All that information was too much for Jaden. He paused and looked toward Malo. The boy was still hugging his knees, sitting at the center of the room.
Moments passed.
Gathering himself, Jaden shook his head and finally spoke.
"Malo... that village you mentioned—it was destroyed a decade ago."
A long silence followed.
"Where have you been all this time? And how did you end up in Northbridge?"
Northbridge was the site of the sudden fracture that caused mass destruction on May 6th, 2027. The incident yielded no visible creature or abomination in the real world. The fracture produced one of the weakest chaos signals ever recorded—almost weak enough to bypass the Special Chaos Detection Radar entirely. Fortunately, it was caught at least ten minutes before manifestation, just enough time for the nearby stationed Sundered to initiate rescue.
Even so, the deaths at the fracture site could not be prevented.
Malo was found unconscious at the very same spot where the fracture had manifested into the real world that led the rescue team to think that Malo was a special grade Sundered.
Of course, that alone wasn't enough to justify sending a child to the Greywell Military Complex, a facility reserved only for Special-Grades—those locked away, both for society's safety and their own.
The true reason Malo was deemed dangerous...That was something only the higher-ups knew—those who understood far more than most ever would.
Malo didn't flinch.He simply stared past Jaden, eyes unfocused—though it wasn't detachment. He couldn't actually see him; Jaden's voice reached him through the invisible speaker embedded in the room's ceiling.
"No… it was just weeks ago."
A pause.
"The sky was grey. The bread in the market was still warm."
His voice cracked—just slightly—but no tears came.
"Then it shifted hue. Turned dark red. Everything… then became…"
He trailed off, as if the words had lost their shape before reaching his lips. Silence followed—a hollow kind that didn't echo, just lingered.
That was enough for Jaden to guess what came next.
He exhaled slowly, almost as if saying it aloud would confirm it all over again.
Jaden could already begin to paint a picture in his mind—fragmented, but forming.
Malo's presence at the fracture, his survival without injury, the lack of clear recollection surrounding the Cabury Massacre—all of it pointed toward one terrifying possibility.
It could be a memory or presence-erasure ability, coupled with localized spatial distortion. That would explain why Cabury—a massacre that should have made global news—was treated with such strange indifference. As if the world had forgotten it on purpose.
The drawback? Perhaps Malo himself forgets. That would explain his disorientation, his inability to process time.
Or worse—it might not be memory erasure at all. It could be time and spatial distortion—a power that would place him far beyond the Special-Grade threshold. If that were the case…Then Malo could be one of the strongest anomalies Jaden had ever encountered.On par with the entity locked inside Site-0.
Still, the truth wasn't out of reach.
If Malo's ability truly affected time, it should be easy enough to verify—cross-referencing his biometric data against the Cabury Massacre files should confirm it.But if it was memory or presence-based manipulation, then even those files might be compromised, rewritten without anyone realizing.
And the boy wouldn't even know what he took from them.
"That's it. You can rest for now. I'll be back in thirty minutes."
A soft click followed as the reinforced door slid open. A man stepped out, scratching the back of his head in thought.
He looked like what you'd expect from someone burdened with authority and exhaustion.A stern-faced lieutenant, early thirties, wearing a tactical military coat over a dark utility uniform. His short hair was slightly disheveled—more from stress than neglect. There were faint shadows under his eyes, the kind that came from too many sleepless nights.
A matte-black pistol was holstered at his side, and a sleek datapad rested in one gloved hand. A thin earpiece blinked faintly at his collar—silent, for now.He exhaled through his nose, eyes fixed on nothing in particular, already running through the next report in his head.
Footsteps echoed through the sterile hallway, fading and returning with each stride as Jaden made his way toward the elevator.
On the way to the upper facility, his eyes stayed locked on the data pad, scrolling through archived news articles about Cabury. There weren't many—just three. Two of them were nothing more than surface-level reports, regurgitating the official narrative he already knew too well.
But the third…It offered something different.
It mentioned a man—John, a traveler who had once lived in Cabury for a time before the incident. He had returned shortly before the event, claiming he needed to retrieve something his wife had left behind.
Not exactly thrilling intel, but it was more than he had before.
Jaden closed the file and looked up just as the elevator doors opened with a mechanical hiss. He stepped out onto one of the upper floors, the walls here lined with reinforced steel and biometric scanners.
He stopped at a door marked Room 1-A.
Time to report.
A woman of broad frame and tall stature, she occupied the room like a monument that had always been there. Her bronze skin caught the pale fluorescent light in uneven glints, accentuating the sharp angles of her jaw and the thick scars that lined her forearms — not old ones, not decorative, but functional, earned.
She was seated — or more accurately, reclined — in a battered office chair that creaked under her weight. One leg was draped casually over the other, and both combat boots rested firmly atop the desk, disrespecting the stack of disorganized files and half-signed clearance forms.The only thing more unruly than the desk was her hair, pulled into a thick, tangled braid that hung over one shoulder like a coiled rope.
Her uniform wasn't pristine — regulation black, but weathered, marked by dust, stitched repairs, and a few long-forgotten bloodstains that no cleaning unit dared question. On her chest: a captain's insignia, dulled but still unmistakably etched.
A single fingerless glove tapped slowly against a metal mug as she read something off a cracked terminal screen. No ornament. No ceremony. Just the quiet, unmovable presence of someone who'd outlived innumerable operations Jaden had only studied in briefing files.
When she finally looked up, her eyes were a dark amber — steady, unreadable.
"Lieutenant Prolev," she said, voice husky from chain-smoking or shouting or both."You're late. Sit down. Speak."
Jaden stood at attention for half a second longer than necessary, then pulled out the chair across from her—worn, one leg slightly uneven.
He sat.
'This is going to take a while.'
he thought grimly.