Chapter 74: The Color Out of Space

Chapter 74: Chapter 74: The Color Out of Space

Chapter 74: The Color Out of Space

The instant Seth Brundle finished saying, "Deep isolation room gate, lock released," something inside the underground facility seemed to change. An indescribable wave of nausea struck Lionel Cosgrove first, his unusually sharp supernatural senses making him stagger before his knees gave out completely. He dropped against the wall and began retching violently, his entire body trembling as though something invisible had reached inside him and twisted his organs.

Only seconds later, Axel Vance felt the purified Jason-bone protective effigy at his waist react on its own. The artifact’s mental barrier immediately tightened around his consciousness, but even that protection could not stop the underground base from seeming to tilt beneath his feet while dizziness and irrational agitation flooded his mind. Axel caught himself against the nearby console, gritting his teeth as the room spun around him.

Seth, who had initially felt almost nothing, stared at them in alarm. "What’s wrong with you two? Don’t tell me that command actually released something." He instinctively moved to steady Axel, while Lionel was still vomiting hard enough that Seth wisely decided trying to touch him would only make matters worse.

Before Axel could answer, uneven footsteps echoed from the dark corridor beyond the control room. He forced down the roaring inside his head and turned toward the sound, immediately recognizing the figure emerging from the shadows. Papa Jupiter, the mutant patriarch who had disappeared from the crater, was stumbling toward them.

The powerful leader they had seen earlier was almost unrecognizable. His skin hung from his body like wax melting beside a furnace, and with every step, more decayed flesh sloughed away while the floor beneath his feet gave off a faint sizzling sound. Whatever he had released deeper inside the facility was clearly killing him as well.

Papa Jupiter fixed his ruined eyes on Axel, and hatred remained one of the few emotions still visible on his collapsing face. When he opened his mouth, his damaged throat produced a hoarse, grinding voice that barely sounded human. "I know you, Axel Vance. The Master showed me your file... your face, your cases, everything you did to our people."

Axel’s eyes narrowed despite the pain inside his skull. Papa Jupiter forced a smile, but the movement caused another strip of decayed skin to peel away from his cheek and fall to the floor. "I never thought you would really follow the trail all the way here, but it doesn’t matter anymore."

The mutant reached beneath what remained of his leather jacket and brought out a small, heavy-looking box. Its dull gray surface resembled lead, and strange distorted markings had been carved across every side, making it look more like a sealed funerary container than laboratory equipment. The moment the box appeared, the Jason-bone effigy at Axel’s waist became painfully hot.

Papa Jupiter held the container almost reverently. "Before you die, you should see our greatest achievement. A fragment from beyond the stars, the foundation of everything we researched here." His voice carried the satisfaction of someone revealing a sacred secret rather than admitting his entire body was being destroyed by it.

The pressure inside the room intensified immediately. Even Seth, whose spiritual sensitivity was far weaker than Axel’s or Lionel’s, suddenly froze as his thoughts seemed to stall for a fraction of a second. That momentary blankness frightened him far more than the mutant corpses outside ever had.

Seth’s expression changed. "Axel, don’t let him open that thing. Whatever is inside is affecting cognition before the seal is even broken." He raised his voice sharply as Papa Jupiter’s fingers moved toward the latch. "Stop him!"

Axel forced his legs to move and staggered forward through the crushing dizziness. The Jason-bone barrier trembled around his consciousness as he tried to close the distance, but Papa Jupiter had already released the lock. The lid opened.

Something flowed out.

Calling it a Color was merely the closest word Axel’s mind could produce. It belonged to no shade he had ever seen and no point on any spectrum he understood, yet his brain was somehow forced to recognize that an impossible color existed in front of him. Its presence alone felt like information that human consciousness had never been designed to process.

The Color spread outward as though it were alive. Light twisted around it, the air seemed to decay, and every object it touched became stained with a hue that should not have existed anywhere on Earth. The metal consoles developed an oily, rippling sheen while low moaning sounds seemed to rise from inside the walls themselves.

Old plaster cracked and began crumbling into powder. Sections of the control room seemed to breathe and distort at the edges of Axel’s vision, as though the alien influence were not merely illuminating reality but rewriting it. Whatever the cult had locked inside that lead-lined container was already beginning to consume the facility around them.

Lionel retched again, only this time black blood and fragments of damaged internal tissue splattered across the floor. He curled against the wall and clawed at his chest, his supernatural sensitivity turning what the others experienced as crushing corruption into something far more intense. His bound-effigy body had survived wounds that should have killed him instantly, but the Color was attacking him on a level physical regeneration could not easily solve.

Seth was beginning to suffer too. His mind desperately tried to categorize what he was seeing—wavelength, radiation, biological response, spatial distortion—but every possible explanation contradicted the next. Bloody tears appeared beneath his eyes as his brain pushed itself harder and harder against something that refused to fit inside normal scientific understanding.

The whites of Seth’s eyes filled with red vessels, and his breathing became shallow. Every rational instinct told him to look away, yet his gaze remained fixed on the impossible hue as though the phenomenon itself were holding his attention. His greatest strength, the mind that never stopped analyzing, had become a weapon the Color could turn against him.

Axel’s condition was scarcely better. The dizziness inside his skull sharpened into piercing agony, as if countless needles were being driven through his brain while invisible hands stirred everything behind his eyes. Seth and Lionel’s outlines warped in front of him, stretching and bending while the shadows along the walls began crawling like living tentacles.

