Part V – Command Above the Storm
The command deck buzzed with volatile silence.
No shouting. No scrambling officers. Only the steady tap of keys, the pulse of security locks re-enabling, and the low ambient hum of stabilizer towers rotating in error-state synchronization.
At the center of it all, Evelyn Zarek stood in stillness that felt carved from obsidian.
Her long black hair was bound high in a combat braid, dark strands glinting faintly under the overhead resonance lights. Her expression was unreadable—dark brown eyes locked on the central data stream as it rotated an ever-shifting spiral of corrupted recursion data. Violet glyphs occasionally pulsed beneath her gloves as she interfaced directly with the system.
Beside her, Ava Halloway moved in calmer motions—her steps precise, her presence like a cool balm against the system's fraying nerves. Her blonde hair was half-tied, loose strands brushing her cheeks as she monitored the stabilizer's emotional readout panel.
[ANCHOR LOAD: 91.7%]
[ECHO VECTOR: ACTIVE]
[VEIL SEED PROTOCOL — TRIGGERED]
"You're tracing the wrong layers," Ava murmured, adjusting the calibration screen. "The shift isn't just coming from the seed logs. It's threading through the auxiliary net—look at this signature. Rowan's field is absorbing more echo than it should."
"I see it," Evelyn said. Her voice was controlled steel, but tension coiled in her jaw. "That's not natural anchor degradation. It's being fed something."
Ava tapped her amplifier crystal once against the console's edge. The screen refreshed.
"What's feeding him?"
"I don't know yet," Evelyn said. "But whatever it is… it has a pattern. Look here."
She enlarged a corrupted fragment—veinlike chains of data laced through an echo silhouette. A shadow barely visible in the logs.
A figure.
Humanoid. Flickering.
And behind it, a spiral pulse of resonance that matched Lucian's perfectly.
Ava leaned in. "That's not a Rift signature."
"No," Evelyn agreed. "It's internal. Self-sourced. Something is replicating Lucian's frequency."
A beat.
Then Ava whispered, "Or echoing it."
Their eyes met.
Neither of them needed to say it. They'd both seen recursion signatures before—ghost data from fractured timelines, leftover imprints trying to reform. But this was different.
It wasn't just echo data.
It was trying to live.
Ava's voice lowered, almost hesitant. "Do you think it's another Veil seed?"
"No," Evelyn said. "It's something worse. It's an unfinished tether trying to replace its original anchor."
Her hand hovered over the killcode key.
Then stopped.
"If we disrupt it without full sync mapping," she said, "we might trigger an internal collapse. The anchor—Rowan—could destabilize before we find the source."
"And if we do nothing?"
Ava's blue eyes darkened. "Lucian could get overwritten."
Silence pulsed between them.
Then Evelyn looked at her—not as Zarek Technologies' director, not as the infamous Rift strategist, but simply as a woman watching the edge of control slip through her fingers.
"If this thing is what I think it is… we were never prepared."
Ava stepped closer, brushing her fingers briefly over Evelyn's.
"We face it together," she said softly. "You don't have to carry it alone."
Evelyn didn't speak.
But her hand—usually cold with control—curled gently over Ava's.
Their grips locked.
Then the console flared again.
[SEED THREAD – REPLICATION IN PROGRESS]
[DECK 12: ANOMALY ACTIVITY SPIKE – 104%]
[ANCHOR CONTAINMENT – ACTIVE ATTEMPT FAILED]
"Lucian and Rowan are engaging," Ava said.
Evelyn drew her blade from its sheath in one motion, the resonance along its edge vibrating with barely contained energy. She turned to the field team interface.
"Activate all interior sub-shields," she commanded. "Deploy support units to level twelve. And flag Ren's chrono signature to standby. He might be needed."
The room pulsed red again.
Below, chaos bloomed.
Above it, Evelyn and Ava stood shoulder-to-shoulder—two halves of Zarek's last line of defense.
And the system wept code neither of them had written.
