The white room had no time. There was only the cycle: the silent void, the soothing music, the terrifying hum, and Valerius's disembodied voice asking questions designed to probe the cracks in his mind. Leo's consciousness was a ship dashed against rocks, and the Captain was meticulously mapping the wreckage.
But even in the storm of fractured selves, a single, constant point began to emerge. It wasn't a memory or an identity. It was a skill. The first skill he had ever multiplied.
Running.
When the dissonant hum filled the room, screaming through his fractured psyche, the hundred Leos did not just cower. A part of him, the core that had awoken in the subway station, reacted. It calculated trajectories through the formless fear. It found the path of least resistance, even if that path was only internal. It was an instinct so fundamental it had survived the annihilation.
[Skill Recognized: Environmental Navigation - Basic Lv. 1]
The thought-command was fractured, glitchy, but it formed. And with it, a ghost of the old mechanism stirred. He didn't—couldn't—apply a multiplier. But he held the concept of it. A shield against the chaos.
During one session, as Valerius prepared to introduce a new, more aggressive resonant frequency, Leo spoke. His voice was a dry rasp, but it was singular.
"Don't."
Valerius paused, his finger hovering over the slate. It was the first coherent, proactive word Leo had spoken in days. "Explain."
"The data... is contaminated," Leo managed, each word a struggle against the chorus in his head. "You test the broken pieces. You don't see... the thing trying to put itself back together. Your interference... breaks the pattern."
Valerius was silent for a long moment. The clinical curiosity in his eyes warred with impatience. "What pattern?"
"The tether," Leo whispered. He looked at his own hands, willing them to be still. "The first skill. The... anchor."
He was speaking in riddles, pieces of a logic only his shattered mind understood. But Valerius, the master of patterns, listened. He saw a new variable: the subject was developing meta-cognitive strategies for self-repair. This was unprecedented.
"The 'anchor' is a low-level physical skill?" Valerius deduced. "The foundation of your talent."
Leo gave a single, jerky nod. The child-self wanted to cry, the soldier-self wanted to fight, but the core self held on, using the simple, brutal logic of survival.
Valerius lowered the slate. "Show me."
He didn't activate the hum. He simply waited.
Leo closed his eyes. He blocked out the phantom sensations, the alien memories. He focused on the memory of the run. Not the hundredfold sprint that had saved him, but the very first, desperate step. The decision to move.
[Skill Recognized: Sprinting - Basic Lv. 1]
He held the skill in his mind, pure and unmultiplied. A single, perfect concept in the maelstrom. He didn't run physically. He ran mentally. He anchored his consciousness to that one, simple action.
When he opened his eyes, they were clear. For ten seconds, they were wholly his own. The twitching in his hands stilled. He looked directly at Valerius.
"The more you poke," Leo said, his voice firm and terrifyingly sane, "the more you remind the broken pieces that they're broken. You prevent the anchor from taking hold."
The clarity vanished as quickly as it came. The other fragments rushed back in, and Leo flinched, a low moan escaping his lips as he lost his grip. But the demonstration was complete.
Valerius stared, his mind racing. This changed everything. The subject wasn't just a passive collection of symptoms. He was an active system attempting homeostasis. Forcing stimuli upon him was like stirring a petri dish to see if the culture would grow—it was counterproductive.
He made a decision. He input a new command.
The white room's lighting softened to a dim twilight. The constant, silent observation feeds from the room were put on a ten-minute delay loop. To any outside observer, nothing would change. But in reality, for the first time, Leo was truly alone.
"No more active tests for forty-eight hours," Valerius announced to the empty observation room. "We will monitor passive recovery. We are no longer studying a breakdown. We are observing a spontaneous reorganization."
As he left, a figure detached itself from the shadows further down the corridor. Kaelen had been watching the watcher.
She had seen the brief moment of clarity on Leo's face. She had seen him fight his way to the surface for a single, coherent sentence. And she had seen Valerius's reaction—not the compassion of a commander for a wounded soldier, but the thrill of a scientist who has just discovered a new law of nature.
Valerius saw a reorganization. Kaelen saw a man drowning, who had just found a single, solid handhold.
She looked at the sealed door of the white room. Valerius was giving him space to heal, but only so he could be broken again in more interesting ways. The Captain had his blueprint.
Kaelen now had her mission. The anchor was real. And if Leo could find it from the inside, she could find a way to reach it from the outside.