Shinra left his bed with an odd new habit: he checked the corners of rooms as if he expected a memory to be hiding there. It was a small superstition — one part caution, two parts residue from the bleed of a thousand-year-old life into a modern world — but it steadied him. The hospital-grade light in Sanctum's recovery wing was blunt and ordinary. Ordinary was something he could use.
The courtyard smelled of wet stone and the faint grease of early morning kitchen run-off. Unit 3 filtered past him in pairs: Riku and Hana arguing quietly about whether Shinra should be allowed to eat spicy food yet; Daren walking too close to a training dummy as if proximity might improve its temperament. Kaizen had already vanished into the planning rooms, leaving orders in his wake. Mizuki, predictably, carried half a server on her tablet and the other half in her head.
"Short lap?" Yuna asked, folding her jacket around her waist. The inside of her voice carried the blunt thrift of someone who'd watched a dozen near-deaths and decided to be efficient with her emotions.
"Short," he agreed.
They walked in silence, not because there was nothing to say, but because each step seemed to tune him back into his ordinary weight. Ordinary, however, had new edges. People looked. Phones flicked into no-audio recording mode and then away when they saw Yuna's face. Children on the far side of the courtyard pointed and then looked back at an adult for permission to stare.
Public reaction had become a slow weather pattern: first storms of headlines, then a drizzle of opinion pieces, then the curious condensation of conspiracy forums at night. Some called him savior. Some called him weapon. Some called him a thing that should have stayed buried.
A small boy ran past them, scraped knee and frantic breath, shouting to his older sister that he'd seen him — the man who saved the city — and would he sign his toy? The sister, a woman in a delivery jacket, half-smiled, half-hushed him. She glanced at Shinra, then at Yuna, then back at the route she had to travel. Survival required compromises people were already comfortable making.
Shinra listened, not to what they said but to how they said it: awe braided into fear, gratitude braided into calculation. That mix would be the political problem for months. For now it was a weather that soaked him without soaking through.
When they reached the operations room, the buzz was surgical — not the pressured clang of crisis but the taut hum of people rewiring logistics around a new reality. The wall screens carried multiple feeds: civilian updates, sensor logs, Authority bulletins, and a live map that glittered with markers where minor Breaches had appeared since the Convergence collapse. Most of those had been small, regional flares — shopfront distortions, weather anomalies in alleys — but they were new for the city's baseline.
"Mizuki," Shinra said, not looking at her first. She was a wire-frame of a person in the center of the room, hands moving like a conductor, pulling data into shapes. She glanced up, then at the screen. "Anything worrying?"
She hesitated just a fraction before answering, which meant the answer was worrying enough. "Not immediate," she said, "but the signature patterns have changed. The small anomalies—what we thought were just aftershocks—are showing attributes we haven't catalogued before. They're—" she chose the words like a doctor choosing a softer knife, "—more adaptive. They correct when we probe them."
Yuna frowned. "Probe in what way?"
Mizuki tapped the screen. A feed zoomed into a narrow alley; the distorted air inside the alley shimmered like heat haze. A pair of low-tier entities slipped through, all jagged limbs and sewn-together masks. An Ascendant fired a dispersive shot. The entities dissolved, reformed a moment later with a different stride pattern, and the same shot now fell short.
"They're altering their formation after exposure," Mizuki said. "And not randomly. They're compensating for the most effective pair of attack vectors — the ones used most often against them."
Hana rubbed her temple. "So they're learning from tactics they encounter."
"Or learning from the environment and whatever was present when we first encountered them," Daren added. "You mean—like him."
He didn't need to finish the sentence. Everyone in the room understood the implication: Shinra's presence in the Convergence Zone might have changed the root's operating parameters. The root — the network of Breach intelligence — had encountered something it had not accounted for: a sealed power that intervened and erased an avatar rather than folding it away. That was data the root would ingest and adapt to.
"Are they—targeting him?" Riku asked, half wanting the question answered and half wanting the answer to be false.
"Not directly yet," Mizuki said. "But look at the probes. They favour zones where he was present, and their response profiles shift faster in those places. It's like the root runs simulation patches and is now testing new subroutines at hotspots."
A silence that was not quiet settled over them. Shinra felt a soft pressure in the back of his skull, the echo of being both subject and instrument.
Yuna looked at him. "You okay with being someone the root pays attention to?"
He smiled without mirth. "I'm used to being an irritant."
"Better to be irritating than extinct," she said.
He agreed in his head.
Their first small mission took them not to a city center but to a dockside warehouse where workers had reported "shimmering air" and "voices that didn't match the crates." It sounded small — safe — and that was precisely why they were sent: test, map, and limit collateral damage. Kaizen insisted on coming; Arisa had declined immediate field presence but sent a pair of her own scouts to observe from another zone. Authority watchers maintained a polite distance, clearly under instruction to be seen but not to interfere.
The warehouse smelled of salt and old cardboard. A low distortion pulsed at the far end, like a heat-haze bubble that refused to move. Entities here were different — less chaotic than the initial waves in the Convergence. They moved with a rhythm that suggested intent, not hunger: a sequence of passes around the distortion, probing its surface like sailors checking a hull for leaks.
Shinra watched them steady, hands stuffed into his jacket pockets. He didn't reach for power. He didn't need to; a part of him had learned how much the presence alone could do. But even a presence had consequences. The entities paused when he moved into sight, heads cocking in the way sentient things did.
