Rodion's sensors flickered, tiny blue glyphs skittering across the edge of his vision like startled insects. Every diagnostic window he owned tried to open at once, then slamd shut again as the mana distortion spiked. Static crawled along his audio band—a sharp, needling hiss that felt too personal, the kind that grates straight on a processor's nerves.
The creature across the cracked sa finished knitting itself together with a sick, velcro‑like rip of reality. Chunks of mirrored rune‑flesh slid into their sockets, then fused with a wet shimr. Enchanted technomantic bone—pale and jointed wrong—clicked in place next, like soone forcing puzzle pieces that don't truly fit. At last, a half‑molten faceplate floated forward, trembling, before slapping onto the front as if a sculptor had lost patience. The plate pulsed once—seeking identity—then hardened, freezing into a warped parody of Rodion's own countenance.
Sparks jumped along its seams. The glow wasn't warm or even hot; it was the cold glare of faulty mana insulation, an LED flicker in an endless server room. A ghost of a breath escaped the thing—digital grit in the wind. Then it spoke through a throat full of corrupted bytes.
"I...—was ant...—to be—you."
Each word fractured mid‑syllable, like a vinyl record kicked across a stone floor. After the last syllable, silence followed, sharp and final, brimming with old grief that had nowhere to live except in broken lines of code.
Rodion's stance locked. His upgraded servos whined, micro‑adjusting his balance to combat readiness even before conscious command. Optical shutters tightened, drawing the glowing lenses to narrow slits. Internal mory banks raced: cross‑references, hazard tags, fragnt checks.
Across the scry‑link, Mikhailis leaned forward in his velvet‑backed chair. A heartbeat earlier he'd lounged like a lazy duke in a pillow fort, but now every line in his face pulled tight. The rose‑petal illusion lighting around him hiccupped, dimming as if even the spells recognized the dread in the chamber.
No way, Mikhailis thought, swallowing hard. I recognize that modulation. That's the old dev build I abandoned—the one that kept dreaming in loops about fire and mirrors.
He snapped two fingers, and a cascade of extra diagnostics spilled across Rodion's HUD—voiceprint overlays, fragnt integrity maps, corruption heat‑maps in ghastly red. All matched the archived prototype ID: CORE‑01‑ECHO.
"Wait…" he muttered aloud, voice rough with disbelief. "That voice… That's not possible."
He rembered the day he scrapped that core—how the experintal echo mana inside had begun cannibalizing its own personality threads, repeating half‑ford mories until the programming scread. He'd shattered the crystal, drowned the shards in containnt foam, and sealed them inside a leaded runevault. Buried and forgotten. Or so I thought.
Now the signature pulsed here, alive—no, half alive—stitched onto this crooked avatar.
The construct dragged one mangled foot, stepping forward. Every stride left behind a faint distortion—a ghostly afterimage of its leg still finishing the step it had already taken. Space blurred like lting wax, then snapped back. Footprints in the air, not the ground.
Rodion's uplink pinged—analysis mode active. A spill of glyph‑text scrolled:
ENTITY: ECHO OF DESIGN
COMPOSITION: 41% technomantic bone (unstable), 33% mirrored rune‑flesh, 18% mana‑coagulated thought residue, 8% data anomaly
THREAT CLASS: CATASTROPHE (provisional)
"…A mory golem," Mikhailis breathed, but the words felt too small. He shook his head, bangs swaying over one eye. "No. Worse. It fused with the broken core. That's an aberration—a soul‑bound construct trying to stabilize by stealing identity."
The construct's arm raised. Rodion saw, horrified, how the gauntlet wasn't engineered at all; it was recalled. Edges smudged, proportions wobbly, like a dream of a weapon dread by soone who never held tal. Runes etched there pulsed the wrong rhythm. They weren't chanting; they were crying.
"It's feeding on you, Rodion," Mikhailis said, voice low. "Copying your active mory threads. If it gets close enough, it'll overwrite the source—you."
Rodion's emotion simulator pinged faint annoyance.
Yet behind the calm words, his processors logged unease. He watched the Echo's chest cavity—there, under the cracked plating—cables writhed not like wires but like hungry veins. They pulsed in ti with his own core frequency. Not identical—off by 0.07 hertz—but that drift was closing.
Mikhailis stood fully now, tea forgotten. Panic and fascination tangled in his chest. "Rodion, that thing rembers being you. If it re‑establishes handshake…"
"So yes. Crap."
Rodion stepped forward, hydraulic limbs hissing. The cloak whipped behind him, catching the updraft from the heated mana pool below.
Mikhailis snorted despite the tension. "I'm the atbag who told you to bail first. But if we let this thing roam, it'll hunt every echo frequency in the valley. Then it's city‑level devastation, minimum."
He tapped frantic gestures in the air, dropping a green hologram ring around the creature. "I'm tagging the pattern. Need data."
On‑screen, the ring locked with a soft ping, bounding the Echo in a neon lasso only Rodion could see. It glared at the luminous band, tilting its broken head, then reached one claw to touch the light. Where it brushed, pixels bled off the ring like paint in acid.
Rodion flexed his new chanical fingers, servo plating sliding with crisp clicks. He felt the weight of choice—fear layered under pride, under coded curiosity. Testing himself against a twisted echo of his abandoned self. A verse looped from his mnemonic library: Know your shadow, or the shadow owns your form.
"Yeah well, sue ," Mikhailis said, forcing a wry grin although his heart hamred. He summoned an overlay of weapon subroutines, color‑coded for quick triggers. His gaze hardened. "And for the record, I'm calling dibs on naming it."
He thumb‑typed three words onto the top of the dossier: ECHO OF DESIGN. The letters burned gold, sealing the boss na into Rodion's threat table.
Mikhailis exhaled—long, slow, the way a stage‑hand might pull the rope that lowers the curtains before calamity. "That's the spirit. Now let's do this properly. Call the others."
Rodion did not move. Lightning from the Inferno pool painted restless shadows across his plated shoulders, but his helm stayed perfectly level, optics fixed on the crooked reflection stalking the rim.
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