DEPTH FLOOR: ZERO LEVEL
The corridor leading to the Daily Evaluation Area thrummed with the sound of hundreds of feet moving at once. Tiny vibrations ran along the metal floor, like the heartbeat of a giant facility waking from a long mechanical sleep. Pale white light bounced off ultra-polished walls, erasing every shadow from sight. In this place, there was nowhere for a body to hide. The only space that remained private was inside a mind.
Ryu walked in the middle of the crowd with a steady body and a blank face. Aki stayed glued to his side, clutching his tablet and holding his breath. "This is insane," Aki muttered under his breath. "I thought there would be twenty or thirty kids like us. This is… hundreds." Ryu said nothing. He did not consciously count faces, but his brain kept recording anyway.
Four hundred eighteen distinct footsteps.
Fifty three unstable breathing rhythms.
Twenty nine kids with reflexes too fast for age thirteen. Seven kids showing no obvious anxiety. Four faces that were a little too calm.
Ryu's pace faltered when those numbers lined up in his head, as if they had just clicked into a pattern he did not fully understand yet. Aki glanced up at him. "What is it?" he asked. Ryu did not answer. His eyes had fixed on a point several meters ahead.
Four kids stood there, not jostled by the flow around them. Their movements were too synchronized, too controlled, too clean. Not clean as in washed and neat, but clean the way a stripped machine was clean, with unnecessary parts removed. While other kids bumped shoulders and shifted weight, those four simply stood, as steady as stone in a rushing river.
A chill ran up Aki's spine. "Who are they…?" he whispered.
Ryu watched them in silence.
Left shoulder angle identical.
Feet placed with the same offset.
Heads tilted two degrees to the right.
Too consistent. Too exact. That was not a natural pattern for gifted children. That was training. Or worse, it was the signature of infiltration.
The ceiling lights flickered three times. A mechanical voice came from hidden speakers all along the corridor. "All subjects, proceed to the Basic Evaluation Hall. Time remaining: one hundred eighty seconds." The sound of movement swelled at once. Hundreds of kids sped up, anxious not to be late.
The four did not move at all. It was as if the countdown did not apply to them.
Ryu turned with the current and followed it. Behind him, he heard a door slide open and seal shut again. At the same time, a faint resonance stirred in his skull. It was barely there, like the whisper of air when an elevator door opens.
[Step pattern abnormal. Formation 4-1-3.]
NV's voice.
This time it was not a distant echo or a glitch of sound. It felt controlled, clear, like a line that had finally been tuned to the right frequency. Ryu's brows drew together a little. "You are speaking without any trigger now?" he asked in his mind.
[Controlled resonance. I only appear when threat pattern rises.]
"Threat?"
[Low grade. But not ordinary.]
Aki looked sideways at him. "Who are you talking to?"
"Myself," Ryu answered.
Aki snorted. "Right. I keep forgetting you are the weirdest person in this whole fa..."
"Inside!" a staff member shouted.
Ryu and Aki stepped through the open doors with the others. Behind them, the four infiltrator children moved as well, their steps perfectly even. No rush of breath. No shift in tempo.
NV dropped one more sentence before fading.
[Those four patterns do not originate from Dominion Astryx.]
BASIC EVALUATION: ZONE I
The Basic Evaluation Hall was a massive ring. It felt like a stadium with the seats cut away, leaving only a circular floor lined with sensors beneath the metal plates. The surrounding walls rose twelve meters high and were covered in analytic display panels, ready to turn every twitch and breath into data.
The first hundred kids were arranged in the inner circle. Another ninety filled the next ring. The rest waited on raised platforms like secondary rows. Ryu stood in the second line. Right behind him were the four children he had been watching.
Aki exhaled slowly. "Feels like we signed up for gladiator games," he muttered. Ryu stayed quiet. He was not listening to the crowd so much as feeling how the room itself settled around them. The doors at the side opened with a soft hiss.
Dr. Elara Mine stepped in first, white coat hanging just below her knees, posture precise and expression like a surgical blade. Beside her walked Cassandra, clipboard in hand, eyes alert. A moment later Arvis entered behind them, carrying a black tablet, his presence as quiet and heavy as a closed file cabinet.
The moment the three appeared, the hall fell into a natural quiet.
"Elara is here. That means physical metrics."
"Are we getting hit with mental test today?"
"That is Arvis… I am dead."
"Cassandra too? Then it is profiling again."
The whispers flared in small pockets and then thinned under the pressure of attention. Ryu watched Elara and Cassandra for a second, then let his gaze settle on Arvis. Elara and Cassandra seemed normal in their roles. Arvis did not. He looked at the room like he was calculating how many bodies it could hold if things went badly.
