Across the observation platform, Kieran's arms were crossed, his usual expression of scrutiny unwavering. His sharp eyes followed every motion, dissecting each step with the precision of a master tactician. "You're still hesitating on transitions. Fluidity is key. "
Orion exhaled through his nose, shaking out the tension in his arms. He had been focusing on refining power, but Kieran was right—his flow between movents still had gaps. "Understood," he said.
Kieran tilted his head slightly, as if assessing whether Orion truly grasped the weight of his words. "Strength without seamless execution is just wasted motion. Again."
Orion rolled his shoulders, exhaling through his nose as he straightened.
Before Orion could respond, a soft chi from his wrist interface signaled an incoming priority ssage. A single glance at the encrypted sender code told him everything he needed to know.
Sothing had co up.
He flexed his fingers before deactivating the weapon and stepping away from the training pad. "I need to cut this session short."
Kieran's gaze sharpened. "An urgent matter?"
Orion nodded, already heading for the exit. "Sothing I can't ignore."
Kieran didn't press further, though his eyes followed Orion's retreating form.
Orion gave the briefest of nods before stepping out of the simulation doors. The activated his wrist comm, the encryption protocol already cycling as he moved.
The dim glow of the holo-terminal cast flickering shadows across Orion's face as he sat in a private chamber within the Reyes estate. Across from him, separated by distance, Lysander Kain leaned back in his seat, his mask reflecting the cold blue light of the transmission.
In the background, Veylan lounged on a nearby chair, stretching his arms behind his head as he lazily observed the exchange.
The encrypted file was retrieved from a black-market data broker for an obscene price, its origins unverifiable and its credibility a bit lacking. It was supposedly a replica of a real transmission, though whether it had been altered to mislead or to make Orion chase ghosts was unknown.
The inconsistencies in its tadata hinted at deliberate tampering, but whether the intent was to obscure critical truths or to fabricate an entirely false trail was yet another layer of uncertainty. Whoever had buried this information had gone to great lengths to ensure that anyone uncovering it would be left questioning what was real and what was not.
"You're fortunate," Veylan said, speaking as if he were the one conducting business. "Not many get their hands on sothing like this. Last known transmission of a dead House? That's history, my friend. So would kill for it."
Lysander remained composed, his voice smooth but edged. "So already have."
"Fair point," Veylan admitted with a grin. "Now, let's set expectations. This isn't the original. The real thing? Gone. Wiped clean. What you're getting is a reconstruction—pieced together from black-market data streams, old Dominion logs, and a few sources who'd rather stay naless. Could be real, could be—"
"Tampered with," Orion finished. His voice was neutral, betraying none of the tension he felt.
Veylan spread his hands. "Exactly. Soone wanted this erased. Soone else wanted it to exist. And now here you are, caught between them."
Lysander finally tilted his head slightly. "Then why sell it?"
Veylan chuckled. "Because soone was willing to pay." He twirled a small data chip between his fingers before holding it up to the screen. "And now it's your problem."
Orion studied the chip, even though he could not physically reach for it. "Decryption?"
"You'll need a specialist," Veylan admitted. "The layers on this thing are ssy—so of it was probably altered to mislead, maybe even to lure you into chasing a ghost."
A faint, humorless chuckle ca through the masked figure's connection. "People who chase ghosts," Lysander said, "usually end up becoming one."
Orion's fingers tightened slightly.
The first step toward the truth—
Or into a trap.
Six hours had passed in the depths of the Reyes intelligence labs, where Orion and Elya Raines worked to decrypt its layers. The process had been slow,—each algorithm peeled back revealing another layer of obfuscation.
"Soone went through great lengths to hide this," Elya had muttered, fingers gliding over the console. "And even greater lengths to make sure no one else could restore it."
The final breakthrough had co with an old Dominion cipher, a relic of classified war-ti encryption. The mont the last lock unraveled, Orion had taken the chip and left, the weight of revelation pressing against his thoughts.
The mont stretched, tension settling into the quiet hum of the console as Orion adjusted the audio filters, enhancing the playback. The flickering glow of the projection danced across his face, casting long shadows across the study's walls. He inhaled slowly, bracing himself as the transmission took shape, the weight of forgotten words about to resurface.
A man speaking to his family in what was likely his final monts.
"Vera. Take the children and go. Leave everything—burn the records and do not look back. They are coming, and nothing will stop them."
A pause. A sharp inhale, as if he was glancing over his shoulder, listening for the inevitable approach of death.
"It's about what we uncovered—sothing beyond our understanding, sothing we were never ant to see. From the mont we discovered it, our fate was no longer our own."
"If you're hearing this, I failed. And if I failed, that ans they won't stop with . They will hunt you. They will erase our na from the stars."
A faint thud. The sound of sothing breaking. The man's breathing turned rapid.
"Vera, listen to . There is still a way."
A violent burst of static cut across the transmission. When it returned, the voice was different—lower, hoarse, as if the man's strength was draining.
"Even now, I don't know if we ever truly understood it."
Another silence, filled with distant, muted sounds—boots on tal, voices barking orders. The man's breath hitched.
The sound of a door being forced open.
The final words, barely a whisper:
"If it was ours to claim"
The feed cut to silence.
Orion stared at the display. His instincts scread that the ssage had been altered, manipulated in ways he couldn't yet determine. But by who? To what end?
The ssage played on a loop, every word dissected, every pause scrutinized. Orion leaned forward, eyes narrowed as he analyzed the waveform display, tracking inconsistencies in modulation, compression artifacts—signs of digital tampering.
"The corruption at the tistamp here—" she muttered, isolating a portion of the audio.
A flicker of static disrupted the audio, an almost imperceptible anomaly just before the na Hekatrya was spoken. It wasn't a natural distortion—the signal break was deliberate, surgically precise, as if soone had forcibly overwritten a fragnt of the ssage.
The irregular waveform confird it, a manufactured gap designed to erase or obscure sothing significant. Whatever had been said in that mont was gone, stripped from the record. And yet, the na remained, like a whisper slipping through the cracks of a censored truth.
Soone had altered this.
"Soone scrubbed sothing out," she confird, fingers moving deftly across the console. "See the irregular signal break here? That's an insertion point. Soone wanted this version of the ssage to exist."
Orion's jaw tensed. "But was it to lead us to Hekatryon... or away from it?"
Elya's fingers hovered over the console before she let out a slow breath. "That's the question, isn't it?"
Orion leaned back, exhaling through his nose. He had paid a fortune for a ghost.
"Hekatryon," he murmured.
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