The Forge rippled around Vaeliyan like a living thing, its molten breath rising and falling in rhythm with his pulse. Heat shimmered through the air like thought given form. Rivers of liquid gold bent beneath unseen gravity, folding and stretching as though obeying a will older than matter. The space itself seemed alive, alive and watching. Every spark in the air moved with purpose. Every heartbeat in Vaeliyan's chest was answered by the echo of something vast that pulsed beneath the metal world.

And then Switch was there.

Perfect. Impossible. Utterly wrong in the way only gods could be.

He stood as the mortal form Vaeliyan knew, unchanged and yet completely transformed. The same mechanical eye glowed faintly, a clockwork orbit behind glass. The same uneven smile played at the corner of his mouth, warm and human. The same relaxed stance, shoulders low, weight uneven, spoke of a man who had never learned how to carry divinity with posture. But every inch of him was made of written things. His skin was words layered upon words, shifting and reforming in constant rhythm. His veins were sentences in forgotten languages, flowing like ink through parchment flesh. His breath exhaled faint lines of script that vanished before they touched the air. He was written into being, made of story, song, and lore shaped into the illusion of a body.

It shouldn't have worked. Yet it did. He was perfectly himself, and that perfection was what made it so strange.

Vaeliyan looked at the god who he had once walked with as a man and asked." What is this Switch?"

When he spoke, it was unlike any sound Vaeliyan had ever heard. It wasn't voice, it was the idea of a voice, the shape of speech written into air, as if the world itself remembered how language should feel. The Forge responded to it; molten light rippled outward from every syllable.

Each word carried weight, carving itself into meaning rather than command.

"Youth," Switch said softly. "For it is what has been stolen from my contender. What she has never had, I give back to her. But this is no mere boon. This is… forged life. And it is part of what I shed to become this."

The words carried heat. Vaeliyan could feel them pressing through the air, vibrating like a hum beneath the molten silence. When he looked down, the feather in his palm answered with light. It pulsed faintly, once, twice, like the fragile heartbeat of something that shouldn't exist. It wasn't made of paper, or metal, or light, it was older than any of them. It was the physical memory of a story choosing to live. The weight of it defied reason; it pressed into his skin until his bones ached beneath its gravity. Every pulse reminded him that it was alive.

Switch watched him, unchanged and eternal. His mechanical eye turned faintly, catching the reflection of the Forge's glow. His presence didn't flicker or fade. He didn't move like something divine. He moved like a man who had simply decided to be infinite.

"It must be given physically," Switch said, his tone calm, the words resonating like scripture and smoke. "For it is not something that can be handed from a god to their own."

Vaeliyan blinked, flexing his fingers around the feather. "What's in it for me?" he asked finally, his voice steady.

Switch's mechanical eye turned toward him, faintly golden in the molten light. For a moment, the Forge went still, like the pause between heartbeats. Then the god smiled...

"Prophecy," Switch said.

The word carried through the air like the toll of a great bell, reverberating through molten walls and the marrow of Vaeliyan's bones. He felt it echo in places that didn't exist yet. The sound, if it could be called that, felt like the shape of something already written, waiting for him to reach it.

Switch took a single step forward, and the air warped around him. His presence pressed against Vaeliyan's mind like a sentence still unfinished. The god of stories, the man made of words, leaned close enough that the glow from his mechanical eye reflected in Vaeliyan's own.

"Leave now, Son of The Shine, Veiled of Neru's light," Switch words carried as whispers. "Rain of the Eclipse."

The final line struck like a closing verse. The meaning of it lingered, humming in the back of Vaeliyan's skull long after the words had ended.

Then the Forge began to fold inward. The rivers of gold slowed, their fire dimming to ember. Steel cooled and curled back into shape as if returning to its first purpose. The air lost its brilliance, and the hum of divine resonance became a low, fading heartbeat. The world of metal and meaning pulled away until the only brightness left was the feather glowing against Vaeliyan's palm, warm, impossibly heavy, and alive.

As the world resolved around Vaeliyan and time reasserted itself, he drew a sharp breath that felt heavier than air should allow. The Forge was gone. The heat, the sound, the impossible presence, everything had collapsed into silence and the brittle edge of reality. The shift left a faint ringing in his bones, a quiet ache behind his eyes that refused to fade. It felt like waking from a dream that had not yet finished, a sensation of returning with new weight lodged somewhere in his chest.

