The third rune vibrated when it shouldn't have.
Not violently. Not visually. There was no shimmer, no flare, no obvious pulse.
But Minjae felt it.
It ran through the quiet like the air between breaths—like a drawn string humming without sound. The kind of resonance that shouldn't exist in a sealed chamber without input.
He stilled immediately.
The lab remained unchanged around him. Ambient energy low. Containment seals intact. Every reading rested within predictable thresholds. Yet in the precise arrangement he'd calibrated—Aethra on the left, Surnglyph on the right, the unnamed third centered—something had shifted.
No physical disturbance.
No vocal trigger.
No conscious interaction.
Still, it pulsed.
Once.
Softly.
Deliberate.
Minjae stepped back and checked the resonance log. There it was—a ripple so faint the system barely caught it. Less than a tenth of a percent. A ghost tremor brushing the outer ring of the Vitalia Surge's latent field.
If he hadn't been paying attention, he would have dismissed it as sensor noise.
But it wasn't noise.
It was response.
His first reaction wasn't alarm. It was interest.
"Emotionally responsive?" he muttered.
Impossible. Rune systems didn't respond to emotion. They reacted to intention, structure, sequence. He'd been careful—calm mind, controlled breath, neutral state. No wandering thoughts. No mental noise.
No thoughts about any of the three women.
…Was he sure?
He shook the idea off as if physically brushing dust from his shoulder.
But the uncertainty lingered.
---
Later that day, the northern annex bustled with the usual weekday rhythm—footsteps, quiet chatter, printers humming, someone laughing too loudly near the vending machines. Minjae stood before a large digital display, its surface reflecting the glow of shifting charts.
The primary screen showed predictive turnover data; the secondary screen displayed a dimensional map of anomaly clusters over two quarters. He tracked the points with methodical calm, cataloguing errant deviations.
The analyst beside him kept explaining something about attrition curves. Minjae listened—or meant to. But the anomaly set pulled more weight in his mind, its shape resonant in ways he couldn't quite dismiss.
Then—
"You missed a decimal."
A voice. Casual, unhurried, and close.
Minjae turned.
Yuri.
She stood with a tablet tucked lightly against her chest, stylus in hand. She pointed toward a dip in the data cluster without making direct eye contact—her usual comfortable distance.
Minjae blinked.
He had missed it. He really had. By 0.7. Small, but unusual for him.
Yuri tapped the corrected value. "That trend isn't frictional. It lines up with calendar fatigue. Early burnout signs, if you cross-check with internal sentiment pulses."
He nodded. "Understood."
She finally looked at him fully, searching his expression in the small way she did when she was trying to answer her own unspoken questions.
"You alright?"
A simple question, but she delivered it with genuine clarity—nothing coy, nothing hesitant.
"Yes," Minjae answered.
But he held her gaze a heartbeat longer than normal.
She noticed. Her lips parted slightly, as if to say something else—but she didn't. She stepped back instead, eyes returning to her tablet.
The moment was small. But not empty.
---
Back in the lab that evening, Minjae reviewed the earlier surge. He rewinded the log, frame by frame, watching the timestamp with a narrowed gaze.
There.
The flicker.
The exact moment the third rune pulsed—precisely matching the second he'd seen Yuri's face that afternoon. Or rather, the moment his attention had sharpened without him realizing.
No input.
No gesture.
No intention.
Just thought.
An echo of recognition.
He wrote a new cluster of notes, the ink shaping itself faster than his thoughts:
> **Rune-Thought Interference?**
> **Emotional Mirror Effect?**
> **Spontaneous Cognitive Drift?**
The hypotheses felt wrong—too simplistic, too crude to describe what he sensed. In his previous life, runes responded to command, not reaction. They required discipline, clarity, force of will. They didn't react to wandering thought or emotional impression.
This—this was different.
Subtle.
Instinctive.
Almost… relational.
He leaned back in the chair, fingers steepled lightly. The glyphs sat quietly in front of him, their light dim, stable, serene.
Yet undeniably different.
Like they were listening.
---
The next morning, Minjae walked past the lounge on his way to refill water. His pace was steady, steps even, eyes lowered just enough to avoid attention.
Inside, Yuri sat with Seori and Yura around a small table. A single slice of cake sat between them, untouched, fork resting on its wrapper. They were mid-conversation—low voices, drifting laughter.
Seori rolled her eyes at something. Yura said something else under her breath. Yuri hid a smile behind her drink, shoulders shaking slightly.
They didn't see Minjae.
Not really.
He paused without meaning to, just for a second. A single, quiet second. Watching the moment. The warmth of it. The familiarity.
Then he moved on.
But the memory of the rune's pulse followed him.
Not in the chamber.
Not on the interface logs.
Not on any measurable instrument.
But in him.
Something had begun to resonate.
And it wasn't just the runes.