CHAPTER 48: THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

Captain Helena Valerius stared at the main screen, her reflection a pale, grim ghost against the mosaic of surveillance feeds.

Her uniform was immaculate.

Her posture was rigid.

But inside, her faith in the system was bleeding out.

"Status report," she said, her voice a clipped, professional monotone that betrayed none of the turmoil churning in her gut.

A young technician, his face pale and slick with sweat under the harsh fluorescent lights, spun in his chair.

"The D-Rank Gate in the Queens sector collapsed twenty-seven minutes ago, Captain," he stammered, his fingers flying across his keyboard. "Standard ghoul nest. Cleanup crews are on-site."

"I didn’t ask for the public report, Ensign," Valerius said, her voice dangerously quiet. "I asked for the truth."

"Anything... unusual?"

The ensign swallowed hard.

"That’s the thing, ma’am," he said, turning his screen towards her. "The energy readings... they’re... wrong."

He pulled up a graph.

Valerius leaned closer, her eyes narrowing.

It showed a series of standard, spiky energy flares, consistent with a Hunter team clearing a nest.

But then, at the very end, there was a single, massive, and utterly bizarre signature.

It wasn’t a spike.

It was a hole.

A perfect, data-sucking black hole that had appeared on their energy map for a fraction of a second.

A power signature that registered as less than zero.

A fundamental violation of the laws of physics.

Valerius’s blood ran cold.

She had seen that signature before.

"It’s him," she whispered, the words a ghost of a sound. "Echo-01."

"Cross-reference all comms intercepts from that sector for the last hour," she ordered, her mind racing, the pieces clicking into place with a terrifying, final clarity. "I want to know who he was with."

A senior technician from across the room, a man with graying hair and a perpetually worried expression, spoke up without turning.

"Already on it, Captain."

"We picked up a heavily encrypted, non-standard comms channel operating in the area during the event."

"The signal was bouncing off a dozen different ghost nodes. It’s professional. Military-grade."

"Can you crack it?" Valerius asked, already knowing the answer.

"No, ma’am," the technician said, shaking his head. "The encryption is a work of art."

"But that’s not the interesting part."

He pulled up a new screen, displaying a complex string of hexadecimal code.

"This encryption... it’s not a brute-force hack. It’s elegant. It uses a back-door security key that was decommissioned five years ago."

"A key," he said, his voice dropping, "that was only ever issued to Level-4 analysts and above, operating out of the DGC’s internal affairs and special projects divisions."

Valerius felt a knot of ice form in her stomach.

The ghost signal at Red Hook.

The professional comms channel at the ghoul nest.

They were connected.

Echo-01 wasn’t just a rogue anomaly.

He had a handler.

A professional. Someone who knew DGC protocols inside and out. Someone with a ghost’s key.

"Pull up the personnel files," she said, her voice a low, dangerous command. "I want a list of every analyst with Level-4 clearance who resigned or was discharged in the last five years."

The list appeared on her screen.

Dozens of names.

But one name seemed to leap out at her, a ghost from a past she had tried to bury.

A name tied to the Ever-Gate disaster.

A name tied to Marcus Arcana.

A name tied to a brilliant, cold, and dangerously obsessive young analyst whose partner had died under... questionable circumstances.

Ryland, Chloe.

Status: Resigned.

Valerius stared at the file, at the crisp, professional headshot of a young woman with cold, determined, gray eyes.

She remembered her. The quiet one. The one who asked too many questions.

The one who never believed the official story.

Just as the final, terrible piece of the puzzle clicked into place, the van’s door hissed open with a violent burst of pressurized air.

Commander Kael strode in.

He moved with a smug, predatory grace, his custom-fit, graphite-gray DGC armor making him look less like a soldier and more like a high-end sports car given human form.

He was the perfected result of Project Chimera, and he radiated an aura of arrogant, untouchable power.

He didn’t look at Valerius. He looked at her screens, a condescending smirk playing on his lips.

"Still chasing shadows, Captain?" he purred, his voice smooth and mocking.

Before Valerius could respond, a high-priority, encrypted alert flashed on her own terminal.

It was from General Gideon himself.

The message was a direct order.

The package is being moved. Dr. Aris Thorne. Transport to Conduit Zero for final debriefing and containment. Immediately.

Valerius knew what that meant.

Debriefing and containment.

A death sentence. Gideon was cleaning house.

"I have my orders, Commander," she said, her voice a flat, cold wall. "External security for the transport."

Kael finally turned to her, his smile widening. It was a cruel, sharp thing.

"Oh, I know," he said. "The General thought it best if I handled the internal security."

"He doesn’t want any more... mistakes."

He leaned over her console, his presence an invasion.

"I’ve already deployed a new pack of Phase Hounds in the lower levels. My personal stock. Refined. More stable than the prototype you encountered at the storage facility."

He tapped a key, bringing up a thermal scan of the building.

"And the lockdown protocols have been upgraded. Your little ghost and his band of misfits won’t be able to just punch a hole in the wall this time."

He looked at her, his eyes shining with a smug, dismissive light.

He saw her as a relic. An old, by-the-book soldier who couldn’t adapt.

"Don’t worry, Captain," he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "I know you have a soft spot for the old guard. For the Arcana legacy."

He straightened up, his smirk turning into a look of pure, predatory ambition.

"But legacies are just stories we tell about the dead."

"This anomaly, this Echo-01... he’s nothing but a flawed prototype. A broken echo of a failed experiment."

He walked towards the door, pausing with his hand on the handle.

He turned back, his gaze sweeping over the tense, silent command van.

"If the ghost and his little band of misfits are foolish enough to show up tonight, I’ll be waiting."

"It’s time to show the world the difference between a legacy and an upgrade."