Hazeed struggled against the force pulling him deeper into the abyss. The presence of the Architect was suffocating, its mere existence pressing against his mind like an unbearable weight. He clenched his trembling fists, focusing on the sigil on his left hand. It pulsed in defiance, resisting the overwhelming darkness."I haven’t chosen anything!" Hazeed shouted, his voice echoing in the void. "I make my own choices!"The Architect let out a guttural laugh, the sound vibrating through the endless expanse of nothingness. "You still believe you have control? You are merely a fragment of what is to come. Your body, your soul, your essence—they all belong to us now."A cold dread seeped into Hazeed’s bones. He could feel his connection to the sigil growing stronger, but at the same time, the pull of the darkness became even more relentless. The Architect’s form began shifting, tendrils of black energy spiraling around it like living shadows. Hazeed knew he couldn’t win in a direct confro

For Hazeed, it wasn’t blood or death that haunted him—it was the weight of failure. He stood in a vision of a world he couldn't save. Cities in ruin, people he once protected now reduced to ash. He saw himself standing alone, powerless, his sigil dimmed.But then, a faint voice echoed—familiar, steady. Nayla.“Hazeed. Focus.”Her voice cut through the illusion like a blade. Hazeed gritted his teeth, clutching the sigil on his hand.“This is not real,” he muttered. “You don't get to define me, Architect.”The sigil flared with golden light, radiating outward. The illusion cracked, shattering like glass. Around him, Mazda and Goro emerged from their own visions, their expressions shaken but clear. Nayla stood tall, her hand on her heart, her scanner flickering with regained clarity.“We’re back,” Mazda exhaled.“No,” Hazeed said, his voice calm. “We’ve broken through the Architect’s final defense. He knows we’re here to end it.”The room around them shifted once again—no longer a trap,

As the echoes of Hazeed’s command tore through the surreal air, Team Vortex sprang into motion.Mazda unslung his dual-phase disruptors, the barrels glowing with inverted energy. “Eat entropy, nightmares,” he muttered, opening fire. The first echo-beast exploded into a shower of fractured timelines, its body unraveling like a corrupted memory.Goro flanked left, his bracers pulsing as he projected overlapping shields—not to block damage, but to slow perception. “I’ve got suppression fields holding for twelve seconds!” he shouted. “Use them!”Nayla’s fingers blurred over her wrist console, injecting viral code directly into the null-field’s pulse. The air shimmered, causing some of the Herald’s constructs to glitch—flickering between now and never. “I’m trying to overload their temporal anchors, but it’s not enough!”One of the larger echoes charged, shrieking in a voice that sounded like laughter reversed. It slammed into Hazeed—but he didn’t yield. The Gate Lance flared, a core of pu

The rift surged around them like a living storm—colors that had no name bled into the skyless void, while time fractured and reversed in brief spasms. Sound turned into light. Light became weight. Nothing made sense, and yet they moved forward, guided only by instinct—and the unyielding will to survive.Nayla, bleeding from a shallow cut above her eyebrow, pressed forward beside Hazeed. Every step they took felt like walking through someone else's memory. Echoes of lives they never lived brushed against their minds—victories, regrets, endings.“You feel that?” Mazda gritted out. “It’s not just showing us what we’ve lost. It’s trying to replace us. Replace our sense of self.”The entity hovered ahead—no longer formless. It now wore a shape that mimicked their own reflections, distorted through a kaleidoscope of other possibilities. A version of Goro stepped forward—cold-eyed, armored in obsidian. Another of Nayla, her expression emotionless, her body merged with machine. The echoes of

He crouched near the center, brushing away dust and frost with his gloved fingers.The same symbol that had flashed on his monitor was here—etched into stone that wasn’t here yesterday.A spiral turning in on itself.It felt old. Familiar. Wrong.Then the sensor to his left beeped.An energy spike.He froze. “Mazda,” he called through the comm. “You near a terminal?”“Yeah. What are you seeing?”“Localized distortion. Small, but... precise.”There was a pause. “That’s impossible. The rift’s been sealed.”“Yeah,” Hazeed murmured. “But something else opened.”The device on his belt—his personal rift tracker—began to vibrate. Softly at first, then violently.Then it stopped.Everything stopped.Wind. Sound. Time.The light dimmed into a strange, twilight hue, and Hazeed found himself standing… elsewhere.It wasn’t the rift.It was… memory.Only not his.Images flickered around him—places he’d never been, lives he’d never lived. He stood at a battlefield under two moons. He drowned in a s