Chapter 15: The Signal Builder
It started with a flicker on Mira's relay.
She was scanning the edge of the quarantine zone from their upper level—just routine. Her drone was quiet, humming along the broadcast loop like usual.
Then the ping hit.
Quick. Sharp. Muted under layers of artificial encryption.
"Someone's using Frame code," she muttered.
Kael turned his head from the other side of the room. "Another corrupted?"
"No. This one's clean." She paused. "But modified."
Juno moved closer. "How modified?"
Mira expanded the signal. It pulsed in uneven waves—half artificial, half Frame core. The code was familiar, but restructured. Bent into something… wrong.
"It's not being used," Mira said, slowly. "It's being rewritten."
2 Hours Later – Sector 14 Fringe
The team arrived at a ruined junction just outside the inner perimeter of Lunaris. Buildings were still intact here, but dead. No light, no drones, no movement.
Just a sound—like a low, distant engine that never stopped running.
"Smell that?" Ryke asked, stepping through the broken door of an old data tower.
Kael nodded.
Burnt code. Like metal and ozone.
They moved floor by floor—quiet, tight formation.
Until they heard it.
A voice.
Speaking in a half-human, half-digital echo from above.
"We weren't chosen by the system."
"We chose to override it."
They reached the main control floor of the building.
And there he was.
A man—late 20s, armored from neck to toe in patchwork EXE plating. Black, white, and gold strips across the suit like someone had stitched it together from multiple Frames.
His helmet was off.
His eyes glowed silver.
Behind him, dozens of cables ran into a massive machine—a replica core, half-built and humming.
Kael stepped forward, jaw clenched.
"What the hell is this?"
The man smiled.
"I'm building a better version."
Mira scanned the structure.
"That's Obelisk code," she said. "Raw and unstable."
The man nodded. "And beautiful."
Juno raised her blade. "This is corruption."
"No," he said, "This is evolution."
He held up a sphere—a condensed Frame spark, bound in a shell of artificial core data.
"This city waits for heroes," he said. "But I'm building gods."
Kael stepped forward.
"I've seen what this does to people. You're not building anything. You're containing it."
"You think the system cares about you?" the man snapped. "It broke this world and left us to rot. But this tech? These Frames? They're keys. And I'm unlocking every door."
He activated the replica.
The machine screamed.
The building vibrated.
And then his armor shifted—twisting into a version none of them had ever seen.
Gold-red plating formed over his limbs. Streamlined. Sharper. The glow behind his visor burned bright.
"Let's see if your sync is worth anything."
The fight was fast.
He moved with a strange rhythm—like he could read their sync pulses in real time. Juno landed the first hit, slicing into his shoulder joint, but he recovered too fast. Ryke took the brunt of a full blast, gritting his teeth as his armor locked up from a coded overload.
Mira disrupted the replication engine with a pulse bomb, forcing the signal to glitch.
Kael charged through the chaos—his armor sync steady, responsive.
He didn't overpower the rogue.
He outlasted him.
Kael cracked through his helmet with one clean hit to the jaw—just as the core behind him overloaded.
The man fell to one knee, bleeding from the mouth, grinning anyway.
"You're syncing better than I thought."
"Guess you're not a failure after all."
They destroyed the machine.
Took what tech they could.
Left the man behind—barely conscious, locked in the lower levels.
Later, back in the shelter, Kael sat with the broken replica core on the table in front of him.
He stared at it.
Then said:
"People are already trying to remake what broke this world."
Mira leaned against the doorframe.
"And we're the ones stuck cleaning it up."