Chapter 13 - The Sunken Ghost

. NEW HIDEOUT, KOWLOON WALLED CITY (REMNANT) - NIGHT

The team is on edge. JULIAN is cleaning a deep gash on his arm, the result of his brutal fight with his own Echo. He is silent and withdrawn, haunted by the experience of fighting a ghost that wore his face. The personal nature of this new threat has shaken him to his core.

ARIS is hunched over his grandfather's journal, cross-referencing it with the Wayfinder's data.

ARIS > I've isolated the first component we need. It's a unique power regulator, designed to handle exotic energy signatures. According to these notes, my grandfather tracked one to its last known location... inside a decommissioned Soviet nuclear submarine. The K-219 "Phantom."

KENJI > A Soviet sub? Where is it?

ARIS > That's the problem. It was sold for scrap to a private collector in the 90s. It's currently sitting in a ship-breaking yard in the Bay of Bengal. A ghost ship in a graveyard.

KAELEN, seeing Julian's distress, approaches him. Her Temporal Sight allows her to see faint, shimmering after-images of his fight, the ghostly echo of his pain.

KAELEN > You're not alone in this, Julian. We'll face them together.

JULIAN > (looking at his hands) > That thing... it had my memories. It knew I was going to duck before I did. How do you fight something that knows your next move?

This question hangs in the air, unanswered.

EXT. SHIP-BREAKING YARD, BAY OF BENGAL - DAY

The location is a vision of industrial decay. The massive, rusting hulks of dead ships are being torn apart on a muddy, oil-slicked beach. It is a dangerous, lawless place.

The team arrives under the cover of a monsoon squall. They locate the K-219 Phantom, a massive, black Typhoon-class submarine, beached on the shore like a dead whale. Its hull is scarred and rusted, a relic of a bygone era.

INT. K-219 PHANTOM SUBMARINE - DAY

The interior of the submarine is a claustrophobic, metallic tomb. Red emergency lights cast long, eerie shadows down tight corridors. The air is stale and smells of decay.

Aris guides them with a makeshift scanner, tracking the energy signature of the power regulator deep within the sub's reactor room. The journey is tense. The groaning metal of the ship, combined with the storm outside, creates a symphony of unsettling noises.

They reach the reactor room. The power regulator is there, housed in a reinforced containment unit. But they are not alone.

The room is filled with a flickering, unstable energy. The Echo they face this time is not of a person, but of an event. They have stumbled into the spectral reenactment of the submarine's final, disastrous moments before it was decommissioned—a reactor leak.

Ghostly figures of Soviet sailors, their forms glitching and translucent, phase in and out of existence. They scream silent warnings in Russian. The air crackles with phantom radiation alarms.

ARIS > It's a temporal echo of a meltdown! The radiation isn't real, but the temporal energy is off the charts! It's interfering with my scanner!

The main threat appears. The Echo of the submarine's Captain, a man who died trying to prevent the disaster. He is more solid than the others, his face a mask of grim determination. He sees the team not as people, but as intruders interfering with his duty.

The fight is a desperate battle against a ghost and his environment. The Captain's Echo can manipulate the sub's spectral systems. Doors slam shut, trapping them. Steam pipes burst with phantom energy.

Julian, facing a ghost who is driven by duty rather than rage, finds his footing again. He isn't fighting a monster; he's fighting a soldier. He uses his tactical knowledge to predict the Captain's moves, creating diversions and herding the team towards the objective.

Kaelen uses her Temporal Sight to navigate the environmental hazards, seeing which pipes will burst and which walkways will collapse moments before they do.

They finally reach the regulator. As Aris works to detach it, the Captain's Echo corners Kaelen and Julian. It raises a spectral pistol. There is no escape.

Julian, remembering the Echo of himself, doesn't try to dodge. He stands his ground, looks the ghost in the eye, and speaks, not with aggression, but with respect.

JULIAN > Your duty is over, Captain. You saved your crew. Let it go.

For a moment, the spectral Captain seems to understand. His form stabilizes. He lowers his weapon. But the temporal storm is too strong. He glitches violently and lunges forward.

Kaelen acts. She uses her Containment Field, trapping the Captain's Echo in a bubble of frozen time. It is a moment of mercy, not violence.

They secure the regulator and escape the submarine just as the temporal storm inside reaches its peak, causing the spectral reactor to "melt down" and dissipate into nothingness.

The episode ends with the team back in their transport, the first component for the Chronovisor secured. Julian looks at Kaelen with newfound respect. He has faced his own ghost and found a new way to fight—not just with his fists, but with his humanity.

FADE TO BLACK.

END OF EPISODE 13