The pain wasn't a fire. It was a glacier. A slow, grinding pressure that threatened to shear his arm from his body not by force, but by a violation of physics. He had tried to phase his hand. Just his hand. A simple test against a rusted training dummy. He'd reached for the Stalker's cold, quiet soul, told it to un-exist, and for a terrifying, beautiful half-second, it had worked. His hand had slipped into the dummy's metal chest as if it were smoke.
Then the Scuttler's instinct had twitched—a phantom limb of pure evasion—and his control had fractured. His focus had wavered. The command corrupted.
He hadn't pulled his arm out. He had re-materialized it inside the wall behind the dummy.
His scream was a dry, choked thing, lost in the oppressive silence of the forgotten junction. The world was a symphony of wrongness. He could feel the dense, packed molecules of ancient ferrocrete intermingled with his own. It wasn't just pressure; it was a horrifying intimacy, his own atoms screaming in protest at being forced to share their space. Cold seeped into his bones, a cold that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the fundamental nature of stone. He could feel the stress-fractures in the concrete as if they were cracks in his own skeleton. He was bonded to it. A part of it. The thought was a spike of pure, dissociative terror.
"You are a special kind of idiot."
Jax's voice cut through the haze of agony. Kael didn't know how long the man had been standing there, watching. He stood with his arms crossed, his expression a familiar, weary mask of profound disappointment. There was no alarm in his eyes. Only the cold assessment of an engineer looking at a spectacularly failed stress test.
"Let go, kid," Jax said, his voice a low rasp.
"I can't!" Kael gasped, sweat beading on his forehead. "It's... stuck."
"Of course it's stuck. You told it to be solid again. It's being solid." Jax took a slow step forward. "You think phasing is a magic trick? You think you're turning into a ghost? You're not. You're giving your own matter a set of complex instructions. You're telling it to temporarily shift into a dissonant energy state. You just gave it a corrupted command, and now it doesn't know what the hell it's supposed to be. So it's trying to be both."
The words, a brutal lecture in the middle of his agony, somehow helped. It wasn't magic. It was a machine. A broken machine. And he was the technician.
Kael closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of his own arm disappearing into rough concrete. He ignored the grinding pain. He reached inward, past the warring, snarling beasts, and found his own quiet current. His Flow. He didn't try to pull. He didn't try to force. He sent a new command. Not 'solid'. Not 'phased'. Just a single, clean instruction: release.
The sensation was like a tooth being pulled from his soul. A sickening, wet schism of sound and pressure, and his arm was free. It flopped to his side, numb and cold, every nerve screaming with the phantom memory of being one with the stone. He collapsed against the wall, his whole body trembling with shock and residual pain, leaving a sweaty smear on the grimy surface.
"There," Jax grunted. "Lesson one of phasing: don't stop in the middle of the wall."
The week that followed was a carefully structured hell. Jax seemed to have abandoned any notion of Kael as a fighter. He treated him now like an apprentice technician with a dangerously unstable new tool. The training shifted from brute control to delicate, terrifying calibration.
The core of the problem became obvious with the first test. Jax set up a simple course: a single, slow-moving drone. "Track it with the Hound, approach it with the Stalker," he'd ordered.
It was impossible. The moment Kael tried to move, the two instincts went to war. The Hound's soul, Lyra's soul, was all forward momentum, a predator's relentless pursuit. It saw the drone and wanted to charge, to close the distance in a straight line. The Stalker, however, was a creature of pure nihilism. It saw the open space as a vulnerability. It wanted to fade, to become nothing, to wait for an opening that might never come.
The result was a spastic, shuddering mess. Kael would lunge forward, only for his legs to stutter and try to melt into the shadows. He'd attempt to phase, but the Hound's aggressive energy would disrupt the delicate state, causing the air around him to crackle with wasted power. He was a machine with two competing operating systems, and every action resulted in a total system crash. He ended up on the floor, again and again, his body a battlefield for the ghosts he carried.