He looked down at his hand, expecting the feather that should have remained, the weight that had once felt like the memory of a heartbeat. Instead, resting against his palm was a tiny cube. Perfect edges. Smooth. Seamless. Unmarked. It reflected no light, absorbing every trace that touched it. It was too deliberate, a shard of intention made solid. The longer he stared, the more the world seemed to compress around it, as if the thing demanded focus.

He turned it between his fingers, testing how it sat in his hand. It didn't register as heavy in any ordinary sense. Its weight tugged at something under his sternum rather than the pads of his fingers. He could not tell whether the sensation was real or a left-over echo from the Forge. The quiet around him remained absolute. The regular noises of the house felt distant, as though someone had turned their volume low. He catalogued the absence of ordinary sound like a soldier checking his kit.

After a long moment, he slid the cube into his pocket, where Styll had already curled herself into a small, steady knot. She shifted, warm and damp with sleep, and settled against him. The fabric moved; the cube made no sound.

"Keep it safe," he said softly, his voice shaded by the aftertaste of the Forge's silence. "It belongs to the Moth."

From inside his pocket came her muffled reply, quick and sure. "Will saves for Moths."

He let the sentence hang with them. Styll's answer was simple and immediate. He smiled without meaning to. That small, honest thing steadied him.

He moved toward the door. The shift from the stillness inside to the ordinary quiet outside was unobtrusive, nearly seamless. Behind his house the Boltfire waited, silver and perfect, its lines clean and unadorned. It made no sound at all. If he hadn't known better, he might have believed it powered down.

Through the open hatch he could see the rest of the squad already arranged, prepared in the way that people become when they have done this before. Chime occupied the cockpit, hands pressed against the control panel, scanning for last-minute updates. Elian and Lessa sat close to the entrance with quiet conversation that held plans rather than small talk. Jurpat stood with one hand braced on the frame, the picture of readiness, and when Vaeliyan lingered he called out with that casual edge that meant business.

"I finally have a task again," Vaeliyan murmured. "And at least this one… seems like something I can do right away."

"That's good," Jurpat called. "Tell us on the way. We're burning time here, so move your gods-blessed ass, Captain."

No one else intruded. They let the small argument ride off into the silence. He stepped up to the Boltfire's hatch and paused long enough to let the weight of the moment settle. He looked once at the house behind him, at the small life he had only for a few hours, and found the sound inside himself that matched promise. He would return.

The team arranged themselves without ceremony. Vaeliyan took his place with them. cube in his pocket pressing reassurance against his chest.

Vaeliyan explained what had happened with the gods to his team while Ramis activated the Deck program, muting all external sensors and closing off outside audio feeds. To any outside observer, it would look routine. The Boltfire's systems began broadcasting a convincing simulation of life aboard the ship, snippets of idle chatter, the shuffle of equipment being adjusted, someone napping and snore lightly, the occasional offhand complaint or laughter. The interior displays showed diagnostic code scrolling in perfect sequence, completing the illusion. They appeared to be checking gear, talking about nothing, passing time before the descent. Nothing unusual.

Inside, every member of the Complaints Department listened without interruption. Vaeliyan spoke plainly, outlining what had happened inside the Forge, what the gods had said, and what they had given him. They understood instinctively that these weren't the kind of truths meant to be repeated.

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When he finished, silence lingered for a beat. No one spoke, but the understanding between them was solid. Chime exhaled through the comms, a faint sigh. Jurpat nodded once. Ramis flicked his fingers through the air, bringing the Deck program's filters up another layer, redundancy upon redundancy, to make sure not even a whisper leaked.

As the moment passed and each of them began to return to their prep, Vaeliyan found himself still standing there, one hand resting against the side compartment near his seat. He hesitated, then pulled the latch and reached inside. His fingers brushed against the object he'd been avoiding: the multi-thread fragment. It pulsed faintly in its containment slot, the light soft and rhythmic like a sleeping heart. He lifted it carefully and held it to the low light, watching how it distorted nothing around it. The surface was perfectly smooth, too smooth to be natural.

He'd meant to wait. To use it later. When he was Warren again. That had been the plan. But plans were fragile things, too easy to break when the world refused to give you time. There were too many variables now, too many risks waiting just outside the hull. He didn't have the luxury of time anymore.

He turned the fragment once in his palm. "I was supposed to save this," he muttered to himself, though no one was close enough to hear. "But I guess this will have to do." He drew a slow breath. "At least I can remove it later."

He could remove it with the Exoversic Inverter and use it as Warren when the shift came. For now, it was better to use it than to let it gather dust inside a crate, waiting for a perfect moment that would never arrive.

