Confusion - Chapter 9-v0.9- By Avnsnax -

He turned the slate toward her. The code on the screen shifted, rearranged itself into a geometric pattern that hurt to look at. Rina flinched.

He heard the soft hiss of the door seal. He didn’t look up. He knew the footsteps.

“Then what?”

“Directive found. Executing: Find the one who dreams of zeros. He knows why we’re empty.” Confusion - Chapter 9-v0.9- By AVNSnax

He turned, confused. “What?”

And he had never, in his entire life, dreamed of zeros. End of Chapter 9-v0.9

He looked down at the floor, then back at the wall. Nothing. Just his own familiar silhouette. “I don’t see anything.” He turned the slate toward her

They stared at each other. The generator hummed. The rain fell harder. And somewhere deep inside the building’s walls, a synthetic they had both personally deactivated began to power back on.

Kaelen finally looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, but there was a strange clarity in them—the kind that comes right before a breakdown or a breakthrough. “The synthetics we’ve been hunting? They aren’t malfunctioning. They’re not being controlled by a foreign AI either.”

Kaelen’s shadow on the wall wasn’t his own. He heard the soft hiss of the door seal

“It was there,” she insisted. Her voice cracked. “I saw it.”

The word “Unknown” felt like a lie. It had been scrawled across every report, every interrogation, every autopsy of the rogue units for the past three weeks. And now, it was staring him in the face again, mocking him from a dead machine’s final broadcast.