The drones came before the silence even had time to settle.
The blue searchlights they cast made the air itself look diseased—pale beams cutting through red haze. I crouched over Doman's body and glanced down at him one last time. His helmet was cracked but still useful , his face slack with death.
I should've felt something. Pity, maybe. Relief.
coded into the hum beneath my skin then it disappeared also me eye changing back to normal .
Assessment incoming academy gauge unit.—potential threat.*
"Fuck," I muttered darkly.
If they found me like this, standing over a dead cadet with blood on my hands, also without a mask on it wouldn't matter what I said. I knew what they'll do.
I couldn't let them see Doman's corpse.
I stripped his mask off. The cracked plate hissed as I pressed it onto my own face, the blood sealing like glue. It burned for a moment, then synced to my breathing. I shoved his body into the debris at the tunnel's edge, burying him under slabs of concrete just as the shadows overhead darkened the smoke.
Boots hit the ground. Six soldiers dropped from the drones, weapons drawn, armor gleaming with the golden insignia of the Academy Gauge Corps—the elite rescue division.
"Hold position!" one barked through his helmet link. "Scan for signs of the infected!"
I raised my hands slowly, keeping my voice slow, broken enough to blend. "Over here," I rasped. "I'm… alive."
They turned, guns lowering as they surrounded me. One of them—a tall woman with a white insignia—stepped forward. Her voice was sharp, assessing. "Identify yourself, soldier."
"Unit 9-. Lower born," I said carefully.
Her visor flickered with a scan light. For a moment, I thought the voice in my head would betray me—but strangely it was silent.
She nodded once. "Any other survivors?"
My mind blanked. The truth pressed against my teeth like a scream. If I said no, they'd start digging—find Doman's body, maybe find me altered. If I said yes, they'd send med drones, scan me too deeply.
I opened my mouth—
"Commander!" another voice shouted from deeper in the tunnel. "I found someone!"
Every head turned.
They pulled a limp figure from the rubble—small, thin, face grey with ash. My chest went cold.
The silent one.
His breathing was shallow, but his eyes were open—wide, glassy, staring straight at me.
How long had he been there? Watching?
The thought rooted inside me like a knife.
The commander rushed toward him. "Get him stable. Move—prep for evac."
As the medics began patching him up, I lowered my head, hiding the flicker in my eyes. If he'd seen what happened… if he remembered what I had become…
Risk level high: eliminate!!
No,I told the voice in my head. Not now.
They lifted him onto a stretcher, the hum of the drones growing louder as they prepared extraction. I followed without a word, keeping my movements slow, human. The others barely looked at me—they were too focused on climbing out before the tunnels collapsed.
By the time we reached the surface, dawn was breaking. The sky above the ruins was the color of old wounds—pale red fading into grey. Fires still burned where the colony had cracked open, turning the metal towers into charred skeletons.
The drones carried us to the gates of the Academy.
---
The Academy Gauge Complex sat on the edge of the upper sector—a fortress of glass, steel, and silence. Inside, everything was clean to the point of cruelty. No dirt. No sound of life. Even the air smelled filtered, artificial.
They called it a *sanctuary for students *. It felt more like a laboratory.
They scanned me at the gates, dosed me with stabilizers, stitched up wounds that were already closing on their own. No one questioned how I was still alive. Not yet.
After the treatments, they separated the survivors. The silent guy was taken to intensive care; I was kept under observation, locked in a narrow room lined with white panels that hummed quietly, reading every heartbeat.
I watched the ceiling, fingers trembling. I know something else inside my body. It was getting stronger—the code, the infection, whatever it was—merging deeper each hour.
I could almost feel it rewriting me.
Host integrity stable.
"I'm not your host," I whispered.
But the silence that followed told me otherwise.
Hours passed before the door hissed open.
Two guards. Then Commander Verne—the same woman who'd pulled me out of the tunnels. The light framed her like a weapon when she stepped in.
"Lower born I mean DM446," she said evenly, "the debriefing starts now."
She turned to the guards. "Bring the other one."
They returned minutes later— the silent guy walking between them, pale but alive. His eyes darted toward me the moment he entered. He didn't flinch, didn't speak. But there was something in his stare I couldn't read. Recognition. Pity, maybe.
Commander Verne folded her arms. "You're the only two left from Mission training in your Squad ," she said. "We need to understand what happened down there."
That phrase—down there—it burned like acid.
Strangely the silent guy looked at me once, just a flicker, as if asking permission. I gave him nothing. There was too much risk in a nod.
"Let's start with you," she said to him. "What did you see?"
He lowered his gaze then he spoke for the first time. "We were ambushed," he said quietly i. A deep tone. "Infected a lot bigger then usual attacked. Everyone scattered.I I blacked out."
"And when you woke?"
His hand trembled slightly. I could hear his heartbeat from across the room—steady, but sharp. " DM446 saved me," he said. "He Dragged me out before I passed out again. He kept the infected off me."
Verne's eyes flicked toward me. "Is that true?"
I nodded once. "Ye—Yes, ma'am."
She studied me for a long, cold second. "Your vitals showed something strange during treatment. Your recovery rate is… abnormal."
I said nothing.
"Maybe it's!?," no never mind. she continued, though her tone made it clear she didn't want to believe it. "For now, both of you are cleared. But you'll be monitored. Don't leave the dorm sector."
The door sealed behind her.
The silent guy stood there for a while, shifting on his feet. When we were finally alone, he walked to me and sat beside the bed. His whispered smiling, almost too low to hear.
"I didn't tell them," he said.
I turned to him slowly. "Tell them what?"
He met my gaze, and for a heartbeat,looking straight at his deep black pupils.
"What I saw," he said. "What you did!!."