The room was quiet—too quiet.
Somewhere beyond the reinforced walls of the hidden bunker, global systems were collapsing. Airwaves still hummed with panic. Streets in major cities echoed with protests, containment drones, and chaos. But inside the Safe Node, time seemed suspended.
Li Chu sat on the floor, knees drawn close to her chest, her breath shallow.
Flickering above her palm, a soft blue hologram pulsed erratically—the biometric sync trace between her and the modified System terminal.
For the past hour, she had tried to decrypt the locked memory shard embedded in her neural archive. A shard left untouched for years—until Lin Chen's broadcast and the Erebus bounty triggered a cascading spike in emotional feedback.
It had started as a headache. Then, images—blurry, distorted. Faces without names. Screams muffled by surgical masks. Her own voice—begging them to stop.
But now, one fragment had surfaced fully.
She saw him.
A sterile white chamber. Bright surgical lights. Dozens of figures in black coats surrounding a single operation table.
And Lin Chen—pinned, sedated, restrained.
His face twisted in pain even unconscious. Electrodes jammed into his spine. Wires running from his temple into a console she had once operated. And on the console—glowing like a forbidden artifact—the prototype Salvator Core.
Her own hands hovered over the keys.
"I'm sorry, Lin Chen…" she whispered aloud, trembling.
In the memory, she turned back toward the observation deck—and saw someone nod to her. An Erebus handler. Tall. Cold. Familiar.
His words echoed in the flashback:
"If he survives the integration, we'll have our first stabilized host. If not… at least we'll know where the threshold lies."
Back in the present, Li Chu gripped her temples. A wave of nausea hit her.
He didn't choose this.
She had always believed Lin Chen to be a volunteer. A rogue. Someone who had discovered the system and made it his weapon.
But now she remembered the truth—or at least 1% of it.
He had been forced into it. Drugged. Bound. Implanted.
And she was part of it.
"Why didn't I remember before?" she gasped.
The System inside her flickered to life for the first time in days.
[Cognitive Firewall Detected: Level-6 Memory Seal Partially Compromised.][Memory Fragment Sync: 1.08% Unlocked.][WARNING: Emotional spike exceeds safety threshold. Recommend stabilizing protocol.]
[Do you wish to initiate Recall Expansion?][Yes] [No]
Her finger hovered over the response.
Tears welled in her eyes—not from fear, but from guilt.
"I helped destroy him."
She didn't press anything.
Instead, she reached for the encrypted communicator Lin Chen had dropped in her lap hours ago, before disappearing again into the storm of the world.
Her voice cracked, low and raw.
"Lin Chen… if you hear this… I remember now. Not everything. But enough."
"You weren't supposed to wake up. I watched them… I watched them rewrite your code, fuse the core into your spine like you were a thing, not a person."
"And I stood there. I let it happen."
The communicator blinked red—out of range.
She clutched it tighter, forcing herself to breathe.
Then she rose.
No more hiding. No more passivity.
She looked at the terminal screen where Lin Chen's bounty still glared in crimson—Top 1 Global Threat.
"You're not alone," she whispered. "Not anymore."
A shadow flickered in the hallway.
Li Chu turned, eyes narrowing.
Erebus was already here.
They had found her.
And for the first time since she woke up broken in a hospital bed years ago, she didn't feel afraid.