Chapter 4: Veil Entry Protocol
[Layer -1.4 – Arrival Zone, Edge of Veil City]
The Echo Team dropped.
Not through air. Through sequence.
The world snapped sideways, then reassembled as memory. Snow didn't fall. It looped. A single flake rotated in the air like a stuck second hand.
They landed in perfect formation. Four agents, one ritualist, Commander Hadrian Kessler at the rear.
Veil City spread before them.
Skyscrapers bent inward like praying hands. Windows blinked. Roads intersected themselves. Nothing moved, but every shadow watched.
"Secure recursion anchor," Kessler ordered.
One agent stabbed a spine-like rod into the cracked stone beneath them. The glyph on its surface flickered, dim and uncertain.
"Anchor response: 63% stability," the agent reported. "Time bleed detected. Minutes may not remain aligned."
Kessler exhaled through his teeth. "No full combat unless logic holds. Engage with symbols, not bullets."
The ritualist nodded. Her hands glowed with ink, Archive glyphs blooming across her palms like bruises.
"Veil is thin here," she whispered. "We're inside a thought. Not a city. A thought pretending to be a city."
---
[Echo Agent Callsign: NEPHRITE]
[NEPHRITE POV]
Nephrite walked point. Every step crunched recursion ice that didn't melt—it fractured, inward, like glass cracking under a scream.
The buildings were wrong. Not abandoned—paused.
Each store window still displayed things: clocks with no hands. TVs playing static loops. A violin in one window played itself, its strings moving soundlessly.
"Command, are these projections?"
"Worse," Kessler answered. "Stored memories. Failed realities. This city holds the dreams the Archive couldn't process."
"So what's the point?"
"They're not fake. They're... orphaned."
A flicker—movement.
Nephrite froze. A figure, far down the street.
White-haired. Barefoot. Blood trailing from fingertips.
Subject 102?
No. The form vanished before confirmation. A false loop. Or bait.
---
[Echo Agent Callsign: FLINT]
[FLINT POV]
"Picking up a feedback surge," Flint reported. His dampener buzzed. "Something is rewriting local cause and effect."
A nearby lightpost grew taller. Then shrank. Then disappeared.
Behind him, a mailbox blinked out of existence.
The recursion dampers screamed—then went dead.
"Local logic just rewrote our gear," he snapped.
Kessler raised his voice. "Circle up! Adjust belief lock!"
The ritualist began a containment glyph—circles inside triangles, bleeding sand from her fingertips. Her voice trembled:
"I draw meaning from false light. I summon anchor through remembered shape…"
A whisper cut her off.
"Stop."
Everyone turned.
A figure stood at the alley mouth.
Not Archive.
Not human.
A tall thing in robes stitched from static and names—hundreds of tags fluttering from its sleeves. No face—just a recursion mask, half-shattered.
It stepped forward. Reality trembled. Not from pressure—but from correction.
"Who climbs the false stair?" it asked, voice hollow. "Who intrudes on the Unaligned Dream?"
Nephrite raised her arm. "Echo Division. Axis Order. By Archive authority—"
"There is no authority here."
Flint fired a shot.
The bullet reversed midair.
It hit the wall behind him—before he pulled the trigger.
His body seized. Blood from his ears. Eyes rolled up. Temporal seizure.
Kessler moved fast.
He stepped in front of the entity and held up an Archive sigil etched in gold.
"We're not here to rewrite. Only to watch."
The being tilted its head.
"Then record this."
The walls behind it collapsed outward—not physically, but logically.
The street behind it no longer existed. It was a library now. Then a church. Then a collapsed satellite station. All at once.
"This recursion layer is not stable," Kessler warned. "We will retreat. We leave the children to their climb."
But the figure turned to the ritualist.
"You," it whispered. "You hold the remembered name."
She staggered back, horrified.
"Don't speak it," Kessler ordered.
But the recursion parasite leaned close and breathed it into her ear.
And she vanished.
No scream.
No flash.
Just gone—erased as if she was never written in.
Kessler's pulse spiked.
"All agents—withdraw to anchor. We breach again in six recursion-hours."
As they pulled back, the figure whispered:
"They are already too deep."
---
[Back at Anchor Point]
Only three returned.
The recursion rod was failing.
Nephrite spat blood.
"Sir... what was that?"
Kessler didn't answer immediately.
He looked up at the sky of Veil City—where clouds moved in hexagonal pulses, and stars blinked in Archive glyphs.
Then he said:
"I think we just met a fragment of the Bleeding Prophet."
The rod shattered.
Time buckled.
And Veil City swallowed them again.
---