"You're trying to be both at once," Jax growled, standing over him after a particularly clumsy failure. "You're trying to drive with one foot on the gas and one on the brake. You're not a commander yelling at two soldiers. You're the damn chassis. You decide which engine gets the fuel."
You decide which one gets the fuel.
That night, lying on his cot, the words echoed in his mind. He wasn't trying to harmonize them. That was a fool's errand. A wolf and a ghost don't sing in harmony. He had to separate them. He had to build a switch. A fire-selector for his own soul.
He sat up, the air in the junction cold and dead. Across the room, Maya slept, her breathing a soft, steady rhythm. She'd been cleared for light duty, but Jax had her assigned here. "To keep you from doing something stupider than usual," he'd said. But Kael knew the truth. She was his anchor. A quiet, human presence that reminded him what he was fighting for.
He closed his eyes and reached inward. He found the snarling, coiled energy of the Hound. He found the cold, patient void of the Stalker. He didn't try to soothe them. He walled them off from each other, reinforcing the bypasses, strengthening the cages. Then, deliberately, he opened one door. Just one.
He let the Hound's senses flow, unhindered. The world resolved into a map of sound and scent. He could hear the faint scuttling of a rad-rat in the walls fifty feet away. He could smell the lingering ozone on Maya's combat suit. It was a world of pure, predatory data. He held it, cataloged it. Then, with a grunt of immense mental effort, he slammed that door shut and opened the other.
The sensory world vanished. The sounds, the smells—all gone. In their place was the Stalker's cold, conceptual awareness. He didn't hear the rat; he was simply aware of a life-form occupying a specific set of coordinates. He didn't see Maya; he perceived a zone of stable, solid matter. It was a world stripped of life, a blueprint of pure physics.
He switched back. Hound. Then Stalker. The mental whiplash was nauseating, but each time, the transition grew a fraction of a second cleaner. He wasn't a wolf. He wasn't a ghost. He was the zookeeper, and he was learning how to manage the exhibits.
The next day in the Forge, he was ready. Jax activated a single dummy in the center of the room. It stood motionless.
"Target is static," Jax said. "Your objective is to approach and make contact without being detected by the proximity sensors. Go."
Kael took a breath. He closed his eyes. Click. He engaged the Hound. His senses flared, mapping the room in an instant. He saw the sensor's field, a faint, shimmering dome of energy around the dummy. He saw the dead spots, the fluctuations. He plotted a course.
Click. He disengaged the Hound and switched to the Stalker. The world of detail vanished, replaced by the cold, quiet hum of non-existence. He moved. His body felt thin, unreal. He didn't sneak. He simply... flowed. He followed the path he had just mapped, a ghost navigating by a predator's memory. The concrete was just a concept beneath his feet. The air was a theory he passed through.
He reached the dummy. The sensor field was a faint pressure he was aware of but not truly a part of. He reached out a hand, his fingers feeling distant and disconnected, and touched the cold, metallic chest.
A green light on the dummy's head blinked on. Target acquired. Mission complete.
Kael opened his eyes, a shudder running through him as reality came flooding back. He was breathing hard, sweat stinging his eyes. He had done it. It was clumsy. It was draining. But it was control.
He looked over at Jax. The veteran's expression was unreadable, but the ever-present, low thrum of his Aethel Frame seemed a little less hostile.
"Not bad," Jax grunted, which from him was a standing ovation. "You've stopped trying to fly the transport and started reading the manual. It's a start." He tossed a small, greasy rag at Kael. "Clean your spear. Tomorrow, we see how your new toolkit handles a moving target."
Kael looked at his own hands. They didn't feel like a technician's hands anymore. They didn't feel like a warrior's either. They felt like his own, for the first time in a long time. They were the hands of a man who was learning to operate the most dangerous, most complex, and most broken machine in the world: himself. And for the first time, he felt he might not crash it.