Part VI – Echo Reversal
The air on Deck 12 was electric—too still, too sharp. Lights flickered in intervals, not from power disruption, but something beneath the building's resonance grid pulsing out of sync. The deeper they descended into the sublevel, the louder the hum became. Not mechanical.
Alive.
Rowan and Lucian emerged into the corridor outside the resonance well. The walls there were curved with alloy-veined supports, retrofitted to house Veil prototypes and chrono systems—dead systems now, blinking red with warning glyphs.
Rowan's breath caught the moment they passed the arc threshold.
Baseline Anchor Instability Detected.
His vision blurred for half a second, and a cold spike jabbed behind his eyes.
Lucian's hand immediately pressed against the small of his back. "You're flickering again."
"I know," Rowan muttered. "But something else is, too."
He didn't have to clarify. They both felt it—the echo not just echoing, but responding.
A low whine trembled through the walls.
Then the far corridor ruptured.
The blast wasn't physical—it was a resonance surge, like a scream threaded into time. Walls twisted briefly out of alignment, as if reality had stuttered and tried to rewrite its geometry mid-frame. From the distortion, a figure stepped through.
Tall. Obscured in static-glitch afterimages.
The shape of a man—shoulders too familiar, movements too close.
Lucian froze, something unreadable passing over his face.
The figure mirrored him. A perfect ripple.
Then it attacked.
Lucian moved first, blade formed from raw resonance energy blooming into his hand, purple glow igniting like a fracture in the dark.
The Echo Lucian met him with a jagged flicker of time-warped weaponry—an identical blade, corrupted at the edges.
The clash sounded like screaming metal.
Sparks of distorted gravity snapped through the air with each blow. The two were locked in a mirrored dance—every step, every shift, every parry too familiar.
Rowan watched, jaw tight, shielding field braced and ready—until he felt it.
The other Lucian's resonance. Still the same base signal. Still tied to him.
Except twisted.
Wrong.
Desperate.
Elsewhere – Observation Room Delta
Ren stood behind a reinforced pane of transparent alloy, bouncing on the balls of his feet like a wolfhound waiting to be let off leash.
"Come on, come on..." he murmured, hands gripping the resonance gloves Ava had given him. "I knew it was gonna get fun eventually."
His chrono amp hummed on his wrist, catching faint spikes of warped time signatures leaking from the deck below. They prickled across his skin like someone walking over his grave—but he didn't look scared.
He looked curious.
From behind, one of the med techs tried to usher him further from the glass. "You're not cleared for deployment, Saiki. Just stay—"
Ren turned to grin at them. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm just watching."
His foot tapped anxiously.
But beneath his bright eyes and twitchy energy, his field was twitching.
Adjusting.
Resonating in tune with the anomaly he couldn't yet see.
He didn't notice the faint burn pattern blooming across his chrono charm. Or the soft pulse from the amp—matching Rowan's anchor baseline.
Back to Deck 12
Lucian was bleeding.
His ribs were scorched along one side where the echo's jagged blade had grazed him—same trajectory, same brutal precision he used himself.
"You're not me," Lucian snarled, ducking low, feinting left, slamming a knee into the Echo's gut. The moment of contact knocked the creature back—just a moment—but he didn't stagger. He folded backward, limbs bending with uncanny elasticity before rebounding into place.
Its face was obscured by light distortion. But its eyes—
Rowan saw them through the flicker.
Glowing. Feral. Violet like Lucian's when he overexerted—but cracked with bleeding lines of light.
It lunged again, blade screaming through the air.
Lucian parried, barely.
Behind them, Rowan extended his guiding field, trying to weave a stabilizer pulse into the air—but the second his resonance touched the Echo, it snapped back like elastic under too much pressure.
He gasped, gripping his temple.
It didn't want guidance.
It wanted him.
Lucian realized it too late.
The Echo turned—blade angled—not at him, but at Rowan.
