They called it a guided avatar before they knew what the word meant.
Mizuki's monitor lit the operations room in cold blue. Lines crawled across the map, then froze on a single pulsing node near the old textile quarter. The marker changed color—yellow to orange to a raw, bright red.
"Tracking a fast vector," she said. Her voice had the clipped tone of someone who'd stayed awake too many hours and decided data was safer than panic.
Shinra was already moving.
Unit 3 assembled like a machine designed to catch things by surprise. Hana and Riku on the flanks. Daren on overwatch. Kaizen coordinating. Yuna at Shinra's side, a quiet, steady presence.
"Show me," Kaizen said.
Mizuki flipped the feed.
A street camera feed showed nothing at first—just wet pavement and a shuttered storefront. Then a ripple in the air, a fold that did not belong, and the thing unspooled.
It looked like a spider built from scrap: jointed limbs, plates that clicked as they shifted, a head with multiple lenses that slid apart and recomposed.
But it moved with an intelligence their earlier avatars hadn't had. It didn't rush. It tested angles. It paused to listen. When Riku's stabilizer sent a pulse, the avatar didn't flinch; instead it adjusted its gait, redistributed momentum, and the next pulse skimmed uselessly off a displacement field it formed on the fly.
Mizuki's face went hard. "It's compensating for repeat patterns in our interference. It's got a reconfiguration layer."
"Guided," Shinra said. The word tasted like metal.
"Directed," Mizuki corrected. "Someone is feeding it a decision tree. Not pure root—someone's overlaying instructions."
They moved.
The alley smelled of oil and wet cardboard. Sirens were distant. The avatar's presence made light bend in small, unpleasant ways. Children's graffiti seemed to peel at its approach.
Hana hit a perimeter charge. The avatar's limb dissolved where the pulse hit, then reconstituted from another angle. It moved like water finding a crack and poured through.
"They taught it redundancy," Hana said, breathless as she reset her stance.
Riku fired a burst that should have stopped its motion. The round passed through a place where the avatar had been and struck the wall beyond. The thing had remade itself a hair's breadth away.
"It's predicting our counters," Riku said, hand steady despite the shock.
Mizuki's comm line chirped. "It's using short-term predictive heuristics. Latency extremely low. It's not learning from the field in passive time—it's receiving an uplink with decision nodes."
Yuna glanced at Shinra.
"Will it recognize you?" she asked.
He felt Arios stir. It's tagged the motif from the shard. It's not just algorithm. It carries a symbol. The voice in his head was a thread of warning, not outrage.
"Probably," he said. "But not yet."
The avatar pivoted and leapt, intent clear now. It wasn't hunting for snacks or scenery. It homed toward a narrow manhole cover and pushed at the seam. A filament slid out like a probing tongue and touched the metal.
The filament glowed faintly. The manhole's seam trembled.
Shinra moved before the seam could open wider. He didn't reach for the 8% that had been his guarantee. He used awareness. He placed both hands on the ground and tuned to the seam's intention like a musician finding a chord.
Arias supplied the cadence to his hands.
[Microfold present. Local resonance keyed to motif. Disrupt the filament's phase and it will fail to integrate.]
He focused. Not force, but pattern. He felt the seam's nascent song and hummed a counter-note.
The filament faltered.
The avatar snarled a sound that was not language and tried to compensate with a different vector.
Mizuki barked instructions. "Push collapse to the perimeter! Divert its feed!"
Hana drove a containment wave. Riku set a trap charge. Daren fired a suppression burst that clouded the avatar's sensory lenses.
The creature reformed, then did something new: it extended a plate and, as if obeying a remote command, scrawled a shallow glyph in the air. The glyph hung for a second—a spiral, the same spiral that had been on the ribbon in the library and on Akari's pendant—and then disintegrated into ash.
"Motif confirmed," Mizuki said, voice flat with a scientist's dread. "They're seeding identifiers into their constructs. It's calling our bait using old-era signatures."
The avatar's movements sharpened. It dove for a seam at the warehouse wall and tried to cut through reality with a blade of folded air. The seam yawned wider than anything they'd seen in smaller skirmishes.
Yuna cursed. "It's opening a gateway."
Not yet catastrophic. Not yet the red dome of memory. But wide enough to let a sentient construct slip through and make a home.
"You can close it?" Kaizen asked Shinra, tension coiled tight.
"Not alone," Shinra said. He could feel his reserves, the raw muscle of his sealed power, reacting like a caged animal. Arios whispered strategy—the same voice that had once authorized ten-seconds of apocalypse. This was a different option: sustain the seam, but force misalignment.
