The smoke hadn't cleared.
Not completely.
Even with the extraction team's floodlights cutting through the haze, the ruins of Sichuan felt choked — silent in a way only death could bring.
Seyfe stood still at the edge of the impact trench, boots crunching over broken glass and singed concrete. His blade, still stained with the Echoform's blackened fluids, hung loosely in his hand.
Behind him, Saline sat on the wreckage of a collapsed wall, chest heaving. Ferez tightened his armor straps again, wordlessly watching the horizon as if expecting another eruption. Jerome had gone ahead with a pair of scouts from the extraction unit.
"Still feels like it's breathing," Saline muttered, wiping ash from her face.
"That thing didn't die natural," Seyfe said. "It burned, sure, but the soil underneath it didn't cool right. Felt like stepping on a fever."
A metallic hiss echoed through the far end of the trench.
One of the extraction vehicles opened, its side venting steam. Med-teams stepped out, followed by a containment crew hauling scanning gear. Their presence should've felt like relief.
It didn't.
Because Jerome's voice came in next — over comms, low and rigid:
"You need to come see this."
The squad moved fast through the half-collapsed mall structure that had once stood as part of an underground shelter. Twisted beams, melted screens, and smoldering mannequins surrounded them as they entered the lower level. The air felt heavier here. Almost wet.
They found Jerome standing before a hanging mass.
Strung across the center of the room, webbed in an eerie translucent membrane, was a cocoon-like structure suspended in mid-air by thread-like strands pulsing faintly with green iridescence.
And inside it — torn, scattered, but unmistakably human — were the mangled remains of a Veiler.
An arm twisted unnaturally upward.
A leg crushed, bones exposed.
The torso gaped open, as if deliberately hollowed.
But it was the head that froze Seyfe.
Half the skull remained intact — the other cracked, one eye socket empty. And as they stared, a sickening wet sound echoed—the remaining eye dislodged, sliding from the torn socket and falling in a slow, surreal descent, hitting the ground with a muffled plop.
Saline covered her mouth.
Ferez cursed under his breath.
Jerome stood still.
Seyfe took a step forward. His fingers twitched. His core pulsed faintly, as though reacting to something dormant yet present in the room.
"What… is this?" Saline finally managed, voice hoarse.
Jerome replied grimly, "The Veiler's ID tag is partially readable. He was part of the scouting unit sent two days ago. But this doesn't look like something that happened quick."
"No," Seyfe whispered. "This was ritualistic."
From the far corner, a medic moved closer to the cocoon's threads, raising a scanner. The screen flickered.
"Sir… there's still a heartbeat."
Everyone froze.
"What?" Jerome stepped forward.
"Not from the body. From the threads."
A shiver ran through the room.
Seyfe's eyes narrowed.
"It's watching us."
In the silence that followed, the cocoon twitched—just once.
Enough to feel deliberate.
Enough to promise: this wasn't the end.
The cocoon pulsed again.
Only once — a slow, contracting twitch — but it was enough to send every weapon in the room raised and pointed toward it.
"Do we extract it?" one of the extraction medics whispered, clutching the side of his scanner as its vitals pinged erratically.
"Hell no," Ferez barked. "You see that thread pattern? That's not a nest. That's a trap."
Jerome had already moved, shielding the medic while his right hand went to the signal beacon.
"Mark the site. Biohazard lockdown. No one touches it until core analytics can sweep for resonance patterns."
Seyfe took a cautious step closer, eyes tracing the green slime-like liquid crusted around the threads. They shimmered slightly — like they weren't entirely in the same layer of reality.
His blackened tongue felt dry against his throat as he muttered,
"This isn't just Echoform biology. It's mimicking… structure."
"Like a web?" Saline asked, still shaken.
"Like a warning."
The remaining eye on the ground twitched. Briefly. Then burst — with no sound, only a thin puff of mist.
Everyone stepped back instantly.
Red overlays shimmered across the 3D map projection of the Sichuan region. A live video feed hovered midair in front of Aki Varess, who stood arms crossed, her crimson eyes scanning every frame of the last 30 seconds.
Her gaze locked on the cocoon. On the threads.
And most of all, on Seyfe's face.
He wasn't afraid. Not like the others.
He was listening to something.
"Pause playback," she ordered.
The frame froze.
"Enhance the thread fibers. Run a weave frequency comparison against Class D-E Echoform constructs."
An aide beside her typed furiously. The scan pulsed. No match.
"Now crosscheck with anomalous layer-spatial drift structures."
There. A flicker of red.
Match Found: Broken Layer Residual Entity Structure, Grade C — Echoform: Sovereign Class Mutation.
Aki's expression darkened. Her voice came soft and deadly calm.
"So it lived…"
Another alert chimed.
Another window opened.
It was an ambient sound feed—barely intelligible.
Faint voices echoed from the cocoon in Sichuan, captured by Veiler scout audio sensors.
Dozens of whispers, overlapping.
A chorus of breathless tongues, speaking a language not translatable.
Aki leaned forward.
Her eyes narrowed.
"Get me a direct link to Overseer Handlers Alpha through Delta. Lock Sichuan under Protocol Veil-Two. And…"
She hesitated, briefly.
Then added:
"Flag Seyfe under elevated Echoform Sensitivity Classification."
The aide froze. "Ma'am, that's only for—"
"Do it. And notify all field teams. Whatever's building this… it's not finished yet."
