The trees thinned.
Han moved fast but quiet, Stormhold's twin gauntlets drifting behind him like silent sentinels. The air was thicker now—warped, humming with stray frequencies. This part of the island had been quiet the day before. Now it felt like walking into a memory someone had tried to bury.
Momo, nestled once more inside the left gauntlet, stirred.
"Feel that?" the hamster whispered through the thread-link. "The mana field's warping. Something's hunting."
Han's eyes narrowed. He knelt at the edge of a ravine where roots and moss made a natural bridge across to the other side. Below, the soil shimmered faintly—memory-scarring, the kind left behind by Echo beasts when they crossed into real space.
Han's stomach tightened. This wasn't residual.
It was fresh.
Stormhold's right gauntlet flickered forward, controlled by the Thread of Quiet Grief still braided through Han's knuckles. He let the thread slacken, loosening the gauntlet's rotation pattern, ready for sudden recoil or acceleration.
"Any student signals nearby?" Han asked.
"Closest I can track are north ridge," Momo replied, twitching. "But they're moving. Fast."
Han nodded, rising.
That's when the forest groaned.
Not wind. Not trees shifting.
A sound made of breath and echo—like something breathing through a dozen stolen lungs.
The canopy exploded downward.
Han dove sideways as something massive crashed from the trees above, splitting the ravine bridge in two with a single taloned limb. Dirt, rock, and vines sprayed into the air.
The beast landed in the clearing with a wet thud.
It wasn't natural.
Its body was shaped like a stag, but too elongated, the limbs jointed wrong. Ethereal bone jutted from its back like shattered wings. Its head was a mask—smooth, ivory-like, with a swirling Echo-sigil pulsing in the center of its forehead. But worst of all were the mouths—dozens of them, carved down its sides like memories screaming at once.
A Wild Echo Beast.
Rank unknown.
Han didn't wait.
"Stormhold—engage full sync," he murmured.
The gauntlets roared to life.
Left—Momo-powered—glowed bright amber, mnemonic sparks bursting from its seams like static fireflies. Right—thread-forged—pulsed slow and deep, a heartbeat of sorrow and clarity. The runes carved into each gauntlet lit in sequence: containment, resonance balance, sigil-focus, recoil dampeners, and mnemonic loop.
The beast turned toward him.
Then charged.
Han's right gauntlet flared forward like a cannon blast, slamming the creature across its mask. The blow would've shattered stone—but the Echo Beast only staggered, absorbing the emotion pulse with a grunt.
It retaliated.
A swipe of claws carved through air and thought. Han ducked, dragging his left hand through a sigil pattern mid-dash. Momo leapt out, his tail flaring in a burst of mnemonic lightning.
"Disorient!" Han shouted.
The pulse exploded near the beast's eyes—blinding light and sound condensed into a single moment of overwhelming memory. The creature howled, its many mouths crying in different tones.
Han surged forward, both gauntlets spinning around him in orbit.
One punch slammed into the creature's knee—joint cracked. Another blow to the side, delivering a memory-burst of a battlefield retreat. Confusion swirled in the beast's aura.
But it didn't fall.
Instead, it opened its mouth—its main one, at the chest.
A blast of blackened memory burst from within, a torrent of loss so intense it made Han's knees buckle. He saw flickers of strangers dying, friends screaming, abandonment that didn't belong to him. Echoes of countless prey the beast had consumed.
The thread around his right gauntlet began to fray—almost.
He focused, pulling the sorrow taut but controlled. No break. No panic.
"I am not your memory," Han whispered.
And with a twist of his fingers, he activated Stormhold's mnemonic disruptor sigil.
Both gauntlets spiraled inward and crashed into the beast's mask in a perfect synchronized impact.
Boom.
The Echo Beast reeled back, mask splintered, sigil cracking.
One more pulse.
Han crossed his wrists. The gauntlets linked—one delivering mnemonic overload, the other catching it, amplifying the frequency.
He slammed them together.
Stormhold's core flared.
A final pulse shot outward in a ring—Thread of Quiet Grief and Momo's resonance synchronized. Pure emotional compression struck the creature like a collapsing star.
The beast shuddered.
And fell.
Silence returned.
Han stood, chest heaving, sweat running cold down his spine. Stormhold's gauntlets hovered back to position—slightly scorched, but intact. The threads didn't snap.
Momo crawled up onto his shoulder. "That was a big one."
"Not the last," Han muttered, looking to the cracked sky overhead.
Above, something deeper stirred behind the broken clouds.
He turned.
He had to reach the-
The world bent.
Han took one step toward the tree line.
Just one.
