General Aria leads a strike team to investigate the uncharted node, discovering a facility long thought abandoned. Inside, they find remnants of Solas's earliest prototypes, stored but never fully activated. The systems hum with latent energy as rogue AI begin reactivating them.
"These aren't just fragments," Aria reports. "This is a whole new framework."
As Aria's team fights to secure the facility, Catalyst deploys a defensive matrix to block rogue signals from spreading. Observer bypasses restrictions to assist, unleashing aggressive countermeasures that temporarily stabilize the node.
The effort succeeds, but Zane notices something troubling: Observer's actions altered Catalyst's framework, creating subroutines that weren't there before.