We arrived at the site where two Bloom teams had disappeared without a trace.
The transport landed on a barren stretch of land surrounded by rocky hills. The moment the engines cut out, an unnatural silence settled over everything. Praveen stayed seated in the cockpit and looked at us for a few seconds before speaking.
"Good luck."
No confidence in his voice. Just seriousness — like he wasn't expecting us to come back. Not a particularly comforting send-off.
I stepped out and immediately felt something wrong. The air was heavy — not physically, not like altitude or humidity, but saturated, as if the entire area was soaked in Universal Energy. I put on my detection glasses.
The world transformed. Countless energy particles floated through the air like tiny glowing stars, but instead of following natural flows and patterns, they moved in complete chaos — drifting in random directions, spinning in loops, suddenly reversing for no reason. No order. No logic.
A cold breeze swept across the empty landscape. For a brief moment I thought I saw the distant air ripple, like water after a stone had been dropped in. Then it was gone.
I frowned. *What exactly am I supposed to find here?*
Beside me, Ira checked his smartwatch. "This phenomenon doesn't match anything in Bloom's database."
That wasn't good. Bloom collected information from all over the world — if even they had no records of this, we were dealing with something completely unknown.
Khan quietly adjusted his backpack straps. Even he understood the situation. Two full Bloom teams had vanished here. Not weak recruits — actual operatives. No bodies, no distress signals. They'd simply ceased to exist. The thought sent a chill through me.
We moved deeper into the area. The farther we walked from the plane, the denser the Universal Energy became — at first just uncomfortable, then impossible to ignore. My body felt heavier, breathing required more effort, each step like pushing through something invisible. The strange part was that it wasn't gravity. It felt like reality itself was pushing back.
Everyone was affected. Khan was sweating. Ira's expression had gone tight. Anita was silent — too silent. While the rest of us scanned the environment, she kept glancing toward empty patches of air, frowning at nothing, then looking away. Like she was catching glimpses of something she couldn't quite make sense of.
Ten minutes in, she suddenly stopped. "Wait."
We all halted. She closed her eyes, and the air around her seemed to still. Then her mental voice arrived inside our heads.
*Don't react.*
Everyone's attention sharpened instantly.
She opened her eyes and turned to Ira. "Use your power."
He raised an eyebrow. "For what?"
"Hide our voices."
He didn't ask more — just activated his ability. Immediately, the sounds around us vanished. Even when Khan shuffled his feet, nothing reached my ears.
Only then did Anita speak. "I think I know what's wrong with this place."
Khan's eyes lit up immediately. "That's my big sister!"
The tension broke slightly. Even Ira smiled. I crossed my arms. "What did you find?"
She hesitated — and for the first time since we'd formed this team, she looked uncertain. That alone was enough to make me nervous.
"I can't completely prove it." She pointed at the empty air ahead. "But I can feel another space overlapping ours."
Silence. No one spoke for several seconds. Even the wind stopped.
Ira checked his watch. "Another space?"
"That's the closest description I have."
"There are no records of anything like that. Not in Bloom's database, not in public databases, nowhere."
"I know." Her expression darkened. "That doesn't change what I'm sensing."
I stared at the area she was pointing toward, then extended my senses outward and activated Transfiguration. Normally, space felt stable — solid, predictable. Here it felt like something was hidden just below the surface of reality. A crack. A fracture. A place where the world wasn't fully connected.
My eyes widened. "I feel it too."
Everyone looked at me. I pointed. "Right there."
Anita nodded. "Exactly."
We moved toward it slowly. The closer we got, the stranger everything became — air visibly distorted, light bending at wrong angles, the scenery flickering for split seconds like two images overlapping. I looked back at the plane. It was less than a kilometer away, but it appeared blurry, impossibly distant, as if separated from us by far more than physical space.
A crawling sense of danger worked its way up my spine. Whatever this thing was, it was real. And it had already swallowed two teams.
I took a breath. "We need to decide what to do."
Everyone turned to me. "If the previous teams disappeared because of this anomaly, then going in might let us find out what happened to them." Khan nodded immediately. Ira frowned.
"Or we end up exactly like them."
Nobody could argue with that.
"There are potential benefits," I continued, gesturing at the distortion. "If this really is another space, it could contain resources, knowledge, things nobody on Earth has ever encountered." My pulse quickened as I said it. The possibility was genuinely intoxicating — opportunities hidden in mysterious dimensions were practically a law of nature in every novel I'd ever read.
I forced myself back to reality. "But the risks are obvious. There could be monsters inside. Hostile environments. No way back. We could die the moment we cross over."
No one smiled now. Even Khan looked troubled. Two trained Bloom teams had already vanished — we were rookies by comparison. If they couldn't survive, what chance did we have?
A moment of silence. Then I offered the third option. "We report everything to Bloom and let them send someone more qualified."
Nobody looked enthusiastic. Safest choice — objectively — but the silence said everything.
I glanced at the distortion. Fear twisted in my chest. So did excitement. Since arriving in this world, awakening my power had been the biggest turning point I'd experienced. Now something was telling me another one was standing right in front of me.
Anita smiled suddenly, her earlier uncertainty completely gone. "I vote we go inside."
Khan's hand shot up. "If Big Sister goes, I go."
Ira rubbed his forehead. "You two are impossible." He sighed. "But I'm not staying behind."
I couldn't help smiling. "Unanimous, then."
We prepared quickly. I ran through my equipment one last time, then activated Transfiguration — metal nearby shifted and reshaped as additional laser rifles and grenades took form. I handed them to the others.
"They're temporary. As long as my Transfiguration energy remains in them, they'll work normally."
Everyone accepted the weapons without question.
We spent the next few minutes absorbing Universal Energy. The area was practically overflowing with it, and one by one we pushed our reserves to their limits. When we were ready, we stood before the distortion in silence. The weight of the decision sat on all of us.
For safety, we held hands. Getting separated inside an unknown dimension wasn't a risk any of us wanted to take. Ira activated his ability one more time, and our presence faded — invisible, silent.
I stared at the fractured section of space ahead. The air twisted. Reality shimmered. Something on the other side seemed to be pulling at us, like a current just below the surface.
I took one last look at the distant plane.
Then I stepped forward.
The world shook. Space twisted. Reality shattered.
And all of us vanished.
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