The silence wasn't peaceful.
It was the kind of silence that crawled down your throat, stuck in your lungs, and made you forget what breathing felt like.
Jackson Broks sat on the cracked rooftop of a building older than memory, high above the slums of District 9. The moonlight spilled like spilled milk over the wasteland of rusted structures and twisted rebar. Below, the city simmered with muffled cries, engine hums, and the occasional scream that died too fast to matter. But up here? It was just wind and the weight of silence pressing on his ribs.
He stared at the horizon—the massive Resonant Wall that stretched like a god's tombstone across the edge of the city, humming faintly like a dying heartbeat. Beyond that wall… the unknown. Beyond that wall… the Vyrants.
Monsters born not from nightmares—but from sound.
Literal sound.
No one knew how it started. A hundred years ago, the world cracked open during an event known only as The Shatter. Cities crumbled. Oceans boiled. And worse… the sounds themselves changed. Frequencies once harmless became deadly. The Vyrants fed on sound, warped by it, amplified by it.
And so, humanity adapted.
Rules were made. Rules that felt more like a curse:
Never make unnecessary sound.
Speak only in Sound Zones.
Live behind the Echo Walls.
Silence is survival.
But the silence did things to people.
It did something to him.
Jackson scratched at the faded leather band on his wrist—his mother's. A relic of the past. A reminder of what he'd lost. Her laugh had been loud. Too loud. The kind that shook a room. The kind that echoed.
The kind that got her killed.
She'd been a Sound Healer—one of the rare Echo Artists who could manipulate frequency into life-saving pulses. She had saved people. She had sung to broken bones and whispered to dying lungs. She had believed that not all sound was deadly.
Until the day she proved herself wrong.
Until a Vyrant came through the wall, drawn to her voice, and reduced their home into a bloody smear on the eastern sector of District 4.
He had been ten.
He'd survived by screaming in fear so loud the creature went into resonance shock and exploded into noise fragments. The doctors said it was impossible. Echo resonance shouldn't have worked that way. They said he had no talent. No Echo Core. No measurable vibration inside him.
But they were wrong.
Something had awakened in him that day—something old, violent, and impossible.
Now, at seventeen, Jackson still hadn't spoken in years.
Not since that scream.
Not since her.
He stood and zipped up his tattered hoodie. "Another quiet night," he muttered sarcastically under his breath, knowing full well the rooftop was inside a Green Sound Zone—a rare, shielded bubble where speaking wouldn't attract monsters.
A gust of wind rustled the metal shutters below, and Jackson froze. His instincts—the ones that whispered like gut-deep thunder—itched with something wrong.
Something was coming.
He turned.
And that's when the sound hit.
It wasn't a roar. It wasn't a screech.
It was a melody. Soft. Childlike. A lullaby… being sung.
His eyes widened in horror.
"No… not here. Not inside the Zone."
He raced down the rusted fire escape, feet quiet from years of training. Every step was a lifetime of discipline—trained silence from the survival academies and orphanage drills.
He burst into the alley near the old sound shelter and skidded to a stop.
There—a girl. No older than nine. White dress stained with dirt and blood. And her lips were moving.
Singing.
Jackson's brain screamed at him to run, to dive, to cover her mouth—anything—but the Vyrant had already heard.
The air cracked like glass.
From the shadows… a Spectral Vyrant emerged.
It looked like a twisted cello made of flesh and bone, limbs vibrating like strings, its "face" an open mouth constantly screaming without sound. It phased in and out of sight like a flickering memory.
Jackson's hands trembled. He had no weapons. No Echo Gauntlet. No tuning blade. Not even a whisper shard.
Just fear.
But then the girl looked at him.
Her eyes… were exactly like his mother's.
He felt something snap inside.
He roared.
It wasn't a scream. It wasn't a word.
It was a pulse.
Raw, unrefined, emotional.
The Vyrant shuddered, its form distorting violently, and for a split second—just one—the creature cracked.
A resonance rupture.
And then it exploded into shards of fractured sound and black liquid.
Silence returned.
The girl sobbed and collapsed, and Jackson knelt beside her, heart still pounding like a drum in a closed coffin. He didn't know what the hell had just happened. Again.
Another Vyrant killed by… his voice?
No, not just voice.
Emotion.
Somewhere deep inside him, a forbidden Echo stirred again. One that shouldn't exist.
The girl clutched his hoodie. "Y-you're… like the woman who sang… the one they killed."
Jackson looked away. "I'm nothing like her."
But that was a lie.
He stood, lifting her carefully. "Let's get you somewhere safe."
Before more came.
Before he exploded.
Before his silence shattered everything.
---
4 Hours Later — District 9 Echo Clinic, Hidden Basement
"You idiot."
The voice belonged to Lara Minsong, a twenty-year-old Echo Cadet and Jackson's only 'friend'—though the word felt too soft. She was the one who occasionally brought him food and patched his bruises. She was also the daughter of the late Captain Minsong, founder of AUREA—the Acoustic Unified Response Echo Agency.
That was the group that fought the Vyrants.
And she was a damned good fighter.
She slammed a bloodied rag into his side. "You went loud in a neutral zone. What if there'd been a Type-3 listener nearby?"
Jackson winced. "There was a girl."
Lara blinked.
"Oh."
"Yeah. One of the wards from Sector 3. Singing."
"Shit," she whispered. "We thought all of them had been relocated."
"They weren't."
Jackson looked at his hands. They were still shaking.
"I did it again, Lara. That... thing. That resonance."
Lara stared at him, then sighed. "You're not supposed to be able to do that. You don't have an Echo Core. No pulse signature."
"I know."
"You're not even trained in any Echo Styles."
"I know."
"So why the hell are you still alive after rupturing a Spectral Type?"
He shrugged.
"I screamed."
Lara exhaled and handed him a datapad. "You need to see this."
Jackson looked. His name, flashing red.
Unauthorized Echo Detected. Zone Breach Reported. Possible Rogue Class Awakening.
"Shit."
"They're going to come for you, Jax. If the higher-ups in AUREA find out…"
"They'll dissect me."
"They'll do worse."
Jackson stood. "Then I guess I have to disappear."
"Again?"
He looked her in the eyes. "This time… for real."
And as the cold wind of the clinic's lower vent tunnels howled, Jackson Broks walked into the dark, unaware that his voice had just triggered an ancient ripple in the core of the world.
A forbidden Echo had awakened.
One that could destroy or save all of humanity.