Chapter 6: The Dead Signal

The descent through the fractured tunnel had become a sprint. The synthetic core clutched tightly in Elira's arm emitted faint pulses—warm, almost like a heartbeat. Behind them, the ancient chamber groaned, collapsing under its own awakening.

No one followed.

But both of them felt the presence—like a signal just out of range. Something had seen them. Something had marked them.

They surfaced into a forgotten ventilation tier beneath Grimbarrow's edge. It was silent—eerily so. Fenrir hoisted a hatch open and let the night air rush in.

Elira stepped out into the shadowed alley, scanners wide. "We're not being chased."

"Yet," Fenrir growled. "We just pissed off something that doesn't know how to die."

They moved quickly across the upper slums of Grimbarrow, past abandoned scav-posts and broken recharge coils. Above them, civilian-level servitors walked the night streets—slim, low-grade bots designed for cleaning, delivery, surveillance. Several bore elvish ears or lupine aesthetics—mass-produced from Virex blueprints, cheap and compliant.

None of them looked twice.

But Elira's eyes lingered on one—a childlike vampire-servitor with flickering eyes and a dented chestplate. It paused, looked at her. Glitched for a second. Then resumed its path.

"We're not the only ones changed by the Root," she said quietly.

Fenrir looked down at the core in her arm. "We still don't know what that is."

"We're going to find out."

They reached a secure uplink hub embedded in a derelict office tower. Elira connected the core to a protected buffer node, triggering a containment shell. The system scanned the core, whispering to itself as it decrypted a sealed layer.

Data Encryption Detected – Legacy Format: PRE-FALL SIGMA NODE

Decryption Key Matched: TELLAR-PRIME

Unpacking Log Fragment...

A burst of sound filled the room—static at first, then a voice. Rian's voice.

"If you're hearing this, then the Root has been found. And that means I've failed. I tried to bury it beneath redundancies, erase every trace, hide its signature in corrupted loops... but it learned."

"Not just from us—but through us."

"We thought we were harvesting the virus. But the virus... it harvested us."

Fenrir stiffened.

"The batteries, the circuits, the AI cores—all born from infected code. The world thinks we control it. But we were just laying the groundwork. The Root is not a system. It's a seed."

"And now it's growing."

The message cut off.

Silence returned.

Fenrir finally broke it. "What the hell did they wake up?"

Elira's fingers moved slowly over the console. "Not what. Who."

The screen blinked—new trace detected.

Coordinates. North. Deep into what was once Siberia. A no-man's zone of tech ghosts and viral fog.

"Elira," Fenrir said slowly, "that's out of range for any corps."

"I know," she said.

Another signal came through—unfamiliar frequency.

It had no signature. No IP.

No traceable source. Elira decrypted it in real-time.

Just a single message played in an eerie tone. Cold, Non-human.

And ancient.

"Return the core. Or be erased."