"I suppose then, that Project Raiju was a success?"

Elio's reaction was immediate - he stepped back, cane rising between them like a weapon. "You shouldn't know that name."

"Shouldn't," Aleksei repeated, like he was testing how the word felt. "But I do."

"You perished before Rachel renamed it. Before the prototypes even ran." Elio's cane struck the floor, once—habit, emphasis. "Where did you hear that?"

"Perished," Aleksei repeated. "Is that what they told you?"

"That's what the data said," Elio snapped. "All traces of your bio-signature ended in the explosion. You think I didn't look?"

"I'd like to believe I've grown to know you over the course of our fruitful friendship. I think you stopped looking when it hurt too much."

Elio's jaw clenched.

"You stopped looking," Aleksei said softly. "But you didn't stop building. You never could."

"You have no idea what I've done since," Elio muttered.

"I have a fair guess," Aleksei replied. "You tried to contain the fire without touching it. I tried to hold it with my bare hands."

"And burned the world for it. Twice over."

"A regret I may have very well taken to my grave."

For a heartbeat, their silence filled the room, brittle as glass.

"The Prometheus Project," Elio said finally, "was supposed to study containment theory. Not… inheritance."

"Then Rachel understood it better than either of us," Aleksei said. "She knew you can't contain an idea that dreams. You can only raise it right."

"What does that even mean? The Prometheus Project was too dangerous to continue."

Aleksei glanced toward me. "It means she succeeded. She always hated the reference to Prometheus, you know? She always said Prometheus was a thief."

Elio turned sharply toward me, then stopped himself, as if afraid of what he might see, before turning back.

"You can't mean…" His voice cracked, then hardened again. "The interface failed. Every host rejected synchronization. Project Prometheus was a dead project."

"So was I," Aleksei said. "But here we are."

"You're an echo," Elio snapped. "A residual imprint, nothing more."

"Maybe," Aleksei said, stepping closer, "but even an imprint can recognize its own work."

"Work?" Elio hissed. "You're calling this—" He gestured at the flickering lights, the unsteady hum in the floor. "—a success?"

"No. I'm calling it survival. Survival for all."

Elio's mouth opened, then closed again. His knuckles whitened on his cane. "You never stopped believing it could be controlled. Even after what happened with the Telos and Kronos cores. And the missing Gramgeist and Nichtus."

"No," Aleksei said softly. "I stopped believing what we had should be controlled."

The man's face shifted, suddenly visibly aging and wrinkling ten years in an instant. His shoulders lowered, the fire in him giving way to weariness. "A bringer of fire? Fire we did not have. It was lightning. We never controlled lightning. We could only set up a lightning rod and pray it would strike where it mattered most."

He looked at me. "Ikazuchi… your name means thunder, does it not? Fitting."

My throat felt tight. "You… know me?"

"I held you once as an infant," Aleksei said. "Before any of this. I met your father while visiting Columbia University as part of the delegation and scholarly exchange back when I was still pretending to be a man of reason," Aleksei continued, voice low but steady. "He was a graduate student teaching and overseeing an undergraduate lab on energy systems - half out of passion, half to pay rent. Brilliant man. Quiet."

My stomach turned. "You knew him? My dad?"

A faint smile crossed Aleksei's face, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Knew him? In a sense. We became fast friends. I admired him. He had a way of seeing the world as a set of gears that still wanted to turn, even when everything was breaking apart. The kind of mind that doesn't give up on the machine, even when everyone else does."

He tilted his head, studying me with the distant fondness of someone watching an echo. "He was proud of you even when you were a baby, you know. Said you'd take things apart before you could even walk. I told him that was the right instinct. To keep an eye on you. I order to understand something, you have to see what it's hiding."

Su Yin's eyes darted between us, suddenly interjecting with suspicion. "Enough sentiment. What are you implying?"

Aleksei didn't look away from me. "I am presuming - that the illustrious Rachel Feynman wasn't merely searching for a host for a project. She was searching for a match. Ikazuchi's resonance—his Soul Graph was an anomaly even in my records. She must've accessed it before the Chaos War that felled Earth and came to the same conclusion I did."