Vaeliyan pressed the fragment to the back of his neck.

It sank in instantly, moving like liquid into his chip.

His thoughts didn't fracture; they multiplied. Threads of logic branched out in every direction, carrying on separate lines of reasoning that all looped back into the same consciousness. He didn't feel disoriented. He felt efficient. His mind no longer ran as a single current, it was an ocean of streams flowing together, layered and exact.

He took a sharp breath, steadying himself as his lattice reshaped around the new skill. His awareness grew denser, a kind of structural evolution. He flexed his fingers, each movement deliberate and synchronized with thought. There was no chaos.

He knew the normal multi-thread skill only had two layers. Dr. Wirk had told him that its evolution paths were well documented, it was a straightforward system. Each upgrade added another layer, expanding mental capacity by one additional thread. But this fragment wasn't the normal multi-thread. This was something far more dangerous. It was the heart fragment of a Neuman.

Dr. Wirk had written in his notes that it wouldn't cause harm. Still, he'd warned that it might evolve differently. There was an extra micro-marker in its pattern, one he had never seen before. Wirk's handwriting had been half-doubt, half-awe.

Vaeliyan's version was either a higher base or something entirely unique. And when he reached into the layers of his new awareness, he realized it immediately. Four distinct threads, each one stable, clean, and synchronized.

He smiled faintly, a quiet, knowing expression. "Alright," he said, voice low. "Let's see what thinking more feels like."

Jurpat looked back briefly. "What was that, Vael?"

Vaeliyan shook his head. "Nothing. Just talking to myself." He pushed away from the compartment wall, the fragment now part of him. He joined the others.

In one of his new overlapping thought threads, Vaeliyan pulled up the description of his newest skill. The information unfolded in his mind, neat and ordered, as if his lattice had already been waiting for it.

Multi-Thread (Passive) Allows the user's mind to divide into multiple concurrent layers of cognition, each functioning independently yet remaining bound to a single, unified identity. Every layer can process a separate problem, maintain focus on an individual task, or follow an isolated stream of reasoning without interrupting the others.

This skill grants the ability to hold and pursue several lines of thought simultaneously, analyzing, calculating, and planning across different mental fronts in perfect harmony. Logical processing, complex computation, and situational assessment all occur in parallel rather than sequence, eliminating the downtime between thoughts.

The sensation of it running in the background was subtle but profound. He could feel it, each layer humming in perfect balance, quietly taking on its own focus: one tracking geological interference reports, another mapping possible ingress points into the Whispering Cave, another simulating heat signatures and movement paths, and one simply monitoring the state of his mind. None of them clashed. They all worked together like gears in the same machine, turning as one. It felt right. It felt designed for him.

He loved everything about this skill. Its balance. Its precision. Its ability to stretch his mind into something larger without tearing it apart. Yet the reason he had wanted to use it on Warren was to see what would happen if the skill was fused with Warren's near-prophetic class.

If Multi-Thread were integrated into his future class, it wouldn't just make the echoes stronger or more efficient. It might make them thinking. Each echo might hold its own set of reasoning processes, its own priorities, its own form of logic while remaining tied to the original through the shared lattice. The class would evolve into parallel existence. Multiple of Warrens or Vaeliyans operating independently, calculating and responding to threats before they even manifested. A chorus of minds, all belonging to one being.

The thought alone made him excited. Even now, he could imagine the way it would look, each echo not merely completing a simple task but anticipating, questioning, adapting. He could feel the ripple of it in his imagination: an entire network of selves working together, each echo a complete reflection of his full strength and will.

He closed the description window and leaned back, exhaling slowly. The layers of thought continued moving beneath the surface, processing, analyzing, calculating. And in one thread, the quietest of them all, he admitted the thought of it scared him.

After Vaeliyan stopped thinking about the skill and his future echoes, he turned all four layers of his mind toward a single focus, every thread approaching the same question from a different angle: the Whispering Cave. Each layer dissected a separate aspect of the problem, the terrain, the entry vectors, the likely guard rotations, and the unknowns that would inevitably surface once they were inside. Every detail that could be imagined was analyzed, simulated, and revised in overlapping cycles of reasoning. It was an orchestra of cognition, four minds working in perfect unison, each refining what the others missed.

They had a rough outline of the structure's design and a confirmed location for the main entrance, but little else. No schematics, no readable transmissions, no predictable patrol cycles. The absence of information was its own warning. A site that clean was meant to be invisible, to erase itself the moment someone tried to look too closely. Buried installations like this didn't exist to be found, they existed to make people vanish.

