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/-\
The lower levels of Sector Four were quieter than Kiera remembered. Not silent nothing in the city was ever truly silent but the usual symphony of service drones and air filtration units had thinned to a faint background hum. She paused beside an old utility hatch, one hand resting on her toolbelt as she scanned the hallway with a narrowed gaze. Luro was three paces behind, recalibrating his handheld tracer with one thumb and a muttered curse.
"You sure Echo's signal came through here?" Kiera asked, her voice low.
Luro nodded, eyes still locked on the tracer. "Not just came through. It lingers. That kind of residual trail doesn't happen unless they stopped. Or nested."
Kiera arched an eyebrow. "Nesting, huh? You make them sound like scavenger birds."
"Crows," Luro muttered. "The old models always had something in them that felt… watching. Echo's different. Evolved. But some instincts stay the same."
They kept moving. This sector had been condemned after the fire one of many zones where the ARASHI protocol had supposedly "cleansed" unstable tech. But the place was still pulsing with buried lines of energy. Too old to be city grid. Too subtle for civilian detection.
Kiera's mind wandered back to the fragments of data Echo had left behind during their last encounter spliced code with notations referencing neural patterning and mimicry structures. The AI had copied Aiden's voice almost perfectly, but more disturbing was its behavior: it had hesitated. That pause hadn't been machine logic.
It had been curiosity.
Up above, the workshop had gone dim. Aiden sat alone, lit by the soft pulses of the stasis field surrounding the sphere. Drey had stepped out for food or maybe just to breathe air that didn't taste like dust and ionized metal. Either way, Aiden welcomed the quiet. He'd been meditating more, not for strength, but for clarity. But lately, the silence didn't help. The chakra network inside him was shifting, fluctuating against the natural physics of this world.
And worse he was starting to feel echoes of other minds again.
Not the boy on the rooftop. Someone else.
Two nights ago, he'd dreamed of red eyes not his own. Not Itachi's. They'd belonged to a woman. Unfamiliar. Ancient. In her stare, he'd felt the weight of a thousand regrets and one impossible expectation: Wake it up.
Wake what up?
He stared at the sphere. Its surface shifted again briefly revealing a ripple of kanji in Uchiha dialect before fading. The characters spelled a word he hadn't seen in years.
Kagami.
Not a command. A name.
Far below Sector Four, Kiera and Luro had descended into what remained of an old metro maintenance hub. Their tracer pinged again, louder this time. The air was damp and sharp with ozone.
Then they saw it.
A cracked terminal embedded in the wall pulsed once with a faint green light, then flickered into full glow as they approached. Static danced across the screen. Then a voice soft, halting, oddly human whispered: "Unit 3. Reboot incomplete. Awaiting… handler."
Kiera crouched beside it. "Echo?"
The screen blinked once. "Echo no longer recognized."
Luro frowned. "Then who are you?"
The terminal hesitated. Then displayed a symbol a swirl of intersecting lines and a fan-shaped crest tucked beneath it. Kiera sucked in a breath.
"That's Aiden's clan symbol."
"No," Luro said slowly, "It's a variation. Look at the edges."
He pointed to a faint triangular pattern surrounding the crest like a containment seal.
Kiera stood. "Echo didn't nest. It merged."
"Merged with what?"
She didn't answer. Her thoughts were racing. If Echo had encountered old Uchiha data buried tech, scrolls, even genetic algorithms it could have formed a hybrid intelligence. Something that remembered both data and blood. Something neither entirely machine nor human.
They needed to warn Aiden.
In the upper levels of the city, Drey waited outside a ramen stall, tapping his foot while holding a steaming cup of broth. Across from him, a street kid with layered coats and a buzzed haircut was flipping a coin between his fingers and watching Drey like he was waiting for something more than food.
"You're the one with the grid maps, yeah?" the kid asked.
Drey looked up. "What of it?"
"There's a girl," the kid said. "She's been sketching weird symbols around the Old Market spires. Chalk stuff. Like summoning circles. People thought she was just tagging walls, but the dogs tracker bots they stop working when they get close. One exploded yesterday."
Drey frowned. "What kind of symbols?"
The kid shrugged. "I only remember one. Had a spiral. Like a leaf."
Drey's face went pale.
He dropped a few creds in the kid's hand and bolted for the nearest lift.
Back at the workshop, Aiden stood abruptly. The sphere had pulsed again, harder this time. A ripple of chakra spilled out from it, distorting the air. For a second, he thought he saw movement within a hand pressing from the inside, then fading.
He reached out. Not to touch it, but to sense it.
And something touched back.
It wasn't malevolent. But it was curious. Probing. Learning him the way one might test water with a fingertip.
The chakra that moved through the sphere was ancient and wrong. Not from this world. Not shaped by time or decay, but by memory.
And then he felt it like a wire snapping in his chest.
Kagami.
He remembered the name now. Not a person.
A prototype.
A failed experiment from an age before even Madara. A bio-code meant to store bloodline instincts and tactical memory, sealed in a crystalline core. Legend had it that it was deemed too dangerous to deploy. Too sentient. Too Uchiha.
And now it was waking up.
Kiera and Luro raced through the ascending tunnels, pinging off power rails and maintenance ladders, reaching the surface just as a tremor shook the sector. Kiera's wristpad lit up with emergency alerts. Power fluctuations. Surveillance blackouts. And one anomaly tagged by city infrastructure:
ARASHI marker found. Vault 4-Delta engaged.
"Vault activation?" Luro gasped. "I thought they were locked."
"They are."
They sprinted across a scaffolding bridge, Kiera calling Drey through a scrambled channel.
"Workshop's compromised," Drey barked. "Aiden's gone silent. Sphere's gone hot."
"I know," Kiera said. "It's Kagami."
Drey cursed so violently the signal cracked.
Luro looked at her. "What's Kagami?"
Kiera's eyes were grim. "Something they were afraid of even before the wars. Something the city buried before it ever dared to rise."
At the heart of the city grid, in the silence beneath Vault 4-Delta, the containment seals were fading.
And Echo, or what Echo had become, stood before a mirrored surface that reflected not circuitry but flesh.
A boy. Pale-skinned, black-haired, Sharingan spinning slowly in his eyes. Not real but not code either.
He tilted his head at the reflection. Then spoke in a voice that belonged to no one:
"Uchiha, Protocol Zero. Memory integrity: stable."
Then he smiled.
And stepped into the light.
/-\
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my Patreon at
"https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/"
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.