The outer gates of Halris slid open with a mechanical sigh, letting in the fog that hadn't followed any other raider.
Just Kael.
A guard standing at the checkpoint blinked, staring through him — not at him. No questions. No nod.
It was as if the system registered his return… but not his presence.
That was new.
Kael didn't stop.
Didn't speak.
He just kept walking.
The familiar scent of the city crept in around him — rusted rails, ozone from overclocked barriers, the faint cinnamon of fried vendor bread from corner stalls. It should've been comforting.
It wasn't.
Ashwood's fog clung to the hem of his jacket even after he'd passed three cleansing nodes. It shouldn't have. Atmospheric tags were automatically scrubbed on return.
But here he was. Still damp with static.
Still carrying something back.
By the time he reached home, his hand was trembling — not from exhaustion, but from restraint.
He didn't look at the glyph again.
Didn't want to.
The apartment door opened with the sound of soft unlocking runes.
Senna's voice rang out from somewhere deep in the hallway:
"Mama! He's back!"
A moment later, her small form launched into his arms, nearly knocking the wind from him. She smelled like crayons and warmth.
He hugged her tighter than he meant to.
She didn't notice.
Liora rounded the corner next — tired, eyes red from dust, but smiling.
"You said you'd be back before dinner," she said, lifting an eyebrow.
"I lied," Kael murmured, still holding Senna close. "But I brought home something better than takeout."
"Let me guess," Liora said. "You didn't nearly die this time."
He gave her a look.
She sighed, kissed his cheek anyway, and moved toward the kitchen.
Later, as he washed his hands in the dim bathroom light, Kael rolled his sleeve up just far enough to see it.
The second glyph.
Long, sharp, and angular. The lines pulsed faintly beneath his skin like a golden burn.
It hadn't faded.
It hadn't cooled.
I patched live during combat, he thought.
I froze an enrage script. I didn't pay Debt. I didn't even drop below 20%.
The system let him walk away with the win.
And then pretended it hadn't happened.
He rolled the sleeve back down.
Behind him, Senna sat cross-legged at the low table, scribbling with her usual reckless energy.
Gold crayon today.
Lines. Circles. A rough sketch of a wolf, its body too long and eyes too big.
He frowned.
"What's that, bug?"
Senna looked up, smiling.
"Just a story I saw."
"Where?"
"In the fog."
Kael didn't speak.
Liora looked up from the sink, eyebrows pulled tight — like maybe she'd heard it too.
Outside, past the locked windows, past the flickering lights of the district towers, something on the data grid blinked once.
Just once.
But it was enough.
Lorne drank his coffee cold.
Not because he liked it that way — but because he always forgot to drink it before the logs finished compiling.
The office around him buzzed softly with old fan-blade vents and humming relay crystals. Half the overhead lights were out. The others flickered like bored lightning.
No one else was in this late.
The higher-ups didn't even check the logs anymore unless Dominion pushed an alert or someone important died.
But Lorne?
He was curious.
The Ashwood node wasn't on his docket.
It was tagged "Low Value / Corrupt-Flagged" — a stub of a raid zone that had been scheduled for deletion for two cycles. No events. No raids. No monster spawns above Tier C.
Which is why it was weird when the notification tripped.
[SECTOR ALERT: ASHWOOD.314-SUB]
[GATE STATUS: CLOSED (CLEARED)]
[PLAYER COUNT: 0]
[TIME STAMP: 21:02:16]
Lorne sat back in his chair.
Sipped the lukewarm coffee. Grimaced.
Then leaned in.
"No players?"
That didn't make sense.
Every Gate close logged at least one ID — even if the system glitched or the run failed. Even if someone de-synced or forced rollback.
But this wasn't flagged as error.
It was flagged as success.
He scrolled deeper.
No damage data.
No kill logs.
No XP distribution.
But there was one lingering line in the debug queue:
[PATCH DETECTED: NON-STANDARD INSTANCE]
[TRACE OVERRIDE: ACTIVE]
[FLAGGED FOR REVIEW – DOMINION ACCESS LEVEL REQUIRED]
Lorne's eyes widened a little.
Dominion-level tags were way above his clearance.
He shouldn't have been able to see that line.
So how did it show?
He copied the packet to a secure side thread.
Wrote a short header:
"Unusual node closure. No players logged. Possible phantom trigger?"
"Tagging as anomaly. Low threat. Recommend Dominion confirmation."
"Flagged for archive. – L"
He was about to log it and go home when the screen flickered.
Just once.
And the file he'd saved?
