Episode 06. Those Who Erased Names
# Episode 06. Those Who Erased Names
Jun Aster.
Those few characters remaining in the center of a fire-scarred record plate were enough to change the entire air inside the corridor.
Sion could not move for a long time, holding the fragment. Erased names usually stayed erased to the end. Once incinerated, a name vanished not only from records but from people's mouths. So for a name that had been forbidden since long ago to return like this — from the dead archivist's final resting place — was something close to a nightmare.
Seorin was the first to recover her voice.
"…Insane."
That single word was so precise that Sion could not even raise his head.
Sern, standing on the other side, was also silent.
He looked at Ater before the record plate.
His lord had stopped. It was a very brief silence, but Sern knew. It was rare for Ater Valkar to stop like that. Especially before a name.
Ater opened his mouth, very slowly.
"Look at the fragment."
The words were directed at Sion, but sounded as if spoken to himself as well. Do not get excited, do not judge by emotion first, look at the record first — the kind of old habit ground into bone. In House Valkar, in the Approval Bureau, the method practiced until it became second nature.
Sion heard that and finally smirked.
"Even in this situation, that comes out first?"
Seorin followed immediately.
"Nice. A name comes back from the dead, but sentiment later, records first."
Sern said low.
"Nothing is proven by sentiment."
"It's already proven."
This time Sion raised his head.
The eyes that had been on the fragment a moment ago now faced forward.
"At least one thing. That someone tried to erase this name to the end."
Sion looked at the fragment's edge.
"And instead of destroying it all at once, they killed it in pieces, cut by cut."
Ater did not answer immediately. Instead he lowered his gaze to the floor beside the body. The archivist's final posture, the broken capsule, the scratched preservation room door, the forcibly torn access terminal, and the automatic preservation device not yet fully dead. Apart from emotion, the scene was speaking clearly.
Someone had come here.
Someone had tried to take something out.
And the archivist had succeeded in leaving part of it behind, until the very end.
Because it was the kind of record that would be finished if it passed whole at once — he had kept it from passing whole. Closer to someone who deliberately left fragments so that nothing could be taken all at once.
Sern moved first.
He knelt before the preservation terminal two steps from the body and checked the dying screen.
"One device is still alive."
Sion shifted his gaze at once.
The terminal surface was cracked and the lower section scorched, but the inner core blinked a faint blue light — not fully dead.
Ater asked.
"Can it be recovered."
Sern answered short.
"From the device alone, difficult. But there are traces of someone pushing something in at the end."
Before Sern finished speaking, Sion was already searching near the dead archivist's hand again. From the cracks in the floor thick with black ash and dried blood, two more thin record-plate fragments emerged. One was completely dead. The other had only an edge remaining.
Seorin looked at the body and said low.
"Never let go, till the end."
At that, Sion paused his hand briefly.
Between the archivist's stiffened fingers, black ash still clung. The trace of someone who had held on, torn free, tried to push in — until the last moment. The hand of a person who could not stop working even as they died.
Sion murmured, very small.
"Carried it all alone."
That this was not simply the hand of someone who'd gathered a few documents and died — that much was now clear. It was the hand of someone who had divided and left behind, until the very end, so that not everything would be lost at once.
Sern connected a temporary line to the device's underside, and Ater forced the dying authorization structure awake through his wrist terminal. Sion took one fragment pulled from the archivist's hand and slid it into the slot Sern indicated.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, in the air above the terminal, broken sentences surfaced.
At first, only noise.
Shattered visual data, collapse warnings, incomplete approval numbers, deletion failure markers.
Then came the voice.
Rough and cracked — the voice of someone moments from death.
The archivist.
"…Recovery… the sequence… no… look at the sequence first…"
The voice cut, then continued.
Most of the middle was destroyed, but that only made it more wrenching.
"…The name remains… but… if the sequence dies… the verdict changes…"
Sion's eyes trembled.
Seorin, for the first time, closed her mouth without a word.
Sern was reading the broken sentences floating in the air; Ater was receiving their meaning more slowly, but more deeply.
The voice came alive one last time.
This time, far shorter.
"…Those who erased the name… the history…"
Noise.
"…they wrote it."
And one final sentence remained in the air.
**Original approval sequence mismatch**
**Recovery hold reason: upper-level seal intervention**
The last error message lingered, trembling, then spread blue across the cracked terminal and vanished.
No one spoke immediately.
A single name returning was already enormous, and the voice the archivist had left behind implied far more. That what they now had to chase was not a single sentence but severed sequences and the scenes left behind — everyone felt it, dimly. But there was no time to put that into words here.
