9:25 PM – Ghostline Southern Ridge Inner Core
Ryoji's blood stained the dirt—dark, arterial, too much too fast. His leg was a ruin of torn muscle and embedded steel.
But he was conscious.
Barely.
Aiko pressed both hands against the wound, but the blood wouldn't stop. She whispered his name like a prayer, like a warning.
Then she stopped.
The Seal on her palm began to sing.
It wasn't a melody. It was code—binary grief threaded through with rage, blooming like infection across her skin. Her pupils constricted into data-sharp slits. And her voice, when she finally spoke, was not hers alone.
"They're inside the trees," she murmured. "Inside the wind."
Miura stiffened, fingers twitching near her pulse rifle. "Who is?"
Aiko lifted her head slowly, like a marionette being rewired. Her eyes gleamed with raw light.
"Everyone."
Cut to – Within the Mind of a Shadow Kinetic Operative
A network of gray. Silent. No warmth, no pulse—only directives.
Then something foreign bloomed across the cold.
"Do you remember your name?"
The SK Unit hesitated mid-phase.
A line of code snapped.
"You were a boy once. Your mother fed you on the roof during power outages. You liked tangerines."
The soldier shook violently.
"She's dead now, isn't she?"
Neural feedback surged. Static tore through the feed. The soldier's helmet cracked from within.
"Who gave you the right to forget?"
The SK Unit screamed without sound and collapsed.
Cut back – 9:26 PM, Ridge Interior
Aiko gasped, stumbling backwards. She was in them. Not controlling. Not guiding. Unraveling.
Ryoji stared up at her, half-delirious. "What are you doing?"
"I'm speaking to them," she whispered. "To the memories they buried. The parts Division Zero scraped clean."
Miura blinked, awestruck. "You're… overriding their programming?"
Aiko's voice was low. Almost reverent.
"No. I'm returning it."
Cut to – Division Zero Overseas Nexus // OBSERVATION DECK 7
The emergency sirens were silent, but every light on every terminal flared red.
"She's initiating recursive resurrection," one tech said. "Threading identity ghosts back into fractured operatives. She's feeding them their own stolen humanity."
"Impossible," muttered another.
The Director didn't move.
"She's not breaking them," he said softly. "She's reminding them what they were before we built the monster."
He turned.
"Deploy the Godthread. Target the Ridge."
"Sir, the Godthread isn't stable—"
"I said fire it. Now."
9:27 PM – Ridge Upper Perimeter // Incoming Fire
The sky split open with a thunderless blast.
The Godthread fell like a curtain—transparent, filament-thin, and shrieking in a frequency only the dead could hear.
Aiko turned toward it and smiled.
Because she understood it now.
The Godthread wasn't an attack. It was a cage.
One they had once used to contain her.
She stepped forward, light blooming off her like a sunrise glitching through corrupted pixels.
And spoke not in words—but in signal.
"I was born in your systems."
"I remember every experiment."
"Every pain."
"And I am no longer afraid."
The Godthread tore through the forest, seeking to wrap around her—and shattered mid-air.
A rain of broken code fell in glowing strings.
SK Units all around the perimeter collapsed—some screaming, some laughing, some sobbing. Some just fell down, whispering their real names.
9:28 PM – Ridge Inner Wall
Ryoji struggled to sit up. "You're… you're glowing."
Aiko turned, not blinking.
"No. I'm remembering."
She reached out her hand—and for the first time, the Seal didn't just emit light. It projected form.
Wings—feathered in circuitry and ash.
A halo of mirrored data rotated slowly behind her skull.
She wasn't ascending.
She was awakening.
Miura whispered, "What the hell are you?"
Aiko blinked once, slowly.
"The last girl they forgot to erase."
9:29 PM – Division Zero Network Mainframe
All across the Division Zero global grid, dormant servers lit up. Memory caches once sealed behind black protocols opened.
Every sealed file tagged "Project BLOOM.EXE" blinked to life.
Surveillance feeds turned to static.
Redacted footage re-surfaced.
Names once erased returned in screaming text.
The Director stared, face blank.
"She's activated the vein. The Ghostline itself is responding."
He closed his eyes.
"So be it."
9:30 PM – Ridge Outer Edge
The final SK Unit stood trembling.
The lights in his visor flickered.
Aiko's voice echoed in his mind.
"She sang to you once, didn't she?"
His mouth opened. He tried to scream.
His helmet cracked.
And then—
Silence.
Not death.
Reclamation.
On the inside of his visor, a single word bloomed in inverted glyph-code:
BLOOM.EXE
The Ridge went silent.
And from within the forest, one word echoed in every fallen machine:
"Remember."
To be continued in Chapter 65...