The Academy always hummed at night—circuits in the walls, climate systems buried in the floors, surveillance nodes panning silently behind faux marble panels.
But now?
It was dead quiet.
Except for the sirens.
Jason sprinted through the corridor, breath shallow and sharp, shoes skidding on polished stone that flickered crimson under emergency strobes. The red lights pulsed slow, like the heartbeat of a dying thing. In between flashes, the hallway stretched and bent in his vision, every shadow shaped like something it shouldn't be.
The System was glitching again.
[Vital Tracking: Unstable][Cortical Bandwidth: Spiking][Sigil Activity: UNREGULATED – SEVERE WARNING][External Flow Pressure Detected – Source Unknown]
He ignored the warnings, even as the words jittered and doubled, symbols warping mid-sentence like they were afraidof what they meant.
His left hand throbbed—burning hot beneath the sleeve.
Not just heat.
Language.
The sigil wasn't just flaring… it was communicating. Not in words. In feeling. Urgency. Response. Memory.
Jason pressed on.
At the end of the corridor, a side hall erupted into panic—dozens of students pushing toward the lower bay access doors. A siren howled overhead, but it was warped, like someone had played it underwater and slowed the tape. The voices were the same. Screaming, but muffled. Urgent, but distant.
Somebody grabbed his sleeve—"Where are the safe-zones?! Are you a medic?!"—but Jason slipped past them without a word.
He wasn't looking for safety.
He was listening.
Somewhere beyond the walls, beyond the panic, something was calling.
He felt it before he saw it.
The window near the west observation deck glowed pale blue, flooded with ambient light from the barrier rising over the city. Jason crossed the space like a sleepwalker, steps silent, throat dry.
Outside—beyond the perimeter wall—a thing stood motionless beneath the fractured sky.
No name came to mind. No species. It didn't match anything he'd studied in Blackridge's biological archives.
It had limbs, but they moved like they weren't made for this plane. It had a head, but it bent too far, like it hadn't been taught where up or down belonged. Veins of flickering violet pulsed across its semi-translucent form, moving too fast, then too slow, like it was syncing with something.
Like it was syncing with him.
Jason's knees buckled.
The sigil on his arm went incandescent, black lines flashing gold. His body lurched forward as pain cut through him—not like a stab, but like every nerve was reversed.
[Alchemical Core: Distorted Resonance Signal][Frequency Match: 73.2% – UNKNOWN ENTITY][Initiating Echo Buffer: FAIL][RUNNING: AUDIO FRAGMENT—00112 Delta-A]
And then the sound hit.
Not noise. Not vibration.
It was the absence of every other sound—a perfect void threaded with pressure, like his soul had been pulled tight and struck like a tuning fork. His teeth ached. His stomach lurched. His vision didn't blur—it twisted.
Then came the second pulse.
BOOM.
It echoed through the walls like thunder in a cave too small to contain it. The floor rippled. Glass strained in its frame. Somewhere behind him, students screamed again, but Jason couldn't move.
Not yet.
Because the thing outside…
It turned.
Faceless. Genderless. Not even monstrous—just… wrong.
And somehow, even from this distance, Jason knew it wasn't attacking.
It was watching.
His palm flared hotter—lines shifting into new formations.
The System sparked:
[UNKNOWN ENTITY DETECTED][LINKED CORE TRACE – MINOR RECOGNITION][RESPONSE: SIGIL MATCH INCOMPLETE]
Then, like it had made its decision, the thing stepped backward—not walking, just retracting. Folding into the veil of Erisflow that surrounded the city's outer edge, as if it had gotten what it came for.
A glimpse.
Or a confirmation.
Jason exhaled hard—hadn't even realized he'd been holding his breath.
The emergency lights kept pulsing.
Sirens started again—lower, steadier now.
People rushed past him, some shouting his name. He didn't answer.
He stood alone at the window.
And in the reflection of the glass, he didn't see himself.
Not fully.
The outline was there.
But the eyes?
The eyes looked older.
Jason stepped back from the window, vision still buzzing. His hand left a faint smear of sweat on the glass.
The reflection was gone.
His breath caught on the edge of a name he didn't know—like his mind was trying to say something his mouth couldn't pronounce.
Then—
"Jason!"
A voice, clearer this time. Real.
He turned, blinking like he'd surfaced from underwater.
Milo sprinted into view, shoulder brushing a half-panicked student aside. His shirt was half-buttoned, a static pulseband flashing bright green at his wrist. He grabbed Jason's arm, hard.
"You good?" Milo asked, eyes darting to the window. "You saw it too, didn't you?"
Jason nodded. He didn't trust his voice yet.
