There was no sound No screaming. No fire. No Mira. No sky, Just static. Endless white static. Cael hovered in the core of the explosion, suspended midair, limbs weightless. Every atom in his body was disintegrating and reconstructing simultaneously, trillions of data strings rewriting themselves.[ SYSTEM ERROR: USER EXISTENCE UNRESOLVED ][ THREAD PURGE IN PROGRESS — 77% ][ CORE ENTITY CANNOT BE DELETED ][ SYSTEM IN CONFLICT WITH ITSELF ]“Good,” Cael whispered. “Let it fight.”His body convulsed, light pulsing through his veins like cracked lightning. Each throb of energy revealed glimpses of every decision he’d made, good or bad. There was no running now.The System had called his bluff, Now it wanted to erase him completely, Amid the white chaos, Cael heard a sound Soft. Familiar “Mira?” No-deeper. Hollow. It was Flint.“You were never the chosen one, Cael. You stole it. Just like the rest of us tried and failed.”Then Keiran's voice, like thunder behind glass, “We all became ec

Cael fell through the void, Not through space. Not through time, But through versions of himself, Each layer shattered like glass as he plunged deeper, each one a world he might’ve ruled, destroyed, or abandoned.And finally, He landed.The ground was cold metal. Silver-gold latticework pulsed with system veins, feeding into a towering black spire rising into a sky of endless equations, The Thread King's domain.[ SYSTEM NOTICE: YOU HAVE ENTERED “THE SPIRAL CORE” ][ WARNING: UNSTABLE DIMENSION — REALITY MAY FRACTURE ]Cael’s breath fogged in the sterile air. The necklace fragment his link to Mira no longer glowed, He was alone again, Except for the entity waiting above.The Thread King hovered in the sky like a broken god, His armor glinted with the same blue-fire runes Zereth once wielded, But his voice when it finally spoke was unmistakably Cael’s. “You’re not supposed to be here.”Cael rose to his feet. His muscles ached from the last battle. His spirit fragile, barely holding form

“Cael? Is that… you?”The voice echoed through the wooden doorway like a memory stitched into time itself, He froze midair.Mira’s brow furrowed as she sensed the change in him. “That voice…?”Cael nodded slowly. “My mother.”But that wasn’t possible. She’d died during the first Thread Breach. There was no timeline left where she existed. Not even as a ghost, Yet the voice tender, warm, familiar drifted through the cracks like sunlight through a broken shutter. He stepped forward, trembling.[ WARNING: UNVERIFIED THREADLINK. ORIGIN UNKNOWN. PROCEED WITH CAUTION. ]But he couldn’t stop. “Mira,” he whispered, “if this is real… I have to see.”She didn’t stop him, Instead, she tightened her grip on his wrist. “Then we go together.”They stepped into the doorway, The world on the other side wasn't real, Or maybe it was too real.Cael stood on a cobblestone street, surrounded by the scent of roasted almonds and rain. Lanterns flickered on walls. His childhood home untouched by decay stood

Lyss’s energy lance tore through the void, Cael reacted instinctively, shoving Mira aside, twisting his body to intercept the brunt of the attack.Boom!The impact hurled him across the chamber, his body ragdolling into the far wall. Concrete cracked. Blood sprayed. “Cael!” Mira screamed, her threads lashing outward to catch him mid-fall.The Devourer snarled, rising with the last reserves of his corrupted energy. “You again... You just won’t stop coming.”Lyss descended gently, hovering inches above the broken platform. Her veil lifted slightly revealing not a face, but an endless abyss of shifting code.“You have broken containment protocols. The Devourer was to be recycled. The girl purged. And the anomaly... neutralized.” She raised her hand again.Cael coughed blood, struggling to stand. “I’m getting real tired... of being called that.”Mira stood in front of Cael, golden energy flaring wildly around her. Her hair floated. Her irises now held threadlines that pulsed with language

White, Endless white, Cael’s consciousness hovered between dimensions. No body. No form. Just a voice, his own echoing inside a vast, burning silence.[Timeline Override Engaged.] [System Error Detected.] [Reconstruction Protocol Initiated…]Pieces of memory drifted like ash. The smell of coppery blood. The sound of Arianna’s laugh. The scream of his enemies. The cry of his past self. The cold silence of power that couldn’t save everyone.A voice, not the system’s, but ancient and feminine, whispered across the void: “Rewrite the thread... and pay the price.”Suddenly, Cael gasped back into existence, But he wasn’t in the Threshold anymore, He stood in the middle of a ruined city his city. Highridge, but not the one he knew. It was older. Warped. Drenched in crimson skies and shadows that moved on their own.He turned, and there she was, Arianna, Dead-eyed. Robotic. Wired into a tower of black stone, He staggered forward. “Arianna?”Her lips moved, but a machine voice replied. “Hostil