dripping off the skull. His shoulders sagged, limbs losing structure until he was a slumping, liquefying human silhouette collapsing into a white puddle.

His ruined mouth formed one last shaky whisper as he dissolved:

“…you doomed us all…”

And then he was nothing.

Just white.

White everywhere.

The white room breathed. Not loudly, but softly and wetly. A sound like something pressing its face against a sheet of plastic from the other side.

I froze.

Amelia hissed beside me, claws half-extended but trembling. Neither of us cast shadows. Neither of us had reflections. It felt like standing inside the blank page of a book before ink decided what we were.

Then the walls rippled.

A subtle undulation, like skin flinching at a cold touch.

Fine lines rose across the white surfaces. At first I mistook them for cracks.

But cracks don’t move. Cracks don’t grow. Cracks don’t breathe. They lengthened into thin, dark strands emerging from the walls like roots.

No.

Not roots.

Hair.

Black hair, hundreds of strands, unfurling across the seamless whiteness. Some long, some short, some thick and wiry, some smooth and thin. They snaked down the corners, across the ceiling, spilling along the floor in slow, deliberate waves, like something brushing its fingers over carpet fibers to see how they’d react.

Amelia whispered, “Nick… what is this place…?”

The hair curled toward us.

The walls swelled, bulged, pulsed.

I heard a wet gurgle. Then another. Like something thick forcing its way through a small opening.

Eyes opened in the walls.

Not one. Not two.

Hundreds.

They blinked slowly and asynchronously, each lid made of the same white material as the room, peeling back like cracked porcelain to reveal the glossy wetness beneath. Some eyes were human, some animal, some elongated or wrong. A vertical pupil. A cross-shaped one. A pupil that rippled like water. A pupil that spiraled inward like a whirlpool.

All of them stared at me.

All of them tracked only me.

The hair slithered faster, reaching for my legs.

Then the mouths formed.

A bulge in the wall swelled outward. The surface cracked, split, and peeled back to reveal a wide, lipless maw filled with pink, toothless gums that quivered like raw flesh. Then teeth sprouted, one row, two rows, multiple rows like a shark’s jaws blossoming from wet meat.

The mouth moved.

It didn’t speak at first.

It chewed.

Soundless. A hungry, repetitive churning, like it was tasting the air. Tasting me!

Then it whispered.

“Come back…”

The voice was layered with male, female, young, old, all speaking as one. A choir submerged in blood.

“You walked away…” it hissed, the hair reaching my knees now, brushing my skin like cold fingertips. “You looked at us… and then you walked away…”

More mouths opened. More eyes blinked awake.

“You were ours…”

“You saw the edge of us…”

“You touched the place-that-thinks…”

“You do not belong there…”

“You belong with us…”

A dozen voices overlapped, then unified into one deafening whisper:

“Return.”

The mouths widened into grins that split too far. Hair writhed like a nest of worms, rising in waves.

“You cannot leave again…”

“You cannot carry what you saw…”

“You cannot run from the knowing…”

The largest mouth, massive, yawning, stretching from floor to ceiling, leaned forward, gums peeling back as it inhaled the air between us.

“You are ours, Nicholas,” it whispered with warped familiarity. “Come home.”

The room surged toward me.

“Fuck,” I cussed.

“Yeah, fuck it is,” Amelia echoed right beside me as she swiped at an eye on the wall. Her claws slashed across the iris, only for it to burst like an overripe blister. Yellow-white pus sprayed across her mask and hoodie, splattering the floor in thick globs that sizzled as if alive. “What the hell is this?”

The room exhaled in response.

The walls pulsed inward, shrinking. Not collapsing, but contracting the way lungs deflate.

Hair scraped across the floor in hungry waves. The eyes tracked our every movement, some widening, others narrowing. The mouths mouthed silently, teeth grinding, tongues twitching as if practicing the taste of us.

“What is happening?” Amelia cried, planting her back against mine as the ceiling lowered inch by inch. “Nick, what the hell is… what… god, what IS this?”

“Calm down,” I whispered, my hand finding hers. She was shaking. I wasn’t sure if it was anger or terror. Maybe both. “We can get through this.”

I pulled her close and focused. Intangibility. My fallback. My lifeline.

I grabbed her waist, pressed my forehead to hers, and stepped toward the wall.

We should’ve passed through it.

