Chapter 6: The Void's Echo

Chapter 6: The Void's Echo

The ride back to Aethelgard was a journey through a vacuum of fear. The transport’s engine hummed, a lonely sound in the suffocating silence. Jax, now conscious but pale, was huddled in the farthest corner, his gaze fixed on the floor, pointedly avoiding Kaelen. Lena flinched every time Kaelen shifted his weight. They weren't seeing the boy who had saved them; they were seeing the hole he’d punched in the universe.

But it was Seraphina’s silence that was the most profound. She sat opposite Kaelen, her posture as rigid as ever, but her hands, resting on her knees, were clenched into white-knuckled fists. The ice in her eyes had been shattered and replaced with something more complex: a maelstrom of shock, humiliation, and a terrifying, analytical curiosity. Her precise, elegant power had failed. She had been trapped, her control broken, her life being siphoned away like Alistair Finch's on the culling platform. Then, Kaelen's chaotic, messy, uncontrolled power hadn't just won—it had rewritten the terms of engagement.

The Phobos System was a quiet, ominous presence in Kaelen's vision, no longer tracking ambient fear but cataloging the aftermath of his own actions.

[Event Log: Void Erasure Deployed.] [Result: Primary Threat Neutralized. Environmental Damage Sustained (Reality Fracture).] [Squad Emotional State: Terror. Awe. Hostility.] [System Warning: Your Energetic Signature is now a Permanent Beacon. You are Marked.]

Marked. The word sent a chill down his spine that had nothing to do with the lingering cold of the Phantoms. He wasn't just an anomaly anymore. He was a landmark.

Upon arrival, there was no debrief. Jax and Lena were whisked away by medics. Seraphina was met by a grim-faced officer who spoke to her in low, urgent tones. But for Kaelen, there were only two guards. Their faces were impassive, but they kept their distance, as if afraid he might leak nothingness onto the floor.

They didn't take him back to the barracks. They escorted him through a series of sterile white corridors he had never seen before, to a small, windowless room containing only a metal table and two chairs. The door closed with a heavy, magnetic thud. It was a cube of perfect, ordered isolation.

He was left there for what felt like hours, alone with the echoing memory of the erasure. He could still feel it, a phantom limb of his consciousness—the sensation of commanding reality to simply stop. It was intoxicating and horrifying in equal measure.

The door hissed open, and Instructor Vorlag stepped inside.

The small room seemed to shrink, crushed by his presence. The faint, golden lines of his power were more distinct than Kaelen had ever seen them, forming a tight, geometric lattice in the air around him. It was a subconscious cage, an attempt to impose order on the ultimate agent of chaos.

Vorlag didn't sit. He stood over Kaelen, his scarred face an unreadable mask of stone. "The official report will state that Squad Seven successfully neutralized the Phantom nest, with Prefect Seraphina leading the charge," he said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. "It will commend her for adapting to a novel threat. It will mention your contribution as 'unorthodox but effective support.'"

Kaelen remained silent. This wasn't a debrief. It was a threat.

"The report will be a lie," Vorlag continued, pacing slowly around the table. "I saw the raw data feed, Vance. I saw a Prefect, one of our finest, disabled. I saw a new class of Phantom we have no defense against. And then I saw a Neophyte who didn't fight it, didn't destroy it. You unmade it. You looked at a piece of the universe and you told it to be empty. And it obeyed."

He stopped directly in front of Kaelen, leaning down, his hands flat on the table. The pressure in the room was immense. "My power imposes rules. It creates order from chaos. It is a fundamental force of construction. What you did… that was the opposite. It was deconstruction. Annihilation. It is the very essence of the void we are fighting. So you will tell me, right now, how you did it."

Kaelen swallowed, his throat dry. "I… I don't know. I was scared. I saw what it was doing to her, and I just… wanted it to stop."

"That is not an answer!" Vorlag slammed his fist on the table, the sound like a gunshot. The golden lattice around him flared. "A weapon that fires itself is a danger to everyone. Where does the power come from? What are its limits? When you erase something, where does it go?"

"I don't know!" Kaelen finally snapped, his voice cracking. "It's just… gone! There's nothing!"

Vorlag stared at him for a long, silent moment, his eyes searching Kaelen's for any sign of deception. He found none. Kaelen saw a flicker of something in the instructor's gaze, something beyond anger. It was a deep, fundamental fear. Ataxophobia. Kaelen wasn't just a disorderly student; he was a walking, breathing violation of the natural laws Vorlag built his entire existence upon.

"You are a gateway, boy," Vorlag whispered, the words carrying a terrible weight. "And we have no idea what's on the other side. Or if you've already left the door open."

He straightened up, his composure returning like a shroud. "You are confined to the barracks until further notice. Do not speak to anyone about what happened in that church. Do not attempt to use your power. You are no longer just a Neophyte. You are a problem that the highest levels of Aethelgard must now solve."

With that, he turned and left, the door sealing shut behind him. Kaelen was escorted back to the barracks in a new kind of silence, the weight of the city's leadership now pressing down on him.

He lay on his rock-slab bunk, staring at the stone ceiling. The other Neophytes steered clear of his corner, whispering and casting fearful glances. He was truly an outcast now, feared not for his weakness, but for his terrifying, incomprehensible strength.

He heard footsteps, precise and deliberate, stop beside his bunk. He didn't have to look to know who it was.

"Get up, Vance," Seraphina said.

He sat up, swinging his legs over the side. She stood there, arms crossed, her expression a careful mask of neutrality. Her pride was still there, a shield of ice, but it was fractured. He could see the hairline cracks.

"The official story is a fabrication," she stated, not asked. "Everyone knows it."

"It's what Vorlag wants," Kaelen replied quietly.

She ignored that. "The Phantom in the church. It warped space. It created a localized field that negated my abilities. I was trapped." She said the word "trapped" as if it were a physical poison in her mouth, a deep violation of her claustrophobia-driven powers. "My power is about absolute freedom of movement. It denied me that. It was beating me."

It was the closest she would ever come to admitting defeat.

"And then you…" she trailed off, her gaze distant, remembering the hole in the altar. "You didn't just break its control. You erased the game board. That's not a weapon. It's a force of nature. Like a hurricane or a black hole."

She looked at him then, her icy eyes boring into his. "I despise what you are, Vance. You are chaos. You are a flaw in the system. Everything about you is wrong." She took a small step closer. "But the tactical reality is that your 'wrongness' is the reason I'm not a dried-out husk right now. The command sees you as an unstable bomb. They're debating whether to try and defuse you or simply throw you into the deepest hole they can find."

Kaelen felt a cold knot form in his stomach. "So what do you want?"

"I want to understand," she said, her voice sharp with frustrated pragmatism. "I need to understand every asset on the field, especially the unpredictable ones. You're a liability, but you're our liability. For now."

It wasn't friendship. It wasn't gratitude. It was a cold, pragmatic truce. An alliance born from shared trauma and a mutual enemy. She saw him not as a chaotic failure anymore, but as a piece on the board with a terrifying and unknown power. She couldn't afford to ignore him.

"Figure out how to control that abyss inside you," she said, her voice dropping to a near-whisper. "Learn to aim it. Because if you can't, they will aim you at something you can't erase. Or they will simply erase you first."

She turned and walked away without another word, leaving Kaelen alone in the suffocating silence of the barracks. Her words echoed in his mind, a final, chilling validation of his new reality. He was the void's echo. He could be a weapon for Aethelgard, or he could be its next sacrifice. And the only way to choose his own fate was to venture deeper into the very darkness everyone else feared.