Chapter 4: Burn the Protocol

Eros didn't sleep.

He sat against the wall, eyes trained on the figure across the room.

Prion.

Still.

Like the world outside the window—the rain, the wind, the lights—had no bearing on him at all.

The chip—Echo-37—rested on the table beside Prion, inert now after its final playback. Eros hadn't touched it since. He wasn't sure if he should.

"You haven't asked," Prion said suddenly, voice soft but sharp in the quiet. "Why I arranged for you to hear it."

Eros didn't move. "You arranged it?"

Prion tilted his head slightly, shadows curling along the angles of his pale face. "You didn't think she just stumbled into your path with classified tech?"

"The woman—" Eros's voice cut off, unsure.

"She used to work in memory containment," Prion said. "She owed me. Or feared me. Depends on how you interpret survival."

Eros narrowed his eyes. "Why now?"

Prion didn't answer immediately. He rose instead, slow and fluid, as if time obeyed him differently.

"Because this time, you listened."

That line hit harder than it should have.

Eros stood, his muscles already coiled. "You manipulated me."

"Of course." Prion's voice was neutral. "If I handed you the chip myself, you would've destroyed it. Denial is your first instinct. So I placed the truth where your hands would shake to hold it."

"And what truth was that?" Eros snapped. "That I'm some failed lab experiment? A tool?"

Prion studied him. "You weren't supposed to remember any of it."

Eros laughed under his breath, bitter. "I don't."

"But your instincts do," Prion said, stepping closer. "You flinch the same way. You hesitate at the same place in the breath before pulling the trigger. You protect me—even now."

Eros's hands curled into fists.

Prion turned and picked up the Echo-37 chip, holding it loosely between two fingers.

"They called me Subject Seven," he said, voice quiet. "The last one. The anomaly. You—"

He looked up.

"—were meant to stabilize me. Not save me."

Eros froze.

"What are you saying?"

Prion dropped the chip back onto the table. The small clink echoed like a verdict.

"I'm saying I remember every time you hesitated. Every time they wiped you clean. I remember because they couldn't wipe me the same way. I was never their weapon. I was their glitch."

The room felt smaller suddenly. Tighter.

Eros reached for the paper Prion had left earlier. Folded, creased. He opened it slowly.

Termination Authorized: Subject 7 / Anchor Response Failure – Logged by Internal Command

Asset Handler Override Required

Reconstruction Directive: Eros.A

A name. Not just a name. A designation.

It burned into his mind like heat through frozen flesh.

"I was never just the killer," he whispered.

"No," Prion said. "You were the condition."

Eros looked up, throat tight.

"How many times?"

Prion didn't blink.

"Thirty-seven."

"You keep count?" Eros said, voice low. "You remember every one?"

Eros thought he was the executioner. But what if he was just the control variable?

The room hadn't changed.

But Eros had.

He sat on the edge of the bed, the classified directive still open in his hand, the ink like rot seeping into his bones. Across the room, Prion moved in silence, rinsing out an old tea kettle, methodical as ever.

As if he hadn't just shattered the foundation of Eros's identity with a single sheet of paper.

"I don't believe you," Eros said, voice flat. "They wouldn't risk this much on one experiment."

Prion didn't look up.

"They didn't think I'd survive past Phase II."

"You were supposed to fail."

"I was designed to fail."

Prion set the kettle aside and finally turned, dark eyes unreadable beneath the loose shadow of his hoodie.

"Failure was the control."

The words twisted through Eros's head like poison.

New Era didn't build him to win.

They built him to break.

He gripped the paper harder, voice sharp. "Then why not wipe me again?"

"They are," Prion said. "Just… slower now. Subtler. They're watching. Measuring. You think you're in control. You're not. None of this is free."

A sudden hum split the room.

Faint.

But sharp. Like static in the back of the mind.

Eros froze. The hum grew louder. Inside his head.

Then—

Ping.

Like a command had fired through the spine.

He staggered, fingers twitching involuntarily.

Prion crossed the room in two strides, caught his shoulder before he fell. "Override pulse."

Eros shoved him off. "Don't touch me."

"You're glitching," Prion said, unmoved. "They're trying to reassert baseline. That's what happens when you start to remember out of order."

Eros backed toward the wall, chest rising and falling, pulse hammering beneath skin that suddenly felt too tight.

"You set this up," he breathed. "The woman. The chip. You're pulling strings—"

"Because I don't have time to wait for you to figure it out on your own," Prion said. "They're closing in. You think this is personal? It's structural."

"I don't care."

"You will."

He reached into his jacket again—this time slower—and placed something new on the table.

A strip of translucent plastic. A sliver of a neural map.

Eros recognized it immediately.

It was a mission route.

His own.

Assigned routes. Trigger phrases. Backdoor protocols.

"This is from your command line," Prion said. "From one of the earlier versions. Before they started hiding the erasure logs."

Eros stared at it.

"How did you get this?"

Prion's smile didn't reach his eyes.

"I left a copy in your gear. Version nineteen."

That hit harder than it should have.

"How many versions are there?"

Prion walked past him.

"Enough that I stopped counting. After your 28th attempt, I stopped talking altogether. You stopped looking at me like a person. So I started leaving pieces behind."

Eros sat slowly, pulse still racing.

"Why?" he asked.

Prion didn't answer at first.

Then, quiet as ash he answered the same line again:

"Because I was tired of this repeating again and again before you remembered me."

They didn't build him to win—they built him to break. But now the cracks are burning through them both.

The neural map still sat between them, pulsing faintly under the table's weak light.

Eros hadn't touched it.

But he hadn't destroyed it either.

