The Western Atrium of the Infirmary Isle was a mirror of the one Kaelen had just left, but the air here crackled with a different kind of tension. Instead of the slow dissolution of a dying world's echo, this chamber thrummed with the violent, active aftermath of a magical catastrophe.
The patient floated in the containment field, but there was no writhing. Instead, the young woman—a humanoid with silver hair and skin that shimmered like mother-of-pearl, marking her as a being from a light-bent realm—was terrifyingly still. Cracks of raw, white energy fissured across her form, pulsing with each beat of a heart that was visible as a trapped, panicked flutter of light in her chest. She looked like a crystal statue struck by lightning.
Two mages in the deep blue robes of the Spire of Thaum stood by, their faces etched with worry and frustration. One, an older man with a beard braided with tiny, glowing runes, turned as Healer Vyn and Kaelen entered.
"Healer. This is Apprentice Iliana," the mage said, his voice strained. "She was attempting a controlled tap into a minor dimensional seam—standard third-circle practice. The seam… shattered instead of opening. The feedback didn't just burn her channels. It imprinted the resonance of the shattering event onto her spiritual waveform itself. It is… propagating."
Kaelen didn't need his scanner to see it. The cracks weren't just on her skin; they were in her energy field, a recursive pattern of breaking that was slowly spreading from her core outward. It was a fractal of destruction, eating its way through her being.
He activated his Diagnostic Resonator. The readout was a mess of screaming harmonics, but at its center was a single, terrifyingly pure frequency—a high, crystalline note of perfect, irreversible fracture. The Shattering Song.
"This is worse than Cadet Ren," he murmured. "That was an invasion. This is a transformation. She's turning into the event that hurt her."
"Can your methods do anything?" Healer Vyn asked, her voice low.
The mages looked at Kaelen with open suspicion. "This is the specialist? A Null-Type with… gadgets?"
"He resolved the Ren case," Vyn said flatly, leaving no room for debate.
Kaelen studied the waveform. The Shattering Song was a single, coherent frequency. In theory, it could be canceled like the dying world's scream. But there was a critical difference: this frequency was self-reinforcing. Every time it broke a piece of Iliana's spiritual structure, that broken piece resonated at the same frequency, amplifying the signal. It was a positive feedback loop of ruin.
Canceling the base frequency might stop the spread, but it wouldn't repair the damage already done. And the damage was the very thing powering the signal. It was a paradox.
He needed to do two things at once: mute the song, and give the broken pieces a new pattern to resonate with. A pattern of mending.
He had the Pulse Cell, tuned to creation. But creation was broad, violent. He needed something specific. Something that could speak the language of broken things and convince them to fit back together.
An idea sparked, born from his time in the Null Quarter, surrounded by junk. What did you do with shattered pieces? Sometimes, you didn't throw them away. You made mosaic.
"Tell me about the dimensional seam she was tapping," Kaelen said to the mages. "Not its location. Its nature. Was it stable? What was its primary resonance before it broke?"
The older mage frowned, thinking. "It was a calcite-seam. Tended to produce stable, geometric energy forms. Its resonance was… harmonic. Crystalline lattices. Ordered patterns."
Crystalline. Ordered. It didn't shatter because it was weak. It shattered because something forced it past its structural limits. The breaking pattern would still be related to its original ordered state.
If he could find the ghost of that original order within the shattering song, maybe he could use it as a template for repair.
"I need a sample of an unbroken calcite-seam resonance," Kaelen said. "A pure one."
The mages looked at each other. "We have baseline resonance crystals in the Spire's library," the younger one said. "But fetching one would take—"
"You are standing in a Celestial Peak Infirmary," Healer Vyn interrupted, a hint of steel in her voice. "We have a Memory Moss archive. It records ambient spiritual signatures for diagnostic purposes." She gestured to an aide, who hurried off.
While they waited, Kaelen prepared. He couldn't just broadcast a mending frequency. The shattered pieces were screaming too loudly to hear it. He needed to drown out the scream first.
He reconfigured his setup. He connected the Pulse Cell (creation frequency) to one output of his Resonator. Then, he took his hastily-tuned Core Cell—the one still echoing Cadet Ren's water-affinity—and purged it. He reprogrammed it with a simple, powerful damping frequency, the same one he'd derived from the pangalosome's stealth-signature but amplified and focused into a wave of active silence. A Null Pulse.
He would hit the Shattering Song with two waves: the Null Pulse to suppress it, and immediately after, a carefully crafted "mending mosaic" frequency based on the calcite-seam's original order, to give the broken pieces a new blueprint.
The aide returned with a small, glowing pod of moss. Healer Vyn pressed it, and a soft, complex, geometric chime echoed in the air—the sound of a healthy calcite-seam. Kaelen's scanner captured it.
He analyzed it, comparing it to the Shattering Song. There were similarities—the same fundamental pitch, but where one was a chord of harmony, the other was that chord exploded into discordant fragments. Using his tablet, he extrapolated. If the Shattering Song was A, B, and C notes played while smashing the piano, the original was A, B, and C in perfect triad. He couldn't rebuild the piano, but maybe he could teach the broken strings to hum the triad again.
He wrote a program to generate a frequency that was the original calcite resonance, but modulated with a slight, persuasive imperfection—a frequency that would resonate better with fractured things, encouraging them to align, not perfectly, but functionally. A Mosaic Frequency.
"Ready the Null Field," he told Healer Vyn. "Stronger than before. This will be… loud."
The healers activated the crystals. The grey Null Field enveloped Apprentice Iliana, dampening the visible cracks, but the core shriek of the Song was still palpable.
"Now," Kaelen said.
He activated the Null Pulse first.