Elara walked to the podium. "Welcome to Basic Evaluation, Module Zero One." Her voice carried cleanly, cool and professional. "Starting today, you will enter the first phase of the Vasena National Training Program. There are seven core disciplines that will be measured every day. However, your numbers will not be compared directly with one another."
A few kids looked relieved. If they were not being ranked against each other, then maybe they could breathe. Elara did not leave that illusion standing for long.
"Because we are comparing you against standards that are higher than that."
Sensors beneath the floor came alive. Blue light rose like a thin mist along the ground. Arvis stepped forward and took over.
"Phase one: Reading," he said.
"Reading what?" a boy in the third row asked.
Arvis turned his head and fixed the boy with a flat stare. "Reading people."
A spotlight cut across the arena. From a side wall, dozens of human holograms flickered into existence. Different ages, different clothes, different expressions. Rage, joy, fear, hurt, disdain, calculated charm.
The task sounded simple. Identify what they were feeling. But the explanation on the screen made the real purpose clear. They were not being asked to understand "feelings." They were being asked to predict what each person might do in the next half second.
Aki raised his hand. "Doctor, is this like learning to read an opponent in a duel?" Cassandra nodded. "Yes. But not every opponent carries a weapon you can see. Many carry intent." Elara added, "And intent moves much faster than a weapon."
Silence returned to the hall.
A timer appeared on the wall.
00:05:00
Arvis lifted his hand. "Begin."
Reading Phase
The first hologram appeared. A middle-aged man with one hand hidden inside his jacket. His gaze was sharp. His breathing was rough. His lips trembled slightly, not with rage, but with strain.
Most kids answered "attack." Ryu answered "panic, but no strike." The hologram updated. The man raised his hand, showing it empty, no blow, no gun.
The floor sensors chimed.
CORRECT: non-offensive pattern.
Aki shot Ryu a look. "How did you see that?" Ryu replied softly, "He was holding his breath too early. People who are about to strike hold their breath after the last inhale, not before."
The next hologram showed a woman smiling with a bag slung over her shoulder. Her expression was open, light, almost friendly. Most kids answered "safe." Ryu answered "distracting."
The hologram shifted. The woman reached into the bag and drew a small pistol.
Sensors chimed again.
CORRECT.
Aki's face paled. "You are not human," he whispered. Ryu ignored the comment and kept watching.
Hologram followed hologram. Emotion followed emotion. Micro-gestures, breathing patterns, eye tracking shifts.
Some kids struggled hard. Their answers jumped all over the emotional spectrum. Others managed to catch obvious cues but missed the layered ones. The four infiltrator children behind Ryu remained eerily consistent.
They always answered three-tenths of a second after Ryu.
Arvis glanced up from his tablet, eyes narrowing for a moment. He tracked their response times, watched the graphs spike in near perfect delay after Ryu's own patterns. His brows tightened. But the system did not flag any errors.
Without errors, he had no official grounds to raise an accusation.
The timer rang. The Reading phase ended. Cassandra's gaze swept the results scrolling up the main display. "As usual," she murmured, "a dominant pattern appears."
Before she could elaborate, movement at a side door made Elara's jaw tighten. The door slid open and a young man in black uniform stepped in. His face was smooth, almost blank, his voice level.
"The Directorate requests the top twenty names proceed immediately to the next examination room," he said.
Elara frowned. "What is the rush?"
"National priority," he replied.
Ryu's instincts shifted, though nothing had visibly changed. Something in the data had gone wrong. Aki's hand tightened around Ryu's sleeve. "I have a really bad feeling about this," he muttered.
Behind them, the four infiltrator children lifted their heads at exactly the same instant. NV's resonance brushed the edge of Ryu's awareness again, colder this time.
[Protocol change not registered in Vasena core. Risk level rising.]
Ryu did not answer aloud. He understood one thing: this day was stepping away from normal evaluation and heading straight into something else.
THE ROOM UNDER THE SHADOW
The top twenty names were called. Ryu's appeared first. Aki's came eighth. The four infiltrator children were listed second through fifth without a single gap in between. Aki gave a short, incredulous laugh that sounded more like despair. "I knew they were good, but straight into ranks two to five? That is not normal."
Ryu watched them quietly. He understood now. They had not been reading the holograms. They had been reading him.
Ryu, Aki, and eighteen other kids followed the black-uniformed officer into a side corridor. The hallway here was darker than any training route they had used before. The lights were spaced far apart and hung low, casting pools of illumination like cheap lamps in an old factory.
"This is not a standard training corridor," Aki whispered.
Ryu agreed silently. His senses were alert in a different way now. NV surfaced again.
[This route is not listed in the Vasena internal blueprint.]
