Tamiyo gave a grim nod in return. "Stay close. The core network isn't a stable environment. The system knows we're here now. It will fight back."
She turned and left their perfect, memory-wrought apartment. Echo went next, and Lucien began to follow.
But for a moment, he hesitated on the threshold. He looked back over his shoulder, taking one last chance to see the rain-streaked window, the comfortable couch, the food they’d shared together.
The ghost of the life he didn’t want to leave behind.
Then he stepped through.
As the three of them boarded the elevator and began to descend from the high tower, Lucien studied Tamiyo.
The fierce, almost feral focus she'd had when she shattered the Auditor was gone, but the power lingered, a quiet hum beneath her calm exterior. Her outfit was one of a kind-faced caregiver, one meant to heal and provide comfort. But something about her presence, her body language—even as she stood with her hands simply clasped in front of her—Lucien got the feeling she’d seen her fair share of trauma.
Her eyes, a startling electric blue, were fixed on the descending floor numbers, while the sleek white antennae on the sides of her head faintly twitched with an energy of subtle analysis. She was running scenarios he couldn’t even see, fighting battles to keep them safe even as she appeared completely at rest. The greataxe was gone, but he understood now that it had never been her true weapon—only a chosen manifestation of the digital willpower she commanded. For a CIPHER to achieve something like that…
She must have paid an unspeakable price.
Her posture was relaxed but perfectly balanced, like a predator might lay in wait for hours waiting to kill. Tamiyo didn’t strike him as a warrior or a fighter outside of the digital world, not one that may pose a physical threat. But she seemed far from harmless.
She was a different kind of weapon—one that was deadly and elusive—sheathed in a polite, calm stillness.
Echo suddenly giggled, causing both Lucien and Tamiyo to look at her.
“The way you’re studying Tamiyo,” she said, like she had read his thoughts. She looked right at him. “I know you don’t remember because it happened recently, but I told you not to underestimate her.”
Tamiyo turned to look at Lucien, an amused look on her face.
Lucien wasn’t sure how to respond, so he asked instead, “You said there’s supposed to be backup on the way? What type of backup?”
Tamiyo faced forward again, stating simply, “Our family.”
That only confused him. CIPHERs were hyper-advanced Cognitive Intelligence Processors—AI mixed with Humanoid Emulating Robotics. Although they blurred the lines of synthetic and organic life, they were still created. Built. Not born.
“Family?” Lucien asked, skeptical. Then, even moreso, “Our family?”
She only halfway glanced back at him, but he could see a faint smile tugging at her lips. “Yes. Our family. But my brother is the one the Conservatory really needs to be worried about.”
Lucien’s brow furrowed under his mask. “I’m sorry, you’re not making much sense. How can a CIPHER have a brother? I’ve never seen a male CIPHER.”
Tamiyo giggled a little. “No, he’s not a CIPHER. We kind of adopted each other.”
“Oh,” Lucien breathed with a sigh of relief. “Okay, good. My reality has been a little… upside down recently. You had me forming all kinds of questions about what I thought was real.”
“Well…” Tamiyo glanced back at him with an innocent, quizzical expression. “My brother is kind of an 8,000 year old demi-god.”
Lucien just stared at her, the only sound the rhythmic clicking as the elevator passed more and more floors.
“You’re fucking with me,” Lucien finally said.
“Nope.”
Echo’s shoulders faintly shook as she giggled to herself.
Lucien let out a deep sigh. “I now have additional questions.”
The elevator reached the bottom and the doors slid open.
“They’ll have to wait,” Tamiyo said with a smirk, and stepped forward.
The world outside wasn't the neon-drenched city of Mindra. It was a raw, chaotic dataspace. The "sky" was a roiling ceiling of crimson code, and the "buildings" were jagged, crystalline towers of pure data, pulsing with a malevolent light. The ground beneath his feet was a semi-transparent grid, revealing a dizzying, bottomless abyss of swirling information below.
The air itself hummed with a palpable sense of menace.
"This is the core," Tamiyo said, her voice tight with concentration. Her digital form now shimmered with a faint, white aura of protective code. "The security here is active, not passive. It's a predator."
As if summoned by her words, the grid beneath them began to bulge. The floor plates warped and buckled, and from the cracks, monstrous shapes began to pull themselves into existence.
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They weren't the simple, skittering Data-Mites from his motor-memory dungeon. These were larger, more complex horrors. Some were armored, their carapaces formed from slabs of corrupted firewall code. Others were amorphous, tentacled things made of tangled data streams, their limbs lashing out like whips. The chittering of the smaller mites was replaced by a deep, guttural roar that was part static, part beast.
"They're stronger here," Echo said next to him. "I don’t know if my drones will be enough."
"With us they will be," Lucien said confidently, drawing his custom handgun.
The first of the digital monstrosities charged, a hulking, four-legged beast made of jagged, black code and flickering red error messages. It was twice the size of a grizzly bear, and it moved with an unnatural speed.
[BALVORN-CLASS INTRUSION COUNTERMEASURE]
[WARNING: TARGET'S DEFENSIVE THRESHOLD EXCEEDS WEAPON’S OUTPUT]
Lucien fired twice, his [MARKSMAN] skill highlighting a weak point in its shoulder. The heavy slugs hit true, but they didn't punch through. They sparked against its hide, causing the creature to stagger but not fall, leaving only glowing, pixelated wounds that immediately began to knit themselves closed.
"It's regenerating!" Tamiyo shouted, her own form flickering as she dodged a lashing tentacle from another beast.
