The medical bay of the Black-Ops frigate was cold, sterile, and silent save for the hum of containment fields and the frantic beeping of biomonitors. Echo lay on a surgical slab, encased in a translucent stasis bubble. Violet tendrils pulsed beneath his skin, mapping his veins like invasive roots. His breathing was shallow, his eyes closed, but behind his eyelids, a war raged.
The Dawn-Class corruption was not mindless. It was a vengeful, intelligent poison—the last spiteful will of Vex'thal, carrying fragments of its consciousness. It sought to consume Echo's anomaly core, to twist his unique nature into a new kind of corruption.
Leyla and Mira were barred from the room, forced to watch through a reinforced viewport. Leyla's claws were out, scoring deep gouges in the metal frame. Mira stood motionless, her knuckles white, her spatial senses pressing uselessly against the medical bay's dampening fields.
Kaelen stood beside the chief medic, a grim-faced Cyberneticist named Dr. Aris. "Report."
"The corruption is Tier 9, at minimum. It's rewriting his cellular structure and attacking his neural pathways. His… unique energy signature is fighting back, but it's a stalemate. If the corruption wins, he'll become a Corrupted Ascendant—intact memories, abilities, but loyalty to the Legion."
"Can you purge it?"
"Standard antiserum is useless. We'd need a sample of a Darkness-Class entity's core to synthesize a counter-agent. Or…" Aris hesitated.
"Or what?"
"Or we amputate his soul from his body and hope the anomaly survives the transfer."
Kaelen's expression didn't change. "Unacceptable. Keep him stable. I'll find another way."
She turned and left, her mind already running through black-market contacts and forbidden archives.
Inside the stasis pod, Echo was drowning in a memory that wasn't his.
He was Vex'thal, once a being of light and logic, a keeper of stellar balances. Then the shadow came—Nyx'thal, a whisper of infinite hunger. There was no fight, only a slow, inevitable consumption. The despair of feeling your consciousness diluted, your purpose perverted, until all that remained was the hunger and the memory of what you lost.
The corruption wasn't just attacking him; it was trying to make him understand its sorrow, to make him accept it.
But deep within Echo, something older stirred.
It wasn't his anomaly core. This was deeper, primal, tied not to cosmic errors, but to the very essence of life—to blood.
A whisper echoed from the very marrow of his bones: "You are of the line that commands the river of life. The corruption is but a taint in the stream. Purge it."
His blood—the one thing the corruption needed to flow, to spread—began to rebel.