"Peace is never the absence of danger, but only the moment it forgets your name."
— Found Diary of an Anonymous Cadet
In the days that followed the August Visit, time drifted by in slow, steady waves, like the gentle ripples that remain long after a stone sinks out of sight. The skies above the planets and systems of the New Facility settled back into its usual muted glow, a soft silver haze stretched thin across the systems and distant stars. For once, the air wasn't buzzing with charged static. The strange rain had passed, but its cool, metallic scent still clung to the world, refusing to leave.
From orbital view, the New Facility looked whole again. It looked like a vast metallic spaceship ring rotating slowly in open space, its lights sliding across the blackness of the Orion like a heartbeat. But inside its walls, the silence felt wrong. It wasn't calm. It was waiting. Every corridor and chamber seemed to hold its breath, unsure whether the storm had truly ended or was only gathering strength for a return. The storm this time... took a new toll, and so, everyone just remained unsure, strangely anticipating that another unexpected event may take place following it. This made everyone resolve to a state of mellowness and somberness.
The containment grids along the outer decks were the first to settle. Their frantic surges faded into a calm, steady amber glow. Across the Academy, the mechanical divisions for engineers unlocked, the labs at the Diagnostics Wing stirred awake, and the cadets slipped back into their familiar routines. Announcements then rolled through the halls "Cadet training restored to normal sequence. Report to your designated sessions by standard shift." The containment grid, is a huge framework of reinforced metal beams and energy panels that wrap around the outer decks like a protective shell, keeping unstable forces from leaking into the station. Its surface is lined with glowing nodes that light up in smooth patterns whenever the system is stable, making the whole structure look like a quiet, living circuit watching over everything. Therefore all territories have this armament, and that's why every territory in the New Facility have this "shell" on them, making it look like a huge egg protruding out of the planets from a far distance in space.
The world had learned, once again, how to pretend that nothing extraordinary had happened.
Yet everyone knew something had changed.
No one actually said it out loud, but the temporal rain had felt different this time. It had not only released drops of warped energy that tugged at the flow of time, but it had reached deeper, slipping into the seams of most people's memory and thought. Some cadets even swore that entire conversations were missing. They could not remember when some events happened when others claimed they were there. Some others even claimed that they blinked and found themselves standing several meters from where they remembered being. Well, that was humorous, to put it short, but these were one of the inevitable and well-known effects of the temporal rain. Any time it came, it was surely bound to serve its purpose – distort time for a few hours and erase memories of certain intervals, causing commotions and arguments among people. Well, those who did this time were those too young to have experienced the previous temporal rain, and so it wasn't too strange to the experienced and seasoned folks. The medics labeled it temporal fatigue, a harmless after-effect that could be fixed with neural rest and nutrient stabilizers. Yet the ones who lived through it felt something else. There was a strange emptiness, a quiet sense that their minds had skipped forward, as if they had vanished for a moment and returned before anyone noticed. Anyways, for sure survival, the world won't stop shifting under every anomaly evolution.
Bale heard whispers from the cadets in the corridors, carried between training lines and dining tables. Though, he never joined in the conversations. He had no words to offer. His own sense of time had not fractured since that day. When he tried to recall the rain, he could remember vividly the sound of his pulse, that strange, hollow throb that did not belong to his heart, and the scene of the rain. Everything up till that moment.
And this was his first time experiencing the event. A unique one at that.
The Unbounds' arrival seemed to calm the storm, but that was not the truth. The rain had simply unfolded as it always did, yet most cadets assumed the Unbounds had caused it, mistaking coincidence for control. Some of those who saw it remembered how the air had warped in the atmosphere around them, and how their silhouettes spurted out of space, to save the people of the Academy, the centre of the disaster. They had said nothing, yet their presence seemed to silence every drone and tremor. When they left though, it felt as if they had carried the world's balance with them. Actually, Unbounds were known to be globally venerated like gods, but it turned out that they were not usually akin to being around the mundane civilians. There were even rumors that their unbounding process has began to untether them from the normal human consciousness, thus making them wary of people around. Some countered, especially those controlled by fear of being pessimistic, spread rumors that they had been very busy conquering the vortexes for humanity's sake. Well, it's not that humans wouldn't want to try being optimistic about all of this, hoping for the better outcomes of situations to happen, so they believed that the domineering aura around them implies that they were strong enough to stand in the defense line of humanity.
However, a question still lingers. Are the current Unbounds strong enough to prevent humanity from going extinct? That was a question that needs be asked. But who shall dare give a truthful answer? Everyone just pretended to be safe, at least.
