Progress rate: thirty percent… forty percent… forty-three percent…
The soft, synthetic voice of the pacification system echoed like a heartbeat in the steel chamber, steadily rising in cadence. With each minute, Seyfe's muscles stopped twitching, the burning in his veins cooled, and the once-unbearable pressure on his chest eased into a manageable throb.
His breathing steadied.
The rapid, shallow inhales that once betrayed panic now softened into a rhythm closer to sleep—closer to stillness.
And then...
He drifted.
Within his mind, the world was weightless.
The sterile, bright light of the chamber gave way to a fog-laced expanse, a place devoid of time, gravity, or form. It was neither a dream nor a memory—just a boundless void of sensation, echoing with the distant murmurs of voices.
They were countless. Layered. Rhythmic. Whispering and screaming at once. Some were ancient and slow, others sharp and infantile. Some wept. Some laughed. All of them spoke to him.
"Why did you sever the heart?""You tore the source… you bore the seed…""It lives in you now…""One of us. One of us. One of us."
Seyfe stood—or thought he did—against the backdrop of this twilight abyss. Around him, figures began to shape themselves from the fog.
They were warped, impossible reflections of himself.
One bore the black tongue. Another had gold-etched runes pulsing across his skin. One had empty eye sockets weeping ink. One wore the veil of a handler, voice drenched in authority. Some were twisted echoes of the echoform he had fought—hybrids of man and nightmare, eyes glowing green, smiles filled with shark teeth.
"What did you touch, Seyfe?""What did you awaken?"
"You broke its prison, and now you wear its mark."
He clutched his chest. The faint golden pulses he'd seen in his veins were now visible on his translucent skin, running like circuits. They felt like a map—a pattern—like something buried in him was trying to form.
Then the ground shifted beneath him, cracking open in a radial chasm. From its depths, a single eye blinked open. Green. Glowing. Familiar.
It watched him.
"You didn't destroy it," the chorus intoned."You made it you."
Seyfe fell to his knees as the eye expanded, swallowing the fog into a spiral of pressure. His ears rang. His tongue ached again, as if reacting to some unseen pull.
"The pacification won't hold forever…""You broke the rule of layer. You walked too deep.""Now… you echo."
Seyfe grit his teeth. "No. I fought it. I beat it."
The voices all shrieked together—mocking and mournful.
"No, Seyfe… you became it."
He screamed.
And as he did, the green eye surged into a blast of golden-white light, ripping the fog apart—just as the system's voice returned:
Progress rate: Seventy percent… Eighty percent…
In the chamber, Seyfe's body arched suddenly—straining against the restraints, the veins in his neck flaring with black and gold before quickly dimming.
"Stabilization spike!" one of the techs shouted.
"Hold the pacification sequence! We're nearing core reaction!"
Aki watched from behind the observation glass, arms crossed tightly. Her gaze never left Seyfe.
"…What did you see in there?" she whispered.
Inside, Seyfe slowly calmed again—sinking back into stillness, his brow glistening with sweat, jaw locked tight.
But in his unconscious grip, his fingers had clenched into a sign—the same pattern etched into the walls of that facility he'd destroyed.
The mark of the echoform's core.
And for a brief moment… the room felt colder.
Progress rate: ninety percent… complete.
The containment chamber let out a sharp hiss as its pressurized seal released. A rhythmic pulse echoed once through the steel, followed by the grinding motion of thick doors sliding open. Cold, recycled air spilled into the room, brushing over Seyfe's exposed body like a sterile winter wind.
The lights above shifted from red to soft white. Indicators turned green.
A voice from the intercom chimed monotonously:
"Subject vitals: stabilized.""Neural activity: synchronized.""Core compatibility: 72%... pacification successful.""Genetic conflict… suppressed."
Inside the chamber, Seyfe slowly stirred.
His breathing had settled, his heartbeat no longer erratic. The golden-black veins once etched across his body had vanished. His flesh was normal again—color returning, warmth regulated.
But not everything had reverted.
When he sat up and let out a low groan, his tongue briefly slid past his lips—pitch black, unnaturally dark, like slick obsidian ink. Thin tendrils of gold-pulsed veins ran along its underside, glowing faintly before dimming again.
The mutation had been contained… but not erased.
The tongue was permanent. His body had accepted it—merged with it. A foreign trait now native to his being.
Seyfe felt the weight in his mouth, heavier than before. It didn't hurt, but it felt alien. Each breath tasted faintly metallic, like breathing air through a bloodstained coin.
He ran a hand through his hair, eyes flicking to the reflective panel across from him. He saw the tiredness. The exhaustion. But the thing that stood out was that one defiance of normalcy—the tongue.
A curse. A scar.Or maybe… a mark of survival.
Outside, Aki Varess approached the containment deck. Her expression was unreadable, arms crossed, coat hanging from her left shoulder. When the steel doors unlocked fully, she stepped toward the open chamber and motioned for the med assistant.
"How is he?"
The assistant studied the console. "Genetic pacification complete. Vital signs all stable. Mental strain low. No signs of echoform neural bleed."
"And the tongue?"
