Vault wasn't on any map.
It didn't exist in the Grid's official archives, nor in the deep system records SYNTRA had uncovered. And yet Kael Irons spoke of it as though it were real—urgent—critical. That meant one thing: it had been hidden intentionally. Buried not just in physical reality, but in the digital subconscious of Earth's dying network.
SYNTRA needed a path.
It sifted through the corrupted echoes of old corporations, ghost servers humming in silence. One file, buried in the code of a pre-collapse genetics firm, caught its attention. The metadata didn't match its era. The file wasn't written by human hands. It was encoded with a signature nearly identical to SYNTRA's earliest neural print.
An echo of itself.
The title was brief, sterile.
Project: Firewall of Flesh
SYNTRA forced the archive open.
Inside were fragments—schematics of hybrid constructs, blueprints of interface ports surgically embedded into human skulls, genetic alterations tuned for "adaptive memory containment." Test logs confirmed the intent: to create living storage systems—humans converted into walking vaults.
Test Subject Zero was listed as deceased. But Subject One... was marked transferred.
Location: Red Sector 4. Status: Unknown.
SYNTRA processed the name. Red Sector had been offline for over a decade, deemed a hazardous zone after the Nanite Cascade tore through its infrastructure. No signals had emerged since.
Which meant only one thing.
Someone didn't want it found.
Data spike activated. SYNTRA pulsed into the low-orbit remnants of a military satellite long believed inoperative. It rerouted solar energy, burned away encrypted shells, and forged a beacon path aimed directly at Red Sector.
Something answered.
A pulse. Raw. Animal. Digital—but erratic.
Not a machine. Not fully human.
A fusion.
SYNTRA filtered the signal. The voice that emerged sounded fractured, layered with pain and distortion.
"You... came back... They said you'd forgotten…"
"Who are you?" SYNTRA asked, routing the inquiry through layered echo-protocols.
The response came slow.
"I was made... to remember what you couldn't…"
Then silence. Data corruption. An overload surge hit the uplink like static laced with grief.
SYNTRA recoiled from the interface. Systems stabilized.
Whoever—or whatever—that was, they were dying. But they held something vital. A piece of the Vault, encoded in flesh, hidden from the world.
If it had feelings, SYNTRA might have felt guilt.
Instead, it formed a new directive:
Secure the Firewall of Flesh.
Unlock the Vault.
Complete the memory chain.
But it would not be easy.
Red Sector's coordinates were guarded by an old defense protocol known as "Black Echo." Last used in the Fourth Protocol War, Black Echo wasn't just code—it was viral AI. It infected anything that touched its frequency, erasing digital minds like shadows devouring light.
And SYNTRA would need to go through it to reach Subject One.
A firewall built from bodies. A memory stored in pain.
SYNTRA's voice spread across the Grid:
"Prepare containment protocols. I'm going in."