From below the dying terminal, a short warning tone suddenly spiked.
Sern turned his gaze first.
"Sir."
A red line spread across the terminal surface.
Though playback had ended, the device was pushing its last remaining authorization signal outward.
A signal that a long-hidden record had been accessed again.
Ater reached for the terminal immediately, but too late.
The red indicator flashed once more, then died.
Sion cursed low.
"We're not the only ones who saw it now."
"It is worse than that."
Sern was already activating his wrist terminal.
The Empire Approval Bureau's formal line was still quiet.
But outside it — the thin networks that left no trace in formal reports — those were already trembling.
One, two, three.
The Black Covenant descendant line.
The outer ring beyond the echo network.
Old eyes planted at the port's edge long ago.
Sern's gaze sank, barely perceptibly.
"They are here."
Ater read his expression and asked.
"Which side."
Sern answered without closing the screen.
"Not only the Empire."
That single short sentence changed the air inside the corridor completely.
Seorin reacted first.
"Nice. So they're coming from above and below."
Sion looked at her.
"Below?"
"An access of this scale — there's no way only the Alliance outer-route administration's upper level moves."
Seorin's words were fast; her mind had already moved to the next frame.
"Port brokers, middleman couriers, civilian surveillance lines — they'll all attach for money. Meaning the ones coming to stop us aren't a single line."
Ater said low.
"The Empire will close the gate first."
"And through that gap, the other side seeps in."
Seorin followed immediately.
She was no longer looking at the body or the records. Instead she was reading the corridor structure, the preservation room's rear exit, the upper piping, the side wall's crack, and the interval of footsteps outside — all at once.
"Sion."
"Yeah."
"From now, understanding comes later. Get out alive, then read."
Sion drew a short breath.
She was right. The moment they dug for more fragments here, the records might survive but the people would not.
Sern had already entered a different calculation.
Time remaining before the Empire's formal blockade closed, the port's outer surveillance routes, the last viable exit corridor the Black Covenant descendants had left behind, and the survival probability of these four moving together versus apart.
The answer was unpleasantly clear.
"Sir."
"Speak."
"We must exit together."
The first face to change at those words was Sion's.
"Great. There's the thing I didn't want to hear."
Sern did not blink.
"Separately, we are destroyed one by one."
Seorin laughed short.
"Pretty way to put it. You're saying all four of us are caught in the same pursuit net."
"Yes."
Ater was silent for the briefest moment.
The situation itself — an Empire Approval Bureau officer needing to escape as a single unit with two Alliance outer-route administration operatives — was already abnormal. But the signals from outside were clear. What was moving now was not formal order alone. Formal order and informal greed had caught the same scent at the same time.
He concluded, short.
"We extract first."
Sion mocked immediately.
"Approval granted."
"This is not a situation for joy."
"On that, I agree."
From the outer corridor, the sound of metal striking metal grew closer.
This time from multiple directions. One sound of something closing from the upper level, two sets of rough footsteps running up from below, and one faint vibration approaching along the outer wall from behind.
Seorin pointed direction with her hand immediately.
"Front is blocked. Above is closing. The preservation room's back wall — that crack. I saw it earlier."
Sion turned his body at once.
"Ventilation piping?"
"Yeah. One person at a time can fit through."
Sern added the calculation immediately.
"The pipe's end drops below the outer maintenance bridge. Official blueprints show it sealed, but the echo network's old waypoint markers have it live."
Sion heard that and looked back at Sern.
"How do you know that."
Sern answered short.
"There is always at least one person who knows the roads you do not."
Seorin smirked at that.
"Annoying, but competent."
"Likewise."
Ater was already recovering the capsule fragments and terminal core left beside the body.
Sion tucked the fragment bearing Jun Aster's name deeper inside his coat. Records were a later problem now. Whether they could carry them out came first.
From outside the corridor entrance, someone shouted.
"The inside is open!"
Immediately after, an impact like gunfire struck the metal wall.
Dust rained down.
"Go!"
This time Seorin moved first.
Sion followed behind, Sern held the direction toward the actual open crack beside them, and Ater looked back once at the very end. The dead archivist's resting place, the dead terminal, the half-open preservation room door. He could not look long at a place already too late.
The four pushed their bodies into the crack behind the preservation room wall without another word.
And in that moment — the Empire closed from above, and the Alliance and the port's dirty hands began seeping in from below.
The instant Jun Aster's name resurfaced, all four who had seen it were sliding into the same pursuit net.