[PHANTOM VEIL v1.0 - TRACE OBSCURATION ONLINE]
[CLASS CAMOUFLAGE: ENABLED (TIER 1)]
[STEALTH FIELD: 23s ACTIVE / 60s COOLDOWN]
[STABILITY OCCUPANCY: -10%]
[PASSIVE DRAIN: -0.3% STABILITY / MIN WHILE ACTIVE]
Kai blinked. Then grinned.
It didn't just hide him. It rewrote him — or at least how the world saw him. Class camo? Stealth?
The Veil had its own cost though. Ten percent of his stability, locked out the moment he equipped it. He could feel it — like a glass ceiling on his body's rewrite buffer. That part of him just... inaccessible.
And if he pushed too far beyond that cap? Threshold again. Maybe worse.
Still. Worth it.
He nudged the camo settings experimentally. The air shimmered — and a moment later, his UI shifted to reflect a new identity:
[CLASS: LEVEL 4 // SYSTEM TEMPLAR // LOGGED USER - ADMIN-KAI.EXE]
Kai blinked. "…Templar?"
That wasn't right. System Templar wasn't just rare — it was internal. Admin-level. A class built to guard backend integrity and flag rogue behavior. You didn't earn it. You didn't even see it.
It was the kind of thing only higher-ups were assigned. Quietly. Off-record. And yet, here it was. Right there on his list.
His eyes lingered on it.
It'd be perfect. High-trust, high-clearance. The kind of role that could walk through a firewall without raising a single red flag.
But not now. Not here.
The minute he left this dead zone, showing up as a low-level Templar with glitched stability would set off every scanner in range. Red-flag city.
Too much heat. He scrolled down, picked something forgettable:
[CLASS: SCRAPPER // LEVEL 4]
Generic. Ugly. One of those background junk roles that wandered code wastelands looking for salvage. Perfect.
The Veil shimmered as it locked in the projection. His class tag stabilized into something harmless. Kai exhaled and moved deeper into the lab.
Perfect cover. Kai toggled it. The Veil shimmered — recalibrating the visible projection. His tag flickered once, then stabilized.
SCRAPPER. Level 4. No threat. No questions.
He nodded and moved forward, deeper into the lab.
The air thickened with static the farther he went. Walls wept condensation from half-rendered textures. Rusted pipes bent into impossible loops, vanishing into code-thin cracks in the rock. Something hissed behind a wall once, sharp and wet—then went silent.
Then—
A faint metallic clatter.
Kai froze. Pressed himself flat against the angled corridor.
A patrol drone clanked into view around the far corner.
It walked—four heavy legs grinding against the floor, armored joints hissing with hydraulic pressure. Its body was a low, tanklike chassis stacked with scanners, rotors, and a mounted emitter that pulsed with charging light. No eyes. Just a grid of sensors scanning in waves across the passage.
Its beam swept forward in a wide cone of deep-blue scanlight, slow and methodical.
[ENTITY SCAN - CLASS: PATROL]
[LEVEL 60 - CODE-SANCTION ENFORCER // STATUS: ACTIVE]
Kai's breath hitched. Level 60?
This wasn't patrol range. It was execution range.
The drone paused. Its scan flicked toward his direction. Light crept up the corridor, closer, closer—
Kai didn't think.
He tapped the Veil's stealth prompt.
The world hiccupped.
His body fuzzed out like static—edges gone, presence dissolved. The scanwave passed directly over him.
No alert. No ping. Just silence.
The drone lingered. One long, twitching second. Then clanked forward and vanished around the next turn.
Kai didn't breathe until it was gone.
Then he did—sharp and quiet, adrenaline rattling his spine.
"…holy shit."
He blinked. Let out a short, breathless laugh. For the first time since waking in this nightmare, something worked. A way to move. To breathe and not worry about instant death.
He kept going.
The corridors twisted. Crawled. Forked.
Kai ducked beneath broken panels, squeezed through crumbling vents, slid down collapsed maintenance shafts. Once, he belly-crawled across a flickering floor panel while a drone passed overhead — its scanfield brushing the soles of his boots.
Each time, the Veil held.
Not perfectly. The stealth field left a flicker trail if he moved too fast. Class camo only fooled surface scans — if someone really looked, they'd know.
But it was enough.
Enough to make him someone else.
A nobody. And right now, that was safer than being Kai.
Eventually, the paths narrowed, then stopped. A dead end.
A sealed chamber lay ahead — no label, no lighting, just a rusted bulkhead half-buried in debris. He wiped his palm on his coat and pressed it to the sensor panel.
The door hissed open. Inside: dust and silence.
Black glass panels lined the walls, cracked and dead. Disconnected terminals sat in a long row, skeletal wiring spilling out the backs like veins. A single chair rested at the center of the room, metal twisted where someone had clearly once panicked.
Above, scorched cables hung from the ceiling like puppet strings, swaying slightly even though no air moved.
And in the far corner — tucked between two collapsed panels — a faint light pulsed.
Red. Unsteady. A flickering holo-emitter.
Kai stepped toward it.
The emitter buzzed. Jittered. And spoke.
"Well well. Look at you. Still breathing. Mostly."
Kai froze."…who—?"
The emitter sparked again, spitting out a few glitching pixels. Then, a voice — distorted, layered, but unmistakably human beneath the static.
"Name's classified. Voice isn't. You can call me whatever you want. But hey — congrats. Not many meatbags make it this far without exploding."
Kai stared. The voice seemed to echo off the walls, coming from everywhere and nowhere.
His legs gave out. He slumped against the nearest wall, breath fogging the inside of his mask.The Veil buzzed faintly — edges flickering. Stability was draining faster than he liked. With his threshold stress sitting at less than 80%, there wasn't much buffer left. Not safe for long.
He looked up. A screen on the far wall — cracked, old — sparked to life. Static first. Then a flicker of a symbol: a tilted eye, glitched out at one corner. Then… a voice.
"Wearing that thing? Either you're lost, or stupid lucky."
Kai blinked.
The tone was snarky, casual — nothing like the cold system prompts. It had weight. Personality. Like someone was still in there, watching.
And maybe laughing just a little.
"You don't look like an observer. Too twitchy. And still bleeding. Which… yeah, fair."
Kai stayed silent.
The voice chuckled. "Threshold stress… eighty percent? Damn. Not bad, newbie. Didn't think you'd last this long."
Another pause. Then—
"You got questions. I got fragments. Welcome to the Echo Cache, newbie."
A low hum rolled through the walls — deep, slow, like a machine trying to remember how to breathe.
"…don't touch anything glowing, by the way. Learned that the hard way."
The monitor sparked again — blue pulse, rhythmic. Like it was syncing with his heartbeat.
"This place isn't supposed to be reachable. Blacksite deep. One-way door kinda deal. Looks like someone forgot to patch a hole."
Kai didn't answer. Just watched as cables along the ceiling twitched, shedding dust.
"Back in the day, though… they used to send people here. Test cases. Burnouts. Rejects. Whatever you are. This place ate them all. Quietly."
A pause. The AI's tone dipped into something almost nostalgic. Then it snapped back:
"Anyway. I'm what's left of the operator AI. Mostly. Got dumped here after the last meltdown. They didn't wipe me clean — just scrambled the edges. Left a few threads intact. Enough to be... helpful."
Another flicker. The tilted eye on the screen twitched once, like it was studying him.
"I've seen a few like you come through. All hungry. All burning red. None got this far. So—"
The light brightened, casting sharp contrast across the ruined chamber.
"You're either exactly what I've been waiting for… or you're about to make things very interesting."
Then the monitor dimmed again — one final pulse. Waiting.
Listening.