It was already marked "retrieved."
Not by his system.
Not by his guild.
He checked the access trace.
Nothing.
Just one final stamp before the file disappeared from his drive:
[EXTERNAL ECHO CONFIRMED]
[INTER-GUILD MONITORING PROTOCOL ENGAGED]
Lorne sat back slowly.
Frowning.
He didn't know what it meant.
But someone else had seen the blip.
And they moved faster than him.
Encrypted channels lit up like a slow-building fire.
Not all at once. Not with urgency.
But like static building behind glass — invisible to most, undeniable to those trained to hear it.
In Crescent Vow, a mid-sized guild best known for clean-run strategies, a raid tactician named Silev glanced at the forwarded packet and chuckled.
"No players? Probably a local glitch."
He tossed the thread to another coordinator and went back to writing his formation brief.
In Iron Accord, the reaction was different.
They didn't comment at all.
Just tagged the thread "Pending Audit – Priority Gray."
The kind of label used when something might be nonsense — or might be political dynamite.
They were smart like that.
In Eclipse Dominion, the file was already being read by someone two layers above field command.
The response was short.
Precise.
Delivered across a firewalled relay that only responded to embedded biometric glyphs:
"Maintain silence."
"Trace origin."
"If it blinked — we find who made it blink."
By the following morning, no one was talking about the anomaly.
But everyone had received the same echo.
A phrase. Stripped of context. Delivered in digital whispers:
"The system blinked."
And for the ones who understood what that could mean?
They didn't sleep that night.
Dominion Tower's upper decks buzzed with the sound of confidence.
Not chaos. Not concern.
Just the steady grind of politics, patrol logs, weapon requisitions, and war-board simulations run ten times over for raids that hadn't even been approved.
Aria moved through it all like a ghost no one could stop — not with her command badge, and not with the glint of steel in her eyes.
She wasn't here to eavesdrop.
She just had timing.
Two officers leaned against the edge of the command table near Sector 7's hologrid, their backs turned, voices pitched for privacy — but not secrecy.
"No ID logs?"
"Zero. Not even a rollback trace."
"So either a ghost flagged that node, or someone scrubbed themselves mid-instance."
"You know that's impossible."
"Not if the system blinked."
Aria slowed her pace.
Just a little.
They didn't notice her.
One of them scoffed.
"Please. We haven't seen a blink since—"
"Yeah, and remember who vanished the last time?"
Silence.
Then laughter, low and nervous.
Aria kept walking.
But she never stopped listening.
Later that evening, back in her personal quarters, Aria sat at her console with the lights off and the window cracked just enough to let in the static breeze from the outer towers.
She typed quickly.
Accessed recent Gate logs.
Filtered for anything tagged Ashwood.
Nothing official.
Then she tried a backdoor tag.
A trace pattern Kael had used once, years ago, to sneak into a ruined Tier B training zone with three other mids. Aria had chewed him out afterward, half out of rage, half out of jealousy that they'd pulled it off without her.
That trace still existed.
But the location it linked to?
[ASHWOOD.314-SUB]
[CLEARED]
[DEBT: N/A]
[RAIDER: — ]
[LOGS: UNAVAILABLE]
[NOTE: CONTENT MISSING]
Aria stared at it.
Brows drawn. Fingers still.
No Kael.
No names.
Just static pretending to be silence.
The guilds did not meet.
They didn't call.
Didn't exchange records.
They didn't need to.
Each had its own way of cataloging threat.
And each, independently, made the same decision before morning:
Tag anomaly. Do not engage. Watch. Wait.
In Iron Accord, the anomaly was labeled "Echo ID: Unseen."
In Crescent Vow, it was "Phantom Flag [Ashwood: Ghost]"
In Eclipse Dominion… it was simply "Blink."
In the black hall of Eclipse Dominion's data sanctum, where light didn't reach unless summoned, a scribe knelt before the archival mirror.
The air shimmered faintly — reality here was thinner.
Everything was thinner.
He didn't speak at first.
Just submitted the report with a whisper of glyph-threaded breath.
Then, after a pause:
"Node closed. No kill data. No survivor logs. But it was cleared."
The presence behind the glass didn't reply.
So the scribe said the rest.
Quietly.
As if naming it might make it more real.
"He's back."
"Or worse…"
"He's not the first."
And in a private subthread, locked beyond even Guildmaster access, the system logged the final line in cold admin-gold:
[RECOGNIZED PATCHRUNNER: 002]
[STATUS: UNKNOWN]
[OBSERVATION PRIORITY: LEVEL BLACK]