New Cascadia – Sector 12, Apartment 18B
The Veil thread snapped like a tension wire under strain.
Cassian jolted upright, gasping as if yanked from deep water. Cold sweat soaked his collar. The room was dim, quiet—except for the high-pitched hum from his offline relay core.
He sat up slowly. Fingers stiff. Vision flickering with residual neural static.
His HUD was gone.
---
System Burn
He triggered a fallback boot—barebones, stripped down.
> [Primary Veil Core: Burned]
[Secondary Path: Architect Layer – Partial Reconstruction Active]
It wasn't failure.
It was transformation.
He had touched something deeper than code.
And something had touched him back.
---
Mira
He made his way to the next room—quiet, slow, careful not to disturb the stabilizer readout.
Mira lay curled beneath the thin blanket, breathing steady. The vial he'd risked so much for blinked faint green from her collar.
Stable.
But she looked… smaller.
As if every hour the stabilizer worked chipped something else away.
Cassian sat beside her, thumb brushing her hand.
> "I'm still here," he whispered. "So are you."
---
He turned on the terminal.
NeuraStream lit up like a neural flare.
> TOP TAGS:
PHANTOM BREAKER – DEVZONE – MIRROR CODE – VEIL GLITCH
Trending Clip: "This one's echo-scraped. The system doesn't even know who uploaded it."
Another:
> "Compiled from bodycams. Guild watchers caught him mid-phase."
His face never showed.
Only the silhouette. The movement. The aftermath.
---
> "This isn't just a player. It's a system flaw."
"He entered a zone that shouldn't exist."
"He bypassed skill cooldowns. Was that a hardcoded override?"
"Who is he?"
> "Is he real?"
The voices blurred.
Others offered theories:
Rogue AI
A living exploit
The original Architect, resurfaced
A corpse memory left behind by Vitality's founders
Cassian shut the feed down.
But the weight of it settled behind his eyes like storm pressure.
---
He sat by the window, fingers wrapped in static-light.
The Buyer's voice echoed in the hollow spaces between his thoughts.
> "You're not the only one chasing ghosts."
A new trace ping had appeared on his network log—an anomaly, not from Synapse or TianXia. Not corporate.
Something else.
Something watching.
---
Elsewhere, a Synapse analyst replayed a blurry frame—his movement stuttering mid-phase, the Veil fragment flaring on impact.
> "Not a hack. Not a mod."
> "This was… written in."
He flagged it.
> File: Anomaly Class – Dev-Origin Suspected
Thread: E. Voss
---
End of Chapter Twenty-Three