MistNovel - Read Web Novel Stories & Fiction Online

The tremor in Rin’s hand spread to her arm as she lifted the memory core. Its surface felt wrong, a disorienting fusion of too warm and too cold, like touching a fever dream made solid. Malevolent data streams spiraled within the crystalline sphere. Buried deep in those chaotic patterns, she saw fragments of programming that made her stomach turn. She knew that signature. She had helped write it.
Her overlay flickered, struggling to analyze the core's contents as error messages cascaded across her vision. The data was too damaged, too aggressively encrypted. Whatever this thing contained, it was buried behind layers of digital protection she had not seen since the collapse.
Rin carefully wrapped the core in a signal-dampening cloth she kept for sensitive bounties and tucked it into her jacket's interior pocket. The weight of it pressed against her cracked ribs, a constant, nagging reminder of her moment of weakness. She had frozen. In ten years of hunting the digital plagues of Neo-Kyoto’s ruins, she had never frozen. Not until she heard his voice.
She needed answers, and there was only one person in the city she trusted to help her find them without selling her out to the authorities.
Rin limped out of the arcade, her cybernetics working to compensate for her injuries but unable to completely mask the sharp, grinding pain. The rain had intensified, turning the old sector's streets into shallow rivers that reflected broken neon in a thousand shattered colors. Her minimap guided her through the labyrinth of collapsed buildings and makeshift barriers that marked the boundary between the lawless ruins and Neo-Kyoto's functioning districts.
Twenty minutes later, she reached Kai’s workshop. The entrance was hidden behind a false wall in an abandoned subway station, protected by security measures that ranged from cleverly mundane to illegally lethal. Rin knew the safe path by heart. She navigated the trapped corridor and punched in the access code on a keypad that looked like a piece of rusted metal but housed military-grade encryption. The door slid open with a soft, satisfying hiss.
Kai “Byte” Ishida’s workshop was a cathedral dedicated to technology, both salvaged and stolen. Holographic displays floated in mid-air, cycling through data streams pulled from a dozen different illicit networks. Server towers hummed along the walls, their cooling fans creating a constant white noise backdrop. The air smelled of ozone, synthetic coffee, and the faint, metallic tang of overworked processors.
Kai himself sat in the center of this organized chaos, his fingers dancing across three separate holographic keyboards simultaneously. He was younger than Rin by five years, with bright green eyes that seemed to reflect the monitor glow and hair that defied both gravity and conventional color theory. Today it was a vibrant, electric blue. He glanced up as she entered, his expression shifting from deep concentration to immediate concern.
“Rin? You look like you went three rounds with a sentient garbage disposal.” He abandoned his keyboards and crossed the room to her, his usual playful demeanor replaced by a professional assessment. “Sit. Now.”
She obeyed, mostly because her ribs were screaming in protest with every step. Kai grabbed a med-kit from one of his workbenches and began a quick examination. His touch was gentle but efficient, the product of years spent patching up the various injuries Rin brought home from her hunts.
“Two cracked ribs, confirmed. Bruised liver, maybe. You took a solid hit.” He pulled out a regeneration patch and pressed it against her side through the tear in her shirt. The patch activated with a warm tingle as its synthetic cells began their accelerated healing work. “What happened? Did a parasite get a lucky shot?”
“I got distracted.”
Kai’s hands stilled. He looked up at her, his usual irreverent expression replaced with something more serious. “You don’t get distracted. You’re like a murder-shaped homing missile when you’re on a hunt. What could possibly distract you?”
Without a word, Rin pulled the memory core from her jacket. Even through the signal-dampening cloth, she could feel it pulsing against her palm, a faint and unnatural rhythm. She set it on Kai’s workbench as if it might explode.
“This did.”
Kai approached the core cautiously, his eyes already cycling through analytical patterns as his own, less invasive cybernetic implants activated. He carefully unwrapped the cloth and held the sphere up to the light. His expression shifted from curiosity to confusion, and finally to something that looked a lot like dread.
“Oh. Oh, that’s not good.” He set the core down gently and pulled up a holographic interface, scanning it from multiple angles. The results made him frown. “Rin, this thing has more encryption layers than City Core’s main vault. And underneath all that…” He paused, his fingers freezing over the keyboard as a string of familiar code appeared on his display. “Is that what I think it is?”
“ECHO fragments,” Rin confirmed, her voice flat and hard. “The parasite spoke to me. It used Elias’s voice. It recited a tactical command from a decade ago, something only he and I would have known.”
The workshop fell silent except for the hum of the servers and the soft patter of rain filtering down through the station’s broken ceiling. Kai stared at the core as if it were a live bomb.
“This is not standard parasite mimicry,” he finally said, his voice low. “This is different. This is…” He trailed off, running another, deeper scan. “This is a data ghost. An actual fragment of a person’s consciousness, preserved in a cage of mangled code.”
Rin’s jaw tightened until it ached. “Can you analyze it? Can you get inside?”
“Can I? Yes. Should I?” Kai looked at her, his expression uncharacteristically serious. “That’s a different question. If this thing really contains active ECHO fragments, if there’s even a chance it’s connected to the original code you and Ward created, then analyzing it could flag us to every security system in Neo-Kyoto. City Core monitors ECHO signatures like hawks watching for mice.”
“I need to know what’s in there, Kai.”
He studied her face for a long moment, seeing the grim determination in her eyes, and sighed in defeat. “Yeah. I figured you’d say that.” He pulled up his most secure analysis rig, the one he reserved for his most illegal and dangerous contracts. “This is going to take time. And Rin? If we find what I think we’re going to find in here, this gets a lot more complicated than a simple bounty hunt.”
“I know.”
She watched as Kai began the careful process of interfacing with the memory core. His fingers flew across holographic keys while lines of code cascaded down multiple displays. The core pulsed in its examination cradle, its corrupted light casting strange, dancing shadows across the workshop.
Somewhere in that crystallized data, buried under layers of encryption and digital decay, lay the answers to questions Rin had forced herself to stop asking a decade ago. She was not sure she wanted those answers anymore. But she knew she needed them.