"Then we don't give it time to!" Lucien yelled.
[GHOST STEP ACTIVATED]
He launched forward, sliding under the beast's snapping jaws and coming up behind it.
[PULSE ACTIVATED]
The creature shrieked as the wave of energy washed over it. Its regeneration stuttered, the red error messages in its code flickering violently. It was a small window, but it was enough.
"Echo, now!" he yelled.
Two of her sleek, capsule-like drones zipped past his head, unfolding mid-air. Larger and heavier equipped than she’d used at Xelara tower, they unleashed a coordinated barrage of searing laser fire, carving deep, molten lines into the beast's back. It roared in agony, its form destabilizing, before it finally collapsed and dissolved into a shower of dying code.
They didn't have a moment to breathe. Three more were already charging them.
They were in a warzone.
The battle was a blur of static, light, and controlled chaos. Lucien moved like a phantom, his [GHOST STEP] carrying him from one crumbling piece of cover to the next. He and Echo fell into a seamless rhythm, a deadly dance they hadn't performed in years but had never forgotten.
He used his [PULSE] to disrupt and stun, creating openings. She exploited them instantly, her weaponized drones zipping through the air to deliver precise, debilitating strikes.
Tamiyo acted as their anchor, coordinating strikes, pointing out enemies, and telling them where to move next. The greataxe she had appeared with was just a visual manifestation of her massive degree of control within that building. Out here—she wasn’t a field warrior. She wasn’t even bound by the laws of physics he understood.
She was the girl behind the code, pushing them forward and allowing Lucien to perceive it all in a way that made sense.
"Six more materializing on the upper archway!" Tamiyo yelled out, teleporting away from an enemy strike and appearing up on a ledge. "They look like ranged units!"
"Echo, suppressive fire,” Lucien yelled. “Give me a path."
Her drones shifted, laying down a wall of searing laser fire that forced the newly formed constructs back. Lucien broke from cover, sprinting along a narrow bridge of solid data. He used [GHOST STEP] to launch himself up the side of a crystalline data-tower, his boots finding purchase on surfaces that shouldn't have been there.
He landed on the archway behind the ranged units, his handgun already spitting fire. He took them down in a rapid, three-second burst of precision shots before they even had time to reorient.
As he hopped back onto the main path beside the others, the ground ahead of them began to shift and warp. The grid-like floor dissolved, replaced by a churning sea of corrupted data. A single, narrow path of stable code was all that remained, leading to a massive, pulsating gate of crimson light in the distance.
"That's it," Tamiyo said, her voice grim. "That's the entrance to the primary security core."
"Looks inviting," Lucien muttered, eyeing the monstrous shapes that were already beginning to coalesce from the churning static on either side of the path.
"We have to move," Echo said, her form flickering slightly with the strain of maintaining her presence in this hostile environment. "The longer we're here, the more of them it will generate."
They moved as one, a tight formation running down the narrow digital causeway.
The air was thick with the shriek of corrupted code and the guttural roars of the system's guardians. Lucien and Echo took the lead, their combined firepower a scythe that cut through the swarms of lesser mites, while Tamiyo brought up the rear. She threw up digital walls of code as they went, protecting them from the swarm with a seemingly impenetrable barrier of zeros and ones.
It was a grueling, desperate push. Twice, Lucien had to take a hit to shield the others, his [INTEGRITY] bar dipping into the yellow. But they didn't stop. They kept moving, their shared objective a singular point of focus in the overwhelming chaos.
Finally, they reached it.
The pathway ended at a wide, circular platform before the crimson gate. The gate itself was a massive, swirling vortex of energy, held in place by three colossal, crystalline pillars that pulsed with a malevolent light.
"We're here," Tamiyo said, panting. "But the gate is sealed. The lock is tied to those three pillars. We have to destroy them to get through."
As she spoke, the pillars began to glow brighter, and three massive Intrusion Countermeasures—even larger versions of the regenerating, Balvorn-Class beasts from before—materialized in front of them, blocking their path.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Lucien groaned, reloading his handgun.
The battle that followed was the hardest yet.
The beasts were faster, stronger, and their regeneration was more aggressive. But the team had found their rhythm, moving as a three-headed hydra of destruction.
Lucien used his [PULSE] to disrupt a beast's regeneration. Tamiyo used the opening to rush in, spawning the axe once more to use as a clumsy but devastating battering ram that shattered the beast's corrupted armor. Echo finished it off, her drones delivering a pinpoint barrage of laser fire to its exposed core.
One by one, the guardians fell, until the last one dissolved into a shower of dying code and an exhausted silence fell over the platform.
Lucien leaned against a broken, stuttering wall made of orange grid lines, his breath coming in ragged bursts. "Okay," he panted. "Now the pillars."
He aimed his handgun at the nearest crystalline structure and fired. The slug sparked harmlessly against its surface, not even leaving a scratch.
"It's shielded," Tamiyo confirmed, her scanners already running. "The shield is powered by the gate itself. We can't break it with brute force."
"Then how do we get through?" Lucien asked, frustration creeping into his voice.
Echo stepped forward, her gaze fixed on the swirling crimson vortex of the gate. "We let it in," she said quietly.
She walked to the edge of the platform and placed her hand on the surface of the gate. A stark, white text box immediately materialized in the air in front of her, the words glowing with a cold, clinical light.
[SECURITY PROTOCOL: TRAUMA LOCK ENGAGED]
[ACCESS REQUIRES FULL REINTEGRATION OF DESIGNATED TRAUMATIC MEMORY FRAGMENT]