Joan opened her eyes to the faint morning light, feeling strangely rested, yet with a familiar, dull ache behind her temples—a pressure she often accepted as normal. The ache was the residual sign of the memory wipe.
She walked to the bathroom. The sight of her own face in the mirror—eyes clear, expression calm—reinforced the normalcy. She performed her morning routine, finding Jonas's note on the counter—Please eat breakfast, flatty. I had to leave early...—but the actions felt hollow. The routine was a defense against a void she could sense but not name.
She splashed cold water on her face, grabbing the towel hanging on the rack. As the terrycloth met her skin, her hands paused. She noticed a faint, rough speck caught in the cotton weave—a tiny, coarse white thread. It didn't belong to any fabric they owned. It was a physical remnant the memory wipe could not touch.
Suddenly, her nostrils flared. A sharp, metallic odor, like fresh, cold blood and dry iron dust, assaulted her senses. The scent was gone as quickly as it arrived, replaced by the sterile smell of the apartment cleaner.
BANG!
The memory flashed—not a coherent scene, but a blur of dark robes, blinding purple energy, and the chilling final image of white bandages covering a face. A single, panicked thought surfaced, unattached to any context: He saw me. He knows the secret. The Bandaged Man, in her wiped memory, had become the frightening figure she was compelled to chase.
She felt a rush of primal, desperate compulsion. She couldn't recall the source of the image, but she felt a profound, chilling familiarity. She instinctively attributed the terror to the figure she currently obsessed over: The Faceless Man. That figure in the memory—the one wearing the bandages—must be the terrifying man himself, or at least intimately connected to him. Her fractured mind was grasping at the last thing she had consciously processed. This must be the recurring "cue" her subconscious was fighting to retain.
Joan rushed to the offices of Sunshine Daily, plunging into the archives. She ignored the usual morning chatter, driven by a kinetic energy that bordered on panic.
She searched everything: CDE anomalies, non-lethal subjugations, reports of strange disappearances near Sector U and Sector R. But there were no leads. Officer Grif had nothing. Wesley confirmed the files were clean.
Joan realized the truth with frustrating clarity: she had wiped the slate clean. Her successful investigation into the Faceless Man had been perfectly erased. She had no tangible evidence to prove the executions or the Bandaged Man's existence. The thread was worthless; the scent, imaginary.
She leaned back in her chair, pressing her fists against her temples. The trauma was there, but the facts were gone. She attributed the persistent, nagging feeling to her recurring obsession with the Faceless Man. I'm pushing too hard, she thought. My head is playing tricks on me.
That evening, Joan was walking the deserted route back to her apartment. She felt the familiar, inexplicable frisson of being watched—a cold, prickling sensation that had shadowed her since the incident. She quickly slipped into a darkened, unused maintenance corridor, pulling her CDE dagger sleeve down to conceal the weapon.
She waited, listening to the city's distant traffic hum. Nothing.
"You've been chasing someone for a long time, Marn."
The voice was low, gritty, and dangerously close. Joan whirled around, her heart slamming against her ribs.
Standing just beyond the reach of the corridor light, shrouded in the oily darkness, was the Bandaged Man. His entire figure was wrapped in the thick white material, and only his intense, dark eyes were visible. Joan felt a rush of confused recognition—a deep, visceral certainty that she had known this figure multiple times before.
"You're the face I can't recognize," Joan whispered, her voice barely steady. "Is it because of the bandages, or is it the same thing that hides the other man's face? More importantly, who are you?"
The Bandaged Man stepped slightly forward, revealing the shape of his arms. "It is not I whom you seek, Marn. I am not the void you have been chasing for years."
As he spoke, a rush of chaotic, shuffled memories flooded Joan’s mind: The sight of the child collapsing. The taste of salt. The metallic whip. The cold hand over her mouth. The sensory data was raw, real, and undeniable, confirming her trauma.
"It seems you are adapting to the memory wipe," the Bandaged Man continued, a subtle shift in his voice betraying concern. "I guess your CDE control is also improving—or perhaps your memory is finally starting to return."
Joan’s eyes narrowed in shock and dawning fury. Memory wipe? She instantly aimed the slim, personalized CDE-powered dagger she carried concealed in her sleeve. The blade hummed faintly with contained crimson energy.
"I may not look like one, but I am capable of defending myself," Joan warned, her voice hardening. "Whoever you are, you better be ready."
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The Bandaged Man held up his empty hands. "Lower your weapon, Marn. I am not an enemy. My name is Corvin."
Corvin's name felt strangely familiar, echoing in the jumbled fragments of her returning memories. Corvin. Is he playing on my fractured state?
Joan didn't hesitate. "You think I'm easily fooled?"
She launched an attack, firing a quick, low-powered CDE blast aimed at the Bandaged Man's legs. The blast struck the air where Corvin had been standing, kicking up dust, but he was already gone. His movements were swift and noiseless—a ghost in the shadows.
