The headache was a familiar enemy, but this one carried a new, psychic venom. It wasn't just the pain of an overused muscle; it was the echo of a hundred shattered selves. Leo spent the next 48 hours in a fugue state, the fractured images from the mirror—the monster, the soldier, the corpse—looping in his dreams. He felt… thin. As if his identity had been stretched and worn down in places.
Captain Valerius noticed. During a tactical briefing on low-level Echo dispersal, his wintery eyes fixed on Leo. "You look like you've seen a ghost, O'Connor. Or made one."
Leo just shook his head, offering a weak excuse about training fatigue. He couldn't admit he'd broken the first rule Valerius had given him: Do not experiment unsupervised. The memory of the thing in the mirror, the feeling of its attention, was a secret he clutched tightly to his chest.
The call to action was a relief. A Manifestation was disrupting the power grid in the old industrial sector. Standard procedure. It was the kind of operation Leo was now built for: identify the anomaly's core resonance, find the right "skill" to disrupt it, and apply the Hundredfold scalpel.
They arrived at a cavernous, derelict factory. The air hummed with a low, dissonant frequency that made their teeth ache. Conveyor belts rattled with phantom motion, and welding arms sparked with ghostly light. It was a "Industrial Echo," a repetition of the factory's final, frantic shift before the Gloaming took it.
"Standard dispersal pattern," Kaelen ordered, her rifle up. "Rourke, take the north flank. O'Connor, scan for the core resonance. Find what this thing is hungry for so we can cut off its lunch."
Leo nodded, closing his eyes. He focused on the skill Valerius had been drilling him on: Resonance Analysis.
[Skill Recognized: Resonance Analysis - Basic Lv. 4]
[Intent: Sustained Application. Multiplier: x20.]
His perception shifted. The world became a symphony of invisible energies. He could see the psychic loops of the Echo, the repeating patterns of long-dead workers' stress and fatigue. He traced the threads of energy, following them to their source, expecting to find a knot of trauma or fear.
Instead, he found a hole.
In the center of the factory floor, where the core of the Echo should have been, was a perfect, silent void in the resonant field. It wasn't emitting energy; it was consuming it. The phantom sounds and lights weren't the Echo's expression—they were its death throes, its energy being actively siphoned away.
"Kaelen," Leo said, his voice tight. "This is wrong. It's not a standard Echo. Something's… eating it."
Before she could respond, the phantom sounds cut off abruptly. The ghostly lights died. An profound, unnatural silence fell, more terrifying than the noise. The air grew cold enough to show their breath.
From the shadowy office mezzanine, something flowed down the metal stairs. It was not made of shadow or memory. It was the absence of those things. A man-shaped void, a walking patch of non-existence. Where its face should be was a swirling, silent vortex that seemed to drink the light from the very air around it.
Rourke didn't hesitate. He roared and unleashed a concussive blast from his gauntlets. The kinetic energy, a visible wave of force, shot toward the creature—and vanished into its chest without a sound. The thing didn't flinch. It simply took another step forward.
"It's not working!" Rourke yelled.
Kaelen fired a sustained plasma burst. The brilliant energy was sucked into the vortex-face like water down a drain. "Switching to solid rounds!" She fired her rifle. The bullets disappeared into the void without even the sound of impact.
The creature raised a hand. It didn't attack them. It pointed at Rourke.
The big man's kinetic barrier, a shimmering field of protective energy, flickered wildly. Then, like a ribbon of smoke, it was torn from his body and drawn into the creature's outstretched hand. Rourke cried out, not in pain, but in profound disorientation, collapsing to one knee as his primary defense was literally eaten.
Leo's enhanced analysis was still active. He watched, horrified, as he saw the truth. This thing didn't feed on fear or trauma. It fed on expression. On energy, on sound, on light, on motion. On Aptitudes.
"It's a Resonance Eater!" Leo shouted. "It consumes energy! All energy! Don't use your weapons!"
But it was too late for Kaelen. The creature turned its void-face toward her. She tried to dodge, but it was as if the air around her thickened. The focused intent, the combat skill, the very potential for violence that made her a Sweeper—it was being pulled from her. She gasped, her movements becoming clumsy and uncoordinated, her expert stance collapsing into that of a terrified civilian.
The creature was turning them back into zeros.
Its faceless gaze now settled on Leo. He felt it. A terrible, pulling sensation, not at his body, but at his mind. At the core of his being where the Hundredfold Application resided. The talent itself, the intricate mental framework, felt like it was being stressed, tested. The creature was trying to siphon the most complex, potent energy signature in the room.
His power.
Panic surged. If he fought back with any multiplied skill, he would just be giving it a bigger meal. A hundredfold energy blast would be a feast. A hundredfold physical strike would be kinetic energy it could devour. He was the ultimate battery, and it was here to recharge.
The pulling sensation intensified. He felt a thread of his own consciousness, a fragment of the "Focused Intent" skill he'd used on the mirror, begin to unravel and stream toward the creature. The headache from his experiment returned with a vengeance.
The mirror.
The thought was a spark in the overwhelming dread. This thing felt familiar because it was. It was the same type of entity that had noticed his fractured reflection. It was drawn to complex, paradoxical energy. To things that shouldn't exist.
And in that moment, Leo understood. You couldn't fight a vacuum with force. You had to fill it with something it couldn't digest.
He dropped his resonance analysis. He stopped trying to fight the pull. Instead, he leaned into it. He focused on the most mundane, simple, and utterly human thing he could think of. He reached into his pocket, his movements slow and deliberate against the psychic suction.
He pulled out a small, worn photograph of his family, taken before the Gloaming. A simple, physical memory. No power. No skill. Just a feeling.
He focused on the skill of Remembering. Not with perfect clarity, not with a hundredfold multiplier. He just remembered. The smell of his mother's cooking. The sound of his father's laugh. The feeling of a sun that didn't shine through a polluted, horror-haunted sky.
[Skill Recognized: Memory - Basic Lv. 1]
[Intent: Sustained Application. Multiplier: x1.]
He applied no multiplier. He simply performed the action, holding the memory pure and steady in his mind, a single, unamplified candle flame in the overwhelming void.
The Resonance Eater hesitated. The pulling sensation wavered. It had been feasting on the high-energy outputs of the Sweepers, on the complex echo of the factory. This… this was nothing. It was inert. It was boring.
In that moment of confusion, Leo looked at Kaelen and Rourke. "Stop! Stop being Sweepers! Just… be people! Think of something normal!"
Understanding dawned on Kaelen's face. She closed her eyes, forcing her combat-honed mind to quiet, to think of something else. Rourke, grunting with effort, did the same.
The Resonance Eater, deprived of the complex energies it craved, seemed to lose cohesion. The void that was its form flickered. With a final, silent ripple of frustration, it dissolved, not into nothingness, but back into the unnoticed background noise of the world.
The factory was truly silent now, just a dark, empty building.
Leo slid down against a rusted machine, utterly drained. He hadn't used his power to win. He had used it to restrain himself. He had won by being ordinary.
But as he looked at the spot where the creature had vanished, a new fear took root. The Gloaming wasn't just throwing monsters at them. It was adapting. It was creating things designed to counter them. And it was now creating things that were specifically interested in him.