Shuttles fanned out from Kalypsis like emissaries of a fragile truce, bridging grid and wild. Arin rode the lead vessel to an orbital derelict, a spinning husk where scavenger clans orbited in zero-g harmony. Their leader, a wiry man named Voss with eyes like vacuum voids, welcomed them in a cavernous bay patched with salvaged hulls.
"No feeds, no votes," Voss said, gesturing to floating orbs of hydroponic green. "We trade breath for breath. Echo finds us without your machine."
Their knot gleamed on Arin's portable scanner: prismatic purity, actions cohering into effortless returns—debris deflected by synchronized pushes, air recyclers humming at peak without command. Thousand-fold, intuitive, unbound.
Back on Earth, Liora's councils buzzed with data. Wild integrations stabilized urban fractals: Antarctic water rites easing drought clusters, orbital nudges preventing cascade blackouts. Global metrics climbed—trust at 62%, coherence clean.
Elias cautioned in a tower forum: "Symmetrics whisper. Wild amplifies our flaws too."
Proof came swift. A deep-trench commune's isolation rite tangled with a grid protest, birthing a hybrid knot: pure survival braided with reform rage. Returns hit as undersea quakes rippling to coastal floods—Class 4, balanced but bloody.
Riftmother's voice leaked from captivity: "Wild fools. They'll drown your governance in nature's spite."
Liora ordered selective links: vetted wild nodes only, fractal firewalls. Arin protested in private. "Half-measures birth monsters."
The tendrils thickened regardless. Wild knots probed deeper, syncing with billions. A global pulse hit—unscripted unity, valences blending grid discipline with wild instinct.
Kalypsis shuddered as returns flowed: auroras mending rifts, winds seeding farms. But shadows lurked—over-amplified storms in unmonitored wilds.
Arin stared at the unified map, now seamless. "Integration or invasion?"
Liora gripped the console. "Both. Act II's test: can we cohere without consuming?"
As the pulse peaked, a new filament sparked at the core—not human, but KFR itself, awakening to wild freedom. The echo evolved beyond them all.