The infirmary air was a liar. It smelled of antiseptic and recycled calm, a deliberate attempt to scrub away the scent of fear and failure that clung to the enclave like a shroud. Kael walked its sterile white corridors feeling like a ghost, his own Aethel Frame a low, troubled hum beneath his skin, a frequency out of tune with the world. He'd spent two days in the forced quiet of his barracks, Jax's words a cage rattling around the bigger, more terrifying cage of the data slate's secrets. Synthesis. A target on your back.
He needed to see Maya. It was a physical need, an anchor in the dizzying vortex of his new reality. He found her in a small, private room, a privilege bought with blood and a broken leg. The limb was encased in a brutalist cage of metal and humming regulators, a piece of Elara's grim art. She looked pale against the white sheets, but her eyes were clear, and the steady, silvery pulse of her Frame was a comfort.
"You look like you've been sleeping in a scrap heap," she said, her voice a little thin, but her spirit intact.
"Feels like it," Kael admitted, pulling a stool to her bedside.
The silence between them was different now. The easy camaraderie of the patrol was gone, replaced by a shared, unspoken trauma. He saw her glance at his hands, his face, searching for the boy she knew, and finding this new, stiller version of him. This zookeeper of monsters. He couldn't tell her about Synthesis, about the true nature of the Stalkers, about the weight of a science that had broken a civilization. The secret was a toxic thing, and he wouldn't poison her with it. Not yet.
"Jax said I'm on leave," she said, her fingers tracing the patterns on her blanket. "He said you are too. A ghost, he called it."
"He's not wrong," Kael said. He felt like one. A phantom haunting the edges of a world he no longer fully belonged to.
He was about to say more when a shadow fell across the doorway. Kael's senses, a tangled web of human instinct and a Hound's predatory awareness, flared. He was on his feet before he even registered the decision, his body a coiled spring.
It was Zane.
He was a shadow of the mountain of arrogance Kael had first met in the storage bay. The raw, earthy power of his Stonetusk Boar was gone, replaced by a discordant, painful flicker that made Kael's teeth ache. He was dressed in the same sterile infirmary jumpsuit Kael had worn, the simple fabric making him look smaller, stripped of his armor and his pride. Beneath the skin of his forearms, a faint, dark web of scars was visible, like lightning trapped in amber. The mark of a broken Frame.
Zane's eyes, however, held none of the brokenness of his body. They were narrowed, burning with a cold, focused resentment. He wasn't looking at Maya. He was looking only at Kael.
"Well, well," Zane sneered, his voice a low, gravelly thing that had lost its booming confidence. "If it isn't the hero of the Shattered Core. Come to visit the teammate you broke?"
Kael didn't rise to the bait. He saw the flicker of pain that crossed Zane's face with the effort of the words. He saw the way the man's hand clenched into a fist, his knuckles white. This wasn't a rival. This was a wounded animal. "I came to see Maya."
"Of course you did," Zane limped into the room, his gait stiff and uneven. He stopped a few feet away, his gaze sweeping over Kael with a corrosive contempt. "I've heard the stories, Scuttler. How you pulled some fancy trick out of your ass. How you stumbled into something that worked. Don't you dare think that makes you one of them. That makes you a warrior." The word was a curse on his tongue. "You're a scavenger. You got lucky."
The Hound in Kael's soul stirred, its hackles rising at the challenge. Threat. Rival. Crush. The Scuttler chittered from its own dark corner. Danger. Flee. Hide. Kael pushed them both down, the mental effort a familiar strain. He was the zookeeper. He met Zane's furious gaze with a quiet he didn't know he possessed.
"It wasn't luck, Zane."
The simple denial was more inflammatory than any insult. Zane took another step closer, his damaged Frame sputtering, spitting tiny, harmless arcs of corrupted Aethel energy.
"No? Then what was it?" he growled. "You think you're so smart with your whispers and your patterns. You got her hurt," he jabbed a finger toward Maya. "And then you probably did something reckless, something that could have killed you both. You're a parasite, just like that damn Echo you carry. You feed on others to survive."
The accusation was so close to Zane's own failing that Kael almost felt a pang of pity. It was a dangerous emotion, he was learning.
"I'm sorry for what happened to you," Kael said, and the words were true. He understood, with the cold clarity of a technician, exactly what had happened to Zane's Frame. He had seen the code. He had seen the system crash.
Zane's face twisted into a mask of pure fury. The pity was a brand, a confirmation of his new, pathetic status. "Sorry?" he spat. He lunged, his movement a clumsy, broken caricature of his former power. He grabbed the front of Kael's jumpsuit, his grip surprisingly strong. "Don't you dare pity me. I was the strongest. I am the strongest!"
The outburst was too much. A violent shudder wracked Zane's body. The dark scars on his arms flared with a sickening orange light, the ghost of the Glass Weaver's soul. He cried out, a sharp, strangled sound of pure agony, and stumbled back, clutching his chest. His breathing was a ragged, painful wheeze.
"User Zane!" A medic appeared in the doorway, her expression a mix of alarm and weary frustration. "You are not cleared for exertion. Get back to your ward. Now."
Zane ignored her. He leaned against the doorframe, his whole body trembling, his eyes still locked on Kael. The raw hatred in them was a physical force. It wasn't just jealousy anymore. It was something deeper. An ideological war had been declared in the quiet of an infirmary room. Zane, the hammer, had been proven wrong by the scalpel. And for that, he would never forgive him.
"This isn't over," Zane gasped, the words ragged. "You're a flaw. A glitch in the world. And you know what we do with glitches." He pushed himself off the doorframe, a broken king abandoning a lost battlefield. "We erase them."
He limped away down the hall, the medic following with a sigh of profound exhaustion. Kael stood in the silence, the fabric of his jumpsuit still creased where Zane had grabbed it. He looked at Maya. Her face was a storm of fear, confusion, and a dawning, terrible understanding.
The rivalry wasn't a competition anymore. It wasn't about who was faster or stronger. Zane had been a monument to the old way: power as a thing to be taken, to be accumulated, to be asserted. His failure was a testament to its limits. And Kael, with his quiet analysis, his accidental Synthesis, his hunt for the ghosts of the past, was a terrifying, walking rebuttal to Zane's entire existence. He was a new kind of power, born from understanding, not force. And in a world built on hammers, the nail gun was blasphemy.