Dawn crept silently across the Western Bureau Exclusion Zone.
The desert wind still carried the scent of ash an unfamiliar odor suspended between metal and human flesh, between technology and the soul. Three weeks had passed since the "Van Sinh Western Bureau" incident, yet the ground here had not cooled.
At times, faint sounds could be heard like iron breathing, like a heartbeat pulsing from deep beneath the earth.
Captain Phạm Quân stepped down from the armored vehicle. His long coat collar was turned up, the morning sun reflected dimly in his tinted glasses.
He said nothing. He simply stared at the ash-covered ruins before him, as if this place had once held lives, voices, warmth now reduced to the imprint of living energy turned to charcoal.
"Has the entire zone been scanned?" Quân asked. His voice was low, clipped, hoarse.
"Yes, Captain. But there's something unusual. At the epicenter of the blast, there is no radiation. No explosives. No residual ions of any kind."
The scientific officer answered, gripping a scanner.
"No?" Quân narrowed his eyes. "Then where did the energy come from?"
"Biological."
Quân frowned. "You're saying the energy came from… the human body?"
"Yes. According to our analysis, the bioelectric waves here exceeded anything ever recorded in artificial neural systems. It was like a heart… exploding."
Silence followed.
Since the dissolution of Van Sinh, Quân had witnessed many horrors but nothing like this.
A heart… exploding. Not a bomb. Not a weapon. A living entity that burned itself from within.
He turned to the technical team.
"Report the physical evidence."
"We recovered an unidentified alloy fragment. It reacts to electromagnetic fields, emitting a faint blue glow. And…"
The officer hesitated.
"A footprint."
"A footprint?" Quân repeated.
"Yes. A human footprint… embedded deeply into molten steel. Impossible to form under normal body temperature."
Quân looked down.
On the polished black metal lay the imprint of a bare foot each toe distinct, every ridge of skin preserved. When light struck it, the mark reflected a soft blue hue, as if glowing from within.
"Run spectral imaging. Cross check DNA."
"No matches, Captain. It does not correspond to any known biological record."
"Which means…"
"That whoever left it does not exist in any human database."
Quân exhaled slowly, lit a cigarette. White smoke drifted into the ash-filled air.
"A being that doesn't exist… leaving footprints in molten steel."
He paused.
"Tell me was it human, or was it a god?"
"I don't know, Captain."
Quân crouched down and pressed his gloved hand against the mark.
It was cold.
So cold that numbness crept into his fingertips despite the high sun overhead.
"The cold of steel," he murmured, "or the cold of the dead?"
---
That afternoon.
Central Forensics Laboratory, Ho Minh City a metropolis rebuilt after the Energy Wars.
Inside the chamber, blue light washed over everything. Holographic screens projected dense streams of data. A female specialist presented the findings.
"Captain, these are the spectral results from the footprint and the alloy fragment. Both share identical properties what we classify as living metal."
"Living?"
"They possess structures that mimic biological cells. They respond autonomously to environmental changes."
"Self restructuring?"
"Yes. They even 'breathe.' We detected ion exchange patterns analogous to cellular respiration."
Quân leaned back in his chair, eyes fixed on the data.
"So this entity was neither fully human… nor entirely machine."
"More accurately a hybrid."
He fell silent.
His gaze stopped on a spiral-shaped energy graph. The spiral was not random. He had seen it before in classified files of the Ministry of Engineering.
The Van Sinh emblem.
"So it's you again," he whispered.
Night fell. Quân returned to the site. A light rain descended, cold wind weaving through collapsed structures. He stood among the ruins, flashlight in hand, shining it into the air itself.
Ash still floated within the beam but strangely, in certain spaces, the ash did not fall. He reached out. The air there had form.
Like the outline of an invisible foot mid-step.
When he touched it, the flashlight flickered. His sensors registered a faint energy signature.
"Footprints… in the air," he muttered.
"He's still here."
The wind howled. Rain hammered against steel.
Quân tightened his grip on the flashlight, his eyes burning with resolve and fear.
He knew what lingered here was more than the trace of a human being.
It was the residue of a soul, searching for a way back.