Milo exhaled through his nose. "Come on, the director just activated convergence mode. They're routing red-bars and core-less into the west wing. I froze up in the chaos, figured you'd… I don't know, be standing alone next to something safe."
Jason offered a weak smirk. "Felt like I had to fulfill my curiosity."
"That's worse," Milo said, dragging him into motion.
The halls had changed.
No longer scattered chaos—there was order now, like the Academy's bones had shifted into a different stance. Automated locks sealed minor passageways, redirecting traffic. Projected guides blinked across walls, floor tiles glowing with light-threaded arrows pointing toward refuge sectors.
But it wasn't comforting.
It was clinical. Like being herded for containment, not safety.
Along the way, they passed groups of students—many still in half-gear from the Awakening Ceremony. Some had glowing cuts across their cheeks, evidence of unstable Core triggers. Others looked too calm, walking like they'd done this before.
One girl whispered to another, "I heard it scanned through the upper sky grid. No attack—just… looking."
Another: "It didn't breach. That means it wasn't trying to."
A boy: "What if it's not one of them? What if it's the first of something else?"
Jason's hand tightened into a fist. The sigil pulsed once under his sleeve in response—like it agreed.
They reached the west wing main chamber—what used to be the combat training hall. Now converted.
Dozens of students had already arrived, arranged in groups based on color tier. Blues sat near instructors. Purples flanked internal defense agents. Reds… sat near the walls, watched but ignored.
Jason's group.
He and Milo settled near a stack of emergency medkits. Jason's pulse had started to normalize, but his mind hadn't.
Because the System hadn't stopped humming.
[Cross-Signal Traces Logged][Similarity to Erisflow: 82%][Biological Signature: No Match][Subsurface Effect: Cognitive Vein Opening – PRECURSOR STATE]
He blinked. That last phrase hadn't appeared before. Ever.
Vein opening?
Milo caught him zoning. "What is it?"
Jason hesitated. Then said, "The system says something's opening... inside of me."
"Like a Core breach?"
"No not that, something… ancient."
Before Milo could respond, the front of the chamber shimmered.
A projection burst into shape—Director Rhel's voice, but not his body. The air buzzed with suspended authority.
"Students of Blackridge. Remain calm."
Calm. Right.
"The barrier held. No damage sustained. But the visitor was not catalogued by our records or the global threat archives. As of now, its classification is 'Transient Anomaly.'"
Gasps. Murmurs. No one said it, but everyone was thinking it:
Transient Anomalies didn't just appear. They shifted through time and space.
The projection flickered.
"One last message," Rhel said. "Those who experienced direct resonance with the entity—report immediately to Veil at the Protocol Processing in the south annex. You will be prioritized for scan and classification."
Jason's stomach dropped.
Because already, a few students were standing.
And one of them was Aven Rourke.
She turned slightly, her eyes scanning the crowd.
Then landed on him.
Just for a second.
She didn't nod. Didn't gesture.
But Jason stood anyway.
As if pulled by something under his skin.
He didn't know what Protocol Processing was.
But it sounded like the kind of place you didn't walk into unless something inside you had already started changing.
And Jason Charon…was already too late for normal.
Aven walked two steps behind Jason, boots silent on the carbon-glass floor as the group made its way down the curved corridor toward the Protocol Processing Center. Emergency sirens had quieted, replaced by a low harmonic tone pulsing through the academy's infrastructure. A signal of lockdown mode—a city holding its breath.
Jason hadn't said a word since the barrier surge. Neither had she.
But Aven wasn't quiet because of him.
She was quiet because her head was full of static and the memory of what it did.
The thing that touched her mind.
It had lasted maybe five seconds.
[FLASHBACK – SEVEN MINUTES EARLIER]
When the first wave hit, most students ran.
Some followed the emergency pathing—routed by their Systems to designated safe zones. Others crouched, frozen, caught between instinct and protocol. The smarter ones moved fast.
But a few didn't move at all.
Aven was one of them.
Not because she couldn't—but because something pulled at her.
Not physically. Not even mentally. It was deeper than that.
A low-frequency call, like a magnet turning inside her bones.
She moved opposite the tide. Through a narrow gap in the south atrium wall. Past flickering lights and auto-locking gates. Toward the far end of the observation deck—normally sealed during emergencies.
It wasn't sealed now.
A pressure field had failed there. The panel sparked and glitched, giving her just enough time to slip through before the barrier hissed back into place.
And there, through the crystalline hex-glass…
She saw it.
Just beyond the city's barrier: the organism.
It didn't charge. Didn't roar. Didn't claw.
It looked, directly at her.
And when its gaze crossed the threshold—it didn't use light, or physics, or even logic.
It bypassed everything.
Reality, software, flesh.
It tunneled straight through the barrier and touched her.
