Chapter 2: "False Start"

The next morning didn't feel right. The dorm air was too quiet, too still, like everything was waiting to load. Vael sat up slowly, half-expecting to see a message still hovering in his HUD from the night before.

Nothing. Just the standard vitals: heart rate, temp, sleep score.

Normal.

And that made it worse.

Kane was already gone. Bed made, locker sealed. No sign anything unusual had happened. If he'd heard anything—Vael talking in his sleep, pacing, glitching—he'd buried it under his usual silence. That was Kane's way. Stay clear of unstable threads. Distance was safer than curiosity.

Vael dressed quickly. The mirror flickered again when he passed, but he didn't stop to check. He didn't need to see a delay to know something was off. He grabbed a nutrition bar from the wall dispenser on his way out, took one bite, then tossed the rest. Everything tasted like metal lately.

By the time he reached the commons, the energy in the building had already shifted. Screens along the walls flashed the same banner over and over:

ZONECASTER LIVE: BRONZE TRIALS BEGIN @1800

Trial Day. The first real shot for cadets to shift their rank. Performance meant status. Status meant survival.

Clusters of students filled the space, running mock drills, swapping module loadouts, and broadcasting confidence like it could be measured. Some cadets already wore upgraded bands and gear plates. Others hovered near the edge, watching for a chance to break out of obscurity. Everyone had something to prove.

Vael passed through them like static. The crowd parted without noticing him, but every time he passed a terminal, something in the image warped. Just briefly. Once, his own face appeared—blurred, shadowed.

UNKNOWN ASSET

Then it reset.

No one said anything. But a few noticed. One silver-rank glanced at him, whispered something to his squadmate, then looked away like the glitch had never happened.

"Drayce."

Vael turned. His posture straightened automatically, the way it always did when someone called his name in public. But the moment he saw who it was, his chest tightened.

Lenya Cho leaned against a pillar, arms crossed, calm and measured.

"That was you, wasn't it?"

He blinked. "What?"

"Terminal 5. Static burst. Looked like your face, just without the tag."

"Could've been anyone."

"No. It couldn't." She didn't sound like she was accusing him. Just confirming something she already believed.

She didn't wait for him to respond. She held his gaze for a beat longer than she needed to, like she was measuring something only she could see. Then she turned and walked off, disappearing into the main crowd like nothing had happened.

Class Z's sim bay sat in the sublevels—half-lit, half-functional, and forgotten. Cracked overhead panels buzzed without rhythm. The floor had soft give in places where it shouldn't. The AI terminals along the walls blinked, but none of them spoke. It smelled like coolant and rust.

Overseer Solas stood by the main terminal, motionless. His eyes scanned the roster as if he already knew who would fail before they stepped into the ring. His uniform was pressed to precision, and his expression hadn't changed in weeks.

"Today," he said, "you're not fighting simulations. You're fighting yourselves."

No further explanation.

The floor activated with a mechanical whine. A ring lit up around the sparring zone. One by one, cadets stepped forward as their names were called.

Kane went early. His opponent spawned in—a Rift Wolf. It lunged at him fast, claws extended and movement jagged. Kane responded like a machine: no fear, no expression. Just efficient counters and a final blow that shattered the sim in under thirty seconds.

Other cadets followed. Some held their ground and finished with shaky confidence. A few fumbled under pressure. One cadet slipped on a projection misfire and had to be pulled out early. Then there was Alenni—a quiet girl from Sector 3—who froze entirely when her opponent initiated a mirror-strike combo. The sim pulsed a feedback spike through her neural loop. She screamed once and collapsed. Med-bots arrived, but not quickly enough to prevent the seizure from locking her limbs in place.

Then the system buzzed again:

VAEL DRAYCE — ERROR. LOADING INSTANCE

The lights dimmed. The sim flickered.

His opponent formed from static.

It was him.

Identical. Same stance. Same breathing pattern. But the eyes were hollow. And it had no shadow.

Sim clones weren't new. Usually glitchy echoes—unfinished copies for combat testing. But this wasn't a test dummy.

This one was accurate. Too accurate.

It struck first.

Vael dropped low, narrowly missing a fist aimed directly for his throat. The swing passed close enough to sting his jaw from the pressure. He rolled, came up off-center, and saw the thing already closing the gap.

No HUD. No system assist. No equipped tools.

It mimicked his every motion, but faster. Cleaner. Like it had already practiced every move he hadn't learned yet.

He tried to feint. It matched.

He kicked wide. It checked the angle.

He shifted his stance, baiting an opening with a misstep.

The clone lunged to exploit the mistake.

Good.

Vael grabbed a fractured shard of corrupted data from the sim floor—half-coded and barely solid. He twisted and drove it into the center of the clone's chest.

The figure seized. No scream—just a harsh jolt of white static as it froze in place. Then, like a system shutting down mid-frame, it shattered and dispersed.

The air went flat.

A tone echoed across the room:

ECHO COUNT: 1

He didn't know what the count meant. It wasn't a score.

It felt like a tag. A permanent flag.

The system had marked him.

The room went silent.

Solas didn't log the result. Didn't move. Just stared, like he'd expected this.

Lenya's expression didn't change. But her eyes said she understood more than she let on.

Kane stood still. Watching the wall.

Vael stayed in the ring, chest tight, hands still shaking. Sweat clung to the back of his neck. His muscles ached—not just from the fight, but from holding back panic. He didn't feel like he'd won. It felt like surviving an exam he hadn't studied for, with answers written in someone else's blood.

Then his HUD snapped back to life. Lines of interface code slid past in pale blue. His vitals redlined and rebalanced. Battery sync reconnected. But one segment didn't behave like the rest.

A word appeared at the top of his vision. Clean. Centered. Bold.

Not a glitch.

A command.

One word stood out:

Anchor.

He'd heard that before. Not from training. Not from anyone else.

From a voice that didn't belong. The voice from his bed the night before. The one that had said he wasn't supposed to be here. It had known this was coming.

ANCHOR NODE DETECTED

RECURSION STABILITY: FLUCTUATING

VERSION 4.7 — PARTIAL SYNC INITIATED

Whatever this was, it wasn't over.

The system wasn't ignoring him anymore.

It was watching.