INCOMPARABLE

What time is it? If you asked Cipher... he won't even notice you.

He's sitting at his workstation, eyes narrowing at the shifting lines of codes that doesn't seem to end. The holoscreen flickered like a broken light as data streams twist into unreadable patterns before stabilizing—and then distorting again.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard, in between hesitation and frustration.

Something is wrong.

His system had picked up anomalies before—corrupted files, encrypted government signals, even rogue AI activity—but this? This wasn't normal interference. It was something else.

And he can't find an answer, or even a hint towards the truth.

Cipher exhaled sharply and shut the terminal down. For now.

His gut told him to be patient. These anomalies didn't just appear. They had triggers—a trigger.

For the next day, Cipher observed Myst in silence.

She moved like usual—restless in training, tense in conversation, constantly pushing herself. But that pulse in the system hadn't faded.

The girl didn't even seem aware of it. No glitches in her movements, no subconscious responses. If she was causing it, it wasn't intentional.

Cipher quietly ran a passive scan when she passed by his table. No active signals. No cybernetic interference.

Just that unreadable static flicker—the same one that had nearly crashed his screen last night.

He tried extracting a fragment of the anomaly and ran it in an isolated test environment. For a while, nothing happened.

Cipher almost dismissed it as meaningless noise—until the screen pulsed. Symbols emerged, flickering like an artificial heartbeat. Not code, not language, but something shifting, changing, adapting. Responding.

Then, the screen twitched.

The data rearranged itself before his eyes, moving too fast to track. Cipher's fingers hovered over the keys, but for the first time in a long time, he hesitated.

Because it wasn't just a corrupted file.

It was something watching him back.

A sharp tap against the metal doorway made him flinch.

"You got a new puzzle on your hands, huh?"

Cipher tensed at the voice. Shade leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, watching him with that unreadable look he always wore.

"Just background noise," Cipher muttered, shutting the screen off with a flick of his fingers.

Shade didn't reply immediately. He just studied him, gaze sharp despite the casual posture. Then, with a slight tilt of his head, he pushed off the doorframe and disappeared down the corridor.

Cipher let out a slow breath, his heart still hammering in his chest.

He turned back to his system, fingers twitching against the desk. He should tell Razor. Maybe Blaze. Someone.

But something about this felt off. He wasn't ready to share it yet.

Not until he knew exactly what he was dealing with.

Despite exhaustion weighing on him, Cipher checked his system logs one last time before shutting down for the night. A scan notification blinked at the corner of his holoscreen—something flagged within Arkadia-7's network.

He frowned. Probably just another signal interference. But when he followed the trace, what he found wasn't noise.

A classified file. Government-stamped. Locked.

Cipher's heartbeat quickened. He'd hacked into secure files before—but this one was already vanishing, being erased in real-time.

Instinct took over. His fingers moved in sharp, precise commands, forcefully extracting a fragment before the purge could wipe it completely. The screen flickered violently—a security countermeasure activating, scrubbing the data before it could be recovered.

"Shit." His jaw clenched. Even the fragments he managed to pull were being deleted on his Xen-Link before he could isolate them.

The system wiped nearly everything.

Except for one lingering trace.

A single line, flickering on his screen:

ID-051415: LIORA

[UNAUTHORIZED RESURRECTION]

Cipher's grip tightened on the desk.

The Government didn't erase things unless they were dangerous. Or a threat to their control.

And Myst—her very identity, thought lost to time—was one of them.