They staggered back into the Hazard Clearance facility just before dawn, a broken and bloodied mess. Unit 17 was no longer a squad of nervous recruits. They were survivors of a slaughter, their eyes wide with a trauma that would never fully heal. Sergeant Vale stood at the gate, a sneer twisting his lips as he looked them over.
"Still breathing?" he grunted, his voice full of disappointment. "Guess I'll have to send you in deeper tomorrow."
A guard's eyes fell on the new, dented shield Maria was clutching like a holy relic. He opened his mouth to question it, but Vale waved him off with a dismissive hand.
"Scrap from the nest," the sergeant said, not even bothering to look closely. "Let them carry it if it makes them feel better. A piece of trash won't save them from a real threat."
The loot was acknowledged, then immediately dismissed as irrelevant. The system did not care about their minor victories. It only cared about their eventual, inevitable disposal.
The next evening, two other Hazard units were sent on a routine patrol sweep that passed near the western perimeter. They walked right by the drainage culvert. To them, it was nothing. A dark, forgotten hole choked with trash and stagnant water, radiating the same low-level industrial mana pollution that permeated the entire sector. They saw nothing. They felt nothing.
But later that night, when Maria and Leo and the silent girl looked out the barracks window in that same direction, they saw it. A faint, pulsing, blood-red glow, a whisper of power that no one else could perceive. The dungeon was calling to them. Its gate was not a physical thing to be seen by all, but a psychic lure, a beacon visible only to those broken enough, desperate enough, to see it. It was a lock that only despair could open.
Inside the barracks, the atmosphere was thick with a strange, feverish energy. Maria sat on her bunk, clutching her dented shield, her knuckles white. "If it worked once, it'll work again," she muttered, her voice a low, obsessive chant. "We can't stop now. We'll die if we stop."
It was not the voice of a triumphant victor. It was the frantic whisper of an addict, a girl clinging to the illusion of control to keep from shattering completely.
Leo held a small, smooth stone, whispering to it like a prayer. The silent girl obsessively polished the chipped edge of her new sword.
Jack watched them from his corner, a detached observer studying a fascinating chemical reaction. It wasn't hope he was seeing. It was addiction. They had been given a single, powerful dose of a drug called "a chance," and now they would crawl back on their knees, through blood and bodies, for another hit. He didn't even need to push them anymore. The herd was already turning back toward the gate on its own.
He checked his mental interface.
[Notice: Tenant Return Probability – 71% → 86%]
The data confirmed his hypothesis.
He then focused on the other notification, the one that truly mattered. The violet alert from the night before still pulsed at the edge of his vision. He focused, willing it to expand.
[System Notice: External Interest – Mana fluctuation logged by Bureau Mana Monitoring Division.]
The world dissolved, and for a moment, Jack's perspective shifted. He was no longer in the barracks. He was a ghost in a sterile, white office miles away, a feature of his interface he hadn't known existed. He saw a low-ranking, bleary-eyed analyst staring at a screen filled with arcane data streams.
"Another energy spike in Sector 7, sir," the analyst said, his voice flat with boredom. "Same signature as yesterday. Should I mark it as an industrial waste surge?"
His superior, a fat man with a coffee stain on his uniform, didn't even look up from his paperwork. "Is it above the acceptable variance for the sector?"
"No, sir. Well within."
"Then file it under noise and move on," the superior officer grumbled. "I've got three units to write off from the sewer sweep. I don't have time for phantom energy readings."
The analyst shrugged, typed a few commands, and the violet alert on Jack's interface was buried under a mountain of digital paperwork. The system had noticed him. But the system was lazy. It was bloated. It was inefficient. Bureaucracy, he realized, was the greatest camouflage of all.
The vision faded. He was back in the darkness of the barracks. A profound sense of control settled over him. He let his mask slip for just a moment, a thin, sharp smile in the dark.
"Sheep that return to the pen," he whispered to himself, "are the easiest to shear."
But his smile faded as he looked at the interface again. The report had been filed, the immediate threat averted. And yet, the violet warning still pulsed. It was fainter now, a ghost at the edge of his vision, but it refused to vanish completely.
For the first time since his Awakening, Jack felt a sliver of genuine, cold unease. The Bureau had seen something. Not enough to act. Not yet. But enough to exist in a file. Enough to be a pattern. And he knew, with a predator's instinct, that patterns were the one thing that could get you killed.