Transition: Following the chilling message left at the Dawnspire ambush and the revelation that Kael is "marked," doubt and urgency simmer beneath the surface…
The residue of the ambush still shimmered in Kael's mind like spectral ash. Dawnspire had been a trap—not just physical, but psychological. Someone, somewhere, knew exactly what he was. What he had forgotten.
Back inside the war chamber, where broken tech glowed faintly beneath relic glass, Echo floated in near-silence. Her form had stabilized since the sync glitch—but something in her code still pulsed erratically, like a heartbeat afraid to restart.
"I reviewed the message," she said. "It wasn't just a threat. It was a timestamp. Someone triggered it the moment you stepped into that zone."
Kael clenched his fists. "They weren't guessing. They were watching."
Echo's eyes glowed dimly. "That means it's time."
[System Notification: Initiating Neural Lattice Alignment – Phase One]
[Warning: Partial Synchronization may overwrite latent memory boundaries.]
When Echo pressed two fingers to Kael's forehead, the pain hit like a meteor.
Memories broke loose—fractured, raw, and non-linear. Screams. Laughter. Blood in sterile light. A white lab drowned in red. Kael remembered himself with a different voice, a different name, standing at the edge of a machine unlike anything Nexus had shown. A gateway—not into the Nexus—but out.
Echo trembled as she processed his feedback loop. "I saw it too. You… you chose this. Before your mind was rewritten. You volunteered to bind with the system."
Kael fell to his knees, panting. "Then someone erased me to cover it up."
Her voice cracked with static. "And whoever did it… had root-level access."
Kael's eyes sharpened. "Then we find them. Piece by piece. Code by code."