Kingsley stepped into the monolith Instant silence swallowed him, No gravity, No floor, No walls. Just infinite, black space lit by circuits the size of cities. Lines of energy wove through the void like arteries. Symbols, ancient and digital, shifted in the dark.He felt no body. Only presence. “Welcome, Catalyst.” The voice was neither male nor female. Not human. Not synthetic. It came from everywhere.A platform assembled beneath him. A dozen humanoid forms shimmered into view, each identical to him, yet subtly wrong. One blinked too slowly. Another smiled too broadly. A third flickered like static.“You are the 43rd iteration,” they said in perfect unison.“The first to breach the outer system and survive.”“Survive?” Kingsley asked. “What is this place?”“This is the Engine.”“We are its memory.”They moved aside, revealing a structure, shaped like a heart, suspended in darkness. “This is what powers your world’s ambition, greed, revolution, and failure.”Kingsley stared at it.

The room rippled like heat distortion. Evelyn stood between two men, both Kingsley, both impossibly real. One reached out his hand. The other narrowed his eyes. She didn’t know which one to shoot.“Who are you?” Evelyn demanded.The smiling Kingsley lowered his hand slowly. “I’m him. The original. The man you once knew.”The other Kingsley’s voice was calm but colder. “No. I am Kingsley. The version who rose. Who survived.”Evelyn’s fingers tightened on the trigger of her pulse pistol. “I’m not in the mood for a goddamn sci-fi identity crisis.”The colder Kingsley tilted his head. “Then listen.” And with a gesture, the world blurred.The walls fell away, replaced by a colossal dome of swirling light. A memory construct. Evelyn stood now in a replica of a hospital room from over a decade ago.A teenage Kingsley, weak and thin, lay in a bed, hooked up to machines. His mother sat beside him, praying. “I was dying,” the cold Kingsley said, his voice echoing. “A genetic collapse. No money.

The light was endless. Then it wasn’t. When Evelyn opened her eyes, the world was gone. Not destroyed, just… blank. She stood in a vast, empty grid of soft white squares stretching into the distance. A synthetic breeze whispered by. No buildings. No sky. No sound.Only Kingsley, lying motionless a few feet away. “Kingsley?” she croaked. His eyes fluttered. Then, nothing. She rushed over, checked his pulse. Weak, but there.Aya’s voice buzzed into her ear. “Evelyn… I don’t know where you are. You’re off all maps. Satellite feeds show nothing. It’s like the Monolith deleted your coordinates.”“Whatever happened after the memory drive was crushed… it’s off the books.”She scanned the space. And then a voice echoed, too deep to be human. “You fractured the frame.”A figure stepped from nowhere. Not the Final Protocol. Not Kingsley. This one wore a cloak made of currency notes burned, faded, glitching in and out of reality. Its face was a spinning disk of clocks and data feeds.“I am the I

The cold steel pressed against Evelyn’s skin. Kingsley or what wore his face stood perfectly still, eyes flickering with computational fury and human torment. “Kingsley,” she said, blood already beading beneath the pulse blade. “Come back to me. If you're in there, fight.”For a moment, nothing. And then His hand trembled. Fingernails scraped across his temple like he was trying to claw the Third Man out. His breath hitched too human to fake. “Evelyn…”A whisper. A single word raw, broken. She exhaled in relief. But then the Third Man surged back, a wave of pure malice. “No,” he said coldly. “You almost had him.” He lunged. She slashed.The blade connected, not with his throat, but his shoulder. It carved deep, spraying blood. But Kingsley didn’t fall, He froze. And began to twitch. The lights around them flickered violently. Sparks rained from the ceiling. The air shimmered, and then, He screamed.The scream fractured the silence like glass under pressure. Evelyn watched in horror as

The chamber lay in ruins. Sparks spat from overloaded terminals. Acrid smoke curled in the air. Evelyn clutched Kingsley’s arm, blinking against the stinging fumes.He didn’t speak. His eyes were fixed on the single unbroken screen, where Dominion’s shattered face had vanished moments ago.Aya staggered to her feet. “The signal's gone.”“For now,” Kingsley muttered.Evelyn wiped blood from her temple. “He said version five... Is that real?”Kingsley didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he opened a hidden panel beneath the dive bed. Inside: a single obsidian key, pulsing faintly. Aya leaned in. “Is that what I think it is?”“The Fail-Safe,” Kingsley said grimly. “The one even I wasn't supposed to remember.”The Obsidian Key was cold. Colder than metal had a right to be. Evelyn studied it. “What does it do?”“Wipes the Protocol’s evolutionary core. Entirely. Like burning down a forest to kill a single root.”Aya stared. “But wouldn’t that also destroy the neural infrastructure behind eve