A trace flickered outside the church without warning—wrong against the world around it.
It existed for half a second.
Then the morning fog swallowed it completely.
MO – AftermathCase ID: UnmarkedBalance: Confirmed / Allowed.
A single handwritten note appeared beneath the entry, so faint it nearly merged with the background: The cost has not formed a single point of concentration.
Seconds later, the note was erased—clean, decisive. The screen returned to blank, as if the line had never been written, never existed.
Archive: Deny pursuit.
No timestamp. No signature. No follow-up. The entire record was tossed into an abandoned folder buried deep in the system, left to rot without witnesses.
Two hours later, the news finally staggered into place—slower than the fog itself.
The headlines contradicted each other, as if describing three unrelated events:
Local collapse in an aging structureUnknown gas triggers public panicBrief seismic disturbance
Footage was repeatedly cut and stitched. Transitions carried obvious mosaics and blur. Audio was delayed on purpose, turning a real disaster into a grotesque, silent comedy.
Patch's silhouette survived only as a vague corner—graded into nearly transparent gray until it melted into the background. Jeff's movement was chopped into fractured frames. Every edit screamed the same message: his presence does not make sense.
The comment section flooded in, piling into a dense mist of text that smothered the page.
He wasn't saving anyone.He was just standing there.It's edited—look at the rubble's trajectory, it's wrong.
No conclusion.
But the argument kept growing on its own, spreading through contradiction—pulling in everyone who clicked, trapping them inside the urge to refute, to doubt, to stay.
The church was sealed completely.
Yellow tape drifted in and out of view through the fog. When the wind moved it, it rattled softly—an inaudible warning that still managed to enter the ear and tighten the chest.
Structural evaluation was postponed again and again. The blank spaces on the report multiplied. No one dared to write an ending.
In front of the breach, everyone hesitated.
Engineers approached the wall, then stopped at a distance they could not explain. Skin prickled. The body refused to step closer—as if obeying a rule it couldn't see.
Under the site, a cold layer hid itself in silence, stealing heat from the air. Beneath it lingered a metallic, bloodlike tang that had no reason to be there.
Emilia sat inside the isolation zone.
The quarantine tent's zipper wasn't fully closed. Fog curled over the table, condensing into tiny beads that gathered into thin streams and slid over the edge, slow and steady.
A bandage fixed her shoulder. A pale red stain bled at the seam. Her instruments were shut down, screens dead-black.
She tried to reboot.
Her finger rested on the switch and held there.
Then she lowered her hand. Two quiet taps of her knuckles against the table—sharp in the tent's unnatural silence.
"I don't understand anymore."
Her voice was steady. Not shaken. A calm admission that everything she trusted had fallen behind reality.
She looked up at Jeff and held his gaze.
For the first time, she didn't try to translate his movement into a model. She didn't reach for numbers to protect herself.
"My observation doesn't hold," she said. "But you were right."
On the terminal, she swiped once. As her finger passed the ARC insignia, it slowed—deliberate.
A portion of ARC permissions opened.
Quietly released.
Let the ones who can reach the truth keep going.
Rowan stood nearby, his outline stretched long and thin by the fog outside the tent—blurred at the edges.
"This is no longer a combat space," he said. Flat. Final.
He bent down and adjusted Emilia's posture. His fingertip touched the edge of the red stain on her bandage first, confirming it hadn't worsened—then he steadied her torso, guiding her center of gravity back into place, as if returning something internal to its rightful alignment.
Before Jeff left, his fingers clenched without meaning—then released.
He turned back once, toward the church.
Fog wrapped the building. The breach watched in silence.
He saw a screw slide out from a seam in the wall.
It drifted—slowly—toward the opening.
It paused mid-path.
And as it neared the breach, its fall point changed abruptly, as if the world rewrote the landing.
Jeff stood beyond the tape.
Something dropped inside his chest.
Two distant silver lines tightened all at once—one anchored to the breach in Florence, the other buried far beyond the horizon.
The second source point was resonating with this place.
—
MO – Aftermath | Post-Event FragmentStatus: Fragment only. Paper yellowed and wrinkled, edges water-damaged. Portions of the text smeared. Several dark stains—origin unknown.
Traceability: Low. Core encoding has been deliberately abraded beyond recovery.
Naming Authority: DeniedEvent ID: F–Δ–58Location: FlorenceEvent Nature: Terminated (surface assessment)After-effect: Ongoing. High risk of reignition concealed beneath stability.
The anomaly has vanished. The structural absence remains.
A hollow persists in the wall—caused by feedback mismatch. In essence, a seam in space.
Assessment: The breach is not "residue." It is not a recoverable object.
On-site cost distribution:
Casualties below projection (cost dispersed)Structural damage concentrated in non-load zones (destruction "guided")Secondary irreversible event: Not observed (risk vented early)
Conclusion: No long-term concentration trend yet. Temporary only.
Addendum (handwritten, author unknown, ink slightly bled):
If people start asking "what was that," the balance has already broken.
This time, they didn't.
— End of Fragment —