Chapter 5: "Directive One"

The HUD timer hit 00:00 just after midnight.

Vael had been awake for hours, waiting. No sleep. No rest. Just pacing silently while the rest of the dorms slept. When the countdown ended, the lights in his HUD blinked once—blue, then red—before stabilizing.

MISSION 01: ENDPOINT REVEAL

LOCATION UNLOCKED: Lower Core—Echo Reserve Sector

The moment he saw it, something shifted in his chest. Like gravity had changed. The air felt thinner.

The Echo Reserve wasn't a place cadets were allowed to enter. It wasn't even listed on the usual access maps. Rumor said it was where corrupted code went to decay—unfinished constructs, broken simulations, things the system couldn't delete but refused to acknowledge.

He dressed quickly and left without waking Kane. The walk to the lower core wasn't long, but every hallway felt like it stretched too far. Like the system was testing his commitment before he even arrived.

Security doors opened without resistance. No scan, no confirmation. They expected him.

Echo Reserve Sector was colder than anywhere else in the academy. The walls buzzed with faint static. Light panels flickered, but the system didn't stabilize them. It didn't care to.

Then the room opened.

It wasn't empty. The Echoes were waiting.

Dozens of suspended projections hovered in the dark—frozen frames of battles, training loops, old cadet logs. Some were blurred beyond recognition. Others looped constantly. A few twitched like they were trying to break free.

At the center stood a console. His HUD pinged.

ANCHOR DIRECTIVE: RETRIEVE LOST TRAIT

SOURCE: Echo File #119-D — Cadet V. Drayce (Version 1.1)

His chest tightened.

It was him.

Or an earlier version.

The screen activated as he approached. A flickering video played—his face, slightly younger. Same uniform. Same voice. But the eyes were calmer.

"I failed this mission," the echo said. "You might not."

OPTIONAL TRAIT UNLOCKED: MEMORY PULL (Rank F)

Pulls fractured memory shards from failed echoes within proximity. Use with caution.

The screen went dark.

Vael accepted the trait. A pulse ran through the floor. All the Echo projections jolted in unison.

He didn't know what came next.

But he knew this was the first step into the system's deeper layers.

And it had just invited him in.

The moment he accepted the trait, something shifted. Not just in the room—but in him. His HUD glitched briefly, displaying fragments of past interfaces, then stabilized with a soft chime.

NEW TRAIT ACTIVE: MEMORY PULL

Passive scan enabled. Detecting residual memory threads...

The console dimmed. Around him, the suspended projections flickered like disturbed water. He turned in place, slowly taking in each image. A cadet mid-strike, frozen in a moment of triumph. Another, collapsed and glitching, looped endlessly through a failed command.

He didn't know any of their names. But the system did.

A second pulse echoed beneath his feet, this one warmer—less warning, more invitation. Vael stepped closer to the nearest echo.

It shivered.

A series of unreadable tags blinked across the HUD: [LOG000F-ERROR], [CLASS:N/A], [ORIGIN: LOST]

His trait kicked in automatically.

MEMORY PULL ATTEMPTING ANCHOR LINK

STATUS: PARTIAL

RESULT: FRAGMENT RETRIEVED — [UNKNOWN CLASS MODULE: DEFENSE PHASE-SHIFT I]

The shard lodged itself into his interface like a jagged puzzle piece. His HUD shimmered. A diagram appeared—a brief glimpse of a technique: sidestep acceleration through simulated latency drift. It wasn't something he knew. Not really. But now, somehow, he could feel where to place his weight.

He backed away slowly. The other projections responded. Some glitched violently, others dimmed. A few rotated to face him, no longer frozen.

That's when the warning hit:

SYSTEM NOTE: Unauthorized recursion anchors destabilize thread integrity. Memory drift increasing.

WARNING: Echo Proximity Limit REACHED. Begin exit protocol.

The lights pulsed red.

But something held his attention. Toward the far wall, a single projection hadn't moved with the others. It stood motionless—more defined than the rest.

It was a cadet.

And it looked just like him.

Not a shadow this time. Not a glitch. Just… a version of Vael who hadn't changed. Who hadn't seen Echoes or Anchor threads or recursion maps.

He looked at peace.

ECHO TYPE: Dormant/Corrupted

RETRIEVAL: LOCKED WITHOUT ANCHOR UPGRADE

Vael reached out, but the HUD blocked him. The screen flashed with a new overlay:

Upgrade Required: Anchor Directive Layer — Tier 1

Mission Incomplete. Exit Required.

He turned away slowly, stepping back through the still-glitching field of projections.

This wasn't just a test.

It was a warning:

Not all versions of himself were meant to survive.

By the time he made it out of the Echo Reserve, his body felt heavier. Not from fatigue, exactly—though his legs ached and his skin felt pulled tight over cold muscle—but from the weight of everything the system had just shown him. The knowledge that pieces of himself were trapped here, archived like data logs, too broken or too dangerous to delete.

He reached the lift and leaned against the wall as it rose. The humming beneath his boots pulsed in sync with the HUD—still recalibrating after Memory Pull. Red lines traced his vitals. Neural strain: high. Anchor deviation: climbing.

SYSTEM WARNING: Prolonged exposure to Echo Reserve has affected stability. Trait corruption possible.

He tapped the HUD overlay and dismissed the notice. Not because he wasn't concerned—but because he didn't want to show the system hesitation. It was watching.

As the lift opened into the upper corridors, the air changed again. Warmer, but more artificial—cleaned, processed. The scent of sterilized alloy and recycled oxygen.

Cadets were moving now. Morning rotations had started. He merged into the flow, head down, gauntlets still damp from the chill below.

No one noticed the red flicker behind his eyes.

Later that day, the system called him again. Not through alarms or summons. Just a blink—a flicker in the hallway lights—and a ping in the back of his skull. He followed it out of instinct. It led him to a sealed terminal two levels up, where the hall looped behind the maintenance stairwells.

ANCHOR UPDATE AVAILABLE

CONDITION: Trait Stability Required

REVIEW PENDING: System Audit Tag (Class Z — Echo Incident)

A new prompt appeared, this one subtler. A query, not a command:

Would you like to review Echo File #002 — Lenya Cho?

He froze.

This wasn't just about himself anymore.

The system was showing him other cadets.

And not the versions walking around upstairs.

The ones it hadn't finished rewriting yet.

His mission wasn't done.

The real one had only just begun.