The cold bite of metal greeted his back. Seyfe's eyes fluttered open to the soft hum of machinery, tubes gently retracting from his chest and temples. The room was quiet, sterile — dimly lit with soft-blue pulses moving along the walls like veins of memory.
Recollection Bay.
He exhaled slowly, muscles twitching beneath the tight synthetic sheath of the post-combat medical suit. A subtle burn lingered behind his eyes — the echo of forced recollection syncing.
"How many times now…" he muttered to himself, eyes unfocused, "…have I woken up somewhere unfamiliar?"
"Twice since graduation," came a familiar voice.
Seyfe turned his head. A glass partition stood a few feet away, and beyond it, Handler Aki Varess stood with arms folded, posture unreadable.
"You've been unconscious for eighteen hours. The Recollection Thread took time to stabilize. Your neural map was—" She paused, searching for a clinical word. "—disordered."
Seyfe grunted as he sat up, wincing as a sharp pain pulsed in his ribs. "That bastard echoform nearly took my damn soul with it."
"According to the readout," Aki replied evenly, "it nearly did. You're lucky Jerome and Saline located your drop point in time. The rift was seconds from collapse."
Seyfe leaned forward, elbows on knees. He let the silence hang for a few seconds, his breathing steadying.
"Did it escape?" he asked finally.
"No. Its last signature was pulled back into a decaying layer collapse. You destroyed the core facility tied to it — the collapse likely severed its link."
Seyfe didn't look relieved.
"I still felt it," he said. "It learned. Not just mimicked. It hated me."
Aki remained quiet behind the glass. Then, with a swipe across her console, she brought up a projected image: the echoform, as recorded by his glove sensors during the battle.
Seyfe looked away instinctively.
"Your Recollection Thread showed everything — the twisted forest, the facility, the... experiments. HQ has already designated it as an emergent anomaly class: Echo Sovereign."
He narrowed his eyes at the title. "Sounds too noble for something made of stitched nightmares."
"You weren't supposed to encounter something of that class," Aki admitted. "This wasn't just bad luck — something altered that layer phase. Something pulled you in."
Seyfe sat still, the memory of the altar, the whispering voices, the shrieking corpses — all dancing behind his vision like a half-faded dream.
Then softly, he said, "…It wanted to be found."
Aki's expression shifted slightly.
"You're not done," she said. "You're stable, but I won't keep you confined unless medically necessary. You'll have some mandatory psyche scans, but after that — you're on standby."
Seyfe let out a low breath.
"Back to work already?"
"Your extraction confirmed one thing," Aki said. "There's a deeper rift web forming, and you were the first to touch it. I need you ready."
He didn't answer.
Instead, he turned back to stare at the echoform hologram, watching its pulsating heart, its stitched limbs, its still-glowing eye.
"Then I guess," he muttered, "I better start sharpening everything."
Aki stood before the glass-paneled debriefing room, arms crossed, eyes flicking across the floating displays of layered reports. Footage from Jerome's and Saline's bodycams played in separate frames—showing the grotesque forest, the tentacled roots, and the brief sight of Seyfe's battered body falling from the tear.
Inside, Jerome leaned back against his chair, the fabric of his uniform stained from the aftermath. Saline sat across from him, posture straight but stiff, her jaw clenched with unspoken tension.
Aki entered without ceremony, letting the door slide closed behind her.
"You're both cleared from infection risk. No residual rift bleed, no echo imprint," she said as she brought up a waveform of Seyfe's last recorded energy pulse before exiting the rift. "But what you encountered needs to be documented clearly. No assumptions. I want facts."
Jerome ran a hand through his hair and leaned forward. "The forest… It wasn't just twisted. It reacted to us — the roots weren't just environmental hazards. They targeted. Synced attacks. And the layout of the place, the air pressure, the scent... it felt sentient."
Saline nodded, her voice clipped. "There were layered echoes of pain in the forest. Every step in that zone pushed emotion into our suits — not random. Anger, mourning. Then grief. It was artificial. Engineered."
Aki raised a brow. "Engineered by who?"
Neither answered immediately.
Jerome was the one to speak next. "We don't know. But someone or something built that place. From the inside. The trees weren't just Echoform material. They were... what happens when you bind emotion and structure together. Raw emotion fused with decay."
"And the rift itself?" Aki asked, zooming into a rift fluctuation pattern displayed behind her.
