The Vault hadn’t shut up since yesterday. If anything, the signal had only gotten bolder—like it realized someone had finally heard it.

  The Shack wasn’t quiet—it was holding its breath.

  Kenji leaned back in the command chair, metal frame groaning under him, a lukewarm can of Crimson Stew? perched dangerously on his belly. He hadn’t slept. Not properly. Not since the twins whispered that creepy line and then forgot it like it never happened. Drone feeds flickered across the main display. Static crawled through one of them like frostbite—Sector Z-41. Still corrupted.

  But not damaged.

  The interference wasn’t from snow, or distance, or system error. It was intentional.

  [Signal Uplink Attempt 4 – BLOCKED]

  [Return Ping Pattern Detected – Content: RECLAIM]

  Kenji squinted. “Well that’s ominous.”

  The word pulsed in the console’s sub-layer display like it was branded there. Not code. Not data. Something older. The Vault had responded.

  The system shouldn’t have understood it. But the Shack’s divine interface tried to interpret it anyway. Glyphs shimmered along the edge of the display—fractal, angular, moving like they were alive. Briefly. Then gone.

  He scrubbed back through the drone footage frame by frame.

  The figure was still there—thin, elongated, skin pulled taut like wet paper stretched over wire. It didn’t walk. It hovered. No eyes. Just an open mouth and static where its presence touched the lens.

  When the drone zoomed in, the thing turned. Looked right at it. Or through it.

  That’s when the feed cut.

  [Crimson Core Drift: 0.006% – Active Sync Spike Detected]

  Kenji groaned. “You better not be syncing with haunted shit.”

  The pulses from the Core had started an hour ago. Soft at first—now stronger. Rhythmic. The Shack had begun shifting energy without instruction, rerouting warmth, realigning internal sensors. It was like the damn place was bracing for something.

  He heard it again.

  Not from the speakers. Not from any system.

  A low, slow hum, deep enough to rattle bone. Like metal remembering music it shouldn’t know.

  Footsteps. Soft. Perfectly timed.

  Luna appeared at his side, placing a small bowl of soup on the tray. Sola followed with tea, eyes downcast, movements silent. They returned to their positions without a word—one step behind him, equidistant from each other. Impossibly still.

  He took a sip and exhaled.

  “This whole place smells like divine negligence,” he muttered. “And now I’m the cleanup crew.”

  Outside, past the Shack’s thermobarrier, the ice creaked under the pressure of shifting ground.

  Somewhere beneath that frozen crust—out west, near the edge of Kenji’s map—Sector Z-41 pulsed again. The Vault was still humming. Like it was trying to remember something. Or maybe, trying to be remembered.

  It started with a false ping.

  [Alert: Western Sensor Array Offline – Signal Interruption]

  [Attempting Reboot... FAILED]

  Kenji didn’t even flinch. He sat there, mug in hand, sipping quietly as the Shack’s internal UI flickered red on the western edge. Then came the second notice.

  [Proximity Warning: Zone Red – Heat Signature Detected]

  [Classification: UNKNOWN ENTITY – NOT IN DATABASE]

  Still no movement outside the barrier.

  But Luna stepped closer to him. Sola mirrored her.

  Neither said anything, but their collars shimmered faintly, mana cores pulsing in sync.

  Kenji set the mug down with a sigh. “Already?”

  Saeko’s voice came in over the comm line, slightly out of breath. “Boss. We’ve got movement—west wall. Not beast-type. It’s... glitching the drones.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Send Brisket’s team,” Kenji replied. “And don’t let anything touch the Shack wall. Great. More weird nonsense to clean up.”

  Outside, west of the Shack’s thermobarrier, snow hissed as something slipped across it—soundless, almost invisible. The turret didn't fire. It couldn’t track it.

  One of the outer drones sparked violently, spun mid-air, then dropped like a dead bug.

  Then they saw it.

  A figure. Thin, pale, and twitching in unnatural ways. It hovered just inches above the snow. The air around it seemed distorted, like heat haze in reverse. It wasn’t walking. It was drifting—phasing forward in a series of disjointed lurches.

  An Astarion moved first. Unit R-6 charged with a thermal blade, but the blade passed clean through the thing’s upper chest. No blood. No resistance.

  The figure’s head snapped toward the Astarion. And then it shrieked.

  Not a sound. A feeling. Pressure. Static in the ears. The kind that makes your vision shimmer.

  Three drones dropped instantly. Sola and Luna snapped their heads toward the wall.

  “Master,” Luna said. “It’s inside.”

  Kenji blinked. “No shit.”

  He tapped a quick override command.

  [Deploy Emergency Grid – Shock Protocol Delta]

  A burst of violet-blue lightning lanced through the air near the western wall. The specter spasmed, twitched, then arched backward—limbs flailing like broken antennae.

  “Tag it now!” Saeko’s voice barked.

  A newly built plasma turret roared to life, finally locking on. It fired twice.

  The thing reeled—and then it exploded.

  Not fire. Not gore.

  Just a pulse. A silent dome of inverted pressure that knocked two Astarions flat and cracked one of the Shack’s auxiliary pylons.

