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/-\
The rain wasn't real not anymore.
Above the city's Mid-Tier belt, programmed clouds rolled like liquid steel, sluicing timed moisture down carbon-glass towers and across sun-starved rooftops. It was the illusion of weather, calibrated to drip at "natural" intervals for the sake of routine, nostalgia, and the few overgrown parks still left in the districts.
But in Dockblock Nineteen, it felt real enough.
Drey kept his coat collar high and his eyes lower. He moved like someone who had grown up being told to look down not out of humility, but because the wrong stare in the wrong neighborhood still got your ribs broken. Luro flanked him in silence, hands deep in a patched jacket with signal-blocking weave. The place reeked of damp ferroplastic and last week's fishmeal shipment.
Aiden wasn't with them. Not yet. This meeting was delicate an information trade requiring anonymity and layered trust. At least, that's what the contact had said.
Only Kiera knew where they'd gone. She didn't approve. She rarely did.
They reached the rendezvous point a forgotten maglev tunnel half-collapsed and bristling with wire fungus. Drey stepped over a corroded control rail. "This better be worth it."
Luro didn't answer, but the slight twitch in his jaw said he was thinking the same thing.
Then the lights blinked. Once. Twice. On the third, the air shimmered.
A ripple of distortion spread across the tunnel wall, folding into itself like heatwaves in reverse. Out of that blur, a figure stepped forward hooded, tall, wearing a coat that didn't reflect light correctly. His face was obscured by an analog breathing mask and a visor band older than most military archives.
He spoke through a throat-scrambler. The voice was low, metallic.
"You brought the shard trace."
Drey reached into his jacket slowly, producing a memory wafer the size of a thumbprint. It pulsed with a faint reddish light, encoded with the last captured interaction Aiden had with the sphere. "You said you could decrypt its metaphase pattern."
"I said I could verify it," the figure replied. "Not decrypt. Not yet."
"Then tell us who you are," Luro snapped. "Because right now, we're trusting a ghost who talks like a government dropout."
The figure turned his visor toward Luro, but when he responded, it wasn't hostile.
"I was ARASHI."
The words dropped like a bomb in the silence.
Drey stiffened. Luro's hand moved closer to the interior of his jacket.
The man raised a hand not a threat, just a gesture of pace.
"Project ARASHI wasn't just research. It was misdirection. Most of the public data trails that survived made it seem like a tactical disaster. But that's because only the failures were allowed to surface."
"You were part of the actual program," Drey said slowly. "Not the shell."
"I helped design the Dusk Directive's containment protocols. I wrote the lock code schema for Gen-BETA archives. I was there when the first vaults were closed."
Luro frowned. "Why break silence now?"
"Because something's waking up. Something we didn't finish killing."
The figure moved forward, and from a pouch beneath his coat he pulled a folded data-core shell aged, burnt along one edge, and sealed with a broken emblem Drey recognized: a variant of the Uchiha fan, interlaced with a spiral sun.
"That emblem "
"Yes. It was our error code. Whenever a subject passed threshold parameters for chakra reactivity but failed temporal anchoring... this sigil marked their file as unstable. ARASHI was building war assets. We were creating memory ghosts. And one of them survived."
"Echo," Luro said.
The man nodded.
"You want proof," the figure continued. "You want to know what Aiden is, why the city's waking up around him. You've seen the sphere respond. You've seen the protocols re-initialize. But you haven't seen this."
He tapped the data-core's edge. A faint light bloomed.
Holographic runes spiraled upward: a video log, dated 42 years ago.
A lab. Bright, humming, sterile. The image was distorted by damage, but clear enough. Two researchers leaned over a containment cradle.
Inside it was a child.
Not a newborn, but no older than three. Hair black. Eyes closed. And beneath the skin, flickers of faint red a glow pulsing in time with a heartbeat.
The timestamp accelerated. The child grew.
Different logs. The child at age six eyes open, calm. At ten alone in a training cube, practicing hand signs. At twelve motionless inside a stasis tank, sharingan active, burning.
Then the audio kicked in.
"We can't stabilize him," one researcher whispered. "He phases during REM cycles. His memories are running centuries into the past."
"We should terminate. This isn't a weapon, it's a recursive event."
"Project head won't allow it. They think he's inherited more than chakra. They think he's… remembering."
The clip ended.
Silence stretched.
Luro finally broke it. "That kid…"
"Was an echo," the masked man said. "Not the same one you know. But a predecessor. There were at least five. Aiden is likely the sixth or the seventh. And he's different because something in him anchored."
Drey looked at the others, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
"There was a theory," he muttered. "That chakra memory could preserve identity through dimensional echoes. But it was written off as myth. How do we even know Aiden's not just a clone?"
"Because he's not behaving like one," the figure said simply. "He's diverging. And his Sharingan isn't just copying it's evolving. You've seen it. You know."
Luro narrowed his eyes. "What does the Dusk Directive want with him now?"
"They want to put him back in the vault."
Drey swore. "They'll kill him."
"No," the man said. "They'll preserve him. Dissect his chakra lattice and memory cycles until they figure out how to make more. Vaults don't destroy. Vaults store."
"And you're helping us why?"
The man stepped back.
"Because I wrote the original containment codes, and Aiden just cracked one without ever seeing the cipher. He's not an accident. He's the end of a pattern. The city's defenses are rebooting themselves around his presence. If that process completes, there won't be a city left to fight for."
"Then help us stop it."
The figure tilted his head. "You still don't get it."
A faint tremor ran through the floor.
"The reboot isn't a malfunction. It's a return."
"To what?"
"To the original ARASHI grid state."
And before either of them could respond, the lights overhead flared flickered then died.
Red emergency markers blinked to life.
The mystery man looked upward.
"They found us."
Drey cursed and grabbed the data-core. "How many?"
"Hard to say," Luro said, pulling out a compact pulse-gun. "But if it's enough to jam district power, it's not a scout team."
Sirens began to rise in the distance low and ululating, from an era where alarms still meant something.
The tunnel wall at the far end cracked. A section of ferrocrete bent inward.
And something began crawling through.
Not walking crawling.
Luro raised his weapon. "Please tell me that's not "
"It's a regulator unit," the masked man said grimly. "From Vault Five. It's hunting the shard frequency."
The creature dragging itself into the tunnel wasn't metal, not fully. It was an abomination a fusion of old vault tech and bio-clone scaffolding. Half of its face was a blank sensory plate. The other half wore skin stretched too tight over something vaguely human. Its fingers split into needled prongs.
It shrieked like tearing circuitry.
"RUN!" the masked man shouted, and pulled something from his coat
A data shard. Covered in Uchiha markings.
He flung it toward Drey.
"Tell Aiden he wasn't the first. And he won't be the last."
Then he turned toward the vault creature, lifting both arms.
From his palms, the glow of chakra not blue. Not red.
But something dark.
A surge of unnatural energy burst outward as the tunnel collapsed into white fire.
/-\
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my Patreon at
" https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/ "
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.