Not loudly—not with force—but with silence so heavy it drowned out even his thoughts. A low-frequency pressure hummed through the forest, like the tension before a thunderclap. The temperature dropped.
Three figures appeared.
They didn't drop from trees or walk from shadows. They were simply there, as if the island itself had blinked and revealed them.
Each one wore a cloak of deep violet so dark it seemed to drink the light around it. Etched into the fabric were designs that hurt to look at—writhing, living sigils that moved against the weave like memories clawing their way free. Their masks were blank and pale, bone-white with subtle runic inlays that flickered softly like breath on cold glass.
Han stepped back instinctively, Stormhold hovering into defensive alignment—left gauntlet shielding his core, right drawing tight and angled forward, the Thread of Quiet Grief pulsing in warning.
The tallest of the three moved first—no footsteps, just glide.
A voice slithered from behind the mask. "You fought the beast. You bent resonance. That makes you… useful."
The second drew a bladed pendulum mounted to an articulated wrist rig, each swing leaving behind echoes in the air—ghostly afterimages that flickered forward, threatening to strike from both past and future.
The third simply smiled, raising a cage-like sphere that clicked open to reveal rows of crystalline needles suspended in magnetic fields—each tip inscribed with extraction runes meant to unweave memories directly from the Echo field.
"You will tell us what we want to know," the first said. "Willingly or otherwise."
Han narrowed his eyes. "Try."
The gauntlets of Stormhold snapped into orbit, the left humming with sigil locks—Momo glowing inside—and the right twitching as the Thread of Quiet Grief unraveled slightly from his wrist.
Then the fight began.
The pendulum wielder struck first, warping time around the arc of her swing. Han dodged right—but her blade phased, slicing through its own memory to strike again from an angle she'd never swung. He brought up the left gauntlet just in time, sigils flaring as it blocked both present and past in a clash of mirrored sparks.
The ground beneath his feet erupted—alchemical mines hidden in the soil. He vaulted back, flipping onto a boulder ringed with dripping Echo resin.
From above, the spine-wielder launched the black-mercury weapon forward. It extended like a spear, fracturing into countless tendrils mid-flight.
Han flicked three alchemical flasks from his belt, hurling them into the air.
"Phase-splice. Copper-root. Bleeding frost."
They exploded into a suspended reaction—threads of time slowed, mercury tendrils freezing mid-arc as crackling frost and copper vapor mingled with mana-laced lightning.
He dashed forward through the chemical haze, slipping between strikes, one hand weaving glyphs into the mud beneath his feet as he moved. As he slid behind a fallen log, he activated the glyph trail. Vines exploded from the soil, animated by catalytic runes, snaring the pendulum-wielder's ankles.
She slashed through them mid-flip—but that half-second gave Stormhold time to strike.
The right gauntlet, driven by Quiet Grief, blasted forward like a mourning comet, catching her in the chest. A shockwave of raw sorrow erupted—her cloak disintegrating in streaks of forgotten childhood. She staggered, shuddering under the weight of stolen memories.
Momo launched from the left gauntlet with a high-pitched screech, tail sparking like a fuse. He bit onto the crystal cage wielder's floating device, sending volatile mnemonic bursts through the needles. They misfired, memories detaching from the enemy's mind like discarded dreams. He screamed—not from pain, but from sudden identity erosion.
The cloaked figure collapsed to one knee, trying to remember his name.
Han spun in a wide arc, landing on a fallen tree split with hollow channels of glowing sap. He pressed his palm to its surface, whispering an alchemical sigil for ignition.
The log flared to life—blue fire racing across the bark and catching the enemy off guard. Han used the flickering light to vanish into shadow, reemerging behind the spine-wielder.
The enemy hissed, spinning—but too late. Stormhold's twin gauntlets reoriented: one high, one low, striking in perfect silence.
The first to the ribs—emotion strike: fear of failure.
The second to the spine—emotion strike: grief of betrayal.
The man dropped to the ground, coughing memories in reverse—his voice repeating fragments of his life out of order.
But still, the pendulum wielder rose again.
She was laughing.
Unsteady, haunted—but laughing.
"You think that's all it takes?"
She flicked her wrist. Time fractured again.
Han's world slowed.
She moved like a ghost between ticks of the clock—swinging in impossibilities.
He reached for his last vial: blackglass venom—a distillation of pain, harvested from his own memory during the forging of Quiet Grief.
He smashed it into the sigil etched on the back of his hand.
The world didn't speed up.
It realigned.
He met her strike. Countered. Twisted.
Stormhold surged around him like living orbit.
Final strike—uppercut with the grief gauntlet.
