Dust scattered across the broken slope as Arix and the team fled the relay station, shadows crawling in their wake.
The thing that followed wasn't like the others. It didn't scream or snarl or howl.
It clicked.
Each step of its many legs echoed like claws on ancient stone, a rhythm too deliberate to be random. Too patient to be beast-like. A hunter.
Kael carried Selis again, the field stretcher sagging under her weight and the slope's pull. Calyx limped beside Arix, blood seeping from the edge of her braced leg—ripped open anew during the scramble through fractured stone. The storm front loomed overhead, crackling with Riftlight. Thunder without sound.
"Four minutes," Kael grunted, glancing at the HUD projected across his lens. "That's how far back it is."
"Four minutes is too damn close," Calyx snapped.
They pushed forward.
The terrain grew steeper, a collapsed section of old-world infrastructure veining the canyon like the bones of a long-dead god. Pillars leaned at unnatural angles. Gutted tunnels wound through the rock, half-choked with debris.
Arix's shard pulsed harder now—not in warning, but in resonance.
Something was near.
> [Signal: Classified Echo Field – Encryption Unknown]
[Caution: Layered Identity Signature Detected]
A fork loomed ahead.
One path was wide and clear—but exposed. The other wound down into the earth, through a structure half-swallowed by the slope.
"Underground," Arix said. "We'll lose it in the tunnels."
Kael nodded and veered hard, dragging Selis through the lower path. Calyx followed, sword already drawn, jaw clenched against pain.
They descended into the dark.
---
The tunnels were cold.
Not just from temperature, but from absence. No heat signatures. No system pings. The Rift couldn't penetrate here.
Which meant something worse had.
The space felt... scraped.
Like memory had been carved out of the stone.
The walls were lined with names.
Not carved. Not painted.
Written in ash.
Calyx ran a hand across one.
"They're not names," she whispered. "They're... numbers. Designations."
Kael tilted his head. "Obsidian?"
"No," Arix said, eyes wide. "Worse. These are... they're echoes."
A console blinked faintly up ahead, half-buried in rubble. Arix approached it.
> [Echo Resonance Detected – Cross-reference Key: Fragment Two]
[Access Granted]
A new vision erupted.
He didn't fall this time.
He stood in a room surrounded by faces—none of them fully formed. Blurred, fading, like photographs smeared by rain. They watched him.
A voice spoke. It was his voice.
"You were never meant to survive."
A flicker. A flash of a woman's face. Lira.
Then darkness.
And silence.
Arix gasped as he came back.
Kael was already aiming down the corridor. Something scraped overhead. Not close, but not far enough.
"We need to move," he said. "Now."
But Arix didn't move.
He was staring at the names on the wall again. One of them glowed faintly now. One that hadn't before.
Vale-0.
His name.
Or a version of it.
Calyx grabbed his arm. "We have to go."
Arix nodded slowly, but his voice was distant. "They built this place around something. Around us."
"Then let's tear it down later," she said. "Right now we survive."
They ran.
Behind them, the creature finally entered.
It didn't roar.
It whispered.
A sound like dozens of voices speaking his name.
---
They twisted through deeper corridors, dodging piles of rubble and broken equipment. The thing behind them moved slow, but steady—never rushing, never losing their trail.
Arix glanced at his shard. It was glowing faintly now, as though caught between alert and recognition.
> [Echo Threshold Approaching – Instability Imminent]
Calyx wheezed beside him, hand clutching her side. "How does it know your name?"
"I don't know," he answered. "But it's not guessing."
The tunnels opened into a long, narrow hall. Murals covered the walls—painted in faded reds and violets, depicting men and women kneeling before the sky. A shard hovered above them, weeping light.
"I've seen this image," Arix muttered. "In the first vault."
"Religious?" Kael asked.
"No," Calyx said. "Worshipful. They thought the shard was divine."
"And maybe it is," Arix added. "Or maybe they made it that way."
At the far end of the hall was a sealed door. Arix reached for the control panel.
It opened at his touch.
---
Inside was a chamber unlike the others. Warm. Lit. Machines hummed softly, powered by old-world reactors still running on buried fuel.
A table sat at the center. Upon it: a data pad. Unlocked. Waiting.
Arix picked it up.
The screen displayed one line:
"This is where the first version died."
He scrolled down. Logs appeared. Test files. Video footage. A child—barely ten—hooked to cables, screaming. A technician whispering to a microphone, "Vale-0 unstable. Sync failed. Prepare the next."
Another child entered the room.
Another version of him.
Arix backed away from the table.
> [Memory Spike Detected – Core Integrity: Strained]
Calyx steadied him. "You okay?"
"They cloned me," he said. "Or copied. I don't know which. But there were others. Before me."
"Which means there could be more," Kael added.
"Not could," Arix said. "There are."
The machine in the room beeped once.
A voice, mechanical and distorted, spoke from the intercom:
"Protocol Reset Initiated. Vault Subject: Active. Target Confirmed."
"Run," Arix breathed.
They sprinted.
Behind them, the hall lit up with pale blue energy. The vault awakened.
And the hunter was coming.
---
They broke into daylight an hour later, battered and scraped. The thing hadn't followed them past the threshold.
Selis was still unconscious but stable. Kael crouched beside her, fingers tight with restraint.
Calyx collapsed beside Arix and wiped blood from her face.
"What the hell is Vale-0?" she asked.
Arix looked toward the Rift-scarred horizon.
"Not what," he said.
"Who."