The space Jax had given them wasn't a workshop; it was a scar. A forgotten utility junction deep in the enclave's ferrocrete guts, a place that had been bypassed and sealed off for decades. The air was dead, thick with the scent of cold metal and dust so ancient it felt like a fine layer of powdered bone. A single, harsh work lamp cast a sterile circle of light on the floor, making the surrounding darkness feel absolute, a physical presence pressing in.
In the center of that light sat the sheathed Phase Stalker Echo. It didn't pulse or hum. It just rested in its lead-lined bag, a cold, dense weight that seemed to suck the very warmth from the room. A black hole in miniature.
Kael sat cross-legged on the floor, a few feet away. His combat suit felt thin and useless. His own Aethel Frame, a low, troubled thrum beneath his skin, felt like a frayed wire next to the contained supernova of the Echo.
Across from him, Maya kept her vigil. She wasn't meditating. Her eyes were open, alert, sweeping the darkness beyond their small island of light. She was a spotter. A guard. A promise. The trust between them was the only other real thing in the room. It was a heavier, more grounding weight than any Echo.
He couldn't shake the image of Zane. The memory was a ghost that haunted the edges of the light—the spasming, the scorched, lightning-like scars, the agonized scream that had been stripped of all its arrogance. Zane had been a hammer, and he'd tried to pound a star into his soul. The result was predictable. A catastrophic system failure.
Kael wasn't a hammer. He was a technician. And this was the most dangerous diagnostic of his life.
"You don't have to," Maya's voice was a soft thing, barely disturbing the heavy silence. "There's another way. There has to be."
"Is there?" he asked, not looking at her. His gaze was fixed on the bag. "We need to get to the Sunken City. We need to be strong enough to survive it. This..." He gestured to the Echo. "This is the key. It's a risk. But it's a calculated one."
The words sounded hollow, a lie he was telling them both. There was nothing calculated about this. It was an act of pure, desperate necessity.
He pushed the fear down. He closed his eyes and reached inward, not for power, but for control. He found the warring consciousnesses he now carried. Lyra, the Shard Hound, was a coiled spring of forward momentum, a predator's relentless drive. The Scuttler was a nervous, chittering thing of angles and evasion, an ambusher's patient terror. They were oil and water. For a week, Jax had taught him not to mix them, but to switch between them. To be the zookeeper.
Now, he had to introduce a new, infinitely more complex beast into the menagerie.
He spent hours prepping the system. He let his Flow, the quiet, steady current of his own Aethel Core, wash through his Frame. He soothed the Hound's snarling aggression, contained the Scuttler's skittering panic. He reinforced the mental firewalls, the spiritual bypasses he had built with such pain in the Forge. He was stabilizing the grid. He waited until the two warring instincts were quiet, contained, two separate, sealed cages in the crowded space of his soul.
Only then did he reach for the bag. His hands trembled, but not with fear. It was the strain of maintaining the delicate balance within. He pulled the Echo from its sheath.
The air went cold. The pulsing, orange light of Zane's Tier-2 Echo had been a violent, angry thing. This was different. The Phase Stalker's core was a knot of perfect, midnight-black crystal that didn't emit light so much as it devoured it. The air around it warped, reality bending around its impossible presence.
He placed it on the floor between them. He took a deep, shuddering breath. He was ready.
He touched it.
It wasn't a detonation. It was an infiltration.
There was no explosion of raw power, no tidal wave of alien rage. There was only a profound and terrifying cold that seeped into him, a silent, insidious chill that bypassed his skin and sank directly into his soul. It wasn't an invasion of force; it was an invasion of concept.
His own consciousness, the part of him that was Kael, felt... thin. Unnecessary. The solid concrete beneath him became a suggestion. The air, a theory. His own body, a temporary collection of particles that could, with a simple shift in perspective, choose not to be there at all. It was the sensation of non-existence, a dizzying, dissociative vertigo that threatened to unmake him. He felt his own identity begin to fray, the memories of Lina, of the breach, of his promise, becoming distant, irrelevant data points.
He fought back, clinging to the technician's logic. I am a system. I am matter. I exist.
The Stalker's consciousness didn't argue. It simply presented a different truth. Existence is a state, not a law. States can be changed.
The cold deepened. And with it came the instinct. It was nothing like Lyra's feral hunger. The Shard Hound hunted to live. This thing... it hunted to hunt. It was a cold, intellectual desire, the joy of a master strategist solving a complex, living puzzle. The world wasn't a feeding ground; it was a game board. Life wasn't sustenance; it was a collection of pieces to be outmaneuvered and removed. He felt a chilling, alien surge of amusement at the thought of a target hiding behind a wall, a smug certainty that the wall was simply a misinterpretation of the rules.
This was the true poison. The Hound's rage was a simple, brutal thing he could cage. This was a philosophy. A complex, malevolent ego that whispered directly to the analytical part of his own soul, the technician who loved solving problems. And it was offering him the ultimate problem to solve: life itself.
He felt his own purpose—his hunt for the past, his quest for the Sunken City—start to feel small, naive. A child's game. The Stalker's shadow offered a grander, purer one. The clean, passionless application of impossible physics. The hunt for its own sake.
No.
The denial was a flicker of warmth in the absolute zero of the Stalker's soul. He focused on it, fanned it with everything he had. He thought of Maya, sitting just feet away, her life a fragile, warm thing in the cold dark. He thought of Lina's hand in his, the simple, undeniable reality of it. He thought of Zane's broken body, a testament to the failure of power without purpose.
He wasn't a god playing a game. He was a boy trying to keep a promise.
He pushed his own Flow out, not as a cage, but as an anchor. He wrapped his own steady, stubborn current around the Stalker's cold, nihilistic consciousness. He wasn't trying to contain it. He was trying to give it context. To bind it to the clumsy, flawed, but very real world he was a part of.
The process was agonizing. It felt like trying to teach a color the concept of sound. For a long, terrifying moment, there was nothing. Just the two opposing truths, Kael's desperate, warm reality and the Stalker's cold, empty potential, locked in a silent, metaphysical war.
Then, something shifted. The Stalker didn't submit. It didn't rage. It simply... settled. It was a new presence in his soul, a silent, watchful shadow that stood apart from the snarling Hound and the skittering Scuttler. It was a tool, now, not a philosophy. A terrifying, world-breaking tool, stored in a quiet corner of his mind, waiting.
Kael collapsed backward, the connection severed not by force, but by sheer, soul-deep exhaustion. He lay on the cold concrete, gasping, his body drenched in sweat that felt like ice. The absorption was done. He had survived.
He looked at his hands. They were his own. He looked at Maya. She was still there, her face a mask of terror and relief. He had held onto himself.
But as he stared into the oppressive darkness of the forgotten junction, he knew he wasn't alone in his own head anymore. The ghost of a wolf, the spirit of a spider, and now, something new. Something that walked through walls and hunted for the sheer, cold beauty of it. He had his power. But now, he carried the Stalker's shadow with him. And he wasn't sure he'd ever feel warm again.