Elio's knuckles whitened on his cane. "That would mean she keyed the Machina lattice to his frequency. So..."

"To balance what was already awakening," Aleksei murmured. "You remember the first containment failure — when the pulse split. Half fury, half mercy. That wasn't an accident."

Elio's eyes widened. "You're saying she—"

"I'm saying she refused to choose," Aleksei cut in. "One core given to reason. The other... to the heart. They were never meant to meet, yet they keep finding one another. You saw what happened last time."

Silence followed, thick and humming.

I opened my mouth, but Aleksei's gaze stopped me cold.

"Don't ask yet, my boy. Concepts can be dangerous. You were never meant to speak to this shadow of me. Never meant to even see it. But sometimes the echo grows loud enough to sing."

He stepped forward, raising one palm slowly. "The Gossamer Echo is failing. It's not because it wants to. It's because the world beyond the door is… hungry. It wants its story back."

"Wait," I cut in. "If it isn't a good idea for me to know just what the hell Raiju... Rai-chan is. That's alright. There are some things I need to ask you if you truly embody the memories of Aleksei Zamir. About your daughter. About your former partnership with Mikhail Petrov."

Elio turned to me in surprise.

Aleksei paused. The name hung in the air, heavy and cold.

"Misha," he repeated softly, a flicker of something unreadable in his green eyes. A ghost of a smile, sad and distant, touched his lips.

He looked at me, his gaze deep, penetrating, as if he were looking through me, into the past.

"What interest would a boy from Earth have in a ghost from Terra? In a monster from another?"

The way he phrased that...

"Your company has been kidnapping researchers. Forced labor. And draining the life force of refugees from Earth to power... something. I want to know what happened. I want to know why." I said, my anger a cold, hard knot in my stomach.

Aleksei's smile faded, replaced by a look of profound, weary understanding. He didn't deny it.

"You've seen it, then," he said, his voice a quiet, sad sigh. "The price of progress as he would call it."

"I've seen the suffering it causes. I've seen what it does to people."

"People...?" Aleksei tested.

He looked at me, a faint, wry smile playing on his lips. "You are a rather impressive boy, Ikazuchi. Much like him, you pierce beyond yours to see the connections where others see only chaos."

He paused, his gaze drifting toward the window, as if he could see the ruined world beyond this perfect, idyllic facade.

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"Misha was my friend. My partner. My brother, in all but blood. We built the future together, with our own two hands. We dreamed of a world without war, without suffering. A world of logic, of reason, of pure, unadulterated progress."

He turned back to me, his eyes burning with an old, familiar fire.

"MMIsha was a genius. A true visionary. He could see the patterns in the chaos, the music in the static. He was the poet to my prose, the artist to my engineer. Together, we were unstoppable."

He took a deep breath, his shoulders slumping with a weight I could almost feel.

"But he was also... impatient. He believed that the ends justified the means. That progress couldn't wait for morality to catch up."

He looked at Elio, a flicker of something like regret in his eyes.

"He believed that humanity was a flawed, chaotic mess. That the Aberrations disease that needed to be cured. And he believed that we would be the ones to find the cure."

"So he started kidnapping people. Experimenting on them," I said, my voice a low, dangerous growl.

"He started with volunteers," Aleksei corrected, his tone gentle, but firm. "People who were willing to sacrifice their humanity for the greater good. But the greater good is a hungry beast, and it's never satisfied. Soon, the volunteers ran out. And Misha... he started taking what he needed."

"I had long suspected..." Elio said quietly, "but I never could prove it."

"So you see, Ikazuchi," Aleksei said, his gaze fixed on me, "it's not as simple as good versus evil. It's not as simple as right versus wrong. It's a matter of perspective. A matter of... philosophy. Misha disagreed with me, so he cast me out and stole our work with our mutual partner's help to push forward. I tried to contain him, to stop him, but it was too late. He was too far gone. He had already sacrificed too much. He had already become the monster he was trying to fight."

"And what about your daughter? What about Natasha?" I demanded, my anger a fire in my veins. "What's her fate in this... philosophy of yours?"

