They weren't attacking.
Not directly.
Raka circled slowly. Dagger in hand. The heat of the Seed flaring in his chest as the seven Spiral echoes shifted around him.
Each movement felt measured. Deliberate. Like a ritual he hadn't agreed to.
They didn't lunge. They adjusted. Mirroring the angle of his shoulders. The tilt of his head. Every feint he made, they echoed with increasing accuracy, as if learning him one twitch at a time.
His foot slid on loose ash. One of the echoes twitched in sync. Not to strike, but to reflect his balance error.
He ground his teeth.
"What are you?" he whispered.
No answer.
Just Spiral arms curling slowly.
Their bodies were too perfect. Glyph-wrapped constructs of stolen memory. Moving with the sterile precision of scalpels, not claws. Very clean.
Like something built from the idea of him.
And yet, he felt watched.
Not by the Spiral.
By something through them.
Disruption
The echo on his left surged suddenly. Blurring forward with a flicker of inverted Ki. Raka struck instinctively. Soulblade colliding with its ribbed glyph-spine.
But it didn't collapse.
It dispersed like a failed dream. The energy reformed across the ring. Realigning as if correcting an error.
Raka stepped back, breath uneven.
They're not testing my body.
They're testing me.
Then something changed.
A flare of light struck one of the echoes from above. Snapping it off balance.
A crack of air.
An explosion of dust.
A voice he hadn't heard in what felt like lifetimes.
"Thought you could use a little chaos."
It's Kael.
Collapse the Ring
Kael's blade cracked the glyph-ring open.
The closest Spiral echo reeled. Destabilized by the energy clash. Before it could reform, Claire was there. Rod spinning low, sweeping its legs in a blast of kinetic Ki.
Jace followed with a pulse mine to the far left. Catching two echoes mid-phase. They shimmered, flickered, vanished.
Kaelen surged forward in sync with Kael, blades twin-sparking with pressure field coating.
Raka didn't hesitate.
He moved into the chaos like a breath drawn late—body shifting through flickers of flame, cutting at the next echo before it could adapt to the new formation.
The Spiral constructs reeled. But they didn't fall apart. They reorganized.
The remaining echoes retreated to a triangle formation. Three rotating fast, four slower, their spiral etchings glowing in sync.
Then they attacked.
Not at Kael.
Not at Raka.
At Kael and Raka together.
One echo mirrored Kael's exact footwork. It pirouetted into Kael's blind spot. Not mimicking, but predicting. As if it had fought him a hundred times before.
Another adapted to Raka's defensive pivot. Curling in and delivering a glyph pulse that should've staggered him.
It didn't.
The Seed flared in defiance. Absorbing the pulse and sending it back in a wave of burnt Ki.
Claire barked, "They're syncing to your rhythms! Both of you!"
"They're not learning one of us," Raka muttered.
Kael parried an echo's strike, teeth bared. "They're learning the space between us."
Claire's jaw clenched. "They're building a template, not for combat. For replacement."
Kaelen grunted, slicing one echo clean in half. Only for its twin to re-form behind him and lash at his exposed side.
Jace screamed, "They're building a response model in real time!"
Kael swore. "Break the pattern. Randomize movement!"
Fire That Isn't Spiral
Raka let his eyes close for a breath. He remembered the Hollow. He remembered standing before a mirror that didn't show reflection but intent.
He took one step forward. Then two steps wrong. His stance broke form. His body moved out of rhythm. Off-balance, unnatural.
The Spiral echoes hesitated.
And he struck.
The flame in his palm wasn't Ki. Wasn't Spiral. Wasn't memory.
It didn't belong to any known source. Not drawn. Not trained.
It remembered him.
Not from a past life. But from a future one he hadn't lived yet.
It was his.
The flame unwove the nearest echo. Not burning it, but erasing its right to exist. Leaving only a hollow silhouette of stolen memory.
The nearest Spiral collapsed.
The rest faltered.
Then Kael was at his side again.
Back-to-back.
"That wasn't just a fight," Raka said.
Kael nodded once. "It was rehearsal."
Like they'd never stopped.
Kael didn't offer a hand. Just a nod so slight it could've been a trick of the light. Raka returned it. Some hellos didn't need words.
Breath Before the Rot
The silence after the final echo collapsed was heavy.
Too heavy.
Claire paced a tight circle around the impact ash, her rods dimming. "I don't like this."
Jace checked his readings twice, lips thin. "Energy drop's clean. No residue. But that doesn't make sense."
Kaelen wiped a line of dust from his blade. "They weren't here to kill. They were here to record."