----
Bale's mornings settled into a loop of watching and waiting. Following a close series of observations of Bale, the diagnostics wing had decided to give him a private cubicle. Metallic walls enclosed the space, punctuated by transparent panels, and the soft hum of monitoring lights seemed almost alive. Bale was strapped to a neural test device that looked like a chair and a bed at the same time. His neural band rested snugly on his wrist, its faint red flicker subdued but persistent. Actually, he was placed on perpetual activation of his neural band and so, he was given instructions to. If not... well, not that Bale liked trouble. Perhaps, it was the other way round. Med drones hovered nearby, scanning, logging, and recalibrating his neural pulses, his temple nodes connected to a pair of wires. Every few minutes, the screens beside his bed rippled with static before steadying again.
He had memorized the sound of those machines though: the low whine, the clicks, and the faint shift of light across the surface of his skin were now familiar to him. Sometimes, he thought they were whispering to one another.
'I'll be damned...'
Prometheus Division had taken over his case within forty-eight hours. Their insignia, a stylized flame encircled by the symbol of infinity, was stamped on every report. They never visited him directly, but he could feel their eyes through the walls, through the quiet. The Prometheus Divisions worked that way. They always observed without presence and controlled without words.
'...ahh now I get it... everyone here is mad.'
At that moment, Instructor Jet barged in, his boots echoing softly against the floor. His expression was unreasonably unreadable, yet quirky as always.
"You're under review," he said. "Prometheus handles anomalies. You'll cooperate, keep your head straight, your patterns steady, and stay off the training grid until further notice."
Bale nodded. Well, he was feeling a hint of remorse for what he was about to say to him earlier in the diagnostics room, before the incidence struck. However, he chose not to. He decided that this was not a right time for him.
Jet's gaze lingered on his neural band for a moment before he left.
"Don't give them a reason to decide for you," he added, his tone low, as if almost a warning.
After that, the Instructor left him again to his thoughts.
---
Classes had resumed across the Academy. Cadets once again crowded the simulation rooms, their laughter spilling out in small, hesitant bursts. They joked about lost seconds and traded stories of misplaced memories as if recounting old war tales. Bale realized how remarkably the human mind could normalize terror. When confronted with the impossible, it learned to make light of it.
Tora joined him in several sessions. Her focus was sharper than before, her expressions calm but alert. When she looked at Bale, it carried a question she never spoke. This was their first time experiencing the disaster, after cycles of hearing rumors about it. They both knew silence was safer. Whatever had occurred during the August Visit had left its mark, shaping them in ways they could not yet name.
The lectures continued as though nothing had shifted in the structure of the universe. In theory classes, the instructors spoke of the Vortex Frontier, of spatial thresholds and neural harmonics, and of mankind's persistence in mapping chaos. The cadets took notes, their eyes bright, and their voices alive with curiosity. Yet, beneath it all, an unease lingered.
Every night, Bale returned to the dorms and tried to sleep in his new cubicle of new cubemates. After the test was finally done and finding out that his VCI was 5.1, he was finally promoted to a cadet of the Explorer rank. Now, most of the Unfits had been promoted to Explorers, their food rationing slightly increased, and placement in new cubes. The sound of the vents filled the room, steady and mechanical. Viewing the outside vista of the rest of the Academy planet from his lower bunk, the world hung silent, pierced by the thin glow of distant stars. They didn't twinkle here. They simply remained cold, unwavering and unfeeling.
He thought about the term the Unbounds used among themselves, "falling upwards". To fall upwards, which meant to rise beyond humanity. It meant to gradually lose one's form, yet gain vision and powers beyond the present. It was a harrowing sacrifice of exchange. Well, it was also the inevitable fate that befell the human race.
It was said that every new Unbound who had survived their resonance test and unbound entered the Vortex Frontier not as aspirants of the vortexes, but as sacrifices. They were those who gave their humanity to stabilize what remained of time and space... what remained of this world.
Sadly, most became Riftborns.
That night, he wondered if he had already begun falling.
"Tch, what am I thinking?I'm not starting to lose my consciousness already, am I?" he muttered to himself.
---
One week passed. The diagnostics reports no longer changed. "Stable anomaly," was what they called it now. Prometheus Division had yet to summon Bale for direct analysis again, using the diagnostics wing of the Academy, though their signals came regularly as encrypted pulses across the VFP Core's neural grid, subtle but constant.