The question hung in the air, heavy and suffocating.

Aleksei flinched, as if I'd struck him. The cool, collected facade crumbled, replaced by a raw, aching pain that was too real, too profound to be an echo.

"My little Tasha..." he whispered, her name a prayer, a curse, a confession all at once. "Given away..."

He looked at me, his eyes pleading, begging me to understand.

"I never thought that I'd see you again. You're too young. You're all so young. I didn't want any of you to have to carry this. Not you. Not her. Not even Petrov's son." He looked at Su Yin. "But here we are."

He looked at me, his eyes filled with a sorrow so deep it threatened to drown me.

"She was my little songbird. My sweet, little Sonatina."

His voice cracked, a raw, broken sound.

"I gave her away to protect her. To save her from this... this endless cycle of violence and despair. I gave her to a clan that promised to keep her safe. She would be raised as a normal girl - with all the resources I could hide away and provide for her."

He turned away, his shoulders slumping in defeat.

"But I failed. I failed her, just like I failed Misha. Just like I failed the world. She was always destined for greatness. She was always destined to be a warrior. And the world... the world is a hungry beast. And it demands to be fed."

He turned back to me, his eyes burning with a cold, hard resolve.

"For a dead man, you sure know a lot," I said. "So what's the punchline? How does all of this relate to me?"

Aleksei took a deep breath, his gaze drifting towards the empty space where the door used to be. The walls of the suburban house were starting to fade, the perfect, idyllic facade dissolving into a swirling vortex of colorless static.

"You are the key, Ikazuchi. You are the variable. You are the one who can change the equation."

He looked at me, his eyes filled with a strange, desperate hope as he glanced over at the strange girl next to me.

"You stand at the intersection of fate. My little songbird is far from the only life you will touch. Misha is dead, as am I. But our work... our legacy... it lives on. In you."

He held up a hand, a shimmering, translucent image of a swirling blue ball of energy appearing above his palm.

"You call it Rai-chan? Raiko? Was that a name you gave it?"

"She gave it to me herself. Then she said it was actually Raiko later. Much later. She said Rai-chan was a cuter name."

Aleksei's expression softened. "Then she chose that name. I suppose she did."

The holographic orb flickered, cycling through soft hues of gold and silver. "Names have gravity. They decide how we walk through the world."

Elio's voice shook. "You used the Cognitum to simulate cognition. And tied it to the Machina. You let it evolve beyond the containment curve."

"Evolve?" Aleksei smiled faintly. "No. As you can surmise - she felt. That was all it took to outgrow our equations."

The walls of the house began to distort, equations bleeding into the wallpaper. I gaped, looking around flickering like dying neon.

"You and Rachel built this... this Wraith a means to attack our world," Elio whispered. "And you think that's providence?!"

"Mercy is the only rebellion left to us," Aleksei said. His voice was fading, caught between frequencies. "But mercy without guidance… is just another kind of storm."

"Wait, wait wait. Hold on," I said, holding up my hands as if to physically stop the torrent of words, of history, of impossibility. My head was spinning.

Between dead men's legacies and glowing cores and a sister who wasn't my sister. "Mercy? Rebellion? What are you even on about? And what's this entity that's attacking this Gossamer Echo or whatever we have here? A wraith?" I asked.

Aleksei's spectral form flickered. A faint, wry smile played on his lips, a teacher's smile for a student who had finally asked the right question.

"Ah. The central paradox. The ghost in our magnificent, broken machine," he said, his gaze drifting towards the swirling chaos outside that was slowly consuming the suburban illusion. "A wraith. A fitting term, perhaps. It's not a conscious entity, not really. It's a psychic scar. A lingering echo of the entity that was torn from its own world."

He paused, letting the weight of his words settle in the disintegrating room.

"Imagine a song, a perfect, beautiful melody, suddenly severed in mid-note. The echo doesn't just fade away. It lingers. It seeks. It yearns to be whole again. The Wraith is that echo. An ontological paradox of something impossible that'd occurred. The Imperator of Civilization was conquered in our world. Quietly. Years before the events that crippled and devastated your Earth."

