It began with a scream, Not from a throat, but from the code itself, Reality buckled. Skylines dissolved into scribbles. Gravity lost its grip. Color drained into grayscale. Even time faltered, moments looping back on themselves like a broken video file.Cael staggered as the street cracked beneath his feet, turning to paragraphs, then single letters, then… nothing “Stop it!” he roared.But the echo only laughed back. From above, the Impostor the Author Residual Entity floated effortlessly, his body a fusion of Cael’s likeness and digital madness. Ink streamed from his fingertips, rewriting existence in crimson code.“You gave them freedom,” he called down mockingly, “but freedom is chaos. Do you see what they’re doing with it?”Cael clenched his fists. The inkblade hummed in his hand. “I gave them choice. You’re the one taking it away.”“I’m restoring order,” the Impostor spat. “One voice. One vision. Mine.”He raised his corrupted quill, and stabbed it into the sky. Thunder split th

[ CHOICE CONFIRMED: YES ][ COMMENCING SYSTEM REBOOT... ][ DELETING PRIMARY HOST IDENTITY: CAEL ELIAS RINN ][ BACKUP UNAVAILABLE. NO RETURN.]The screen dimmed as Cael's trembling fingertip vanished from the holographic prompt, In the instant that followed, the world convulsed, Not metaphorically literally.Buildings folded in on themselves. Time inverted. Air turned crystalline. The ground cracked open to reveal a churning bed of code. People frozen mid-step suddenly unspooled like pixel strings, disassembling and reassembling into their original, true selves.And at the center of it all, Cael hung suspended in golden light, his body already beginning to unravel, his system links being forcibly severed from existence, Mira screamed, her voice lost in the sonic implosion of time-space realignment.Keiran sprinted toward the Memory Cradle, eyes wide in disbelief. “You stupid bastard,” he whispered.The moment Cael vanished, atomized by his choice, the System emitted a sound like a br

The impact of Cael’s punch meeting the Impostor’s fist ripped through the layers of Xen-17 like a digital earthquake.[ COLLISION: THREAD-LEVEL INTEGRITY BREACH ][ TIME SEAM TORN — TEMPORAL SPLICE INITIATED ][ UNSTABLE ENVIRONMENT DETECTED ]Mira fell to her knees as the very air warped around her. Keiran struggled to stabilize a shield, but bits of reality kept blinking, like pixels deleting and restoring mid-frame, Cael and the Impostor hovered mid-air, trapped in a frozen explosion of light, Then everything crashed.Flint lay unconscious, bleeding from both nostrils. His internal implants were short-circuiting from the system flux. Mira grabbed him, yelling for Keiran “We need to move now!”But Keiran wasn’t listening. His eyes were locked on Cael, “He’s... overpowering the thread. That’s not possible.”Mira looked up, Cael’s body was flickering, between flesh, code, shadow, and fire, Every time he struck the Impostor, he seemed to glitch further “He’s tearing himself apart.”But

Cael awoke in a crater. His body was steaming. The scorched remnants of his clothes clung to him like tattered memories. Every breath he took sounded like static, his system interface gone, yet... something new hummed beneath his skin.The sky above was cracked, a web of glowing fissures stretching across reality itself, He tried to stand, and the earth shuddered beneath him. “Welcome back,” said a voice.Keiran stood at the edge of the crater, eyes wide, hand shaking around a datapad. “You were dead, Cael. Dead. What the hell brought you back?”Cael looked up at him, eyes glowing faintly. “I don’t know. But it wasn’t the system.”Keiran ran a full diagnostic. Cael’s vitals were human... but overlaid with signatures he couldn’t decode. His brainwaves pulsed in sequences beyond known neurocode. And worst of all, the quantum drive in Cael’s spine? Gone. Replaced by something else.Something organic. “I scanned your core,” Keiran said. “It’s like you’ve been rewritten. You’re no longer t

As the broken compass dissolved into light, Cael's body jolted upright, eyes blank, limbs stiff. “Back away!” Keiran shouted, dragging Mira to safety.But Cael didn’t attack. He floated an inch above the ground, a silver-blue glow enveloping him, rippling with fractured timelines. “Is he... alive?” Mira whispered.“No.” Keiran’s voice cracked. “He’s becoming something else.” Above them, in the Weave’s celestial canopy, the SYSTEM flickered.WARNING: HOST UNBOUND.SYSTEM OVERRIDE DETECTED.EXECUTING EMERGENCY THREADLOCK RESTORATION.A dozen new subroutines launched, and from the sky came silver needles injectors from the Code Core, They weren’t coming to heal Cael, They were coming to chain him again.As the needles descended, Cael raised a single finger, Time warped,The needles froze mid-air then shattered into pixel dust. System defenses failed to adapt.From nowhere, Mira screamed, “He’s resisting the system itself! That’s impossible!”Cael’s head turned slowly, locking eyes with he