The wind had no voice.But inside Kael’s head—it screamed.He stood there, sword lowered, shoulders tight, jaw clenched. The battlefield around him was still, for now. The ashes had settled. The sky no longer bled light. But inside him… the storm hadn’t stopped.Selene’s voice had come from that thing. That… thing.A trick. A manipulation. A tactic.Right?“You heard it,” Kael muttered.Marcus and Pamela exchanged a look. Neither of them answered immediately.“Kael,” Pamela finally said, stepping closer. “We all heard it.”“But not like I did,” Kael said, eyes haunted. “It wasn’t just a voice. It was her. The way she used to say my name. The hesitation. The warmth. It—” He shook his head violently. “It wasn’t possible.”Pamela touched his arm gently. “You know what this war does. You know what the Eradicators are capable of.”Kael’s eyes flicked to her hand, then to her face.“You’re afraid of me,” he said.“No,” she replied—too quickly.He gave a broken laugh. “You should be.”Marcus

The air was wrong.It felt thin and sharp, like breathing in broken glass.Kael stood still, muscles tensed, eyes fixed on the flickering horizon. The sky itself looked like it had been torn apart and taped back together—only the pieces didn’t fit. Static bled across the clouds. Shapes twisted unnaturally above. The battlefield they had just fought on was no longer even land. It shimmered like pixels on a corrupted screen.“It’s starting,” Elias muttered.Pamela pressed one hand against a broken wall, her breathing short. “What the hell is this? What’s happening to the world?”Marcus leaned against a console, his jaw clenched. “I don’t know. But this… this isn’t just collapse. It’s something else.”Kael closed his eyes for half a second.It wasn’t destruction.It wasn’t invasion.It wasn’t cleansing.It was rewriting.They weren’t going to be killed.They were going to be replaced.Erased. Every memory. Every breath. Every piece of them. As if they had never existed in the first place

The world was broken.Kael could feel it under his boots with every step. The ground wasn’t just crumbling—it was rewriting itself. One second, he was walking over cracked stone, and the next, he was stepping through rivers of frozen light. Then, clouds. Then, something he couldn’t even describe.They were close.Too close.Pamela stumbled behind him, clutching her head. Her skin flickered between flesh and something else—something transparent, almost spectral.Marcus wasn’t doing any better. He kept glancing around, confused, whispering things that didn’t make sense.Kael slowed down, trying to steady them with his voice. “Stay close. Focus.”Pamela blinked hard, as if trying to drag herself back to reality. “I… I can’t tell what’s real anymore.”Marcus stumbled against a wall made of what looked like black glass. His breath came in harsh, shallow pants. “I keep… jumping. One second we’re here, the next—I’m somewhere else.”Kael reached out, steadying Marcus with a firm hand. The pul

The broken mirrors floated in the blackness, endless and sharp.Each one showed a different Kael.A different life.A different end.Kael stood still, breathing hard, heart hammering so loud it felt like it shook the ground beneath him.He wasn’t sure where he was anymore.Was this still a trial?Or was it already a judgment?A slow sound echoed through the dark—like something ancient moving, waking.Footsteps.Steady.Unhurried.The Architect emerged from the shifting mirrors.No longer just a shadow.Not just an echo.A man.A god.A future.Kael’s stomach twisted as he stared.He was looking at himself.At what he could become.At what he would become—if he made the wrong choice.The Architect’s presence bent the air around him. Every breath Kael took felt heavier, harder, like the world itself was struggling to exist beside him.“You don’t get it yet,” the Architect said.His voice was deep, calm, almost gentle.It made Kael’s skin crawl.“You weren’t stolen, Kael. You weren’t for

The world was ending again.Not with screams.Not with violence.But with silence.A deep, aching silence that swallowed everything it touched.The Core split wide open, like a wound too deep to heal.Cracks raced across the ground, splitting the ancient stone.Timelines—thousands, millions of them—collapsed into each other, folding in on themselves like dying stars.Colors bled from the sky.The ground shook under Kael’s feet.And still, he stood.In the center of it all.In the center of the ruin he had chosen.The Architect’s form flickered in front of him.Once a towering figure of strength and control, it was now crumbling—breaking apart at the seams.Memory shards peeled off his body, floating like dying embers into the empty void around them.“No,” the Architect rasped, voice splintering.“No, this is wrong. We were supposed to be one.”Kael said nothing at first.He just stared.Tired.Unflinching.The golden light in his veins still burned, searing through every twisted lie t