"That is not possible," Ryu thought. "No area is left off the record."
[That is the entire point.]
The corridor ended at a large metal door fitted with multiple locked systems. Retina scanner. Palm pressure plate. DNA analyzer. Personnel verification. Kinetic code input. It was the kind of door used for things that officially did not exist.
The officer touched the panel. The system ran its checks and flashed acceptance. The door began to open, metal grinding against metal in a layered sequence.
CHRRRRR–KKRTTT–THUNK.
The sound echoed around them.
Beyond it lay a circular room, dim except for thin neon blue lines along the floor. Five camera clusters pivoted and locked onto the group the moment they crossed the threshold. Aki stepped back half a step. "Ryu," he murmured, "I really do not like this place."
"It is too quiet," Ryu replied.
"Why is that a problem?"
"Because Vasena is never quiet."
The officer turned to face them. "Enter one at a time," he ordered. "Stand on the white circle. Do not move until the verification process is complete."
Ryu went first. As soon as he stepped into the marked circle, the floor vibrated faintly under his feet. A voice came from hidden speakers overhead.
"SUBJECT ONE - RYU ARCHERON - D-LEVEL VERIFICATION."
NV's presence snapped into sharp focus inside his head.
[Stop. That is incorrect.]
"What do you mean?" Ryu thought.
[D-Level is reserved for two types of subjects only. One, candidates for national protocol. Two, extreme-risk anomalies.]
"I am not the extreme-risk one," Ryu answered.
[You are not the second category.]
Ryu's shoulders tensed, breath catching for a second. The speaker repeated calmly, "SUBJECT ONE - D-LEVEL - PLEASE WAIT."
Aki swallowed so hard Ryu could hear it. "Ryu… why are you marked D-Level?"
"I do not know," Ryu said.
The four infiltrator children stepped onto their own circles next. The speaker announced,
"SUBJECTS TWO THROUGH FIVE - LEVEL C."
Ryu narrowed his eyes, thoughts moving faster. "Why are they C-Level, not D?"
NV's answer came without hesitation.
[They are not the primary target of this state.]
A mechanical noise rumbled above. From the ceiling, a metal ring descended, broad and heavy like a crowned frame. Lights along its inner rim brightened slowly as it lowered. Aki's voice dropped to a nervous whisper. "That looks like a brain scanner."
Ryu looked up. The design was wrong for a medical device. The casing was too thick. The support arms too armored. The whole thing felt more like a military apparatus than a clinical one.
The ring stopped directly over Ryu. A thin alarm tone sounded.
"RESONANCE UNSTABLE. ECHO FREQUENCY DETECTED."
Elara Mine and Cassandra stepped in through a side door at once, their faces stripped of their usual composure.
"Stop the process!" Elara shouted.
The black-uniformed officer turned, startled. "The order came directly from the Directorate," he protested.
"I do not care," Elara snapped. She rushed to the control panel and slammed her palm against the override.
Arvis came in a beat later, his expression dark. "What are you doing?" he demanded, eyes moving from the device to the officer.
"The directive was transmitted from central command," the officer insisted, already sweating.
"Which branch?" Cassandra cut in sharply.
The officer's mouth opened and then closed. He did not answer.
Arvis looked at Ryu, then at the descending ring, and something in his face changed. "Raise that device now," he ordered.
The alarm blared louder. The metal ring reversed course and lifted back toward the ceiling. Elara grabbed Ryu's shoulder, fingers cold through the fabric. "Whoever ordered this is not acting from inside Vasena," she said.
Aki stood frozen, eyes wide. Four infiltrator children smiled, just a little, for the first time since they had entered the facility. The expression was wrong on their faces. It looked like a test that had gone exactly as planned.
Ryu stared at them, feeling the weight of NV's next words before they arrived.
[Identification complete. Those four are not part of Dominion Astryx. They were sent to test you.]
"For what?" Ryu asked silently.
NV's reply made a line of ice slide down his spine.
[To determine whether you are a natural anomaly… or only the result of a state experiment.]
Elara's jaw tightened as her gaze followed the four children. Cassandra spun, searching the room for the officer who had brought them here, only to realize he had slipped away in the confusion. Arvis kept his eyes on Ryu, as if trying to read an encrypted file hidden behind his pupils.
Aki moved closer, voice shaking. "I told you this was wrong… this is a trap… this whole thing is a trap."
Ryu did not answer. Inside his mind, the last line from NV settled into place like a verdict.
[Ryu, they did not come here to evaluate you. They came to make sure you do not live.]
The room seemed to dim, even with the neon lines still burning on the floor. The chapter of the day closed there, in a circle of blue light and a silence full of knives.