Not her skin.
Not her mind.
It touched the part of her that knew she was being watched.
And in that frozen second, sound ceased.
Then: the flood.
Not a vision.
A collapse of meaning. An injection.
Mountains spiraled inside out. Time bent like heat off a burning road. A sigil split open and reflected her—but not the version she knew. A name entered her body, wordless, backward… but fully understood.
Then it ended.
Like waking from someone else's memory.
She stumbled back as if pushed, chest heaving.
And her System snapped back online with a silent hiss.
[Core Field Breach Logged – Undefined Pathway][Cognitive Integrity: 87% Stable][External Echo Detected: Anomaly Signature – Familiar]
That word again.
Familiar.
She didn't know why it mattered.
Only that the thing hadn't just seen her.
It had recognized her.
[PRESENT – WALKING TO THE CENTER]
"…Aven?" Milo's voice broke in. She blinked, realizing she'd stopped walking.
Jason glanced back at her, quiet but sharp-eyed. Reading her again. Not prying—just registering.
"I'm fine," she muttered, stepping forward quickly to resume her place.
He didn't press.
Ahead, Veil stood by the entrance to the Protocol Processing Center, flanked by two temporal anchors buzzing faintly. The doors behind her shimmered with pre-Council sigils—old and locked to voiceprint access.
As they approached, Aven curled her fingers inward.
The half-burned sigil hidden in her pocket felt warm through the fabric.
Not just warm.
Aware.
And somehow, she knew—
That thing beyond the wall hadn't chosen randomly.
It had picked her.
It wanted her to remember.
Even if she didn't understand it yet
The doors to the Protocol Processing Center hissed open with a delay—two seconds longer than standard clearance should've allowed. Jason noticed. So did Aven. So did Veil, but she didn't acknowledge it.
Inside, the room felt colder than it looked. Not from air temperature, but from disuse.
It was clean. Lit. Operational.
But wrong.
Like a place that hadn't been needed in years until tonight forced it awake.
Veil walked ahead, long coat trailing behind her like a shadow stitched to silence. Her boots echoed once, then stopped—absorbed by the layered sound dampeners of the legacy-encoded floor.
"This center predates the current awakening structure," she said, not turning around. "Its protocols aren't aligned with System stabilization. They predate even the Erisflow sync wave."
She turned then, meeting Jason's eyes first. "Which is why we're here."
Milo crossed his arms. "So we're the anomaly club now?"
"No," Veil replied. "You're the variables the mainframe can't explain. That's not the same thing."
Aven's gaze drifted to the far wall. A mural stretched across it—geometric shapes woven into a massive ring. At first glance, it looked like art. But as her eyes adjusted, she saw it: the mural was moving. Rotating. Each symbol spinning slightly out of phase, creating a loop of layered data.
Jason stepped closer to it. The system in his head pulsed.
[Unknown Protocol Detected][Data Format: Obsolete but Valid][Recommendation: Proceed with Caution]
He paused a foot away, but didn't touch it.
"Is this where we're supposed to sync?" he asked quietly.
"No," Veil said. "This is where you start to remember."
She reached for the control pillar—an ancient interface encoded with analog glyphs and anti-digital locks. Her fingers danced over the carved runes like someone tuning an instrument.
The wall pulsed once.
Then sections of the mural retracted, revealing three narrow alcoves behind it. Each held a chair—not modern, but something older, reinforced with resonance stabilizers and primitive neural alignment ports.
Aven's jaw tightened.
Jason's pulse picked up.
Veil motioned. "Sit."
None of them moved.
"Why?" Jason asked.
Veil didn't blink. "Because your Systems aren't the only ones logging your instability anymore. The city has seen you. The Erisflow has marked you. And something at the perimeter recognized at least one of you by name."
She took a step closer, voice low, precise.
"When something from outside the barrier touches you—reallytouches—you don't experience it all at once. The memory arrives folded. Buried. You feel it, but you don't remember it. Not yet."
She glanced toward the chairs.
"These devices were built during the early Contact anomalies. They don't simulate awakening. They reconstruct what the organism left behind."
Aven's fingers clenched.
"You want answers?" Veil said. "This is the price you need to pay, alignment with a legacy substructure. One that predates the awakening gates, before flow-based Class assignments. Before Profession algorithms, and even before synthetic Cores were legal."
Jason looked at the chair again.
It hummed faintly—like it was breathing.
The others hesitated.
Then Jason stepped forward.
He sat.
The moment his back hit the chair, his system flared.
[Legacy Protocol Sync Request Detected][Stability: Volatile – Syncing Memory Substrate][WARNING: Unverified Code Detected in Stream][Do you wish to proceed?]
'Yes.'
And then, lights out...