The image of the stone slab with the hand-shaped imprint kept echoing in Kuro's mind like a slow, persistent reverberation.
He remembered every detail, the depth of the indentation, the worn edges, the way his skin aligned perfectly with the surface, as if it had been carved just for him.
No pain. No cold. But it ran deep.
Like touching the second layer of a reality long dormant.
He shook his head, unwilling to let the thought sink any deeper.
...
They reached the thinning part of the woods, where a shallow stream cut across their path, the same one they passed on their way in. Both stopped to rest.
Kuro rinsed his face with the cool water. Mike sat with his head folded into his knees.
"When you blacked out," Kuro asked quietly, "did you see anything?"
Mike stayed silent for a moment, then nodded.
"Yeah," he said. "Not images... but thoughts."
"What kind of thoughts?"
Mike lifted his eyes slightly. "Do you think it was some kind of creature?"
Kuro considered, then shook his head. "No. Not something that lives the way we define life. It felt more like... a concentration."
Kuro stared at Mike for a long while but didn't ask more. The word, concentration, hovered in their minds the rest of the walk, a term they didn't fully grasp, looping silently in the space between them.
When they returned to Noctis, nothing had changed. The traffic lights still blinked with disinterest. The drink stand by the station still played soft background music. A group of students still fooled around outside the library, tossing jokes like nothing mattered.
Neither Mike nor Kuro said a word on the way back.
They rode double on the electric scooter, slow and soundless, like two kids coming home from a failed camping trip. But they both knew that what they had been through wasn't merely strange, it was real, and yet unreal.
Back at the dorm, Mike showered first while Kuro waited.
The hot water didn't just rinse away the dust of forest and street. It stripped something else, a layer of static, of weight. Each drop that slid down skin seemed to wake nerves that had forgotten their function.
When they were both clean and dry, they sat across from each other in Kuro's room. A fold-up table, two plastic chairs. Old equipment scattered on the floor. A map spread beneath yellow light.
Kuro opened the image folder. The screen flickered, grainy, but one of the final photos before the device failed was still there. Near the edge of the anomaly zone, in the right corner, a smudge, stretched, blurred.
"I zoomed in already," Mike said. "You see it, right?"
Kuro nodded, frowning. "But whatever's at the center... it's warping the image. Hard to make out."
"It kind of looks like that stone monument," Kuro murmured. "But why is it there? That ruin, it shouldn't be that close, and no one seems to have discovered it. Even though it's just... in the forest."
Mike picked up a pen and circled the blur.
He scribbled quickly: "Unverified zone - further data needed. Area contains anomalous energy - uncertain origin."
His hand shook slightly.
Kuro spoke without looking up. "Do you think... it's real?"
Mike paused. Then said, almost in a whisper:
"It wasn't just something I saw. Or felt. It was... very real."
The next day, they returned to school. Life didn't wait. Professors didn't ask. Classmates didn't notice. Everything moved forward as if nothing had happened.
But inside both of them, something had shifted. A kind of emptiness, not because they had lost something, but because something had been left unresolved.
That afternoon, they met again in the library.
Mike brought printed scans from the backup drive. Not much data, but enough to rekindle old questions. Kuro brought his notebook filled with hand-drawn glyphs and marginal maps of the outer zones.
Lined up side-by-side, their materials revealed patterns.
Each location where stone obelisks appeared, they all aligned to a central axis.
The symbols carved into the stones were not identical, but they shared structure: center, spiral, six arms.
"This isn't coincidence," Mike muttered. "But... could humans ever have possessed such a form of perception or power?"
Kuro didn't answer.
He turned to a page in his notebook.
Drawn there: a circle inside a triangle, layered over three tiny wave lines.
"Do you think... we're the first to see this again?"
Mike stared at the page. "Probably not the first to ever see it. But maybe... the first to say it out loud."
Mike pulled up the final photo again on his tablet. He adjusted the contrast, leaned in close.
After a pause, he looked at Kuro.
"You know... if we really are the first, why us? Doesn't that seem off to you? Like maybe it... led you here."
That line echoed in Kuro's mind, like a quiet knock on a door that had never truly been shut.
A door that had opened when they entered the anomaly.
A door that... may never close again.
The hum of the lab still lingered in Cerin's ears, even after the machines had gone silent. Not a real sound, just the echo. Like footsteps in an empty hall.
The air smelled of warm plastic and latex powder. Another experiment done. Some off-hand jokes from his group. Then nothing.
He leaned back in his chair.
Everyone had stepped out.
Except Taara.
She wasn't part of his group. Belonged to another team in the same lab class. Cerin only knew her through Lyna, his girlfriend. Or something like that.
Lyna once described Taara as "a moody genius with unreliable attendance."
Taara dragged a chair beside him. No permission asked. None needed.
"Your friends," she said casually, "Mike and... Kuro, right?"
Cerin blinked. "What about them?"
"Saw them last weekend. Leaving campus. Didn't look like a picnic. Their bags weren't even proper hiking gear. Looked more like... tools."
Cerin didn't answer right away.
"Probably fieldwork or something," he offered vaguely.
"Both of them?"
He nodded.
Taara leaned back, her eyes searching invisible lines in the ceiling.
"Thought you three were close."
Cerin said nothing.
He'd noticed the changes too. Mike had grown more silent. Kuro even more withdrawn. And it wasn't the kind of distance that came from being busy. It felt intentional. Contained.
Still, Cerin hadn't asked.
Not because he didn't care.
But because his mind had been cluttered with too many fragments, assignments, presentation drafts, Lyna's half-laughs, their last date that felt like a formal rehearsal of nothing.
He wasn't even sure what they were anymore. Lovers? Friends? Placeholders?
His phone buzzed. The lab group chat. He skimmed. Ignored it.
The break wasn't over yet, but the TA had returned. Taara walked away.
Cerin stayed seated a moment longer. Then quietly rose.
Late afternoon. Sun dipping low, heating the sidewalk from beneath.
Cerin walked slowly past the auxiliary tech wing, where Mike sometimes claimed a storage room as his own lab.
He hadn't planned to stop. But something pulled his steps to a halt.
The door wasn't locked.
Inside: scattered papers, half-sketched diagrams, notes hastily left behind.
Cerin stepped in.
A yellowed article peeked from under a digital magnetometer, something about geomagnetic anomalies near the southeastern basin of Noctis, dated almost a decade back.
He frowned.
That zone wasn't in their course material. Not even listed on the standard mapping files.
On a folded paper map, someone had circled areas in thick red.
Names scratched out.
Only a question mark remained.
Cerin lifted another sheet. Rough sketches. Electrodynamic pulses. Oscillation intervals. Mike's handwriting scribbled:
"Convergence? Not certain."
"No satellite correlation."
"Measured it, three times."
Cerin felt a chill crawl up his spine.
Not fear.
Recognition.
Mike and Kuro were following something.
Not homework.
Not a game.
But something else entirely.