You know that feeling when your skin knows something is watching you — before your eyes catch up? That cold weight on your neck, that heartbeat that isn't quite your own?
That's how it started.
The mission was supposed to be simple. A cleanup operation in a C-rank Rift that opened near the Hollow District. A dozen monsters. A few traps. Nothing a low-tier squad couldn't handle.
But the Guild wanted me to go.
They'd started doing that lately — "volunteering" me for missions I had no business being on. I think they were testing me. Watching me. Waiting for me to crack open like a melon and spill whatever secret they suspected I was hiding.
Arlen came anyway. Uninvited, as usual.
"Why are you here?" I grumbled as I pulled on my broken-tinted goggles.
"Because," he said, slinging a crossbow over his shoulder, "every time you go alone, you come back either bleeding or staring into nothing. I like my friends not dead."
"You call me a friend now?"
"You're too annoying to be a stranger."
I snorted.
Truth was — I was glad he came. Not because I needed help fighting, but because I was starting to forget how to act human when no one else was around.
The Rift stood in an abandoned subway line — a spiral of violet haze that shimmered like oil on water. It pulsed. Breathed.
Waiting.
And when we stepped in, the temperature dropped like a stone.
Inside the Rift
The place looked like a drowned cathedral.
Pillars made of warped iron. Benches half-melted into the floor. A soft chittering echoed in the distance — like insects with lungs. I took point, while Arlen kept his back to mine.
[System Notification]
Gate Type: Abyssal Echo
Risk Level: B-
Anomaly Detected: Presence of a False Core
Objectives:
— Terminate Hostile Entities (12)
— Locate the False Core
— Extract Alive
A False Core?
That was new.
Rifts usually had a Source Crystal — the thing that powered the whole Gate. But a False Core? That meant the Gate had created a decoy. Something intelligent. Something that could trick you.
And tricked we were.
By the time we reached the central chamber — a round arena with glasslike walls and writhing shadows — half the squad that entered with us were gone.
One screamed.
Then silence.
Then a pop, like a melon splitting open.
Arlen gripped his weapon tighter. "Crispin. You feel that?"
I did.
It wasn't fear. It was worse.
Recognition.
Something was calling to the Echo inside me.
And the Echo was listening.