In Between Realms

A heavy door slid open with a low pneumatic hiss, followed by the deliberate click of boots on steel. A figure stepped into the observation chamber clad in a sleek, black Veiler command coat—etched with a rank insignia rarely seen in active zones. Her face was obscured by a mirrored mask, voice cold and resolute.

"Aki," the superior addressed without preamble, "you're to remain on standby until the diagnostics reach Phase Four."

Aki turned toward her, the soft blue glow of the monitors reflecting off her lenses. "And if it breaches?"

"Then you are to step in immediately. No hesitation. No preservation."

Her silence was a reluctant agreement.

The superior stepped closer to the glass chamber, watching the faint shimmer of corrupted runes blooming beneath Seyfe's skin like reverse frostbite. "He's carrying something," she said quietly. "Something more than just residue."

Aki's gaze lingered on Seyfe's unconscious form. "He didn't even know what he was fighting. He thought it was dying... that it was already broken."

The superior's voice dropped an octave. "That's what makes it worse."

For a long moment, neither spoke. The hiss of cooling systems and the buzz of medical tech filled the air.

Then the superior turned back to Aki. "Observe carefully. If the imprint takes hold and completes a bind, the chamber won't hold. And if he transitions…"

"I understand," Aki replied, her hand resting lightly on the blade at her side.

"Good. Pray it doesn't come to that."

And with that, the superior walked out, the door sealing behind her.

Aki remained alone in the room, the only thing between the infected boy and whatever waited inside him.

As Aki stood silently, still watching Seyfe's body twitch under the pulsing stasis light, the superior's voice echoed back to her through the commlink—this time colder, more clinical.

"And that baby," she said. "I know what you've been doing with the lost ones—passing them off quietly into private hands, letting fate decide."

Aki's jaw tensed, but she said nothing.

"For that one," the superior continued, "things will be different. It's not to be released into general adoption. That child goes into government custody."

A pause.

"Don't worry. We have a dedicated department that handles such cases. Trained, efficient, and entirely off-record. That child will be… cared for."

Aki's hand subtly tightened around the strap of her satchel where the baby's warmth still radiated through the fabric. Her voice, when it came, was carefully even.

"Understood."

But her silence afterward said more.

The commlink cut off.

For a long moment, Aki stood there—neither approaching nor backing away—watching both the boy in the glass and the sleeping child in her arms.

The tension in the medical bay thickened with every flicker of unstable readings across Seyfe's vitals. His heart rate spiked and dipped erratically, while the glowing runes beneath his skin pulsed faster—out of sync with the chamber's rhythm.

Monitors screamed warnings.

The room had descended into organized chaos—Veilers standing at the ready, containment specialists murmuring warding phrases, and cryo-pneumatics pumping in vain to slow the spread of corruption.

Then the head doctor—a gaunt, graying man with four decades of field trauma behind his eyes—stepped forward, hand pressed to his temple as he absorbed the storm of data.

Finally, he exhaled slowly and turned to the attending staff.

"There's only one option left," he said grimly. "Let us integrate a Weaver's Core into his body."

The words struck the room like a seismic wave.

One of the younger assistants recoiled. "But sir—he's not a Veiler. His system isn't prepared for a merge. No thread alignment, no mental discipline. His body could reject the core, or worse—detonate from instability!"

"He won't survive this infection otherwise," the doctor snapped. "The echoform is rewriting him from the inside. At this rate, it'll hollow him out and puppeteer his remains."

He turned to the surgical crew. "We prepare the core. Type III—low volatility, latent activation. We bond it to the heart to stabilize the binding marks."

Someone muttered, "Type III cores were meant for emergency grafts… not civilians."

"Which is exactly what this is," the doctor shot back, already donning reinforced gloves. "An emergency."

Aki, from behind the viewing glass, narrowed her gaze. For the first time, something in her shifted—a faint flicker of unease.

She looked down at the baby in her arms, still fast asleep.

What in the hell did you drag us both into, Seyfe?

The lights dimmed around the operating chamber—not for atmosphere, but to allow the glowing glyphs etched onto the Type III core to take center stage. It hovered in a magnetic suspension unit beside Seyfe's stasis bed, humming with restrained energy, its surface swirling with patterns that pulsed like a heartbeat trying to sync with the living.

The head doctor stood at the control panel, jaw tight, muttering under his breath—not orders, but prayers.

"Fifth tier of the Weaver Core graphic... Maker have mercy," he said.

One of the aides looked up, visibly pale. "Sir, you're sure about this? Type III was never meant for direct grafts, especially not without thread preparation—"

"I'm sure of nothing," the doctor growled, eyes locked on Seyfe's scorched vitals. "But if we don't try, he's dead before morning. Or worse—reborn into something we won't be able to contain."

With a final command, the core was lowered, its containment shell peeling away like a mechanical flower, revealing the volatile heart within. The core's light cast sharp shadows across the walls—symbols of forgotten languages dancing like ghosts.

A second team rushed forward—mechanics and medics synchronizing movements with ritualistic precision. The boy's suit was unsealed down the chest, exposing the blackened streaks crawling like inked veins across his ribcage. A stabilizer mask was latched to his face as the core was slowly rotated into place over his heart.

The core responded.

Its light flared—once, twice—and then sank lower.

The entire chamber shook faintly as the first pulse of integration began.

From behind reinforced glass, Aki watched with furrowed brows. Even her expression, normally unreadable, broke slightly—her eyes narrowing with something that could be mistaken for dread.

Inside the chamber, the core touched down—and the graft began.