Cadets were warned not to speculate about internal affairs, though rumors spread anyway. Some said Prometheus was constructing new resonance chambers deep beneath the Frontier Divisions sectors. Others claimed the August Visit had damaged something far beyond repair. Bale listened, said nothing, and kept his eyes on his routines. At least the Academy was safer now. He didn't need to bother much about the affairs of other planets.
One quiet afternoon in the training hall, he spotted Tora by the far wall, calibrating her drone. Sunlight streamed through the viewport, forming a gentle halo around her purple hair. For a fleeting moment, he wanted to call her name, but the sound never left his throat. Something inside him held back, as if even the smallest word could tip the fragile balance he was fighting to maintain.
When their eyes met, she smiled faintly. It wasn't the warmth of comfort, but of recognition. They had seen the same storm.
---
Evenings in the Facility stretched longer. Lights dimmed sooner than expected, and the corridors shimmered with their own reflected glow. The hum of the reactors running the whole planet sank into a near-silent vibration that seemed to resonate in everyone's bones. They said the Academy's core breathed, drawing energy from the Vortex and exhaling life into the systems that kept humanity's last colony alive..
Bale sometimes stood at the dormitory window, watching the stars shift position. He knew they weren't real anymore, not in the way they used to be, and this had happened long before even he was born. They were fragments of broken constellations stitched together through light refractions. They were distant echoes of the universe that had once existed before time fractured.
'I wonder... this universe must have been so beautiful before now. Before the whole thing.'
He placed his hand on the glass. It felt cold, yet pulsed faintly beneath his skin. A rhythmic vibration, not mechanical, not natural. Just... something in between.
That night, back in his dorm and unbeknownst to him, the neural band beside his bed flickered again... this time without him putting it on. Once. Twice. Then went still.
---
When sleep finally came, it felt less like rest and more like descent.
He suddenly found himself descending on his back through an tide of incorporeal glasses, like breaking through reality. Then he found himself in a new world.
He stood in a mirrored world beneath a sky of liquid silver, where the heavens themselves seemed to pour downward, but held still nevertheless. The glassy plain beneath his feet stretched endlessly, smooth but fractured in impossible ways, as if the surface itself resisted order. The glassy plain looked flawlessly flat and endless, but the reflections on it were eerily in jagged and distorted ways, like a cracked mirror. His reflection followed half a step behind, moving out of rhythm, a mocking shadow of himself. Each step scattered faint, glowing symbols that winked and died like dying stars sinking into the glassy floor.
At the distant horizon, inverted mountains loomed, their peaks pointing downward into the mirrored expanse. Towers rose from these upside-down peaks, jagged and unnatural, endlessly crumbling and rebuilding in a cycle of silent, grinding torment. The air thrummed with the sound of collapsing stone, bending and folding space around him. This world was alive in its wrongness, watching, waiting, and whispering that every step he took belonged to it.
The whole scene felt so wrong.
Then he turned and saw Tora once more. She was standing somewhere in the distance, not affected by the distorting space. It was as if she was standing in another dimension. This time, her figure was clearer, but her expression felt hollow. Her voice reached him as a whisper of wind, her words lost in the distortion.
"Y..u...houldn't...be...ere," she said, her tone neither kind nor cruel. "This...place...rem..em...ber...hat..we...orgot."
'Why is she here again... and...why is she like that?' the thought lingered in his mind. He didn't plan on asking her, though. He had already felt extremely cautious of the environment, and so he thought it best not to speak. Something told him it meant danger.
The mirrored surface of the sky beneath them began to fracture. Beneath the cracks, a vast, ancient light stirred, cascading upwards in its illuminating glory. He tried to move, but then the air around him thickened, resisting. The scattered reflections shattered into countless fragments, each one showing the same image of himself, endlessly falling through the luminous void.
Then came a familiar pulse.
That same rhythm from the neural band.
It became a slow beat that sped and sharpened, until it became a piercing ache in his skull.
He gasped awake. His breath came shallow, his hands trembling. The dorm lights flickered weakly, casting shadows that twisted and bowed along the walls. Everything was still, save for the faint hum of the world beyond. Around him, his cubemates slept undisturbed. One was an Explorer like him. The other two were Scouts.
The band on his wrist glowed faintly, softer than before, but alive.
He sat there in silence, the echo of that pulse still trembling inside him.
Outside the window, the horizon of the VFP Core shimmered once, faint and brief, as if the air itself had just remembered something.
The storm had passed.
But the stillness that followed was not peace.
It was waiting..