Joan spun around, searching the darkness. She found a small, folded note pinned to the wall where Corvin had stood, stuck there by a small, non-CDE piece of metal that hummed with a different, unknown energy. This piece of metal was not CDE, and it radiated coldness, confirming the existence of the "Unusual Energy" he had been studying.
She ripped it off and read the single line, typed on synthetic paper:
Go to the Enigma Pub.
Joan lowered her dagger, her mind reeling. She was faced with a chilling contradiction: a man who admitted to repeatedly assaulting her memory, who demonstrated uncanny evasion skills, and who was now providing a direct, physical lead.
Is he telling the truth? About my memories? The question hammered against the dull ache in her head. Corvin was a danger, but he was also the only tangible proof she had that her fractured mind wasn't simply a fault in the system. Her dead end was now a terrifying, guided pursuit.
Joan woke with the usual dull ache, but this time, it was accompanied by a terrifying clarity that transcended the memory wipe. The name Corvin was an anchor now. The memory was gone, but the facts remained: Corvin. Memory wipe. The Enigma Pub.
She walked the streets, the name echoing in her mind. Corvin. Corvin. It felt simultaneously true and utterly fabricated. Who is Corvin? Is that even his real name? The possibility that the Bandaged Man had used his true identity was a risk—and therefore, a vital clue.
She knew she couldn't chase shadows or rely on fractured feelings. If she wanted to confirm the impossible, she needed the one thing the Red Empire valued above all else: The definitive record.
Her path led her back to the towering offices of Sunshine Daily, away from the bright modern terminals. She needed the deep past, where records were physical and harder to purge.
Joan found Wesley supervising the loading of massive print rolls onto a delivery drone.
"Marn? Back so soon? I thought you'd be following up on that strange CDE ripple you mentioned."
Joan approached him, her voice low and focused. "Wesley, I need a favor. I need access to the archives. Not the quick-access databases, but the main analog records room—the vault with the physical synth-paper files and crystalline storage cores."
The analog room was a near-mythical place, a Level 4 vault known to few. It was a massive, sprawling chamber built deep into the foundations of the complex, a museum of the Empire's recorded history.
"That vault requires Level 4 authorization, Marn. It's protected by archival data wards," Wesley reminded her, a flicker of curiosity in his eyes. "Are you up to something good? Personal, political, or demon-related?"
Joan gripped the small note with the Enigma Pub address in her pocket. "I don't know, Boss. For now, it's personal. But I know this will link to something good. This feeling… I've never been so sure of a mystery."
Wesley sighed, a hint of genuine affection for her relentless obsession softening his resolve. "Well, a personal obsession that feels like a conspiracy usually pays the rent, doesn't it?"
Wesley immediately submitted a request for special authorization on his behalf, listing the mission as "Historical Research into Pre-Foundational Chaotic Incidents." Within the hour, Joan had the blinking silver access key.
The silver key clicked, and the massive, thick vault door hissed open, moving on heavy hydraulic pistons. The air inside the Level 4 Analog Archive was five degrees colder than the newsroom, regulated to preserve the ancient synth-paper and data cores. The only sound was the whisper of the massive climate handlers and the creak of the rails holding the towering shelves. The room smelled of ozone, dry dust, and the faint, metallic tang of decaying synthetic paper.
Joan realized she wasn't just searching records; she was wading through the physical graveyard of the Empire's mistakes and lies. The sheer volume was staggering. Massive shelves stretched to the high ceiling, filled with synth-paper scrolls and blinking crystalline storage cores—each one containing years of meticulously cataloged, physical data.
She found a research terminal connected directly to the vault’s primary catalog. It was a simple, dedicated machine, designed for indexing physical artifacts.
She brought up the catalog.
Bandaged Man. No results. Assailant, Unidentifiable. Hundreds of reports, none matching.
"I need to narrow the search," she murmured, tracing the name on the screen with her finger. "Is Corvin really his real name?"
She carefully typed the name Corvin into the Empire's public record index filter.
The terminal paused for a moment, the crystalline core humming softly as it accessed restricted sectors. Then, the screen flashed crimson: One match found.
Joan felt a cold dread settle in her stomach. It turns out there was only one man named Corvin in the Red Empire's extensive records that fit any unusual criteria, and he was not an anonymous drifter.
The file was classified, but the archive access key bypassed the soft locks. Joan pulled up the documents, her breath catching as the details scrolled across the screen:
Joan stared at the image, her mind reeling. The shock was immediate. The eyes—sharp, intelligent, and fiercely human—were the same eyes that had pierced her through the filthy white cloth hours ago. The possibility slammed into her like a physical blow: He is the same person.
The gap between the man in the light and the phantom in the dark was a profound wound in her understanding of the world. The Empire hadn't just lost a genius; they had purged one. The memory wipe, the technical capability for high-level evasion, the knowledge of CDE instability—it all stemmed from his background.