Seyfe's body convulsed. Not from pain exactly—but from sheer overload. Like lightning choosing a mortal coil to settle in. The runes that had infected him screamed in protest, warping and melting as they tried to reject the intruding power.

But the core pushed back.

Flesh sizzled. The lights surged. Alarms wailed again.

And Seyfe—unconscious, bleeding, drowning in flickering memories—remained on the threshold between two fates.

Then—

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

The monitor spiked—wildly erratic.

The head doctor gritted his teeth. "Increase neural tolerance dampeners. He's rejecting the core—"

"No, wait—look," said one of the techs, voice cracking.

All eyes turned to the scan.

The Type III core, once resisting integration, had begun to react—no longer just stabilizing, but syncing. The runes from the Echoform infection pulsed outward across Seyfe's skin like fractured roots, but instead of spreading like a virus, they started to bend toward the central node—the core.

"They're... responding to it?" a nurse muttered in disbelief.

"Impossible," said another. "That's not how imprint runes behave. They're supposed to consume the host, not submit."

The scanner lit up in golden hues, displaying readings not seen in decades—if ever. For the first time, the room was silent. Not from calm, but from the shared realization that something they didn't understand was taking place.

Behind the glass, Aki stepped forward. Her gloved hands curled slightly at her sides, tension coiled in her posture.

"Get me a breakdown of the boy's weave resonance," she ordered sharply.

A junior veiler beside her, clearly shaken, hesitated. "Ma'am... his resonance just spiked. It's... it's off the scale. There's no previous match."

The lead doctor turned to the control room.

"Send word to High Command," he said grimly. "Category Red Integration Successful. Subject's immunity has... adapted."

Aki didn't respond right away. Her gaze was fixed on the boy, still unconscious but visibly stabilizing. The blackened streaks across his chest were fading into silver lines—veinlike trails glowing faintly beneath the skin. Not Echoform corruption anymore—something else. Something new.

She tapped her comms.

"Confirm to Sector Nine: Subject 0142 has survived core grafting. Immediate surveillance is now priority one. No public record. No clearance below A."

There was a long pause.

"And... notify the department," she added quietly. "The baby will remain in protective custody—permanent."

One of the aides glanced nervously her way. "Do you think he'll survive the next phase?"

Aki turned, mask unreadable once more.

"He has to," she said. "Because if he doesn't... we just gave birth to something worse than the Shift."

Now the time shift into six hours after the graft.

The room hummed with low voices and the buzzing of data projections illuminating grim faces. Above the polished steel table floated several holograms: biological scans of Seyfe's body, fluctuating readings of the Weaver Core integration, and energy models depicting the stabilization of the Echoform's runic infection. The silence was eventually broken by a thin, aging man in a lab coat with crimson trim—Dr. Halden Yurek, chief of bio-adaptation.

He pointed at one of the neural maps hovering mid-air, where glowing runes threaded neatly around Seyfe's spinal column. "This is... unprecedented. The infection hasn't been rejected, nor is it spreading aggressively. Instead—it's dormant. Integrated. Almost... coexisting. The runic pattern has aligned with his neural pathways as if they were pre-designed for it."

"Are you saying he's a hybrid?" someone asked—a young analyst, clearly new to the room. "Between Echoform and human?"

Yurek shook his head slowly, turning toward a new scan. "That's one possibility. But we've uncovered something else—something buried in his cellular structure. He's displaying markers consistent with an old, classified infection. A disease once thought to be eradicated."

The room shifted uneasily. A military liaison at the far end leaned forward. "You're talking about Rheumatic Cerabimuns Mutilation?"

Gasps and hushed whispers followed. Another doctor responded, "That's impossible. Nobody survives past Phase One. The mortality rate was near total. No one ever made it to the second stage with enough stability for documentation."

Yurek pulled up archived footage—a grotesque slideshow of former patients riddled with internal hemorrhaging and neurological decay. "We have reason to believe Seyfe not only survived the first and second phases—but unknowingly crossed into a potential third."

He tapped the projection, highlighting Seyfe's nervous system. "Look here. These strands—see how the core's power isn't overwhelming him? His body isn't resisting the Echoform imprint or the Weaver Core. It's adapting. Mutating."

"The second phase of RCM, as we documented," Yurek continued, "led to a form of hyper-evolved nervous resistance. The body repelled all Echoform attempts at neural possession. But in exchange, it turned on itself—cellular suicide, slow decomposition from within."

"And the third phase?" asked the senior Veiler operative.

Yurek paused, the tension sharpening. "That's the theory. In Phase Three, the body no longer resists. It synthesizes. The subject doesn't just fight the infection—they repurpose it. Their nervous system acts as a conduit. Not only immune to Echoforms, but capable of wielding their energy in harmony with a Weaver's Core."

"You're telling me we've been burning bodies infected with this thing for years," the Veiler growled, "when they might've been the next evolution?"

Yurek met his gaze. "No. I'm telling you none of them survived long enough to matter—except Seyfe."

Another official added grimly, "And that raises a question. Was he just lucky? Or was something... guiding him through it?"

Aki finally spoke, breaking her silence. "He's not just surviving. He's resonating. Like a tuning fork between two worlds. That Weaver Core should've killed him. But it didn't. And if this is truly the third phase of RCM…"

The room fell silent again, the possibilities churning like a storm. One of the military officers looked toward the digital silhouette of Seyfe's unconscious body within the chamber.

"Prepare contingency plans," he muttered. "If he's becoming something new—we need to be ready for what he might attract."