POV: Ryuu Takeda
Location: Sector 13 – Transit Slums, West Rail Arch
Time: 23:17 local – 41 minutes after MIRAGE glitch report
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Sector 13's outer lanes weren't patrolled. They were abandoned. Officially, they were still under jurisdiction—printed in neat rows on Federation maps. But past Junction G, past the stuttering drone patrols and broken light scaffolds, law became optional. Only the brave, the hunted, or the haunted walked here after nightfall.
Ryuu wasn't sure which he was.
Maybe all three. Ryuu Takeda didn't care.
He needed the silence.
His Core had been twitching since sundown.
Not pain—pressure. Like a second heartbeat, buried deep under bone, whispering through his breath. A soundless throb that pulsed when he wasn't listening. Like it was waiting for something. Something old. Something not his.
His boots scraped across charred asphalt. He passed under the arc-light of a defunct relay tower, the LED pulse stuttering like a heart in denial. His reflection briefly surfaced in a broken transit mirror.
His own face.
But not quite.
---
There is movement behind him.
Too slow to dodge.
The first blow hit ribs—hard. Enough to drop a civilian. Ryuu staggered sideways, hit the wall, and rolled off instinctively.
"Subject Eleven confirmed."
Three attackers. Uniformed in black, civilian-coded but wrong. Black masks. Armored gloves. One advanced with a containment glyph-rod, glowing blue—Federation-only. Illegal outside controlled zones. A second flanked hard left with a net-caster. The third hung back, covering the angle with his posture.
Ryuu's heart kicked once. Not just from the pain. From recognition.
Not muggers. They didn't move like muggers. No chaos. No scrambling.
Their formation was tight. Two flanked wide. One advanced with arms high—aiming center mass. Tactical sweep. Suppression pattern. Not street.
His vision narrowed.
A glint of silver on the back of one attacker's glove—a TitanTech-class restraint rune. Civilian suppression tech. Military-only.
Extraction unit.
Not here to rob. Here to remove.
The second attacker lunged.
He didn't think.
Ryuu moved—not planned, just moved.
Twisted, low—swept a loose pipe from trash heap to hand, swung hard. The impact cracked a visor wide open. Sparks and filtered blood misted in the air.
The third man shouted:
"Contain his Core—now!"
But they were already too late.
---
The Core ignited.
No conscious command.
No flare-up from anger.
The Core ignited like a match lit in a memory he didn't own.
And then —
A phrase.
Not spoken. Not learned.
Etched somewhere deeper than thought.
It burned through his chest without flame.
"No throne. No name..."
"...Only fire that walks."
But the voice wasn't his.And the vow… wasn't in any archive.
[RECURSION FLARE: UNTAGGED AURA ANCHOR][WARNING: UNSANCTIONED BINDING IN PROGRESS][HOST TRACE: INHERITANCE UNKNOWN][VOW IDENTIFIER: NULL // CODEX ENTRY: NOT FOUND]
His Core answered anyway.
The vow had chosen him.
Before name.Before ritual.Before he even knew what it meant to burn.
It started beneath his ribs—heat without fire, like glass shattering in slow reverse. Red light pulsed from his chest to elbow, crawling into the pipe in his hand like memory poured into metal.
Ryuu stepped forward.
The pipe in his hand burned red from within.
It wasn't metal anymore.
It was memory.
---
Ryuu exhaled. Then moved.
He moved again—quick, brutal, precise. Not a street brawl.
This was taught. Old style. Older than TitanTech records.
Every strike found the tendon. Every dodge exploited breath spacing.
A glyph net fired—he rolled low, let the pulse skim past.
A shield raised—he stepped through the posture, inverted his stance, and split it in half.
Aura-flame tore through metal like scripture through silence.
It wasn't a fight.
It was a lesson.
From a memory.
---
When it ended, two were unconscious. One attacker was gone.
One lay twitching, breath rattling through a half-melted filter.
"The fire ghost…" they croaked. "Kaelen's echo…"
Ryuu froze.
"Who?" he asked.
But the man had already blacked out. Only static. He looked down.
His hands were scorched. Blackened. Ash etched along his forearms like someone had painted flame onto his bones—not drawn, but remembered into flesh.
The pipe crumbled in his grip. Not from impact.
From completion.
[RECURSION SIGNATURE: VOW-BURNED]
[SURFACE DECOHERENCE: MEMORY-BRANDED]
Ryuu stood still, chest rising and falling like something remembering how to breathe. He should've run or panicked. Or called someone. But his hands were still hot, his arms still burned with the memory of flame that didn't belong to him. What disturbed him more wasn't that they'd called him a ghost—but that some buried part of him had almost wanted to answer.
He turned away from the twitching body. His steps were uneven. The flame hadn't burned out, only buried itself again.
He passed an old utility pole.Taped to it was a faded poster:"Missing – Yula, Age 9, Sector 9 South. Last seen near the recycling grid. Contact code unreachable."
Ryuu didn't pause. But his eyes flicked back—just once.The photo was old. But the silence in it? Too familiar.
Then—He moved.
He didn't speak. Didn't think.
He just walked.
As if his body remembered a route his mind didn't approve.
---
He drifted under the arc of a dead rail bridge—Didn't recall turning toward it, but he was already there.
Behind him, two blocks away, MIRAGE flickered into view. Just a shimmer of blue diagnostics and lazy threat-level indexing.
[THREAT CLASSIFICATION: SUBJECT_11 — OBSERVE ONLY]
[RESPONSE PROTOCOL: NON-INTERVENTION — LOG ONLY]
No sirens ever came. Just a log entry. Another unread file.
He passed a runoff panel along the edge of the wall, light catching in the puddle beneath it.
He paused.Not because he saw movement.
Because something in the reflection watched him first.
He looked down.
A golden flicker passed through his eyes.
Not a glow. A recognition.
Then it vanished.
But not before the shadow behind him blinked.
Before he did.
---
He stared at his hands. Still steaming.
The Core pulsed under his ribs like a beast that had always known fire—just forgotten how to ask for it.
It wasn't his vow. Not yet.
But the flame? It didn't wait. It had already answered.
---
[echo_fragment://KAELEN_CORE/3.2-A]
"A vow doesn't wait for your name to return…
It waits for your fire to answer."
[signal stability: 12%]
[memory source: corrupted]
[origin tag: ASH-WARDEN UNKNOWN]
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