Kael didn't know where he was walking. The world changed too fast to map, too subtly to catch in motion. One moment, the ground beneath him was soft soil with ash-gray moss. The next, it was smooth metal panels, humming faintly like a buried machine just beneath the surface.
Still, the cube in his hand pulsed.
It hadn't stopped ticking since he took it.
A soft rhythm—backwards.
He had counted forty-two ticks before realizing they weren't seconds. Each one came at irregular intervals. Sometimes three heartbeats apart. Sometimes none. As if time around him was adjusting to its rules, not his.
Then—tick #43.
The world changed again.
One blink—and he was in a hallway.
Steel walls. Flickering lights overhead. Markings on the ground in a language he almost understood. A corridor of shadows and echoes.
But this time—he recognized it.
> "Sector F-12. Facility Loop 3."
The memory hit him like ice.
He'd run through here before. Barefoot. Bleeding. Holding something that wasn't his.
And someone was chasing him.
Kael turned sharply.
Nothing.
He took one cautious step forward. The lights overhead dimmed.
Another step. A screen on the wall flickered to life.
A white square. Then a voice—robotic, but calm.
> "Subject 17. Cycle 18. Reintegration attempt failed."
> "Initiating Second Echo."
Kael's mark glowed red.
The floor shifted beneath him. Not moved—changed. What was once metal became transparent.
And beneath it, he saw dozens of bodies.
His.
All versions of him.
Sleeping. Burned. Drowned. Some broken. One still screaming with no sound.
He staggered back, bile rising in his throat.
> "This is what happens when you try to leave before you're complete."
Kael shouted at the screen. "What do you want from me?!"
No reply.
Just a pulse from the cube in his hand.
> Tick.
And with it, came a new ability.
It wasn't obvious. It wasn't power. Not yet.
It was a glimpse.
For half a second, Kael saw the hallway as it truly was—not metal, not clean. Just a rotting, blackened tunnel filled with rust and rot. He blinked, and it was gone.
But he knew what that meant.
> "This isn't real," he whispered. "It's just a skin."
He wasn't inside a place. He was inside a projection—a training ground, a prison, a simulation running on top of something older. Something ruined.
That was the Second Echo.
The gift of seeing through the false layer—briefly, painfully, but enough.
Kael stood still.
Let the lights flicker.
Watched the ground below, the corpses of himself shifting slowly in their glass graves.
He held up the cube.
> "How many fragments are there?" he asked the system.
The screen blinked once.
A number appeared:
> [17 REMAINING]
And below it:
> "Collect all to reach the Fracture Core."
> "Reach the Core to make your Choice."
> "But each fragment brings the Echo closer."
Kael narrowed his eyes.
> "Echo of what?"
The screen flickered off.
And behind him, the hallway door unlocked with a hiss.
Kael turned.
Beyond it: a staircase spiraling down into static.
---
End of Chapter Four