The air in the debriefing room was stale with the ghost of ozone and the thicker, more bitter scent of failure. It was just a small, windowless box carved out of the enclave's bedrock, furnished with a single metal table and four chairs that didn't match. A place for autopsies, not conversations.
Squad Scion sat in a line, a collection of broken parts. Leo was trembling, a constant, low-grade shiver that his thin frame couldn't hide. He stared at a spot on the floor, his Aethel Frame a flickering, panicked light, like a candle in a gale. Maya was a statue of quiet control beside him, her own Frame a steady, silvery pulse, but her hands were clenched so tight in her lap her knuckles were white. Zane wasn't there. His absence was a hole in the room, a void that pulled all the sound and light into it.
And Kael… Kael just felt cold. He held the guilt of being right, a weight far heavier than the shame of being wrong.
Jax stood before them, out of his armor. In his simple fatigues, he looked less like a force of nature and more like what he was: a tired, old soldier who had buried too many kids. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. The silence did the work for him.
"Squad Scion is hereby disbanded," he said, the words flat and final. They weren't an accusation. They were a statement of fact, like noting the time of death.
Leo flinched as if struck. Maya didn't move, but Kael saw the light of her Frame dim for a second.
"The official report will list it as a catastrophic failure during a Tier-2 Chimera engagement," Jax continued, his eyes scanning each of them in turn. "Leo, your request for transfer to a non-combat support role has been approved. You'll be assigned to Armory logistics under Elara. She'll work you half to death, but you won't have to see the Scar again."
A wave of palpable relief washed over Leo, so potent it was almost sickening. It was immediately followed by a flush of deep, burning shame that made him shrink in his chair. He was a coward. He was alive. The two things were tangled together now, a knot he'd carry for the rest of his life.
Jax's gaze moved to Maya. "You showed control. You followed the plan, even when it was a bad one. Command still sees potential. You'll be assigned to patrol rotations. Paired with a veteran for now."
Then, his eyes landed on Kael. The cold, hard assessment was back. "And you. The anomaly." He paused, and for a half-second, Kael felt the man's focus not as a look, but as a probe, a brief scan of his Aethel Frame. Jax's expression didn't change. "You were right about the plan. You were reckless with the secret. You'll be on provisional status. Low-threat sector patrols. Solo or duo. You're a tactical asset, but you're not a team player. Yet. We'll see which one wins out."
That was it. No shouting. No punishment. Just a quiet, efficient disassembly of their failure. The hammer had been broken, the shield cracked, and the wild card put on a very short leash.
"What about… Zane?" Maya asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Jax's face hardened, the weariness settling into deeper lines around his eyes. "Zane is a lesson. He's confined to the long-term recovery ward. His Frame is… compromised. The Weaver's Echo didn't just overload it, it tried to rewrite it. The medics stopped the physical colonization, but the core pathways are scarred. Fused. He'll live. But he'll never wield a spear again. He's a ghost. A reminder." A reminder of the price of hubris. A reminder that power without control was just a suicide vest.
Jax turned to leave. "Dismissed."
The word hung in the air. They weren't a squad anymore. They were just survivors, heading in different directions.
***
The nights were the worst. The days were filled with the mindless routine of patrol, the familiar crunch of crystalline grit under his boots, the low, steady thrum of his own contained power. It was almost peaceful. But at night, alone in the hollow silence of the C-4 storage bay that served as his barracks, the ghosts came out.
He saw Zane's face, twisted in agony. He heard Leo's whimper, the sound of a boy's world breaking. And beneath it all, he felt the cold, hard weight of the data slate in his pouch. A truth that made their personal tragedy feel small. Petty.
He couldn't leave it alone. The knowledge gnawed at him, a new kind of hunger that had nothing to do with the Hound. After his shift, he'd sit on his cot, the thin blanket pulled around his shoulders, and coax the slate back to life. It wasn't a machine you could command. It was a dying thing, its memory a fractured landscape of static and light. He had to listen to it, to feed it a tiny, controlled thread of his own Flow, stabilizing its corrupted energy just long enough to read the whispers.
He started to find patterns. Names. He pieced together fragmented log entries, cross-referencing corrupted data strings. It was the most complex diagnostic he had ever run.
The first name that solidified from the static made his breath catch. Dr. Aris Thorne.
It wasn't just "the Ancients" anymore. It was a person. A scientist. The architect of their world's ruin. The name gave the sin a face, and Kael felt a chill that had nothing to do with the drafty barracks.
He pushed deeper. He spent hours, nights, letting the slate's ghostly blue light paint his face, his own Aethel signature a quiet hum in the dark. He learned to navigate the static, to follow the faint, unbroken threads of data through the noise. He found a project title, repeated over and over, a recurring nightmare in the code. The Aethel Frame Project.
The logs were detached, clinical. They spoke of forced evolution, of jump-starting humanity's potential. They spoke of failure, of unstable integrations, of subjects becoming… something else. The Chimeras. They weren't a plague. They weren't invaders. They were the project's horrifying, beautiful mistakes.
And then he found the reason. A single, chilling phrase, buried in a corrupted security memo. A justification for Thorne's monstrous work.
…desperate measure required to combat Exo-Threat.
Exo-Threat. The word was alien. It felt heavy, dangerous. The Ancients hadn't been playing god out of arrogance. They had been afraid. They had created monsters because they were running from something worse. The entire foundation of their history, the simple story of hubris and downfall, was a lie. A comforting bedtime story to hide the truth: they were not alone, and whatever was out there had terrified a civilization of gods into destroying itself.
His hands were shaking. He almost dropped the slate. The Scar outside the enclave walls suddenly felt small, familiar. The real threat wasn't the monsters they could see. It was the one they had forgotten.
He forced himself to continue, his heart hammering a frantic, terrified rhythm against his ribs. He needed to know everything. The search became a fever. He found a final, fragmented entry in what seemed to be Thorne's personal log. The text flickered, unstable, the words forming and dissolving like smoke.
…containment failure… project compromised… moving primary research… need a secure location… off-grid…
Kael poured more of his own Flow into the slate, pushing his control to its limit. The static fought back, but for a single, crystal-clear second, two phrases burned themselves into his vision, brighter than all the rest.
Outpost PR-3.
The Sunken City.
Then the slate went dark, its energy finally depleted, leaving Kael in the sudden, oppressive blackness of the barracks. He was alone, but the room felt crowded with the weight of what he now knew. The vague, formless hunt for truth had just been given a name. A destination.
He looked out the small viewport, at the distant, ever-present hum of the barrier wall. It no longer felt like a shield. It felt like the edge of a cage, and he had just realized the real monster was outside, rattling the bars. His secret was no longer just a burden. It was a map.