[Initializing Node Ghost Protocol – Accessing Blackline Memory Residue…]
"Time isn't erased. It's overwritten. If you listen closely, the past is still humming underneath the present—like a backup song playing behind a glitching track."
📍Location: Arcline Cathedral Ruins, Sector 7-Grey
The Cathedral didn't look like a place of worship anymore.
Most of its data-shielded stained glass had long shattered, leaving jagged data remnants floating mid-air like corrupted mosaics. Once a vault of sacred soul-script and Resonant Code, now it was a decaying echo-chamber—unstable, broken, and haunted by bad updates.
But Aiven needed to be here.
His breath fogged in the cold digital haze, even though the ambient temperature was technically fixed at 22 degrees Celsius. The effect was psychological, induced by legacy echo drift—a glitch left behind by the last Sync War. This entire area had been marked redline: unrecoverable, uninhabitable, and unwise to enter.
But that's what made it valuable.
"If there's any trace of the Original Patch, it'd be in here..." Aiven muttered.
He ducked beneath a collapsed data-beam and entered the nave. His HUD flickered, overlaying ghosted blueprints over the current structure. Most of it didn't match. The Cathedral had evolved with every Patch—but not cleanly.
[> INITIATE ECHO SCAN – RANGE 40m.]
[> Scanning for: Unregistered Protocol Echoes...]
A faint chime.
Hit.
There, behind the cracked altar, half-buried in broken memory-stone, was a ghosted interface—half real, half memory. Faint lines of code spiraled from it like a bleeding hologram.
[Memory Fragment Detected – Owner ID: "S. Virell"]
An Echo Fragment is not just a recording—it's a shard of will. A moment of thought so deeply felt, it stamped itself into the system, defying deletion. These fragments can be dangerous. They hold emotion, perspective, and occasionally... intent.
To access one is to relive it.
Aiven pressed his fingers to the interface.
His vision snapped.
[ECHO INITIATED – Source Memory: Spectra Virell]
The world around him twisted into clarity—too clear, hyperreal. He stood now in the same cathedral, but whole. Polished. The stained glass above shimmered with glyphs that told the story of human evolution: from bone to gear, gear to wire, wire to code.
At the center stood a younger woman—Spectra, no older than twenty-five. She wore no armor. Her face was soft, not yet hardened by Concord's cold hierarchy. She held a child in her arms.
Aiven blinked.
"Is that…?"
The memory Spectra was humming a lullaby—no lyrics, just a tune. Her voice was soft, emotional. Something he hadn't known she possessed.
"His code's unstable," she whispered to someone outside view. "I warned them. You can't bind a living soul to an untested Patch root without shattering continuity."
Another voice answered. Low. Mechanical.
"Then why did you do it?"
"Because they were going to erase him. And he was... mine."
Aiven's breath caught in his throat.
Was she talking about him?
The memory collapsed suddenly, the cathedral returning to its ruined state. A flicker in Aiven's vision showed new data written into his PATCHCAST HUD.
[NEW INFO FILE ACQUIRED: "Soulkey Entry Zero"]
He staggered back, heart pounding.
"She was trying to save me…"
Suddenly, movement.
Fast.
The echo fragment hadn't gone unnoticed.
From behind a shattered confession booth, something slithered out—not walked, not ran—slithered.
Its body flickered in and out of existence, like corrupted textures in a game. A blend of armor and glitch, it hissed with unparsed sound files. Echo Constructs, born from corrupted emotion and failed purge cycles. This one was malformed, massive.
"Echo Daemon," Aiven cursed. "Of course…"
A Daemon in PATCHCAST terminology isn't just a monster—it's a sentient code wreck. A failed construct that gained enough autonomy to exist without instruction. They're unstable, often violent, and feed off unlocked memory.
[> PATCHCAST: FOCUS THREAD // ENGAGE ECHO-CUTTER]
[> INITIATE: LAYER SLICE – DIRECTIONAL DECODE]
A blade shimmered into Aiven's hand—not metal, but a curved arc of code and energy shaped like a sickle of fractured reality. An Echo-Cutter—one of the few tools capable of deleting Daemons without causing permanent data spill.
He charged.
The Daemon hissed, limbs shifting geometry mid-attack. One second it was a hunched crawler, the next it towered, forming cybernetic wings that screamed static.
Aiven rolled under the first swipe, slicing across the daemon's midsection. The blade disrupted its form, temporarily scattering it into a cluster of voxel-like cubes. But it reassembled, faster than expected.
"Fast respawn loop," Aiven gritted his teeth. "Gotta break its host thread."
He spun, leaping onto a tilted pew and vaulting over the creature, slamming his blade into the pulsing core at the base of its spine—a chunk of old code engraved with a child's face.
Not just any child.
His face.
He froze.
Too long.
The daemon struck back, slamming him against a pillar. Warning flares flooded his HUD.
[> DAMAGE DETECTED: MEMORY INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.]
[> PATCH INTEGRITY AT 34%. SUGGESTED: DISENGAGE.]
But he didn't run.
Instead, he whispered a new command. A secret one.
[> ECHO COMMAND: Soulkey – SIG: "VIRELL-BLOOD"]
[> CONFIRMATION OVERRIDE. PATCH RESYNCHRONIZING.]
The blade in his hand pulsed gold. Not code.
Emotion.
He drove it into the daemon's core.
It didn't scream.
It remembered.
Its entire body trembled, flickering through thousands of shapes—a boy, a man, a version of Aiven who had died too early, one who had lived too long. Until finally, it dissolved. Gracefully.
Like a soul being freed.
Aiven collapsed to one knee.
And in the silent aftermath, a new voice whispered.
Not mechanical. Not digital.
Just... human.
"You're not just running from the system," it said.
"You're the last uncorrupted memory of someone they tried to delete."
He looked up, blinking against the residual light.
At the far end of the cathedral stood a figure draped in patchwork robes, glowing faintly with inactive commands. Her face was veiled, but her presence was unmistakable.
She bowed her head.
"I am Runa, the Echo Architect. And you… are what they call The Last Update."