Chapter 13: Fractures in the Web
The morning haze hadn't yet burned off when Victor von Doom stepped into the fractured light of the undercity — the ruins beneath the surface-level transit grid, older than memory, layered in rust and silence.
The shadows here were different. Thicker. Denser. Almost sentient.
He walked without hesitation, his cloak brushing past broken rails and forgotten maintenance terminals. The woman's trail was cold, but not lost. Something still pulsed in the air — not scent, not sound, but psychic residue.
> [Mental Protocol Level 2: Sensory Amplification – Passive]
[Residual Psionic Imprint Detected: 2.1%]
Too faint to track by ordinary means.
He exhaled slowly and whispered the command, more thought than sound.
> "Engage Mental Protocol Level 4."
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then—
> [Warning: Mental Protocol Level 4 – Cognitive Layer Decoupling will cause perceptual distortion. Proceed?]
[Y/N]
> Y.
A surge. Like his mind cracking along invisible fault lines.
The world didn't change — but his perception did.
---
Now he could see everything in layers.
The rusted pipes were overlaid with faint streaks of psionic energy, dancing like afterimages in ultraviolet. The broken floor held imprints of boots, disturbed air currents, fragments of whispered memory.
And then — a figure. Not truly there. Not alive.
An echo.
She had stood here. Not long ago.
Victor staggered, breath hitching.
> [Protocol 4 Side Effects: Short-term dissonance, cognitive flickering, memory bleed.]
He ignored the warning.
She had looked back here. At something. No — at him. The imprint wasn't conscious, but there was a pull. A reflexive awareness.
She had felt his echo.
And in that shared moment of psionic feedback, the system had absorbed more than just data.
---
Victor knelt, pressing his palm to the concrete.
The vibration wasn't physical. It was a hum — like the system itself had slipped through a crack in time.
> [Accessing Echo Convergence Thread…]
[Decrypting Memory Shard…]
A burst of images slammed into him: a flame spiraling in reverse, a tower collapsing into itself, a child holding a broken gear, and her — standing in a field of mirrors, all of them reflecting different versions of Victor.
Then darkness.
---
He gasped and fell back, blood running from one nostril.
> [Protocol 4 Overload – Disengaging Cognitive Layer Decoupling.]
The world snapped back to normal. Flat. Dull. Silent.
Victor wiped the blood and steadied his breathing. The shard wasn't just a memory.
It was a message.
Or a warning.
Someone — or something — was leaving him breadcrumbs. Not just her. The system? The relics? Something older? He didn't know. Yet.
---
He stood.
The psionic trail was still faintly visible, and though Protocol 4 was offline, he'd mapped enough of it mentally.
She was moving with purpose — but erratically. She wasn't avoiding him; she was avoiding something else. Her route doubled back through null-zones where surveillance systems and psychic tracking alike failed.
Not random.
She knew the city.
But not him.
Not truly.
---
By midday, Victor reached a locked transit gate — long defunct, sealed decades ago after a tunnel collapse. The place reeked of ozone and something older, metallic and burnt.
On the gate was a sigil. Simple. Etched by hand.
A spiral with a slash through it.
Victor's eyes narrowed.
He'd seen it in one of the decoded glyphs on the subway relic — barely a footnote in the system's data stream.
> [Symbol Match: 87% Similarity to Echo Nexus: Site Delta-Four]
Another relic site.
And someone had marked it.
Her?
Or someone watching her?
---
He didn't enter.
Not yet.
Instead, he reached into his coat and pulled a small triangular shard — a leftover fragment from the subway relic before it vanished. Dormant since recovery.
Until now.
It vibrated faintly, responding to the symbol on the gate. A pulsing call and answer.
> [Fragment Sync Initiated.]
[New Data Unlocked: Code Phrase – "Second Thought is First Wound."]
Victor's pulse slowed.
A code phrase. No obvious meaning.
But somehow… it resonated. In the chest. In the mind. In the memory of lives not fully his.
The system remained silent, offering no clarification.
That, more than anything, unsettled him.
---
A whisper reached his ear, but no sound had been made.
She watches. The echo knows.
Same as the courier message.
But this time, something different happened.
His reflection — faint in the glass of a half-shattered monitor — stared back at him.
But not him. Not exactly.
The eyes were wrong. Colder. Smiling.
Victor blinked.
Gone.
---
He turned and left the gate untouched. For now.
He would return, better prepared. Protocol 4 had shown him how fragile the walls of thought were becoming — how easily the system could open them and how quickly they could close.
He would not risk that again without anchoring himself deeper.
---
Back in his room, he entered everything — the glyph, the phrase, the echo trail — into the encrypted system console. Threads upon threads emerged. Some crossed. Some ended in static.
But three new coordinates pulsed on the map.
Three potential relic sites.
Three paths forward.
And one truth buried beneath it all:
She was a key.
But to what?
---
Victor didn't know.
Yet.
But as he stared out the window, the phrase echoed again — not from memory, but from deep within the system, like a whisper stitched into his very code:
> "Second thought is first wound."
---
He would find the meaning.
Or become the wound himself.
---