"Then we do it together," Yuna said.
They moved as a single, practiced team.
Hana's barrier pinched the seam's outer edge. Riku placed entropic charges in a weave that would scramble any packet the root might try to push. Kaizen aimed a tether to hold the space steady so Shinra could work without the seam blinking.
Shinra placed his palms at the seam's edge. The overlay came—thrones flaring, a name heard in the dark—and he welcomed it like a tool rather than a storm. He let a fraction of his presence bleed into the seam, not to erase, but to confuse the signature the avatar used to navigate.
Arias fed him the pattern to hum.
He matched it, note for note, but twisted the cadence so the motif harmonized into noise.
The avatar reeled. Its uplink stuttered. For a fraction of time, the decision tree it followed had a gap.
"Now!" Mizuki shouted.
Riku detonated the trap charges. The seam flared and then buckled as the entropic field swallowed the avatar's orientation packets. The guided construct convulsed and collapsed into a pile of inert plates.
They moved in to secure the residue.
No grand annihilation. No dramatic deus ex machina. Just a tight, surgical neutralization earned in sweat and breath.
When they bagged what was left, Shinra saw the etchings. The spiral, shallow and precise, cut into an armor plate like a maker's mark.
Mizuki's fingers shook with the rush of data. "This is a hybrid signature," she said. "Root-derived architecture, with overlayed vector markers keyed to old-era motifs. Somebody's fusing human cultural anchors into root calling protocols."
"Who would do that?" Riku asked.
"Someone who knows both systems," Mizuki said. "Someone who can speak the root's dialect and the city's memory language."
Akari, who'd been near the perimeter watching with a faint, white tension at her throat, stepped forward.
"They're using names as routes," she said. "Not as priestly nonsense, but as GPS. A name is a label; this—this is a path."
Shinra touched the residue and felt an echo of the spiral under the cold metal. It pricked like a small memory.
Arias made a small, sharp sound inside his skull. They're experimenting with cultural vectors to teach the root to aim. The voice was not alarmist. It was analytical. That implies an orchestrator.
Mizuki's screen filled with cross-references. The plates matched fragments they'd recovered before. The motif appeared in three other recent residues: the library ribbon, the dock shard, the market pamphlet. Someone had been stitching a lattice.
Kaizen's jaw clenched. "Whoever's building this has patience and access. That's not a root mind. That's a planner."
Ryou's message arrived on the secure channel: Envoy Kurogane requests immediate custody of select residues. He is insistent.
Mizuki's reply was a terse refusal.
Kaizen shrugged. "Then he'll try another way."
Shinra felt the city's attention like a pressure in his chest. They were a small knot threaded into a larger tapestry. Someone had learned to tie knots using the city's names.
Akari's hand trembled when she touched the spiral on the plated fragment. "It's people who remember," she said softly. "Not necessarily people who want to hurt. People who think they can steer history by stitching it."
"Steering history with anchors," Shinra said. "That's new."
"Dangerous," Yuna added.
They returned to Sanctum with the residue sealed and a new string of questions appended to their logs.
In the debrief, Mizuki's voice was sharp and efficient. "We stop guided avatars by denying their navigational beacons. We contaminate motif channels, we bury anchors where the root can't reach, and we watch for the orchestrator who speaks both cultural and root tongues."
Akari sat beside Shinra in the dim after-action room, the pendant warm against her throat. She looked at him with an exhaustion that was more like the gravity of one who had been given a ledger.
"Do you think they'll try again?" she asked.
Shinra counted the breathing pattern without thinking.
"Yes," he said. "But they'll be more cautious."
She nodded. "People who know names are clever. They can hide in libraries and markets, where everyone forgets to look."
He thought of the man who had closed the seam in the river. Of the threads they were tracing. Of the shard that had called something that could answer.
Arias whispered, not unkindly: We are a lesson now. Lessons can be shared.
Shinra let the thought settle. He thought of Yuna's steady hand, Kaizen's grin, Mizuki's feverish mind, Akari's worn pendant.
"We make it hard for them to teach the root without paying a terrible toll," he said.
Mizuki's smile was small and mirthless. "Then we teach them lessons they'll regret."
Outside, the city kept moving. Inside, on a small table, the plated fragment gleamed with a scarred spiral.
Someone had learned to aim.
They had learned to answer.
And the orchestra conducting this strange music had not yet shown its face.