It wasn't strength.
It was story.
The story of a boy who lost too much, weaponized every regret, and made them sing.
The pendulum wielder shattered—echoes disbanding like smoke through an old window.
Han stood in the ruin of memory and fog, panting, gauntlets humming low and steady.
Momo limped back into his slot with a tired squeak.
"They weren't normal," he said.
Han nodded. "No."
And from the far trees, the growl of something bigger answered. An Echo Beast had heard them.
He turned toward the sound.
It wasn't just a growl—it was layered. A bone-deep thrum that made the trees tremble and the fractured air pulse with raw pressure. The vines that clung to the rocks curled inward. The mana fog shifted direction.
Something massive stirred within the treeline.
Han moved quickly, not wasting time with questions. He tapped three glyphs along the base of Stormhold's left gauntlet—amber sigils that flared, then dimmed, initiating a low-level resonance scan. The data streamed across his vision, decoded via mnemonic link: heat spike, sixty meters. Mass displacement: heavy. Mana profile: aberrant Echo signature. Ancient.
"Not just a beast," Momo whispered from his housing, ears laid back against his tiny skull. "It's feeding from the fracture."
Han felt it too. The rip in the sky had leaked more than Echo resonance. It had stirred whatever this was—something that had been dormant, festering.
Then it broke the treeline.
The Echo Beast stood easily three stories tall—quadrupedal, plated in chitin that shimmered like shattered obsidian. Its face was a mask of shifting bone, no eyes—only a radial mouth full of quill-fangs and a mane of etheric tendrils that hissed with mnemonic static. As it moved, it left behind a trail of warped time—footprints that decayed into black glass.
A Ravager-Class Riftborn. And this one was newly awakened.
"Plan?" Momo asked.
"Delay. Redirect. Survive," Han said.
The Beast charged.
Han hurled himself sideways just as its forelimb crashed down where he'd stood. The impact sent quakes rippling through the ground, fracturing the terrain and toppling nearby trees.
Mid-roll, Han etched a glyph into a fragment of stone and slapped it into a rootbed: Alchemical lure rune—tuned to grief frequencies.
The Beast's head snapped toward it—pausing.
That was the key. This creature didn't see in light. It hunted emotional imprint.
Han rose, breath fast but controlled, and whispered a trigger command in old glyphscript. Stormhold's gauntlets split—one rising into the canopy, the other skimming low around the Beast's flank.
The high gauntlet released a burst of mirror-flare—bright light laced with mnemonic feedback loops. It struck the Beast across the upper neck, scalding one of its bone masks clean off.
It roared—a sound that hurt to hear, like someone screaming through their own eulogy.
Han used the moment to rush forward. He pulled a crystal ampoule from his coat and cracked it against his bracer. Smokeburst rune. The air thickened with vapor that refracted all light and Echo readings. Perfect cover.
He dropped low, sliding beneath the Beast's rib arch. He reached out and etched a quick reaction glyph on its exposed inner plate—a basic de-binding mark paired with a grief-thread fuse.
Then he ran.
Ten seconds.
The rune activated with a dull pulse.
Not an explosion.
A release.
The echo-rune fed back into the Beast's nervous system, triggering a cascade of stored grief energy—the Beast recoiled, howling, tendrils snapping in all directions. It staggered sideways into a crystalline ravine, its form flickering between real and not.
But it wasn't down. It was adapting.
Its skin began to grow runic counterglyphs.
Han's eyes widened. "It's learning."
"Then we hit it with something it can't learn," Momo said.
Han didn't respond. He simply reached into his belt for the vial he'd hoped never to use.
The Memory Hex.
It wasn't made to kill.
It was made to erase.
He poured it over Stormhold's grief-threaded gauntlet. The runes hissed in protest—so much raw sorrow in one place—but the weave held.
Then he whispered, "End this."
Stormhold surged forward, both gauntlets locking into tight orbit. Han sprinted toward the beast, leaping from shattered stone to a hanging tree limb. He twisted midair, both gauntlets spiraling around him like twin moons, slamming into the Beast's core with a scream of bound grief.
The impact was silent.
Utterly, heartbreakingly silent.
The world folded inward for a breath.
And when it unfolded, the Beast was gone.
Not dead. Not shattered.
Gone.
The memory of it unraveled.
Even the glass footprints dissolved.
Han dropped to one knee.
Momo emerged from the gauntlet, panting in squeaks.
"You okay?" the hamster asked.
"No," Han said, "but we're alive."
Above, the breach in the sky flickered—new shadows gathering at its edge.
Han looked up, jaw tight.
More were coming.