Fold 1 - Transit

The sound of the helicopter was constant. Saejin sat motionless, hands loose over his knees, eyes half-lidded behind the faint glass of his visor. Across from him, the escort clutched a datapad they hadn't checked since takeoff. They didn't speak. No one usually did on these flights but Saejin didn't mind. Silence had its uses.

Outside the window, the terrain began to change gradients. Jagged ridges blurred into the strict geometry of Axiom's upper sectors, where steel structures ran through mountains and domes sat half-buried in stone. Axiom didn't build for beauty. It built for containment.

The helicopter banked slightly, beginning descent.

For Saejin most missions blurred together but he knew that this one would be different. He had seen it already in the small details: the tension in the pilot's expression as he embarked, the undisclosed route, the unmarked helicopter they had chosen.

The landing was smooth. As the doors slid open, sterile air rushed in, dry and over-filtered. The escort stepped out first and Saejin followed, adjusting his visor to the change in brightness.

The facility rose ahead, a big structure of reinforced glass and matte steel although inside, the corridors were surprinsingly narrow. They were made to be disorienting by design: if you didn't know the path, it would be very difficult for just anyone to escape.

But Saejin knew it by memory. Left at the dull-glass mural, skip the central lift, go through the second passage, bypass the main junction. They never routed him through the official pathways.

No one spoke until they reached the third access gate. A woman in a gray field jacket waited there, fingers moving across the control panel like she knew very well what she was doing. She was older than him by a few years, and she didn't bother to hide her frustration:

"He's stabilized" she said not looking up. "Barely... The restraints are holding for now."

Her hands moved across the gate's interface, biometric locks unlocking one by one.

"He rejected Class-A guidance. Also burned through all anchors in under three minutes. The last one barely held."

She turned her head towards him.

"If he breaks containment again before you're finished, we're calling a full freeze."

Saejin's voice barely sounded at all.

"Don't."

She blinked, thrown for a moment by the refusal. "Excuse me?"

He restated but didn't lift his head.

"Don't freeze him. I'll go in alone."

For a second, the tension filled the air. Then she nodded sharply, locking her features back into protocol. The door seal disengaged for him.

The final corridor was quieter and Saejin walked through it with calculated movements.

He could feel it ahead: the unstable frequency, like a wire stretched too much. The familiarity of the pattern underneath bothered him, it seemed different than what he was used to. It was a resonance just out of phase with his own.

He paused at the reinforced door and placed his gloved hand lightly against the cold surface.

Just beyond it: an Esper. Yuwon Sol. High-risk, volatile, already half-burned through anchors and guidance protocols. And this time, Saejin wouldn't have external stabilization units. No secondary comms. No backup.

That was the reality of being a Guide.

People thought Guides were commanders: that they controlled, commanded, forced order onto chaos. It wasn't true. A Guide wasn't a leash. They weren't even protection. They were calibration, resonance stabilizers who aligned with an Esper's frequency just long enough to take off the excess. A Guide didn't tame power, they absorbed its destructive force and reflected its pattern.

The closer the resonance match, the safer the Esper could operate.

But there were risks. If a Guide misaligned, if they failed to catch the rhythm of an Esper's surge at the right moment, they didn't just break themselves. They could trigger a full resonance break, a rupture that containment protocols couldn't fix fast enough to count.

This wasn't control. It was coexistence on a blade's edge.

Saejin knew how to work with that instability, because he didn't fight resonance. He warped himself into it until the chaos began to recognize itself in him.

He opened his eyes fully and leaned closer to the door. Listening.

The sound behind the door was strained. Heavy.

Waiting.