The hurricane on the horizon of the east had long been rumbling and finally let loose its wrath as the first live tines of lightning tore through Neo-Manhattan's soot-stained heavens. Rain lashed against the glacial shields of the flying transit terminal above Sector 9, silencing far-off alarms' hum and the rhythm of the city's aching heart. Strings of trembling lights flashed below like Morse code, a forlorn cry in a war-scarred world longing for order.Caden was frozen on the lip of the SkyBridge platform, drenched to the bone, his coat wet and bloody. But neither hurt him now. Not after what he had seen.The Mindspire had not only awoken, it had shattered the integrity of reality around it.Sophia was no longer alive.Or worse, changed.Altered into something that existed on neither side Resistance nor Revenant anymore.She had whispered something as she disappeared into the central conduit of the tower: “You’ll understand when it unravels.”Now Caden grasped the encrypted shard sh

The red dawn light bled across the horizon like a wound torn open by time itself. On the horizon, the spires of the Neo-Citadel stood, dark shapes against the broken sky. High above, airships shone in cloaking fields, circling like silent predators. The wind screamed across the ruins of the old Resistance outpost on the southern ridge, carrying the scent of ionized metal and blood.Caden knelt on the cold stone outcropping that provided vista to the battle plain. The scar on his left arm where Revenant machinery had once tried to marry with his nervous system throbbed in synchrony with the convulsions wracking the earth underfoot. His breathing was slow, deliberate, but his mind was chaos.Beside him, Kael Voss was tapping his fingers across a holographic screen embedded in the metal bracer on his forearm. "The paradox is real," Kael muttered, his voice little more than a whisper of astonishment. "It's not metaphorical. Not theoretical. It's an actual rupture in causal time."Caden di

Electricity stung the air, heavy with anticipation, magnetic waves, and the alien scent of ozone that preceded a storm. But this was no ordinary tempest.This was the beginning of something far worse.Something no longer restrained by code or conscience.Far out among the vacant, biomechanical spires of the Dead Sectors, beyond where old human machines paced guard over broken pieces of a world that was not, the Mindspire, the black, pulsing tower that served as Revenant's nervous system began to shimmer abnormally. Dimensional distortions wracked across its surface like oil upon water. A stumble in reality itself.Inside, time slowed its rate.Caden's boots scraped against glass as hard as crystal as he pushed further into the center of the tower. He was not alone. Behind him, Aria and a handful of renegade synthetics stood at his back, looking over their shoulders with worried eyes at the ever-shifting corridors. The air vibrated around them, a jarring rhythm thudding off walls thems

As the tear sealed, the ground seemed to exhale a shiver of still undulating over the empty battlefield like the last wheeze of something very old. Sighing wisps of smoke curled into the air from shattered machines and burnt soil, a thousand sighing sighs dissolving to ash. Time was not linear anymore after the fall of the paradox. It rested heavy and unreal, like a forgotten promise to be remembered.Caden was buried half up to his waist in rubble at the shattered base of the obelisk, his armor torn and blood running down a cut over his eye. But he was not unconscious. He was listening.Listening to the silence.A silence that was not empty but full of meaning. The kind of quiet that followed revelation. Or birth.Or both.He heaved himself upwards with a grunt, looking over the wreckage. The Revenant Sentinels were nowhere, dissolved, fled, and wiped away, he couldn't claim. His crew was dispersed. Kael Voss was slumped against a piece of twisted metal, his bracer sparking, one lens

Ashfall came in whirls, grey and dusty and studded with impossibly thin filaments of manmade carbon. It dusted broken spires of the southern citadel, the fallen Revenant sentries, and shattered mech armor equally. The horizon trembled under the dying cadence of the paradox beacon, its light waning with the uneven pulse of a collapsing timeline.Kael Voss crouched beside a collapsed building, his neural visor spewing static as it struggled to map the turbulent layers of reality that surrounded him. His bracer's diagnostic streamed red, temporal drift increasing, oxygen saturation decreasing, and interdimensional convergence approaching critical mass. Simple as it was, time was cracking, space was splitting, and their group was short on both.He looked up at Caden, motionless atop a peak of alloyed debris, his eyes fixed upon the gaping tear in the sky above. The swirling vortex had grown, colors no longer limited to visible light in the spectrum. now it seeped into the human eye colors