Not since the crater.
Not since the walls fell and the stone remembered how to scream.
Now they called him Subject Zero.
The Unstable One.
Terracode.
He hadn’t spoken in days.
Didn’t need to.
Not when the ground answered every time he moved.
Not when cities quieted at the mention of his name.
Three days ago, a sector fell.
Steel folded like paper. Towers collapsed inward like they were ashamed of reaching so high. Thirty-two dead. Seventeen missing. Hundreds displaced.
The only one left standing had been barefoot. Shirtless.
Arms glowing.
And the pavement beneath him had turned to molten glass.
He hadn’t run.
Hadn’t wept.
Hadn’t explained a thing.
Just stood there—
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breathing slow,
while the world trembled around him.
They called it an event.
An anomaly.
A reaction to unknown stimuli.
But the older ones, the ones who’d seen something like this before?
They didn’t say anything at all.
Now he sat in a chair, wrists bound—not by rope, but by containment-grade Tenra cuffs, reinforced with stabilizing crystal.
They had stopped making eye contact two days ago.
They had stopped speaking to him one day after that.
But he knew what they were thinking.
Because he had started to think it, too.
[Classified: Apex Imprint Registry Entry — Codename: TERRACODE]
Real Name: Redacted
Age: Estimated 21-22
Rank: Grade 0
Imprint: Geo-Spiritual Mutation / Deep Tenra Integration
Nexus Pattern: Unknown
Behavioral Notes: Quiet. Responsive to seismic activity.
Recommendation:
Contain.
Observe.
Terminate if instability increases.
Addendum:
Subject displays signs of echo-awareness.
Possible signs of imprint sentience.
Further contact discouraged.
Kael exhaled.
The cuffs tightened slightly, reacting to the spike in his pulse.
Somewhere, a sensor tripped.
He looked up at the wall in front of him.
There was no door. There never had been.
Still, he waited.
Because twenty floors above him,
a fifteen-year-old version of himself
was about to wake up
for the very first time.
Kael Veyl, Age Fifteen
Unranked. Unimpressive. Undetected.
A boy with no power.
Yet.