Scion's Log: 73-Zeta. Subject: Kael. Designate: Maya.
Squad Scion is a ghost. A name in a file. Leo is gone, transferred to a life away from the front. Zane is a spectre haunting the infirmary, a monument to the saying that pride is a sharper blade than any Chimera's claw. And then there is Kael. He carries the ghost of a Hound inside him, but now he carries something heavier. A question.
They partnered us after the incident. The quiet ones. The survivors. At first, I was terrified. Not of the Chimeras, but of him. The energy coming off his Frame was sharp, chaotic. But beneath it, there was a stillness, a focus I hadn't seen before. He wasn't just training to fight; he was searching for something.
We found it in the western sectors. Phase Stalkers. Tier-2 predators that walk between heartbeats, turning solid matter into a suggestion. They ambushed us. My light was useless, a candle against a tide of smoke. I was down, my leg shredded, waiting for the end. And then Kael… he did something impossible.
It wasn't a technique from the manuals. It wasn't brute force. He stood over me, his spear humming with a light I'd never seen, and he resonated. He didn't just fight the Stalker; he rewrote the rules of its existence, forcing it back into reality with a shriek of violated physics. It was the first time I understood. Kael doesn't just use the power. He listens to it.
That understanding became our secret. It was the key that unlocked the next door: a place on a long-haul convoy heading west, past the petrified forests and into the unknown. Our pretext was a supply run. Our true destination was a set of coordinates from the forbidden data slate he carried.
The Sunken City. The name doesn't do it justice. It's a grave. A whole civilization drowned in swamp and silence. We found the outpost, PR-3, and Kael opened a door sealed for centuries not with an explosive charge, but with a whisper of energy, matching his Frame to the lock's ancient frequency.
Inside, the silence was heavier than any tomb. And in that silence, we found the truth.
I watched him at the main console, the light of the archive painting his face. I saw the moment the puzzle pieces clicked into place. The shock. The revulsion. The Chimeras were not a plague from the stars. They were our children. The monstrous, beautiful, agonizing result of our ancestors' desperate ambition. The "Aethel Frame Project." A name that sounds like a prayer and a curse all at once.
He found more than just history. He found a new path. "Echo Synergy and Synthesis," the files called it. A lost art. The science of weaving souls together to create something new. It wasn't about absorbing power anymore. It was about understanding it. It was about becoming an architect of the very power that has been trying to kill us.
We left the Sunken City with a truth that could shatter our world and a theory that could remake it. Kael is no longer just a survivor with a dangerous gift. He is the sole inheritor of a forgotten science. He carries the weight of the Ancients' greatest sin and their last, desperate hope.
And I will follow him into the dark. Because he is no longer just an anomaly. He is the only answer that makes any sense.
End Log.