The temporal rift pulsed with a savage light, its edges tearing at the world like the claws of an angry god. Through the rippling distortion, fragments of a thousand timelines bled into the present—disparate futures flickering in and out of phase with a reality that no longer knew what it was.Eris stood at the precipice of the breach, wind tearing through her coat, hair whipping across her face. The Core was no longer stable—it had begun its collapse into singularity. Time was folding in on itself, bleeding out through the artificial conduit that had once powered the Nexus.And at the center of it all stood Caelus, or what remained of him.The man was now more machine than human, his frame augmented by quantum-enhanced prosthetics fused directly to his nervous system. Around him hovered twelve drones, each one humming with the destabilized energy of a fractured future.“You brought us here,” Eris said, voice low but steady. &ldquo

 The world had stopped making sense.As the last shimmer of the Chrono Rift dissolved into fractal static, Myles stood frozen in the war-scarred corridor of the Spiral Citadel. Everything around him vibrated—not physically, but existentially. The air tasted like paradox. His HUD flickered, glitching through timelines, his vitals overlapping with phantom data from other versions of himself.Lena staggered forward beside him, her eyes wide, bleeding faint threads of red light. “Something’s wrong,” she murmured.“No,” Myles said quietly. “Everything’s finally right—and that’s the problem.”The Rift had closed. Permanently. The equation they’d spent lifetimes solving had resolved. But the cost? The multiverse had stopped collapsing—not because it was saved, but because it had chosen a singular, dominant outcome. Their timeline had won.And now it was consuming al