Saline exhaled, shaking her head. "It wasn't natural. The spatial pull kept shifting. We almost didn't make it back. And Seyfe…" She paused, brows furrowed. "It didn't let him go. That thing chased him through each pulse phase. The forest, the altar—like it was designed to keep pulling him deeper."
Aki turned away for a second, eyes narrowed, before she quietly said, "So it's no longer random."
Jerome crossed his arms. "What are you thinking, Ma'am?"
"I'm thinking," Aki replied coolly, "someone hijacked the Broken Layer Phase system from inside. There's an intelligence within the dead zones. Something that knows how to manipulate echo-bound architecture. And it chose Seyfe as its focal point."
"Why him?" Saline asked.
"Good question," Aki said. "That's what HQ wants to know."
There was a tense pause. Aki turned to a side console and activated a secure holo-feed.
The image of Veiler Commander Herat Annon flickered to life.
"I've reviewed the footage from Seyfe's glove," Herat began, his voice low and measured. "We've flagged this anomaly under Emergent Category: Living Echo-Architectures. This is the first sign of echoforms adapting our own traversal systems. I'll be sending you a team of Echo Analysts and an Echo Binder—get ready to re-enter that canyon. A secondary investigation team will extract the site fragments."
"Understood, Commander," Aki replied crisply.
Herat's gaze narrowed. "And Handler Varess—keep Seyfe under observation. He survived something that should've shredded his mind. If he's adapting to those layers, we'll need him as more than just a soldier."
The feed cut.
Aki turned back to the two cadets, her tone sharp.
"Dismissed for now. Rest. Update your logs."
As they stood to leave, Saline paused at the door and asked, "Is Seyfe going to be sent back out?"
Aki didn't answer right away.
Then, quietly: "Not yet."
But in her mind, the real answer lingered.
Yes. Because whatever this is—it started with him.
And it was far from over.
The room was white. Almost too white. Sterile. Silent. The only sound came from the soft hum of the diagnostic machines scanning his vitals, motion, and neural frequency patterns.
Seyfe sat up on the biobed in Recollection Bay, shirtless, patches wired to his back and neck. His arms rested heavily on his knees. Bandages wrapped around his midsection and shoulder, bruises painting his skin like ugly reminders of what he barely clawed his way out of.
His mind swirled with fragmented flashes—roots writhing, the core pulsing like a heartbeat from hell, that thing evolving mid-fight… and finally, the plummet through that vortex of space and agony.
The tech assistant monitoring the screen next to him tapped a few commands, then squinted. "Something… irregular with your neural patterns, Veiler Seyfe."
Seyfe didn't respond. His body still ached, but the pain was manageable. What wasn't manageable was the low, sickening feeling in the back of his throat—the sensation like something was moving.
A cough escaped him.
Then another.
He leaned forward, gripping the edge of the bed as he hacked up something wet—sticky and metallic.
The assistant turned, alarmed. "Sir—are you—"
Seyfe tilted his head up.
The assistant took a step back.
Seyfe's tongue...was black.
Not bruised. Not injured. But fully, richly, unnaturally black. As if it had been soaked in pitch, dark and slick like oil. The very texture of it was wrong. Veined. Slightly ridged. Something pulsed beneath the surface, as if it had absorbed something from that damned place.
Seyfe slowly reached up, touching the edge of his lips with his thumb. He could feel it—not just the tongue, but something humming in his jaw. A taste that didn't belong. Bitter and ancient.
"Get… Aki," Seyfe said, voice low. His breath came out heavy. "Now."
The assistant bolted out of the room without hesitation.
Seyfe leaned back against the wall, breathing through his nose. His mind raced. His body felt intact—but something was inside him. A remnant. A thread of that nightmare not yet severed.
He didn't feel sick.
He didn't feel pain.
But he did feel changed.
A pulse throbbed behind his eyes, and briefly—just for a second—he saw green.
Not in the room.
Not a light.
But from within himself. A flicker. A blink.
Just like the eyes of the echoform.
Cut to:Veiler Medical Control — Emergency Quarantine Orders
The assistant ran down the hall, slamming her hand onto the alert panel as a digital siren turned blue.
CODE G-4: Rift Signature Residue DetectedSubject: Seyfe HeroContainment Status: Pending ReviewAki Varess Notified
Aki sprints down the hall with a bio-suppression team, her heart pounding as the reality dawns:
The rift didn't let Seyfe go.
It marked him.