  Kenji winced. “Damn it. That’s going to cost me a power cell.”

  Static rolled across the Shack’s internal speakers. Then silence.

  The breach was over.

  But something had tested them.

  And now it knew where they were.

  [Status: Entity Neutralized – Classification Pending]

  [Tagging Protocol: SPECTER-CLASS – OBSERVATION REQUIRED]

  The specter was gone, but the tension lingered like an aftershock.

  Kenji leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples as the system purged alerts from the interface. The lights flickered once, then stabilized.

  Luna and Sola stood silently behind him, eyes forward, still as statues. Their uniforms were untouched. Not a single hair out of place. The only clue they had moved at all was the faint, lingering glow on their mana cores.

  “You two moved quick,” Kenji muttered without turning around. “Too quick.”

  Neither replied.

  He cracked one eye open, giving them a sideways glance. “Not that I don’t appreciate it. But that’s not your job. You’re not front line.”

  Sola shifted slightly. “We sensed the threat before the system did.”

  Kenji raised a brow. “Good. That means your instincts are sharp.” He leaned back and groaned as his spine popped. “”

  He pointed vaguely to his lower back. “I’m brittle. That spot's one wrong move from exploding. My knees too. You want me snapping in half mid-yawn?”

  They didn’t laugh. They didn’t move. But something like a flicker of amusement passed between them.

  He grunted. “Stay close. No heroics. If I get speared by a ghost blob because you two went chasing shiny targets, I’m haunting you both.”

  Sola and Luna responded in unison, voices soft but certain.

  “Yes, Master.”

  Kenji nodded once, satisfied. Then reached for his drink, still lukewarm.

  He paused mid-sip, eyes narrowing at the corner system log.

  Something wasn’t clearing.

  [Residual Energy Detected – Sync Deviation: 0.003%]

  He stared at it, then tapped once to flag it for review.

  “Just great,” he muttered. “More ghosts in the goddamn machine.”

  The cleanup crew—three drones and a two-man Astarion team—moved in silence across the Shack’s western perimeter. No blood, no body. Just static-burned snow and a shattered drone husk twitching in the frost.

  Inside, Kenji scrolled through the replay on the main console, frame by frame.

  “Still no readings from the moment of detonation,” he muttered. “Whatever that thing was, it shorted half the sensors just by existing.”

  Saeko’s voice crackled in over comms. “I’ve got nothing physical. Just corrosion. Like it melted the snow, then erased itself.”

  Elyra added, “Drone fragments are salvageable. One’s core is warped—looks like something phased through it.”

  Kenji snorted. “Cute. We get ghosts now.”

  Behind him, Flanksteak stepped forward. “The Shack system registered a foreign sync pattern before the breach.”

  Kenji frowned. “Define foreign.”

  “Not from anything we’ve seen. Not beast-type. Not raider junk. Divine... but incomplete.”

  Kenji turned back to the console, opened the flagged system log.

  [ARCHIVE: SIGNAL TRACE ACTIVE – MATCH LEVEL: <1%]

  ORIGIN: UNCONFIRMED]

  It blinked, then shimmered once. A line of code restructured itself in real time—jagged glyphs rearranging like they were thinking.

  Kenji flagged it and ran it through the Shack’s interpreter. The result came back broken.

  [Translation: [INCOMPLETE] / [RECLAIM] / [MEMORY_CHAIN] ]

  “Sounds like a dead god’s backup folder,” he muttered.

  “Should I purge it?” Flanksteak asked.

  Kenji hesitated.

  “No. Not yet.” He sat back again. “There’s something buried in this mess."

  The Shack dimmed for half a second.

  A ripple passed through the core chamber, subtle but distinct, like the system had hiccupped. Kenji glanced up from the console just as a flicker ran along the command panel’s edge.

  [System Notice: Processing Background Fragment – Warning: Incompatible Memory Format]

  Sola and Luna didn’t move. But something in their posture changed—minutely. They turned their heads toward the far wall. In perfect sync. Silent. Alert.

  Kenji narrowed his eyes. “Something wrong?”

  Neither responded.

  [Subroutine Alert: Dormant Signal Resonance Detected – Source: Unknown]

  Kenji tapped a key. “Define unknown.”

  [No valid designation. Residual divine framework detected. Fragment may be incomplete or corrupted.]

  On-screen, the data pulse stopped. The display froze for less than a second. Then resumed.

  Sola’s eyes flashed crimson. Luna’s glowed with soft blue.

  And together, with no prompt, they said aloud:

  “The Gate remembers.”

  Then blinked.

  Neither of them seemed to realize they’d spoken.

  Kenji stared for a long moment. Then leaned back and took a slow sip from his cup.

  Out past the Shack’s external cameras, the snow rolled quietly across the western ridge.

  For a moment, just one, something long and thin moved across the screen—too fast to track.

  Kenji didn’t move. Didn’t even curse.

  He just stared.

  “If this is the gods' idea of a joke,” he muttered, “they better hope I never make it upstairs.”

  End of Chapter