Information didn't explode.
It seeped.
That was the Continuity Bureau's first mistake—assuming truth behaved like fire. Loud. Obvious. Easy to contain.
Instead, it leaked like poison into groundwater.
Encrypted packets surfaced across independent nets. Not dumps—breadcrumbs. Partial schematics. Redacted emails with just enough visible text to suggest what lay beneath. Names without faces. Dates without events.
Patterns.
Seris stood at the center of Ashfall's operations room, eyes bloodshot, fingers dancing through data layers faster than the displays could keep up.
"This isn't a whistleblower," she said. "It's a controlled hemorrhage."
Rook leaned against the wall, arms crossed. "Meaning?"
"Meaning someone inside the Bureau wants this seen," Seris replied. "But not all at once. They want panic, not clarity."
Kael listened from the corner.
Or rather—he tried to.
The words reached him. He understood them. He even agreed with them.
But they didn't stick.
Moments slipped through his grasp like melting ice. He'd catch himself staring at the same screen twice, unsure if he'd already read the data or merely thought about reading it.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: MEMORY CONSOLIDATION FAILURE—MODERATE]
He ignored it.
"I need the pattern," Kael said.
Seris hesitated, then nodded, projecting the compiled fragments.
The Continuity Bureau wasn't a department.
It was a failsafe.
Created decades ago, off-books, answerable only to a rotating shadow council whose members officially didn't exist. Their mandate wasn't governance—it was continuity of human dominance.
Hunters were assets. Monsters were pressure valves. Unrankables?
Evolutionary threats.
"They didn't just synthesize the magic," Mira said quietly. "They seeded it."
The room stilled.
"Gate fluctuations. Dungeon cores. Mana saturation," Seris continued. "All of it nudged. Adjusted. The unrankables weren't accidents—they were stress tests."
Kael closed his eyes.
For a split second, he saw the Freezer again.
The cold.
The silence.
The sense that something was watching him even then.
"So the government didn't lose control," Rook said slowly. "They outsourced it."
"Yes," Seris replied. "To time."
Kael opened his eyes.
"And post-rankers?" he asked.
Seris swallowed. "A counterweight. Always planned. Designed specifically to hunt you, Kael. Even before you existed."
A strange calm washed over him.
Not relief.
Confirmation.
"Then they won't stop," Kael said. "Even if Defense folds."
"No," Seris agreed. "Especially then."
The first major leak hit twelve hours later.
A video—older, grainy, timestamped nearly fifteen years back.
A younger Director Harkon stood beside a Continuity Bureau official, both watching through reinforced glass as a child screamed inside a frost-lined chamber.
The audio was clear.
"If it survives," the Bureau official said, "we recalibrate containment doctrine."
"And if it doesn't?" Harkon asked.
The official smiled. "Then it wasn't viable."
The child looked directly into the camera.
And screamed.
Public reaction was immediate—and violent.
Defense Ministry buildings were stormed in three cities. Protestors clashed with hunters. In one district, a post-ranker opened fire after being pelted with stones.
Twenty-six dead.
The Ministry of Defense issued a statement an hour later.
It was their second mistake.
They denied everything.
Every document. Every video. Every implication.
They blamed Ashfall.
They blamed foreign interference.
They blamed "mass hallucination caused by unregulated fire use."
Kael watched the broadcast without expression.
"Denial," he murmured. "Again."
But something tugged at him.
A sense of… familiarity.
"Seris," he said slowly. "Have they always done this?"
She looked up sharply. "Done what?"
"Lie like this," Kael said. "So confidently."
Seris hesitated. "Yes. Why?"
Kael frowned. "I think… I used to be angrier about it."
The room went quiet.
Seris checked his vitals instantly.
"Kael," she said carefully, "what did you have for breakfast?"
He opened his mouth.
Paused.
Closed it again.
"I don't know," he admitted.
[SYSTEM WARNING: DEGRADATION ACCELERATION—UNUSUAL PATTERN]
Rook swore under his breath.
"This isn't normal unrankable decay," Seris said, voice tight. "You're not fragmenting—you're shedding."
Kael flexed his hand, watching fire ripple across his skin.
"It doesn't hurt," he said. "That's the problem."
The third mistake came from the Ministry's enforcers.
A decorated unrankable.
Publicly known. Celebrated. Used for years as proof that the system "worked."
His name was Calder Voss.
When Calder began showing signs of degradation—confusion, emotional blunting, misfiring fire techniques—the Ministry quietly reassigned him.
Then disappeared him.
Ashfall found him two days later.
Or what was left.
He sat in a reinforced room, wrists bound, staring at nothing. Fire leaked from his pores in slow, erratic pulses. He didn't react when Kael entered.
"Calder," Kael said gently.
No response.
Seris scanned him, hands shaking. "They burned him out. Forced over-assimilation. They were studying how long he could last."
Calder suddenly laughed.
A thin, broken sound.
"They said I was a hero," he whispered. "Did I do good?"
Kael knelt in front of him.
"Yes," he said without hesitation. "You did."
Calder's eyes focused—for one last moment.
"Good," he murmured.
His fire surged once.
Then stopped.
Ashfall didn't release footage of Calder.
They didn't need to.
The absence spoke louder.
That night, Kael stood alone on the rooftop.
The city below burned with unrest.
Names floated through his mind.
Some stayed.
Some drifted away.
Lyra.
His mother.
His sister.
He clung to those like lifelines.
[SYSTEM STATUS: USER APPROACHING THRESHOLD]
"What happens when I cross it?" Kael asked quietly.
The system hesitated.
SYSTEM:Outcome undefined. Historical data insufficient.
He smiled faintly. "Of course."
A presence approached behind him.
Mira.
She stopped a few steps away, unsure.
"You're changing," she said softly.
Kael didn't turn. "So is the world."
"That's not what I meant."
He looked at her then—really looked.
Her fire was steady. Her eyes clear. Concern written openly on her face.
A romantic tension that had been there for weeks—unspoken, restrained—hung heavier now, sharpened by grief and proximity.
"If I forget," Kael said slowly, "will you tell me who I was?"
Mira swallowed. "Yes."
"And if I stop caring?"
She stepped closer. "Then I'll remind you why you should."
For a moment, Kael considered reaching out.
Then the thought slipped.
He lowered his hand.
"Thank you," he said instead.
Mira watched him with something like heartbreak—and something like resolve.
Far beneath the city, in a sealed chamber, the Continuity Bureau convened.
"The Prime is destabilizing faster than projected," one voice said.
"Good," another replied. "Then he'll burn out."
"And if he doesn't?"
A pause.
"Then we deploy the last countermeasure."
A new file opened.
PROJECT: POST-HUMAN NULL
And somewhere in the Freezer, Kael's sister suddenly screamed as the cold surged back—stronger than before.
Kael felt it.
A spike of pain.
A memory trying to anchor itself.
He whispered one word into the night.
"Wait."