Prion poured the hot water into two chipped ceramic cups and set one in front of him without a word.

The silence coiled tight. Tighter.

Then Eros spoke, slowly.

"You keep saying this isn't personal. But you've tailored every interaction to make it personal."

Prion didn't sit. He leaned against the wall, shadows slicing across his cheek.

"You think I'm manipulating you?"

"You are," Eros snapped. "Every word you say, every piece of data you drop—it's curated. Targeted. You've engineered this loop. You knew I'd come. You knew I'd hesitate."

"And yet," Prion said quietly, "you're still here."

The silence fractured like a hairline crack in glass.

Eros stood. "You've built a story around me. And now you're waiting for me to play my part."

"I'm waiting," Prion said, "for you to stop playing theirs."

He walked past the table, heading for the window. His hand brushed aside the curtain. City light filtered in—cold, fractured across damp streets.

"I don't need to rewrite you, Eros. I never could. What they built into you is stronger than anything I could plant."

He glanced back. "But there are… gaps."

"Gaps," Eros repeated, flat.

"They overwrite the directives. They reset the mission logs. But emotions? Impressions? Those leave traces. Muscle memory. Instinctual recoil."

Eros's hand had begun to twitch again.

That same glitch.

Prion's voice dropped.

"You flinch before you fire. You always hesitate at six meters. You can't look me in the eyes longer than three seconds unless I'm injured."

Eros froze.

He didn't want to believe it.

But the shiver along his spine wasn't from the cold.

"You think you know me?" he said.

Prion tilted his head.

"I should've died thirty-seven times by your hand. I've watched you bleed out twice. And once—once, you begged them not to erase me. That was attempt seventeen. You scratched my name into your own arm before they wiped it."

Eros's fists clenched. He didn't know if he wanted to punch the wall or demand proof.

Instead, he said nothing.

Then, something buzzed.

A subtle shift in the silence.

Prion tensed.

Eros felt it too—the wrong kind of quiet. The city's low hum muted too perfectly. No engines. No footfalls. Not even birds.

They both moved at once.

Prion grabbed a black disk from under the sink, snapping it open. A disruptor—signal scrambler.

Eros reached for his pistol.

Three red blips blinked to life on the window's edge.

"New Era," Prion muttered. "They've found us."

Eros swore under his breath.

"Did you lead them here?"

"No," Prion said. "You did."

And that's when Eros understood—this meeting wasn't just being observed.

It was being baited.

The room is wired, the city's too quiet, and Eros's instincts are no longer his own. Something is about to break.

Three red dots.

No time to think.

Prion didn't reach for a weapon. He reached for the wall panel—tore back a hidden layer and triggered a blackout scrambler. The lights snapped off. Instantly.

Eros didn't need light. He moved on instinct, dropping to the floor as the window shattered behind him.

Silent entry.

Standard breach unit.

They were inside.

Prion's voice cut through the dark.

"They'll go for you first."

"Because I'm still loyal?" Eros growled, rolling behind the overturned table.

"No. Because they know you're not."

Eros didn't get the chance to answer.

A shadow lunged through the window's ragged frame—silent and exact. Masked, armoured, wired into the same spineport system Eros once wore. A perfect mirror of what he used to be.

Eros fired twice.

The body dropped.

No scream.

Just silence.

Another red dot blinked on behind him. Then another.

Three had become five.

"Protocol expansion," Prion muttered, somewhere deeper in the shadows. "They escalated the directive. This isn't just an execution. It's a purge."

"You brought them," Eros said.

Prion's breath caught faintly.

"No. You did."

The next attacker came fast. This one didn't aim for Prion. He aimed for Eros.

That told him everything.

New Era didn't care which one failed.

As long as one of them did.

Eros twisted, disarmed the assailant, and slammed the reinforced wrist brace into their neck. They crumpled.

In the stillness that followed, Eros whispered, "They're testing me."

"Yes," Prion said softly. "Again."

The quiet between them stretched—warped by tension.

Eros wasn't out of breath, but something in him was fraying. He wasn't sure if it was the override pulses still humming at the base of his spine, or the echo of Prion's voice in the dark.

"Thirty-seven times... You always hesitated."

He moved through the blackness, tracing the pulse of his own steps, until he found Prion standing by the far wall—backlit now by emergency exit light, hoodie soaked in shadow, hands loose at his sides.

"Why don't you run?" Eros asked.

"I used to," Prion said. "Every time. But they always brought you back. So eventually I stopped running. I waited. I set traps. I left messages. Then one day, you paused longer than usual."

Eros stepped closer.

"And that was different?"

"No," Prion said. "That was hope."

The air smelled like dust and blood and burnt circuits.

"You know this can't last," Eros said. "They'll come again."

Prion nodded.

"Then we burn the protocol."

Eros narrowed his eyes.

"What does that mean?"

Prion turned toward the old vending machine shoved in the corner.

Pried open the rusted frame.

And behind it—a case.

He pulled it out and opened it without flourish.

Inside: a black drive. Fracture-synced. Locked with his own biometric code.

"The Echo-37 core," he said. "They think I lost it when I escaped. But I kept it. Because this isn't just about remembering."

He turned, face unreadable.

"It's about rewriting."

And then—sirens in the distance.

No more time.

Just the dark.

And the memory of someone who never should've existed still standing right in front of him.

The fracture core is in Prion's hands. The purge has begun. And this time, neither of them may make it out.

They're not just surviving now. They're remembering.

The fractures are spreading—and Prion just revealed he has the one thing New Era thought they lost forever.

If the one person you were sent to destroy held the key to rewriting who you are—would you still pull the trigger?