"Observe," Yuna murmured.
Hana set up a localized recorder. Riku took vantage; Daren flexed as if certain the fight would be sloppy for him. Kaizen watched Shinra with an expression he reserved for dangerous, expensive things he also liked.
An entity slid forward, assessing. It extended a limb that seemed to taste the air. It recoiled a sliver and turned, moving toward a seam of the distortion. Then, as if it had learned from some invisible script, it performed a small ritual — circling once, touching the seam lightly, then withdrawing. The seam shuddered and grew a tiny filament.
Mizuki's tablet blinked: micro-readings spiked. She frowned. "It's attaching markers. That's new."
"Markers?" Riku asked.
"We think so," Mizuki said. "Reference points. Identifiers. Possibly echo beacons the root can use to locate these seams remotely."
Yuna's jaw set. "So the root is experimenting with tagging anomalies — an active global map."
"Not global yet," Mizuki said. "But this is test-case behavior. The warehouse is low priority. If it scales, the root can extend those markers, bootstrap a net, and then—"
"And then it will hunt with better GPS," Daren finished.
The air tightened. Shinra felt something move behind his eyes, a memory almost but not quite within reach: plans drawn on maps, men in cloaks pointing at dots and deciding where to press. The memory did not belong to this era and yet it came with an authority that made his knees tighten.
[We are known,] Arios said softly.
[They sense the landmark.]
"Who?" Shinra asked aloud.
[The root,] Arios answered.
[It is not merely network. It is a system that tags and targets. You have become a beacon on its grid.]
Yuna watched him, eyes slanting with calculation. "So the small things were probes," she said. "And this was them testing a way to find him again."
Mizuki's fingers tapped at her tablet faster. "If that filament is an anchor, it could allow the root to funnel more targeted avatars into a given area. That makes containment exponentially harder."
"Then we remove the anchor," Shinra said.
"No," Mizuki snapped. She sounded far more tired than he would have guessed. "We document. We don't play into whatever evolution it's using. If we destroy the anchors, we force the root to alter its method and we lose the ability to study the changes."
"Which is what we do," Kaizen said. "You document and we react. Then you make a call."
Shinra felt the weight of responsibility settle differently than it had in the plaza. It was no longer only about raw stopping power. It was about being a node in a surgical fight for information and advantage.
The entity nearest them, apparently satisfied by the filament's placement, untethered and glided into the warehouse wall. The distortion shimmered and collapsed inward, leaving behind nothing that looked worth writing home about — except for a faint residue on the floor: a small black shard no larger than a fingernail, rough and hot to the touch.
Riku reached out before anyone stopped him, fingers closing around it. He drew back, eyes wide.
"It's warm," he said.
"Contain it," Mizuki ordered.
They bagged the shard and moved out. Authority recorded, watched, and asked for the chain of custody. No one in Sanctum offered it freely. Any playing of hands would be a political mistake; Kaizen refused to make a gift to a committee that might decide to place a lid on something they'd come to depend on.
Back on the transport, Shinra rested his head against the cool panel and let his eyelids fall. Memory overlays had become less violent but more frequent — a guard in an old uniform saluting a throne he didn't own; a field of men kneeling with lanterns raised; the smell of wet ash. Each lasted only a breath, but each left the same aftertaste: an older life that had its own vocabulary and its own debts.
"You okay?" Yuna asked.
"For now," he said. "This will get worse before it gets clearer, I think."
She gave him a look that was both stubborn and soft. "Then we keep walking," she said. "One lap at a time."
They returned to Sanctum with the shard locked away and a new data line open with Authority — formal enough to keep the Envoy from spiking a panic, guarded enough that Sanctum retained final custody for now. The public would see a photo of the shard later and whole internet communities would spin theories, but none of that intelligence would alter the new truth: the root had learned a new trick, and it was using the city as a testbed.
That night, while the guild sat around a low table and pretended to eat something called stew, Shinra found himself staring at his hands. They were still his. They still had thumbs and scars and the old incline to idle fiddling. And yet they had recently been instruments of erasure — a thought that both intrigued and frightened him.
Outside, the city slept in a state of wariness. Somewhere in the dark, the root adjusted its net. The shard warmed in its sealed case, a small, silent proof that the fight would not be as simple as smashing the visible things and walking away.
At the edge of that thought, like a distant switch flipping, the notion arrived — not a memory but an address: Found you.
He didn't know who had said it. The voice felt older than the root, patient and procedural, like an archivist who had misplaced a book and then finally found it again. The sensation slid through him, less an invasion and more a notice posted on his skin.
Arios whispered, almost apologetic, "They are learning faster."
Shinra breathed in, and the breath tasted of the city: smoke, engine oil, the sharp citrus of someone sweeping a store front at three in the morning. He looked at his guildmates, at Yuna's profile in the low light, at Kaizen's stubborn grin over a bowl, and he made the smallest choice he'd made all day.
"We keep walking," he said softly. "We map. We look. We protect. We don't hand ourselves over."
Yuna's hand found his across the table, a simple anchor. Kaizen raised his cup in a crooked salute.
Outside, in the dark net of the Breaches, a node pinged a little louder. Somewhere behind that ping, something vast shifted its focus a fraction of an inch.
The fight had learned to find him.