The four of them sat in a perfect square, a tense, silent heart at the center of the trial room.
The air was thick with the latent energy of the System, the very fabric of the space a brittle shell around them.
[Trial Status: Internal Echo Format – Active]
[Time Dilation Enabled: 2.0x Mental Sync Load]
[Reflection Stability: 72% and rising]
Jack's heart pounded in sync with the pulse of the trial room. Across from him sat his Echo, his other self. Expression unreadable, eyes like polished obsidian.
Hollow's counterpart twitched beside him, shadow movements a half-second ahead, as if predicting the fight before it had even begun.
Sear's double smirked, a cruel and familiar twist of the lips.
Lucen's echo simply stared, unblinking at all.
They were too perfect. Too correct. Like the flawless answers to a question the real team hadn't even finished asking.
"Stay tight," Jack whispered, his voice a low current on their synced channel. "No reactionary calls. No first strikes."
Ghost Ledger nodded.
Each word Jack spoke formed as pulse-lines in the chair's neural net, syncing faintly with their biological rhythms.
He could feel it the tension fracturing beneath the surface, like a single wrong breath would shatter the entire chamber.
Then the reflections moved.
It started with Sear's echo launching a flame spiral that curved mid-air like it had memory, seeking out the perfect path.
Sear countered with a flick of her fingers, dispersing it in a precise, pre-emptive backlash pulse.
[Sync Interference Registered – SEAR Trait Convergence: 88%]
"That's too close," Hollow said, his voice strained.
"They're adjusting faster than predicted," Lucen replied, her hands tracing sound vibrations into the air. "They're not just echoing. They're streaming."
"Live?" Jack asked.
Lucen nodded. "Down to emotional resonance."
Jack's eyes narrowed, a cold clarity settling over him. "Then we need to desync."
[Sync Override Attempt Initiated – Jack Bernard]
[Target: Ghost Ledger Team Emotional Anchor]
[Result: Partial Success – SEAR & Hollow Thread Split Achieved. Lucen: Resistant.]
The moment Jack split the sync, everything slowed to a surreal crawl. His heart beat once, deeply. Then his vision split. The room fracturing into three parallel actions at once.
Hollow parried an echo-flash blade that hadn't yet been drawn.
Sear screamed as her flame burst rebounded on her own shield.
Lucen vanished completely, not as an action but as a concept.
He heard her voice in his skull: "Signal lost... Jack... too loud..."
Jack activated Calm Speech. But his echo activated it, too.
The two effects collided and canceled each other out with a soft hiss of displaced energy.
[Trait Feedback Detected – Dominion Class Trait Interference]
[Reflection Jack Initiating Control Pulse – 3s Delay]
"NO," Jack said, his voice full, calm, and cutting through the dissonance.
He took a breath. Focused and silence.
[Override Command Accepted – Initiating Noise Lockdown]
The trial froze for one heartbeat. Reality crackled like a shorted-out wire, and then steadied itself.
"Let's try this again," Jack said softly, his gaze sweeping over the team. He turned, nodding at Hollow. "You hold your echo. No mimics, just unpredictability."
Hollow cracked his knuckles, a nervous tic turned into a tactical choice. "Chaos? I'm good at that."
"Sear, pressure the flame loop. Burn, retreat, shift rhythm every time."
Sear grinned, a flash of white in the sterile room. "Time to be noisy."
Jack stepped to the mirrored cube, now flickering between images of past and potential.
A thousand unfinished actions burned across its surface.
Lucen's echo reappeared, shimmering like a ripple in broken water.
Jack couldn't see her hands but he felt the echo of her intent. Cold. Measured. He had seconds.
"Lucen," he whispered into the ambient channel. "I need you here. I need your noise."
A ripple. A pause in the room for a moment.
Then, her voice: "Then listen. Stop thinking like yourself."
Jack closed his eyes.
He let go of sync, of coordination, of logic.
He moved.
The battle turned into something else entirely.
Sear became erratic. Her flame patterns twisted like a sudden wind, abandoning order for entropy. She reversed her own burn cycle, drew fire from her double, and let the floor melt beneath them both.
Hollow laughed as he mirrored his echo with pure mockery, mirroring mirroring itself, breaking all symmetry. He spoke nonsense mid-fight, danced through reflex loops, and baited false aggression.
And Jack? Jack blurred. He moved not with calculation, but with intuition. He predicted not with analysis, but with intent.
He lunged forward two steps ahead of his echo. Then behind, then beneath. Not faster and planned. Just... intuition.
Reflection Jack faltered.
[Echo Sync Breakdown – Instability Rising]
[Lucen Reconnected – Partial Phase Stabilized]
Lucen reappeared in a burst of inverted sound. Her echo screamed, splitting into raw data particles. The walls pulsed, unable to sustain the resonance.
A new pulse from the cube:
[Reflection Format Unstable – Sync Collapse Imminent]
Then, silence. Only one set of chairs remained occupied.
[Trial End: Ghost Ledger – Victory Achieved]
[Echo Format Destabilized]
[XP Awarded: +110 per member]
[New Trait Unlocked: Signal Surge (Passive – Emotion Layer Interference Control)]
Sear collapsed to one knee, panting.
Hollow leaned against the wall, his deck flickering with static trails.
Lucen sat quietly, her hands still vibrating from the last pulse.
Jack stood at the center.
"Let this be a rule," he said, his voice calm and solid in the silent room. "If they copy us again, they get noise."
Somewhere in the House, an Observer feed closed with a soft flicker.
[COMMENTARY FLAG: Unstable Sync Adapted]
[COMMENTARY FLAG: Noise Tactic Not Predicted]
And deeper still, behind black partitions:
[Echo Experiment Result Logged – Outcome: Insufficient Control Protocol Response: Pending]
Elsewhere, the Observer Table lit up for the first time in six cycles.
[Subject: Ghost Ledger – Review Scheduled | Deviation Flag Level 2 Raised]
A single note was appended by a nameless seat: "Do not interfere. Not yet."
And in Jack's room, the first encrypted message arrived. No sender. No System trail. Just five words:
You are not alone anymore.
He stared at the message long after it faded. Not because he doubted it. But because it felt like a beginning.
And in a House built on isolation, beginnings were the greatest threat of all.
[Chapter End – Ghost Ledger Triumphs Over Its Reflection. Signal Surge Acquired. Emotional Sync Mastery Level 1 Established.]