The sun did not rise in Nehkara—it clawed its way across the ash-stained sky like a dying beast. Pale and bruised, it cast no warmth. Light here was a concession, not a promise.
Atahsaia Vire moved with methodical precision through the dead brush and skeletal trees of the Drounge Ravines. His body ached from bruises gathered in silence. He'd slept with his back pressed to obsidian roots, his ears attuned to distant snarls and the whispers of Hollow Echoes drifting in the wind.
This was not survival.
This was reconnaissance.
He did not intend to remain prey.
He had begun to build a mental lattice—an internal map of the territory's rhythms. Every scream in the distance, every footprint in the mud, every broken branch was data. Atahsaia had never killed a man on Earth. Here, he had watched two Earthlings die in the past twenty-four hours, their insides dragged out by a clawed beast with no name.
The others were either dead or turned.
Turned.
The word lingered like a rot. A few survivors had begun to resonate with Echoes prematurely, but without guidance or control. They weren't saviors. They weren't even themselves anymore.
The man he'd once studied logic with back on Earth now screamed in fractured tongues, lashing out with a warped body half-submerged in Echo smoke.
The transformation was irreversible.
He encountered them just before twilight—humanoid figures clad in cloaks stitched from black sinew, their faces hidden behind masks carved from bone. They stood around a circular arrangement of spears plunged into the earth like teeth. At the center lay a corpse, still fresh. Not bleeding—draining.
The air pulsed.
One of them turned slowly. No weapons drawn. No words.
The Bone-Marked.
He had heard of them from fragments in the Resonant Weave—those who stabilized their Echoforms through ritualistic dismemberment and remembrance. They marked their bones with Echo runes to stay grounded.
"You've no echo," said the figure at last, voice like friction. "Yet you walk this world. Why?"
Atahsaia didn't answer.
The Bone-Marked didn't ask again. Instead, the figure raised a thin dagger and sliced their own palm open. Blood fell onto the corpse.
The corpse twitched.
And screamed.
It wasn't the scream that staggered Atahsaia. It was the sensation that followed.
A vacuum opened inside his soul. Cold. Pure. Ancient. Something responded within him—not an Echo, but a void where Echoes should be. His Resonance Index still read 0%. But that no longer felt like a failure. It felt like insulation.
His Null Core did not connect him to other selves.
It devoured them.
He stumbled away from the ritual as the reborn corpse thrashed against invisible chains of resonance. The Bone-Marked paid him no attention. Their ritual was a communion. He was merely an interruption.
But his Null Core drank in the bleed-off energy like a dying man inhaling steam.
And then—
Lockbreak.
It wasn't violent. It was clean. Like the crack of glass under pressure.
A memory not his own flickered behind his eyes: A battlefield. A thousand versions of himself. Fire raining from the heavens. A world breaking.
Then darkness.
Atahsaia woke hours later beneath a canopy of glow-fungus. His thoughts were fractured—memories bending, logic slicing through hallucinations.
But one thing remained.
A name.
Tactician Echo: Version 17A.
Not power. Not strength. But a self who had survived through pure calculation. An Echoform from a future where Atahsaia had weaponized time, probability, and consequence.
He hadn't accessed it directly.
But he had skimmed its edge.
Sync Rate: 7%.
Enough to feel its thoughts overlaying his own.
Probability threads. Tactical anchor points. Sacrificial route analysis.
He could see outcomes now.
He could begin to predict.
He returned to the outer ridge of the ravine with new purpose. Where others saw chaos, he now saw calculable aggression curves. The beasts hunted in predictable sweeps. The terrain offered blind zones.
He began leaving false trails, using broken Echo fragments like scent lures. Monsters followed them into deadfalls.
By the end of the second night, he had drawn blood from a Wretchen Hound with no weapons—only strategy. It died confused, its claws tangled in laced vines he'd placed hours earlier.
He didn't eat that night.
He studied.
As his sync rate rose, voices began to intrude—faint at first. A female voice, calm and cold. A younger version of himself, terrified and screaming. An old version, murmuring mathematical riddles.
They were fragments from the Tactician Echo.
This wasn't possession. It was exposure.
He learned to compartmentalize. To sort voice from self.
He documented his thoughts. Names. Terms. Variables. He wrote equations in the dirt, then erased them before anything could see. Paranoia was survival. Pattern was power.
On the fourth day, he encountered a girl—another Earthling. Wounded. Coughing blood. She had partially synced to a Shard Echo and was beginning to fray.
She begged for help.
He analyzed her condition. The sync rate was unstable. Echoburn had begun. She had minutes, maybe less.
He could leave her. He could end her.
Or—
He could use her.
He knelt beside her, whispered false comfort, and placed a resonance anchor on her pulsepoint. When her sync failed fully, her collapse fed the tether.
His sync rose to 11%.
He did not smile.
He simply turned and left, the whispering louder now.
He reached the cliffside where the land descended into Fleshspiral Dominion—one of the monster-governed territories. Below, chitinous towers spiraled up from the ground like twisted coral. Lights pulsed beneath their surface like bioluminescent veins.
He stared into the abyss.
He did not flinch.
A voice—his own—whispered from the Echo:
"To rewrite the system, you must walk through the code of blood and bone."
Atahsaia Vire turned his back to the lightless sky.
And stepped forward.
To be continued…