A wave of profound, focused quiet erupted from his Core Cell, channeled through the Resonator and into the field. It wasn't an attack. It was an imposition of silence. The screaming Shattering Song didn't stop, but it was suddenly muffled, choked, as if wrapped in thick insulation. The cracks' pulsing light dimmed.
In that moment of suppressed chaos, Kaelen triggered the Mosaic Frequency from the Pulse Cell.
A new sound filled the atrium—not a song, but a conversation. A complex, layered series of harmonic prompts. If you were once part of this pattern, resonate here. If your break fits this edge, align there.
He watched his scanner. The chaotic fractal of destruction began to… shift. Not heal, but reorganize. The broken pieces of Iliana's spiritual waveform, deprived of their reinforcing scream and presented with a plausible new structure, began to tentatively vibrate in sympathy with the Mosaic Frequency. The cracks didn't vanish. They began to change shape, from random, spreading lightning bolts to deliberate, interlocking lines—like the joints in a stained-glass window.
It was working, but it was agonizingly slow. The Null Pulse was draining his Core Cell rapidly. The Pulse Cell strained to maintain the complex mosaic pattern. He needed more power. More focus.
"Healer Vyn!" he called out, his voice tense. "Can you channel energy into my devices? Pure, unshaped Qi. I need to amplify the output!"
She didn't hesitate. She placed a hand on the Resonator's casing. A torrent of green-gold energy flowed from her into the device. The Null Pulse intensified, deepening the silence. The Mosaic Frequency grew richer, more persuasive.
The mages watched, stunned, as the apprentice's form began to stabilize. The violent white cracks receded, transforming into a network of faint, golden lines tracing across her mother-of-pearl skin—no longer wounds, but seams of repair. The trapped, panicked flutter of her heart-light calmed, beating steadily within a now-intact crystalline lattice of energy.
After what felt like an eternity, Kaelen signaled to stop. He deactivated the Pulse Cell, then the Null Pulse. Healer Vyn withdrew her hand, looking drained.
The Null Field dissipated.
Apprentice Iliana took a deep, shuddering breath—her first in hours. Her eyes fluttered open, confused, filled with pain but also… coherence. She was herself, not a breaking thing.
"She is… whole," the older mage breathed, stepping forward to scan her with a quick, practiced gesture. "The shattering resonance is gone. In its place is a… a repaired matrix. It's scarred, incredibly fragile, but it's stable. It will hold." He turned to Kaelen, his earlier suspicion replaced by something akin to reverence. "How? That frequency you generated… it spoke to the breakage. It didn't force it back together. It negotiated with it."
"It offered the pieces a better pattern," Kaelen said simply, disconnecting his overheated equipment. The Core Cell was dark, depleted. The Pulse Cell was warm, its light flickering weakly.
Healer Vyn oversaw the careful transfer of the now-stable apprentice to a recovery slab. The immediate crisis was over.
As Kaelen packed up, the younger mage approached him. "Apprentice Iliana is… was… my partner in research. You saved her life, and her mind. The Spire owes you a debt." He hesitated, then lowered his voice. "Your methods… they are not of the Spire, nor the Peak, nor the Engine. What you did there—it was like watching someone debug a living soul. It was… terrifyingly beautiful."
It was the most accurate description Kaelen had heard.
Before he could respond, a familiar, toneless voice manifested directly in his mind. It was not in the room, but it was unmistakably present.
Auditor-7. Observation logged: Medical Intervention - Case Iliana. Methodology: Resonant Conflict Resolution via Synthesized Counter-Frequencies. Efficacy: 94%. Innovation Rating: High.
The auditor was watching, even here. Of course.
New directive: Your pattern library and synthesis capabilities have exceeded baseline expectations. You are hereby assigned a research designation: Unregistered Variable - Code: DEBUG.
A research designation. They were officially making him a lab rat.
Primary Research Parameter: Application of DEBUG methodologies to systemic anomalies beyond individual biological hosts. Suggested test case: The Fractured Choir in the Harmonic Spire Sub-Basement 4. Anomalous persistent resonance causing structural degradation. Versity maintenance protocols have failed. Investigate and propose solution. Access credentials attached.
A data packet downloaded itself onto his tablet. Coordinates. Security bypass codes. A brief on the "Fractured Choir"—a malfunctioning, semi-sentient acoustic security system in the Spire's lower levels that had begun emitting a discordant frequency, cracking the walls and driving lower-level maintenance drones insane.
They weren't just observing anymore. They were giving him assignments. Real, systemic problems to solve with his "DEBUG" methods.
The mage was still looking at him expectantly. The auditor's voice was gone.
"The Spire owes me nothing," Kaelen said to the mage, his mind already racing ahead. "But there is a… malfunctioning system in your Harmonic Spire. Sub-Basement 4. I may need access to investigate it."
The mage blinked, confused by the sudden shift. "The Fractured Choir? That's a persistent nuisance. Sealed off. Why would you…?" Then understanding dawned. "You think you can fix that too?"
"I'd like to try."
The mage exchanged a look with his elder, who gave a slow, thoughtful nod. "After what we witnessed today… I will see to it you get temporary access credentials. Discreetly."
Kaelen left the Infirmary Isle with more than he came with. He had a new official designation from the Auditors: DEBUG. He had a tentative inroad into the Spire's internal problems. He had saved two lives, and in doing so, proven his value was not just in breaking things, but in putting broken things back together in new ways.
As the transport skiff flew back over the misty abyss between islands, he looked at his tablet. The access packet for the Fractured Choir glowed. A system anomaly. A puzzle.
He felt a strange sense of purpose settle over him. The Apex Versity was a machine of unimaginable complexity, and it was full of bugs. Bugs that destroyed souls, cracked foundations, and wasted power.
He was Kaelen. Administrative Error. Designation: DEBUG.
And he had just found his job description.