The suburban house around us suddenly bled into wireframes. Photographs snapped into blank polygons, faces erased first, then rooms.

Aleksei stood by the window, watching it like weather. "We're past whatever grace this place could buy you, it seems. Quite marvelous, how she constructed me. How much of my heart was already in her?"

His gaze drifted to Su Yin. "And your arrival, little knight... a foreign variable. You destabilized the system. The Echo tried to accommodate you, to integrate your experiences into its narrative. But your presence... your soul's resonance... it's too strong. It's incompatible. How much love fuels you, I wonder?"

He turned back to me, his form flickering like a dying flame.

Elio's outline flickered a well, and he narrowed his eyes, immediately strikingthe floor with his cane.

"Ikki." His voice slipped like an audio file with a corrupted bitrate. "Get in contact with the real me when the Chaos Event concludes. No delays. Bring questions I will want to refuse to answer."

"Hey w—"

The sound cut. Skipped.

He was gone.

Aleksei didn't flinch. "He always hated goodbyes," he murmured. "Even the temporary ones."

The room groaned. Wood splintered into polygons. Picture frames bled their colors upward like reversed rain.

A tremor rippled through the false house—silent but deep, like a subwoofer thudding beneath my ribs.

The floor dissolved into wireframes again, then solidified, then flickered.

Reality was stuttering.

Aleksei's form glitch-shifted, green eyes dimming to static and back.

"We're nearly out of borrowed time," he murmured. "She's fighting far harder than I expected."

A sound like crystal stress-fracturing cracked through the air, and a holographic box appeared.

[RAIKO-OS//SYSTEM_WARN]

● EXTERNAL PROCESS COLLISION DETECTED

● Unknown entity attempting to overwrite local sandbox

 

Suggestion: panic ●…recalculating… …no, actually. panic was correct.

Aleksei's outline blinked—once, twice—then cut to half opacity.

The walls warped inward, like a house under immense pressure.

Photos popped off one by one into empty wireframes.

[RAIKO-OS//CRIT_ERROR]

● Sandboxed-memory integrity: 14%

● Gate-pressure: rising

● Host-consciousness: semi-coherent

please hold still ikki i am doing twelve things and nine of them are screaming ● Aberrant-Resonance approaching local partition ...i don't know what this thing IS but i know i don't like how it looks at you.

"To fight for someone of her own accord," Aleksei said quietly, with a wonder in his voice. "...And with such conviction."

The pane flexed again. Cracked. Shivered.

"Get ready," Aleksei breathed.

"For what—?" Su Yin managed to whisper, before it happened.

The window exploded inward in a shower of refracted light.

Something—no, someone—tumbled through the breach in a spinning blur of starlit ribbons and half-formed wings made of golden light.

I barely had time to register the pink-amber shimmer before she slammed into me, knocking us both to the floor. Air punched out of my lungs.

A soft, familiar gasp spilled against my collar.

"Err. Um. ...Hi?"

I froze.

That voice.

She lifted her head, blinking in confusion.

Celestial Sonata stared down at me, eyes wide with shock and something rawer beneath it.

Her gaze flicked past my shoulder.

She saw Aleksei.

And in that single instant—before the Echo tore him away, the facade of the composed celestial warrior fell clean off her face.

"You're—?!"

Aleksei's smile was small. Gentle. Regret carved into light. But he looked at Celestial Sonata with a fondness I couldn't put my finger on.

Then the Gossamer Echo made its final cut.

His form folded like paper and evaporated upward into the thinning ceiling without a sound.

Sonata's breath hitched. Just one sharp, broken intake.

Before I could reach for her

A sharp intake of breath cut the air.

Sonata and I both turned just in time to see Su Yin transformed, a crystal spear half-formed in her hand.

"You—" Mayari breathed.

The look on her face wasn't fear. It was disbelief.

"Celestial Sonata?"

"Mayari of the Twilight?!"

Recognition blooming like an old wound reopening.

Mayari lowered her stance, but only barely. Her eyes were wide, confused, even wary.

"...What." Mayari deadpanned.

...

"....What?!" Sonata repeated breathlessly, still sprawled on top of me.

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