Kael turned to Raka. "Did they speak to you?"
"No," Raka shook his head, slowly. "But they left a gap. Like they're waiting for me to fill it."
Then the wind shifted.
Kaelen's eyes narrowed toward the dark slope.
"That's why it's not over."
Spiral-born
Something emerged from the edge of the basin. Scraping along stone and collapsed glyph lines.
It was not fast. But it didn't need to be.
A hunched shape. Once human. Now split by Spiral etchings and Ki-scars that glowed faintly like dying embers. Its jaw hung too low. Its limbs twitched out of sync.
A corrupted soldier. Like a human made soldier. But a failed experiment. It's body half-consumed by jagged glyphs. Preserved too long in the wrong kind of dark.
Claire grimaced. "Ugh. So ugly. Like someone wore their Ki inside-out."
Her rods flickered. 'Wait. These glyphs are signed. Someone's fucking tagging their work.'"
Kaelen's jaw clenched. "That uniform… Emberfront. He was someone's commander."
Kael's gaze sharpened. "Can you take him?"
Kaelen rolled his shoulders.
"I trained against monsters before I knew what Spiral was."
He stepped forward.
"I'll remind him what it felt like to be human. Right before I tear him out of it."
Kaelen vs. Corrupted Human Spiralborn
The Spiralborn moved like a glitch. Jerking forward with erratic bursts. Trailing distortion arcs in its wake.
Its claws scraped across the basin floor. Gouging shallow grooves in the earth that hissed with heat.
Kaelen stepped calmly into its path. No fear. No shout. Just movement.
His ribs screamed. An old injury singing in harmony with fresh pain but his blades stayed silent.
The Spiralborn lunged. Jaws opening with a spiraling roar, its shoulders distorting mid-leap.
Kaelen pivoted.
His first strike severed the creature's forward momentum. Cutting across the ribs, not to kill, but to correct.
The Spiralborn twisted in mid-air. Its form already regenerating. Muscles reforming over broken Ki-bone.
It charged again. Faster this time.
Kaelen ducked low. Rolled beneath the swipe, and rose behind it with a clean vertical cut. Blasting a pressure ripple into its spine.
"Too slow," he muttered.
The Spiralborn shrieked. Its voice cracking into two tones.
Glyphs flared on its skin, new ones. And it slammed its fists into the ground.
Stone buckled.
Claire flinched. "It's adapting!"
Kael barked, "Jace, containment net, now!"
Jace fired a pulse tether. The rings snapped around the creature's midsection. Tightening, locking.
Kaelen didn't wait.
He leapt forward, twin blades crossing in a downward X.
The Spiralborn raised its arms to block. And failed. Steel met flesh. A burst of Ki cracked the basin like thunder.
The Spiralborn's upper body exploded in a spiral of ash and fractured soullight.
What remained collapsed to its knees. Twitched once. Then fell. Dead.
Aftershock
Kaelen exhaled through his nose and sheathed both blades.
Claire jogged up beside him, eyes wary. "That was... disgusting."
Kael circled the body, scanning for residual flickers. "No regeneration. You got all of it."
Raka stood slightly apart, watching the last glyphs fade from the soil.
"They're changing faster now," he said.
Kael looked over. "And they're watching us change too."
Kaelen didn't speak.
He just crushed the glowing glyph underheel. It didn't shatter. It split open. Releasing a whisper that sounded like Raka's name.
Serpent. Crown. Mirror.
Kael and Raka stood side by side.
For a long moment, they didn't speak. The wind dragged a line of dust between them, curling like a dying echo.
Claire finally broke the silence. "So… are we gonna talk about how you're alive?"
Raka didn't look at her. "Later."
Jace knelt beside the Spiralborn's remains. "Something's off about the body. It wasn't decayed. It was preserved. Like it was meant to survive longer than it did."
Kaelen approached slowly, wiping his blade. "That thing adapted faster than last month's forward batch."
Kael nodded. "And mirrored too cleanly."
He turned to the group.
"We flag this for Coren. He'll know what kind of counter-protocol to test."
Kaelen glanced at the broken staff still lying in the dirt. "Let him bring Sylva. If this gets worse, we'll need something louder."
Kael gave a half-smile. "Then I'm sending you with them. Coren trusts you. And you can make Sylva won't do loud things too early."
Kael gave Kaelen a look that said more than the words. "You've walked Spiral edges before. We trust you."
Claire blinked. "What? We're splitting?"
Kael nodded. "You, me, Jace, and Raka. We're pushing forward. Hollow East won't wait."
Kaelen grunted. "Good. I've had enough quiet for one war."