Lucian launched forward, body screaming in protest, intercepting with a roar of raw power as he slammed his own resonance blade into the Echo's trajectory.
The impact sent both of them flying backward.
Lucian crashed into a pillar, coughing blood.
Rowan's vision dimmed.
And through the fog of distorted air and flickering lights, the Echo paused.
It raised its blade again.
Its head tilted toward Rowan.
And though its mouth didn't move—
"You always die before I reach you."
Rowan's blood ran cold.
Part VII - Emergency Containment
Before he could step back, Lucian was already moving.
A flash of light. A violent rift ripple.
Lucian collided with the Echo mid-lunge, both of them crashing into the far wall with a pulse of kinetic force that shattered the corridor's reinforced glass panes.
The building groaned around them. A flaming conduit crashed behind Rowan, forcing him to dive aside.
Their blades met with a scream of resonance.
The same blade. The same movement.
Lucian attacked with a slash from above—high to low, a downward arc meant to disorient.
The Echo anticipated it. Matched it. Countered.
A burst of temporal distortion exploded outward as the Echo blinked behind Lucian in a flicker of purple-glitch light, ramming his elbow straight into Lucian's spine with a crunch.
Lucian grunted and staggered, spinning in time to block a second strike aimed for his ribs—but not fast enough. The blade carved across his side in a flash of blood.
"Shit!" Rowan yelled. He surged forward, trying to reach them, but debris barred his path.
A tactical squad rounded the corner just as Lucian slammed the Echo against the wall.
"GET HIM DOWN!" barked the unit leader.
Pulse rifles whirred and fired—arcs of blue kinetic bolts launched at the Echo from multiple angles. The hallway filled with the staccato thunder of weapons fire.
The Echo didn't flinch.
He absorbed the impact. Let it hit its shield.
And then—
He vanished.
A blink forward.
Two of the tactical officers were impaled a second later.
The Echo's blade split the first clean down the middle—skull to groin, spraying the walls with a wet slap of blood. The second's head was sliced clean at the jaw, still wearing a frozen expression of terror.
Lucian moved again, intercepting, but his movements were half a breath too late.
The Echo was too fast.
Too practiced.
Lucian pivoted, launching a kinetic spear toward the Echo's heart, and the clone caught it mid-flight—and threw it back.
It slammed into Lucian's shoulder with bone-snapping force, throwing him across the corridor. He hit the floor hard, coughing blood, his arm limp at his side.
Rowan screamed, resonance field bursting outward. His shielding activated around Lucian in a crackle of teal-blue light just as the Echo aimed for the killing blow.
But the blade hit the shield and glanced off.
For now.
Rowan's legs gave out, nose bleeding from the strain.
"Lucian!"
Lucian was trying to rise, blood trailing down his side, face pale but his eyes—his eyes were still sharp. Still furious.
"Don't act like me," he hissed at the Echo, voice ragged.
The Echo didn't respond.
Instead, he turned his attention to Rowan.
And moved.
—
A golden flare of time split the air.
"NOPE!"
Ren crashed into the scene from the far end, launching off the wall with a pulse of Chrono Flare.
"Back the hell off!"
He slammed his hand into the Echo mid-step and triggered a Temporal Snare. A dome of warped air crystallized around the Echo, freezing his motion for a breath.
Just one breath.
"Ren, fall back!" Evelyn's voice screamed through his comms.
"Busy saving people, Commander!" he yelled.
He yanked Rowan back with a hard grip on his collar, dragging him across the scorched tiles, sparks flying as the world resumed.
Lucian used that moment—his blade ignited again, and he rammed into the Echo from behind, plunging the resonance blade into its back.
But the Echo only laughed—a broken, static-laced sound.
"I've already lost you, too."
The Echo turned his head, blood bubbling from its mouth.
And then, with a surge of mirrored kinetic energy, he launched both of them apart in opposite directions.
Lucian hit a pile of rubble. Hard.
He didn't get up.
Rowan's scream pierced the chaos. "LUCIAN!"