Fear and disgust rose from somewhere deeper than conscious thought. Every instinct inherited from millions of years of human evolution screamed that this thing did not belong anywhere near life, and Axel found himself wanting to flee and tear everything apart at the same time. The mental barrier around his consciousness shuddered under the pressure.

Then the agony changed.

Not much.

But enough.

Axel felt the pressure ease by the smallest possible amount, granting him a fraction of clarity. That tiny moment was enough for him to remember something he had nearly forgotten beneath the overwhelming corruption.

[Adaptive Resistance]

Continuous tempering strengthens the body and will. Repeated exposure to similar damage can gradually produce minor resistance.

Axel’s thoughts immediately locked onto the ability from Prisoner Fitness Lv.3 — MAX. Back in prison, repeated exposure to supernatural chanting and mental pressure had gradually hardened his resistance until the attacks could no longer affect him the same way. The Color was vastly more powerful, but the principle remained unchanged.

Another wave of mental corruption struck him. Axel nearly collapsed, yet the next wave felt fractionally less sharp than the one before it. Adaptive Resistance had begun responding to the repeated cosmic assault.

Axel dragged in a rough breath and slowly straightened his back. The hallucinations remained, the air still looked wrong, and his thoughts were sluggish, but he could distinguish the real control room from the distortions again. His gaze returned to Papa Jupiter.

The mutant patriarch had become little more than a decaying corpse standing inside the Color. Flesh collapsed from his arms and chest while the alien influence consumed him without discrimination, yet he spread his remaining arms and sighed almost contentedly. "Do you feel it? This strange infection... it drinks the vitality from everything around it."

His fingers crumbled into ash while he spoke. "We studied it for years, fed it, tested it, built everything around it, and still never understood what it really was." The bitterness in his ruined voice suggested the cult had finally learned the difference between possessing something and controlling it.

The Color flowed across Papa Jupiter’s torso. His body rapidly dried, collapsed, and broke apart until the mutant patriarch became nothing more than ash and decayed matter drifting into the expanding phenomenon. Within moments, Papa Jupiter had disappeared completely into the very research subject he had treated as his clan’s greatest achievement.

Axel’s vision cleared another fraction. His reasoning remained compressed beneath enormous psychic pressure, but his combat instincts were becoming sharper as conscious thought stripped itself down to whatever was necessary for survival. He glanced toward Seth and Lionel, both of whom were effectively incapacitated, then back toward the Color spreading across the control room.

He could not wait any longer.

Axel tightened both hands around the enchanted chainsaw and poured every remaining trace of Psionic Power he could gather into the Spirit Binding weapon. The engine’s growl suddenly climbed to an unfamiliar pitch as supernatural power flooded through the housing and chain. Silver-white fire erupted across the weapon.

The flames did not burn Axel. Instead, the advancing Color recoiled from them, creating a narrow pocket of ordinary space around his body where the walls stopped visibly twisting. For the first time since Papa Jupiter opened the box, Axel had something that could push the alien influence backward.

He stepped forward.

The pressure immediately intensified.

Another step brought a fresh wave of impossible images directly into his consciousness. Vast eyes opened in bottomless darkness, mountains of corpses stretched beneath dead stars, and silent worlds hung beneath suns that shone with colors no human language could describe. Axel understood none of it, nor did he try.

The Color churned harder as though it had recognized him as a threat. More images crashed into his mind—endless cosmic emptiness, shapes moving behind reality, dead civilizations, and things too large for his brain to understand as living beings. Each vision tried to drown his identity beneath information that human consciousness had never evolved to hold.

Axel kept moving.

His entire mind narrowed around one thought.

Destroy it.

He broke into a run before the Color could spread farther across the facility. The Jason-bone mental barrier shook violently while Adaptive Resistance continued building beneath each repeated psychic impact, allowing him to force his body another step forward. Axel raised the silver-burning chainsaw and charged directly into the densest point of the impossible hue.

Then he swung.

The enchanted chain struck the core of the Color.

The entire underground facility went silent.

The roar of the chainsaw vanished, Seth’s ragged breathing disappeared, and even Lionel’s agonized retching ceased to produce sound. For one impossible instant, it felt as though time, space, and the movement of air had all been frozen around Axel.

The silver-white flame pressed against the alien Color. Instead of retreating, the phenomenon boiled violently and contracted around the chainsaw as though trying to swallow the weapon, consume Axel’s Psionic Power, and assimilate the foreign presence invading its center. The mental pressure inside Axel’s skull exploded.

Countless shrieks tore through his consciousness at once. The concrete beneath his boots softened until it seemed elastic, while transparent tentacle-like shapes stretched out from empty air and squeezed directly against his mind. Distance, direction, and physical shape became unreliable as the entire control room folded beneath the Color’s influence.

Axel clenched his teeth and refused to release the chainsaw. Every fresh assault pushed Adaptive Resistance harder, forcing the ability to respond faster than it ever had before. Each wave of corruption struck his consciousness, inflicted damage, and left behind another microscopic layer of resistance.

The piercing agony continued climbing until it seemed impossible for a human mind to endure another second. Then, after reaching that unbearable peak, the pain finally began changing. The sharpness faded first, gradually dulling beneath the accumulating resistance until the torture inside Axel’s skull began to feel distant.

The pain was still there.

But now it was becoming numb.

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