Darkness gave way to static.
Ren Calder stirred, eyes flickering open to a crimson strobe pulsing from a shattered emergency panel. The air hung thick with ozone and the wet-metal reek of old blood. The corridor stretched before him—rusted walls weeping condensation, shattered glass crunching beneath his boots.
Silence.
Then—
Scratch-scratch-scratch.
A sound like fingernails dragging over bone, echoing down the hallway. Distant. Deliberate. Something sniffing through the dark.
Then the voice—cold, crystalline—invaded his skull:
> "Subject: Calder, Ren – Soulburn Candidate recognized. Sync unstable. Initiating delayed protocol…"
A white-hot needle of pressure stabbed into the base of Ren's skull. His vision flared, crackling with jagged blue light as the System interface forced itself into his sight:
> "Soulburn Protocol initializing… Synaptic alignment at 11%… Warning: Core stability compromised."
Ren gasped. Cold fire raced up his spine, his bones humming like over-tuned piano wires. Flash-frozen memories—not his, never his— detonated behind his eyes:
A woman screaming into a crimson wheat field, her tears boiling as they hit the soil.
A skeletal hand reaching from shadow, fingertips dripping liquid ink that hissed like acid.
The sky shattering like stained glass, raining down shards of void.
> "Host alert: Memory sync incomplete. Corruption level—25%. Combat assist authorized."
Combat. The word curdled in his gut.
A sudden CLANG—metal on metal—ripped through the corridor. Ren's head snapped toward the sound.
Twenty paces ahead, a figure hunched in the gloom. Limbs bent backward at sickening angles, joints popping with wet clicks as it moved. Its face was a churning vortex of static, like a television screen tuned to dead channels.
Ren stumbled backward, shoulders grinding against cold riveted steel. The System chimed again, its tone edged with something almost hungry:
> "Host integrity at risk. Initiating Soulflare Protocol: Stage One."
His muscles locked like snapped cables. His right hand jerked sideways without consent, fingers clamping around a rusted metal shard jutting from a conduit.
The static-thing lunged—a blur of broken limbs and screaming silence.
Instinct—older than thought—took over.
Duck the scything claw that carved sparks from the wall.
Drive upward—shard punching into pulsing static-flesh.
TWIST.
SHIIICK-CRACK!
Black vapor geysered from the wound, reeking of burnt hair and spoiled milk. The creature imploded into swirling ash, its death scream a shattering chandelier of glass.
Silence slammed back, thick as a tombstone. Then—
> "Wraith-Spawn eliminated. Soul Shard acquired."
A sliver of bruised-violet light rose from the ash and drilled into Ren's sternum. He staggered, ribs vibrating like struck gongs, as foreign power—cold, corrosive—flooded his veins.
> "New entries unlocked. Classification nodes available: [Harbinger] – [Echo Knight] – [Mnemonic Revenant]. Assignment optional."
Ren stared at the ash, skin prickling.
"What the hell am I?" The whisper scraped raw from his throat.
He dismissed the prompt. The phantom weight of phantom weapons lingered, but he turned away. Too many questions burned hotter than the brands seared into his forearms.
Ahead, a shattered console lay half-buried beneath collapsed pipes. One screen flickered like a dying firefly. Beside it, a charred data-slate whirred, spitting sparks as it played:
> "Dr. Reivan, Log 721… They told us the Echoborn Project would end the Forgetting. But all we made were weapons that remembered too much. Calder was the last viable host before the protocol failed…"
The feed collapsed into screaming static.
Weapons. Hosts. The Forgetting. The words scratched at his sanity.
His fingers trembled as he pocketed the slate, its surface still warm. Still humming. On the wall, a navigation beacon blinked blood-red, pointing toward a jagged maintenance hatch.
He moved past containment cells—shattered from the inside.
Glass walls spiderwebbed with stress cracks.
Rust-stained floors etched with burning System sigils—circles within circles.
Bones in the corners—femurs, vertebrae fused with crystal.
> "Warning: Host integrity compromised. Countdown to Corruption Threshold – 6 days."
The hatch hissed like a serpent as it slid open. Freezing wind slapped his face, carrying the stench of ozone and deep-earth rot.
He stepped into a shattered world.
A dead sun hung low, bleeding bruise-purple light across a broken horizon.
Towers of blackened stone jutted like broken teeth from scorched earth.
Floating islands drifted overhead, trailing roots of glowing moss.
Below, a sea of violet mist churned, hiding things that scuttled and clicked.
Behind him, the facility sealed with a final, hydraulic gasp.
Ahead, the wasteland waited—silent, immense, hungry.
And deep beneath the scars, beneath the brands and borrowed strength,
something began to burn.