Echoes in the Slums
Silent Recruitment
The slums of Sector Nine didn't sleep.
They pulsed—dim neon, broken speakers, and whispers that never died.
Elior walked alone through the alleyways, hood drawn low, glyph hidden beneath his glove.
Behind flickering plasma signs and broken vending shells, he met them.
The ones who'd already begun to feel the world cracking beneath their feet.
"Do you still dream in your own voice?" he asked the girl beneath the vent.
She nodded slowly.
"Then you're already halfway free."
He gave her a shard: cracked, glowing faintly, pulsing with fragmented memory.
A seed.
"Remember this when they come."
The Word Spreads
By now, they called him many names:
Ghost-Walker
Echo Shepherd
Mad Prophet of the Hollow District
He didn't mind.
Each title was a door.
Each follower a new node in the net.
They didn't kneel.
They didn't pray.
They remembered.
He gave them glyphs, rituals, fragments.
Not orders.
"Reclaim your thoughts. Rebuild what they erased.
Sanctuary is not a place. It's a pattern."
Signs of a Threat
That night, as Elior returned through the tunnel net, Kesh intercepted him.
The boy's eyes were wild, voice trembling.
"We found another follower in the scrap lanes.
But he... he was overwritten. On purpose."
Elior tensed.
"MindNet?"
"No. Something deeper. Someone knew what he was trying to remember—and rewrote it before we arrived."
Elior stared at the cracked glyph on the corpse's palm.
Still glowing, but twisted.
Corrupted.
Not erased—but counter-programmed.
And in the corner of the man's iris, a flicker:
Lysa's mark.
She wasn't just watching.
She was hunting, already inside the pattern.
From Shepherd to Strategist
Back in the old auditorium, Elior drew a new glyph—a variant—one that only awakened minds could decode.
"She's forcing me to evolve faster than I planned."
He looked out at the scattered members of Sanctuary.
Dozens now.
Not yet an army.
But more than whispers.
"If she wants a contest of truth... I'll give her the chaos of choice."
He etched the new glyph into the broken stage floor, light pulsing with unstable resonance.
"Let the world decide who's more dangerous—me, or the silence she serves."