Vaeliyan let one thread of thought run logistics while another estimated the probabilities of internal architecture based on historical black-site design: deep corridors, airlocks, redundant kill-switches, automated defenses. His third layer modeled how sound and pressure would move through its rock chambers, testing resonance patterns that might reveal hidden tunnels. The fourth considered the risk factors, what if the Whispering Cave were a weapons testing facility, it would likely host personnel such as scientists, engineers, and security staff specialized in containment and classified experimentation. Security could include automated drone patrols, sentry systems, reinforced airlocks, and possibly experimental defense constructs or prototypes mechs. The staff might be loyal to their research, coerced by secrecy, or conditioned for isolation, making them both desperate and dangerous.

They could replicate the framework of previously discovered and captured Princedom black sites, but even those, with their archives and blueprints, were inconsistent. Each one had been constructed differently, different depths, different layouts, different layers of paranoia built into their walls. There was no pattern to predict. No two black sites ever matched. Even if they used what they knew, it would be guesswork at best.

That thought didn't concern him. Not really. It made him curious.

A black site like this was built to resist theoretical threats: overwhelming kinetic power, orbital bombardment, biochemical breach, and mental interference. It would have radiation shields layered with nanite deterrents, automated structural seals, and fail-safe detonation systems ready to erase the entire complex if compromise was confirmed. In theory, it could stand against almost anything.

In practice, the Complaints Department was not theoretical.

They were sixteen High Imperators, each carrying a lattice tuned for destruction, each armed with a Soul Skill capable of rewriting a battlefield in seconds. A facility could plan for an army. It could not plan for them.

Vaeliyan reviewed the math out of habit, letting two layers of his mind handle calculation while the other two continued mapping assault scenarios. The official classification was City Breaker. A single High Imperator could erase a population center unaided. The numbers were theoretical, but the proof was written in history. He had done it himself once, not out of malice, but necessity.

He let himself imagine what the Whispering Cave's defense systems might do in response to their arrival. Maybe it would lock down, call for mech reinforcement, bury itself. Maybe it would fight. Maybe it would plead. It didn't matter. The result would be the same.

Vaeliyan almost felt sorry for whoever was inside. Almost.

It took no time at all for them to arrive. The Boltfire's cloaking systems were unmatched, a masterpiece of silent engineering that rendered the ship a ghost against the sky. The silver hull shimmered faintly in the pale morning light, gliding low and smooth through the misted canopy. Not a single sound escaped it. It was as though the craft itself refused to exist unless it chose to.

Chime sat at the controls, her precision terrifying in its focus. She had only truly learned to fly less than a week ago, but she had spent every waking hour since then training, simulating flight paths, and testing the Boltfire's systems in secret. She had memorized every gauge, every light, every micro-response of the craft. Her confidence was quiet but absolute, and it showed in the effortless grace with which she guided them through the treeline. The others barely felt the descent.

"Alright," she said over comms, her tone steady with a trace of pride. "We're setting down about a mile out in an empty copse. Should keep us hidden. I'll keep cloaking active while we move inside the cave. When we leave the Boltfire behind, the field stays up. That way, if we need to run, they won't be able to see my baby or target her."

Vaeliyan adjusted the straps of his harness and glanced toward the 360° glass. The terrain stretched beneath them like a sea of shifting green and stone, the early fog curling over the ridges like smoke. The entrance to the Whispering Cave appeared as a just another shadow, another depression in the earth. To the naked eye, it looked like nothing more than a scar in the hillside, a hollow too deep for the morning light to touch.

The Boltfire broke through the mist and came to a hovering stop above the designated clearing. It was quiet enough that even the rustle of leaves below seemed loud in comparison. Chime lowered the craft with surgical precision, landing gear brushing the forest floor without disturbing so much as a twig.

"So," Ramis said after a moment, voice carrying that familiar hint of humor that never quite left him, "I hear they've got some complaints for us."

Varnai chuckled from the back of the cabin, her armor catching a stray shaft of light as she stood. "Guess we're here to answer them."

Vaeliyan reached up, locking his helmet into place with a smooth click. The sound echoed faintly through the otherwise silent interior. "Damn right," he said, his tone low but certain. "Let's make sure there's nothing left to complain about when we're done here."

Outside, the forest swayed softly in the wind, unaware of the sixteen High Imperators hidden among its shadows.

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