We didn’t.

Instead, the wall flexed like taut skin. Rejecting us. The surface rippled and shivered under my hand, neither solid nor liquid. Something worse. Something alive.

“I can’t phase,” I muttered. “It’s not letting me.”

The hair rose around our ankles. The room let out a low, resonant groan.

Amelia’s voice trembled. “I smell fear on you.”

I flinched.

She looked at me, her pupils thin and feral. “Tell me, Nick… are we going to die?”

The way she asked it stabbed deeper than the teeth creeping along the walls.

“No,” I said.

“How do you know that?” she demanded.

“Because I saw the future,” I replied.

And I meant it.

The situation was unfamiliar, yes. Hell, this wasn’t even a power anymore, this was an ‘entity’. Not the same as the one I encountered before. The eyes were different, the whiteness of the room was different shade of pale from the Entity I encountered.

It kept shrinking.

The walls pressed closer, the ceiling dipped so low strands of hair brushed the top of my head. The eyes blinked in unison, as if savoring the moment. The floor swelled upward beneath our feet, buckling.

I fired a burst of electrokinesis at the nearest mouth.

Nothing.

I projected telepathy outward, an empty echo.

Empathy resulted into dead air!

I switched to a kinetic blade gadget I hid on my watch, its edge dissolved into useless static.

Even Amelia’s nullifier claws sparked against the fleshy walls, only to be swallowed by the hair growing over them.

I never expected the situation to develop like this.

We had a plan, a clean one, elegant even. Create a diversion, separate Continuity from his subordinates, force a one-on-one confrontation. Amelia and I handle him directly. Windbreaker delivers the finishing blow if he wanted vengeance. Then, if things aligned just right, we’d slip into the vacuum within Division Five and expose the SRC from the inside.

It was simple and efficient. Almost heroic.

But fantasies rarely survive contact with reality.

Right now, all of those fantasies were collapsing with the walls around us.

The room shuddered again, violently, like some enormous beast taking a torturous breath. The walls contracted inward with a sickening, wet crunch, the floor heaving upward beneath us like muscle spasming under skin. Hair whipped across the shrinking space, tangling around my legs, dragging against my arms.

“Nick—!” Amelia gasped as another section of ceiling dropped.

The impact forced us to kneel.

The walls didn’t just move. They pressed.

Hard.

The sound was immediate.

CRRRRKKKK—

A dozen joints, tendons, and ribs crackled at once, ours or the room’s, I couldn’t tell. It hurts. The air filled with the sound of bones grinding together, like some invisible giant wringing a handful of carcasses. Pressure crushed down on my spine, on Amelia’s shoulder against mine. Each breath was a struggle, shallow and sharp. My ribs felt like they were being folded inward.

“Nick… it’s…” Amelia hissed, biting back a scream as the wall squeezed her arm, forcing it against her torso at an impossible angle.

“I know,” I wheezed, trying to shift my weight, trying to create space where there wasn’t any.

The room didn’t care.

It constricted again.

CRRRRK—KCHKKK—

Something in my back popped. Amelia’s claws scraped at the floor, but even she was losing leverage as the space narrowed to barely a meter across.

The eyes on the walls blinked lazily, watching us compress. The mouths opened in silent, greedy anticipation. Hair brushed our skin like fingers testing ripeness.

I pushed with everything I had from intangibility, electrokinesis, telepathy, and empathy, but nothing answered. It was like trying to breathe in a vacuum. My powers simply weren’t.

The room quivered.

The next contraction would break something vital.

“Nick,” Amelia whispered, voice trembling. “What the hell did he do? Continuity… what did he… bring us into?”

I have no idea.

The room convulsed, slamming inward.

Amelia screamed a raw, animal sound that tore through the collapsing space. “NICK—! NICK, DO SOMETHING!”

I tried. God, I tried. My powers skittered uselessly against the closing walls.

The white flesh surged again.

A second scream burst from Amelia, higher, choking, breaking in the middle. My own voice followed without permission, a hoarse, torn cry as the pressure crushed down on us. Our screams mixed, overlapping, and echoing off the shrinking chamber with nowhere to go.

“NICK!”

“I’m here—!”

“WE’RE GOING TO—”

The walls clamped tighter.

A final scream ripped itself out of both of us, one sound, one voice, strangled by the folding pressure and then there was… nothing.