CHAPTER 14: THE RECORD VAULT
The Record Vault was never meant to be seen.
That was the first lie.
The second was that history was stable.
The Vault sat beneath Aurelis like a buried spine—layer upon layer of reinforced stone, resonance-dampened alloys, and archival sanctums sealed away from time. It wasn't just records stored here. It was context. Names that had been erased elsewhere. Events quietly reclassified. Bloodlines smoothed into footnotes.
Power didn't live in weapons.
It lived in memory.
X walked through the outer corridor without urgency.
The mask hid his face, but not his intent. Thin lines of red resonance crawled beneath his sleeves, pulsing in time with his heartbeat. The Vault's defenses reacted instantly—barriers shimmering, biometric locks screaming for authorization.
They failed.
One by one, systems shut themselves down, blood responding to will, iron responding to command. He didn't tear through the Vault.
He opened it.
Alarms wailed anyway.
Of course they did.
People came.
They always did.
A half-dozen figures rushed in from the far end of the corridor—armed, armored, desperate. Not soldiers. Volunteers. Citizens who'd learned just enough to believe courage could compensate for power.
"STOP!" one of them shouted. "This place is protected by—"
X lifted his hand.
The fight lasted less than a minute.
They were good. Coordinated. One tried to flank, another went high, a third threw a resonance disruptor that almost clipped his shoulder.
Almost.
Blood obeyed faster than thought.
It coiled mid-air, redirected force, hardened into whips and blades that never touched skin yet crushed bodies into walls, into floors, into unconscious stillness.
One of them tried to get back up.
X walked past him.
"You should've stayed ignorant," he said calmly.
The man's eyes rolled back as the pressure increased—not pain, just inevitability.
When it was over, the corridor was silent again.
X didn't look back.
He stepped deeper into the Vault, boots echoing against stone older than the city itself.
Using X' absence, Victoria finally managed to escape from the house, entering an underground tunnel.
Dave felt her before he saw her.
A flicker.
Small. Untrained. Sharp with fear.
He stood on the edge of a derelict sector three levels above the city's underbelly, resonance expanded wide. X's signature was gone—too loud, too focused, pulling everything toward the Vault.
But something else had remained behind.
Victoria.
Dave swallowed.
You shouldn't be alone, he thought.
He followed the resonance trail through collapsed tunnels and forgotten transit shafts until the air grew warmer, more alive. She was nearby. Very nearby.
He stepped into the open.
She was already facing him.
Eyes wide. Shoulders tense. Resonance flaring instinctively around her like a storm she barely held back.
"Don't move," she snapped.
Dave raised both hands slowly.
"Easy," he said. "I'm not—"
She struck first.
A raw pulse of lightning slammed into his chest, throwing him back into the wall hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. He grunted, barely rolling aside as another blast cratered the concrete where his head had been.
She wasn't precise.
She was terrified.
Dave staggered to his feet. He couldn't fight with his resonance, but he could at least sense the direction. He straightened up,his resonance flaring defensively now, deflecting a third strike that would've shattered his ribs.
"Hey, stop this" he shouted.
She froze.
"What do you want from me? How did you locate me?" she demanded, voice shaking.
"Because you're not invisible," Dave said. "You're just alone."
She screamed and launched herself at him.
This time, it was close—too close. Her knee slammed into his side, his shoulder clipped her jaw. They crashed into the floor, rolling, resonance crackling wildly between them.
Dave didn't fight to win.
He fought to survive.
Her elbow caught his temple.
Stars exploded behind his eyes.
She stood over him, hand glowing, breath ragged.
"I won't go back," she said. "I won't."
Dave coughed, blood on his lip.
"Then don't," he said hoarsely. "I'm not your enemy."
The words cut through her like silence after thunder.
She hesitated.
Just for a second.
Enough.
Enough for her to feel him—not as threat, not as control, but as something else.
An anchor.
A choice.
Her hand trembled.
"You're… not afraid of me," she whispered.
Dave smiled weakly. "I am. Just not in the way you think."
Her resonance collapsed inward.
She fell to her knees beside him, shaking.
"I don't want to be his," she said quietly.
Dave sat up slowly, wincing.
"Then don't be," he replied. "Come with me."
For the first time since the mask touched her face, Victoria believed escape wasn't hypothetical.
It was standing in front of her.
The inner sanctum of the Record Vault was vast.
Circular.
A cathedral of data and stone, rings of suspended archives rotating slowly around a central pedestal. X moved through it with reverence bordering on hunger.
He interfaced directly—not with machines, but with bloodlines encoded into the Vault's deepest records.
Names surfaced.
Connections.
Truths long buried.
Then—
A voice echoed through the chamber.
"Hello, bastard brother."
X stopped.
Slowly, he turned.
Leviathan stood at the edge of the sanctum, resonance coiled tightly around him like a restrained beast. Behind him, one by one, the others emerged from the shadows.
Aria.
Paul.
Mary.
James.
Sophia was no where to be found.
The past, assembled.
X tilted his head.
"…Leviathan," he said.
Even through the mask, recognition was unmistakable.
"You're early," X continued calmly. "I expected you after the fallout."
Leviathan smiled grimly.
"We stopped waiting for fallout," he replied. "We started thinking like you."
X chuckled.
"That's disappointing."
"Take off the mask, please" Aria said quietly, having hopes she could change him.
X didn't move.
"No."
Paul stepped forward. "You don't get to hide anymore."
X spread his hands slightly.
"This is hiding?" he asked. "Or preparation?"
The air thickened.
Resonance surged.
Leviathan's voice hardened.
"You ran," he said. "You burned everything behind you and called it necessity."
X's gaze locked onto him.
"I ran? My, I didn't think you were brainwashed this hard. Is that what you've been thinking all this while, huh? Is that what our manipulative, dead beat parents said?"
Mary spoke next, voice trembling but firm.
"Don't say that about our parents. You left us."
X was silent.
For a moment—just a moment—the Vault seemed to hold its breath.
Then X spoke.
"I guess you are still living in a lie. Time to break it"
Leviathan's resonance flared violently.
"Then let's end it," he said.
The first clash cracked the floor.
Not blood.
Not yet.
But inevitability.
History had finally caught up.
And none of them would leave unchanged.