The breach opened ahead of schedule.
They always did.
But this one had no warning pulse. No siren. No pressure spike to trip the sensors.
It just happened—
Like someone folded the air behind the mall on a Tuesday and forgot to mention it.
By the time Compact boots landed, the Rift had already pulled four people in.
Kayne didn't wait for the team.
He wasn't supposed to be on this mission.
He didn't wear a coat.
Didn't carry authorization.
He was on body pickup.
Nothing else.
He should've walked away.
They told him he couldn't enter zones anymore. They tagged him Unfit for Field Response two winters ago.
But he saw the color of the tear.
And he knew what that meant.
Cyan bleed, before crimson flash.
That Rift was new.
But it remembered something.
He crossed the line without speaking.
The air slapped him for it, cold and immediate — like walking into a funeral you weren't invited to.
Rift Zones were always messy, but this one was... panicked.
Pavement peeled in loops.
Fire alarms rang inside bathrooms.
An old man with panic in his jawline was still trying to pull his wife's hand from a closed gate, even though the wrist was gone.
Kayne walked past him.
He didn't look down.
She was bleeding out by the stairs.
Compact Hunter. Young.
Support class—glow still flickering from the half-deployed ward on her belt.
Too much blood already pooling.
Her pulse was past saveable.
He knelt anyway.
She grabbed his forearm before he could touch the wound.
"Go," she whispered. "Wrong type. Fast. Doesn't test."
"I'm not a Hunter," he said.
She blinked.
"...Even worse."
He heard the first kill over the next wall.
Not a scream. Just that wet-canvas sound of someone's lungs giving up in chunks.
Kayne moved toward it.
Not because he could stop it.
But because something in his ribs wouldn't let him stay still.
Not again.
The mall's back corridor sloped wrong.
Water from fire lines trickled upward in slow curls, like the laws in here weren't interested in physics today.
He saw the creature when he was already too close to change course.
It was small.
Wrong-small.
Like a toddler reassembled at adult proportions and taught how to smirk.
It was eating someone's memory of their own face.
Not literally — but the light bent around what used to be a head.
It turned to him.
No chase.
No buildup.
It just made a sound like a child shouldn't make—
"Name," it gurgled, coughing syllables that almost knew how to be human.
Kayne took one step backward and hit a mirror that wasn't there.
The sound broke him.
Not the volume. The placement.
It came from just inside his skull, like a wrong chord plucked on premortem nerves.
He fell to a knee.
Everything in Kayne's thoughts screamed: stay down, do nothing, you're paper.
Instead…
he reached for his belt.
There was no weapon.
Just the handle of something that didn't belong on him.
The handle was warm, as if it had been waiting.
He didn't raise it.
Didn't know how.
The monster turned. Slowly.
It stared.
Then cocked its malformed head.
And stepped backward.
Deliberately. Carefully.
For a silhouette that had no eyes, it looked… nervous.
"Still breathing," it said, quieter now.
"Too early."
Then it disappeared.
No smoke. No surge.
Just gone.
The recovery team found him twenty minutes later.
He was alone in the back corridor, half-covered in someone else's blood.
His hands trembled. Only once.
Then stopped.
One rescuer radioed in.
"Civilian found. Alive. Not wounded."
Another scanned Kayne with a wrist tool.
Silence.
"His profile's not loading."
"Try command ping."
"It's not there."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"Means he wasn't deployed."
"...Then what the f*** is he doing in there?"
Kayne didn't look at them.
He looked at the path the monster vanished through…
and thought of something he hadn't remembered in years:
A voice whispering his name in a place that never had doors.
Back then, he'd forgotten it because no one believed him.
Just like now.
Three floors beneath Compact HQ, hidden behind a denial-coded access chamber—
Ikoras Vale finished reviewing the same Rift feed, eyebrows perfectly still.
Half the video was damaged.
One portion showed a smudged scan where Kayne stood — that track had been marked terminated in 3-year-old data.
Ikoras leaned forward.
And finally said:
"We didn't lose him back then."
"We buried him."