Ilien stood by the edge of the Trinhold forest, watching the feed from her scout drone. She had placed it high above the ridge, programmed to follow residual motion near the second blackout site. Two days passed with nothing. Then, at dawn, something moved.
A hooded figure stepped into frame — tall, broad-shouldered, with a staggered gait. The figure walked along the treeline and stopped at a rusted junction box. It knelt and placed something inside before vanishing back into the trees.
Ilien ran frame analysis. The cloak was standard, civilian-cut, but reinforced at the seams — an old Hero field variant. The right boot had a metal clasp with a bent hinge, just like those used by pre-modern Rift units. The figure had turned once, briefly. The jawline was visible. Scruff, squared chin, high cheekbone.
She froze the image. It was faint and shadowed, but familiar.
She matched it against old photos recovered from her Rift War archive. The jawline was identical. The stance. Even the damaged boot, Veyne had taken shrapnel to the ankle during the second Veilmark breach. A mission report had noted that he refused surgical replacement.
This was him.
She located the junction box. It was a sealed HeroNet repeater. Long abandoned. When she arrived, the lid had been left slightly ajar. Inside was a broken earpiece, a black coin, and a folded strip of cloth.
She recognized the coin, a training token given to Hero squads that completed autonomy drills. A practice relic. Most tossed them away after graduation.
Written inside the cloth strip was a line:
"He waited. I waited."
Ilien didn't take anything. She sealed the box and stepped back. This wasn't just a trail. This was a message chain. A private broadcast. Not digital but human.
Someone was marking the past, one stop at a time.
---
Ilien returned to a survivor shelter near the old Veilmark ridge. It was operated by volunteers and unaffiliated medics. Most of them had lived through the Rift War. Some still had scars from the pulses. Most refused to talk about the war. But one man stepped forward.
His name was Durren Kai. He walked with a cane and wore an old Rift evac badge. She showed him the photo of the cloaked figure.
He stared at it longer than she expected.
"That's him," Durren said. "He was at the second corridor breach. We were told to pull back, but the transport didn't come. We thought they'd left us."
She asked when this was.
"Seventeen years ago. We were in a convoy. About fifty civilians. Mostly from the South Rim districts. They said the breach was getting worse. We didn't expect to make it. Then someone called us from the rocks. It was a squad. They had Hero tags but no command codes."
Ilien showed him the name.
"Veyne," he said. "Yes. That's what they called him."
He described how Veyne and a woman, red thread stitched into her sleeve , led the civilians across the waste sector. The woman carried a small child in one arm while radioing instructions to someone behind them.
Durren had watched Veyne refuse evac three times. He gave his spot to someone older. Later, he cleared rubble with his bare hands to make a path. No one filmed it. No orders were recorded. The squad simply acted.
Then the signals stopped. No one came for them again.
Ilien wrote it all down. When she asked why Durren remembered, he just shrugged.
"Because he stayed. Everyone else left."
She left the shelter and stood by the old breachline. The Rift zone beyond it was quiet now. The sky looked normal. But the land still held the weight of what was done here.
She added new entries to her record:
Durren Kai — civilian witness to Veyne
Red-threaded woman — Gura Coil confirmed by badge pattern
Evac refusal — repeated, voluntary
No formal command — squad operated independently
Human-led broadcast chain — ongoing
They were no longer just traces. They were witnesses. Real, living people remembered Veyne. And every trace left behind confirmed that someone had taken careful steps to let the truth survive.
Ilien now understood, this wasn't about uncovering records. This was about recovering memory.
Ilien returned to her safehouse in silence. She didn't turn on the lights. Her pad glowed in the dark as she loaded the Rift War rosters.
She compiled every confirmed unit involved in the southern operations — names, tags, squad numbers, deployment logs. It took her most of the night.
According to official records, there were 582 field units deployed in the South during the final year of the war.
But the archive rosters didn't match.
In the operational backups stored in the Veska south-server mirror, 629 unique deployment IDs were listed. That meant 47 squads were missing from the public record.
She went deeper.
She searched for any trace of those 47 squads —injury reports, death tags, burial logs, promotion records. None of them had re-entered Hero Command after the Rift War.
She ran a cross-check through medical archives. No injuries filed. No post-war therapy reports. No next-of-kin notices. Nothing.
It was as if 47 entire squads had been cut off and erased.
She compiled the IDs of the missing squads. Two of them matched old reports from Ashen Hold. One of them matched a field code found in Vault 6. Another matched the weapon ID from the torch she had recovered.
All of them had one thing in common, they were all stationed near evacuation corridors. Their assignments were mostly civilian protection, not frontline combat.
Ilien felt something tighten in her chest.
They were the ones meant to shield the escape routes. The ones told to stay behind and hold long enough for the retreat to work.
And then they were abandoned.
She added a final note to the file.
47 squads
All unlisted
No death records
All near evacuation routes
Never reassigned
Deleted from HeroNet post-war sync
Ilien didn't get time to act on the findings.
Two officers showed up at her door the next morning. She knew them — internal HeroNet inspectors. They asked for her pad. She refused. They handed her a court directive.
It was signed by Sereth Vale.
She scanned the order. It declared her under suspicion for unauthorized data retrieval and breach of HeroNet encryption protocols. She was to surrender all devices, all evidence, and report for debrief.
She didn't wait for them to finish. She stepped back, slammed the door, and climbed out the window.
She took only what she could carry — her sidearm, her notes, and the encrypted drive Veyne had given her. The rest she left behind.
She moved through back streets, passed through a rail tunnel, and reached one of her old field safehouses. It hadn't been opened in years. Dust covered everything. But the walls were still shielded, and the locks were manual.
She sealed herself inside.
She knew what this meant. Vale was watching. He had let her investigate just long enough to get close — and now he wanted it shut down. That wasn't a coincidence.
She powered down her pad and went dark.
They would trace her soon, but not quickly. The old safehouses had no HeroNet access. She had food for a week and power for five days.
She laid out everything she had on the table — the burned cloth, the Coil badge, the torch, the log from Vault 6, the list of erased squads.
She stared at the drive.
Veyne had said, "Don't plug it in near them."
She would wait. She needed to understand the pattern before opening it. If it was corrupted or tracked, she'd lose everything.
She pulled out a paper notebook and wrote by hand for the first time in years.