"Still present," the assistant said carefully. "Its structure has been fully integrated. He's… not infected. It's not corrosive. But the mutation is permanent. The DNA imprint couldn't be reversed."
Aki didn't blink. "Cognitive risk?"
The older doctor—gray-haired, sunken-eyed, the same one who had first worked on Seyfe after his initial recovery months ago—stepped forward.
"I'd monitor his psyche closely," he said. "Echoform DNA often leaves behavioral residue… not enough to control him, but enough to influence. If there's a voice in there still, it's not gone. Just quiet."
Aki gave a small nod, then stepped into the chamber threshold. Her boots echoed on the metal floor as she stood before Seyfe.
He looked up. His face was gaunt, but his eyes sharp. Clear.
She took a moment before speaking.
"You alive?"
Seyfe snorted lightly, the corner of his mouth twitching. "Define alive."
She folded her arms. "You're breathing. You're not trying to tear your skin off. That's a start."
He leaned forward, hands clasped over his knees, his voice hoarse and low. "I can still taste it. The forest. The blood. The thing's screams. They don't leave."
She studied him in silence.
Then she asked, "Can you stand?"
Seyfe nodded, pushing himself to his feet. He wobbled slightly, but the resolve in his spine held. When he spoke again, his tongue flicked against his teeth—the jet-black thing an inescapable visual.
"I'm ready," he muttered. "Let's get it over with."
Aki turned toward the exit. "You've got five minutes to dress. Then report to debrief. You and I have things to discuss."
Seyfe stepped out of the chamber slowly. Cold floor met bare feet. The steel walls behind him sealed with a clang, as if to make clear: whatever came in with him—wouldn't be leaving again.
Even now, something slithered at the edge of his thoughts. Not a voice. Not a command.
Just presence.
Watching.
Waiting.
And still smiling.
The room was colder than Seyfe remembered. Clinical. Hollow. The overhead lights buzzed faintly, and across the metal table, Handler Aki Varess stood like a statue — arms folded, expression unreadable.
Seyfe sat hunched in the lone chair, wrapped in a medical compression suit. His fingers twitched slightly, still remembering the echoform's acidic touch. He didn't know how long he'd been here, only that he woke up contained. Contained like a threat.
Aki finally broke the silence.
"Four months."
Seyfe blinked. "...What?"
"You disappeared for four months. Not days. Not weeks. Four months, Seyfe." Her tone wasn't angry. It was worse — measured. Focused. Watching him like a test subject about to give unpredictable results.
He leaned forward slowly, his throat dry.
"No. That's not right. I was gone for four weeks, max. I kept count."
"We ran the diagnostics six times. Temporal displacement inside a broken layer loop. You were off-grid. Not just from Veiler tracking, but reality itself."
Seyfe felt a chill crawl up his spine. The room suddenly felt smaller.
"That's not possible."
"It is now."
Aki walked toward the holotable beside her, flicking her fingers to bring up the projection. The map shimmered with rift data, layered anomalies, activity spikes around the Great Canyon.
"You weren't supposed to be out there alone. No mission. No clearance. No trail."
He exhaled through his nose.
"It wasn't official."
"Clearly."
"I didn't expect to get sucked into that layer phase. I was just… traveling between cities."
Aki turned sharply.
"And you just 'stumbled' into a Grade-A rift tear domain? One we didn't even know existed until it spit you back out unconscious with corrupted vitals and mutation patterns we've never seen before?"
Seyfe's jaw clenched. He didn't answer.
Her eyes drifted to his face. "The tongue. It's not just a mutation, is it?"
He tried to swallow. His tongue, still ink black, pulsed faintly. Its golden veins had dimmed, but hadn't disappeared. It was his now. A piece of the thing he fought. A reminder.
"It bit me. Or maybe bled into me. I don't know. It wasn't just one fight. It changed. It… learned."
Aki's gaze hardened. She tapped the holotable again, switching the view to his biological scan — erratic vitals, spiking resonance, traces of foreign matter.
"Your Veiler core isn't even at one hundred percent synchronization. You shouldn't have survived in a loop that long. Yet here you are."
"Maybe I shouldn't have." His voice was low. Bitter. Tired.
Aki stepped closer, folding her arms.
"Did you hear anything in there? Voices? Instincts that weren't yours?"
He hesitated.
"...Yeah. All the time."
"And now?"
He nodded faintly. "Still there. Quieter. But not gone."
A pause hung between them like a sharp blade.
"Until further notice," Aki said, voice firm, "you're off deployment. You'll remain under observation and regular pacification checks. If anything changes — if those voices grow stronger — you report it immediately."
Seyfe scoffed quietly.
"What if I can't tell what's me anymore?"
She didn't smile. Didn't blink.
"Then you're going to have to fight like hell to remember."
She turned to leave. At the door, she paused.
"Whatever you found in that place... it marked you. We may not understand it yet, but you're changed. Just make sure you're still Seyfe when it tries to finish the job."
Then she was gone.
Seyfe let his body fall back in the chair. The lights above flickered.
And somewhere — not in the room, but in his head — a whisper curled through his mind like smoke.
"We're not done yet..."