A low rumble of warning signals echoed through the Command Hall as the map slowly began to shift — new red zones appearing across the Eastern region.
Seyfe's name pulsed quietly under one.
And behind him, something old had begun to awaken.
A hush fell across the room as the last of the audio feed cut out. The murmuring from the cocoon still rang in the heads of the staff who heard it. Every monitor now displayed live vitals, spatial integrity scans, and failing containment thresholds across the Sichuan sector.
Aki stared at the frozen image of the cocoon—its grotesque design almost too deliberate. Too precise.
"Why are low-graded Echoforms showing sovereign mutations?"
Her voice didn't rise.
But it cut through the silence like a blade.
No one answered at first. Then one of the analysts, a younger overseer clad in a pale navy coat, cleared her throat.
"There were no indicators prior, Ma'am. No mutation trends tracked. The first manifestation of the sovereign traits... it happened post-ambush."
Aki turned to her. "Meaning?"
"Meaning it adapted. Or something forced the evolution."
Another tech added, nervously, "We reviewed historical data of Sovereign-tier Echoforms. They usually occur due to spatial anomalies overlapping—at most, two or three layers merging."
"But Sichuan wasn't even categorized as unstable," the comms officer said, fingers flying across the input pad. "There were no drift pockets, no Broken Layer interactions on record."
Aki's red eyes narrowed.
"That we know of."
She turned her attention back to the 3D map as fresh red lines etched across it — overlapping veils expanding from Sichuan outward like a fungal bloom.
"Send a request to the Spatial Archives. I want a full chronological review of all layer disturbances within a 600-kilometer radius, even the Class Z anomalies."
"But ma'am, that'll include unclassified entries. Some predate the Sovereign codex."
Aki's tone sharpened.
"Then dust them off."
She paused again, more to herself than anyone else.
"If these mutations are no longer bound to Echoform grades..."
Her hand hovered over the screen, pointing at Sichuan.
"Then something is rewriting the rules."
The ash-laced wind howled low across the fractured ground. Broken shells of once-formed buildings lay half-swallowed by the debris. The Vanguard Veiler Squad 07-D, four strong, moved in formation across the deadened basin. Their visors flickered faintly with telemetry updates as they crept toward the scorched crater.
"I've got movement," whispered Veiler Tanos, weapon half-raised. "Single heat signature. Human frame… but it's just standing there."
"No comms ping. Might be a lost civ—"
"No. Too still."
They crept closer, peering through the shifting dust.
There—a humanoid figure, garbed in a layered gray cloak, its face partially obscured by a dark breathing apparatus. Beneath him lay a mound of shredded Echoform husks—several dozen, freshly slain, if the oozing green blood and twitching tendrils were anything to judge by.
But the humanoid wasn't fighting them.
He was studying them.
Holding up a narrow injector, he inserted it slowly into the neck of one of the collapsed D-class Echoforms, pressing the plunger until a black-gold fluid was emptied into its system.
The Echoform's corpse jolted violently.
Veins burst from its skin like spider roots. Spines erupted. Its ribcage cracked backward—then reshaped.
A sovereign glyph—one that no codex had on record—flickered across its forehead in a fiery outline.
Then the humanoid laughed.
Not just any laugh. A low, giddy ripple, like someone overwhelmed with satisfaction at witnessing the birth of a masterpiece.
"Now then," he said, voice cold and serene. "Test run. Target: Veiler signatures—four, close-range."
The reborn Echoform's eyes flared orange. Its jaws split vertically into three.
The humanoid turned toward the stunned squad and grinned beneath his half-mask.
"Exterminate them."
The sovereign-warped Echoform screeched, hurling itself toward the squad as the humanoid vanished into thin air—like mist.
The room was already tense. Murmurs from other handlers filled the air as maps flickered with increasingly red zones. But the moment the piercing SOS chime rang out again—this time with a violet-priority beacon—Aki Varess turned sharply toward the holotable.
"Source?" she asked, voice sharp, her crimson eyes flashing under the harsh glow.
"Vanguard Squad 07-D, Sichuan fringe. Live feed just went dark. Last signal indicated hostile Echoform engaged… and then—" The analyst's voice faltered. "They saw a humanoid presence. Not civilian. Possibly controlling the Echoform."
Aki's pupils narrowed.
The feed rewound, and for a split second—just before static overtook the stream—Aki caught the image.
A man. A syringe. And something changing.
"Pause. Zoom frame 82."
The holo froze on the figure. The playback glitched, the image distorted, but the outline of the dark fluid injection was clear. As was the moment the Echoform's body reacted violently, beginning its shift.
"This isn't an environmental mutation. That's artificial augmentation," Aki muttered.
Another operator called out, "Ma'am, we're getting another echo spike—northwest drift. Possibly another sovereign mutation ripple. Same frequency. Spread radius is increasing."
Aki inhaled deeply. Then:
"Initiate Protocol Red Veil—containment threshold three. I want every squad in surrounding sectors rerouted for wide-net coverage. No rescue missions unless squads are paired."
She turned to her terminal, fingers already moving.
"And pull up the last remaining squad report on sovereign-class behavior in non-layer regions. If we're looking at coordinated Echoform evolution…"
Her voice trailed off.
This wasn't just a shift.
This was war, and someone was accelerating it.