The threshold climbed.
Not smoothly—violently.
The vertical scale on the central screen rose past its initial stability point, the calm green indicators bleeding into amber, then orange, then a warning red that pulsed in time with Sophia's heart.
THRESHOLD: 10%
The moment it crossed into double digits, something in her broke formation.
Sophia's jaw tightened hard enough that her teeth ground audibly. Her hands curled against the restraints of the chair—not from fear, but resistance. Memories surged not as images but as weight—layer upon layer of lived experience collapsing inward.
Training corridors filled with judgment.
Mission debriefs spoken with polite disappointment.
Praise that never felt earned.
Failure that never faded.
Her subconscious recoiled.
No—stop—this isn't—
She screamed.
The chamber reacted instantly.
Red chains erupted from the floor and walls, not summoned by Dr. F's hand, but by the chamber's autonomous safety protocol. They wrapped around her wrists, her ankles, her torso—not to punish, but to stabilize violent neural feedback translating into physical convulsions.
THRESHOLD: 12%
Blood spilled from the corner of her mouth as her jaw clenched beyond human tolerance.
The screens ignited.
Every surface erupted into cascading playback—voices from her past, layered and overlapping, each word indexed, filtered, and scanned for relevance. Every insult, every command, every half-spoken doubt replayed at once, algorithms tearing through the noise in search of alignment.
Dr. F's posture stiffened.
He turned sharply, eyes narrowing—not at her, but at the data.
Human memory is infinite, he knew.
You don't extract truth—you hunt for fractures.
The system responded by escalating.
THRESHOLD: 20%
Sophia's scream tore raw from her throat, no longer controlled, no longer human in cadence. The DNA obsidian fabric clinging to her body darkened rapidly as blood soaked through, staining black-red beneath the harsh chamber light.
Her thoughts exploded outward, no longer coherent sentences but shards—symbols, acronyms, echoes.
One of the screens froze.
A single term pulsed in stark white against the red background:
BTM–Ω
Dr. F's breath hitched—only once, only briefly.
"That shouldn't be accessible to her," he muttered.
But the system was already pressing forward.
"Sophia," he said sharply, voice cutting through the chaos, "hold on. Just wait."
She couldn't hear him.
THRESHOLD: 25%
The screens flickered violently now, data stuttering under overload. The red chains tightened, biting into her restored flesh as her body arched involuntarily.
Another term surfaced—ripped free from deep, sealed memory layers:
SS RANK
Dr. F's eyes hardened.
"That classification is beyond ISA public schema," he said quietly. "Keep going."
He did not look at her.
He watched the words.
THRESHOLD: 26… 27… 29
The alert systems screamed.
NEURON COLLISION RATE: +1,000,000,000 / SECOND
A third fragment tore through the noise:
HEXA BARRIER
Dr. F's fingers twitched for the first time—an instinctive reflex, immediately suppressed.
"That's pre-universal defense theory," he said under his breath. "Why would—"
He stopped himself.
The extraction was unraveling too fast.
THRESHOLD: 32%
Blood spilled from Sophia's eyes now, thin red lines tracing down her cheeks as her screams fractured into hoarse, broken sounds. The chamber's ambient light dimmed automatically, compensating for biological distress.
A fourth phrase emerged—clear, unmistakable:
GHOST DIVISION
Dr. F's composure cracked.
"Impossible," he said. "That division doesn't exist in any recorded ISA—"
THRESHOLD: 35%
The chamber registered a catastrophic anomaly.
Blood seeped from her ears.
The system stuttered—screens flashing between red and black, warning sigils overlapping one another. Sophia's screaming became something else entirely—no longer pain, but collapse.
Dr. F stepped forward.
For the first time.
"She's resisting," he said sharply, not to the chamber but to himself. "Subconscious override—one more term—"
THRESHOLD: 37%
Every screen turned red.
CRITICAL — DEVICE FAILURE IMMINENT
Dr. F moved instantly.
He slashed his hand downward.
"Shutdown. Now."
The chamber obeyed.
Power collapsed inward. The helmet disengaged violently, snapping upward into the ceiling on emergency gravitic recoil. The red chains dissolved into nothingness as systems shut down in cascading waves.
Sophia's body went limp.
She collapsed forward in the chair, bloodied, unconscious—no scream left to give.
The silence afterward was absolute.
Dr. F stood frozen for a fraction of a second.
Then he crossed the distance to her in two strides.
He caught her before she hit the floor.
His hands—steady, precise—held her head carefully, checking vitals with his eyes alone as the chamber began emergency stabilization.
"She shouldn't know those words," he whispered.
Not to the system.
To the truth now staring back at him.
Sophia Watson was not an uninformed S-rank.
She was a sealed variable.
And whatever ISA had buried inside her—
It was far older, far deeper, and far more dangerous than he had calculated.