A tremor shook Emberpoint.Not from an attack—this one grew from within.Kieran awoke to the emergency alarms blaring in a low, ominous rhythm. Red lights flashed over the command deck. The Override Librarian had returned—this time more insistent. But something else was in motion: something vast, untouched by human code, awakening beneath their feet.He raced to the Holotracker, where Skye and Lyra were already hovering over the map projection.“System’s glitching everywhere,” Skye said, fingers tracing lines that pulsed blue and black. “Older nodes are waking up.”Lyra pointed at the sub-layer. “Look—there. Zone Echo Depth. Energy readings are spiking. Not Override—but ancient tech. Pre-Blackwell. Pre-system.”Kieran’s heart sank. “What are we dealing with?”Lyra’s jaw tightened. “Something the Override tries not to mention.”Uncovering the ArchivistThey gathered in the tactical lab. Under emergency lighting, Kieran activated the Legacy Archive interface—hoping for answers.Accessin

The Ascension Tower was nothing like the Vault.Where Emberpoint’s depths pulsed with living code and rebellion, the tower was a grave.From a distance, it looked like a broken spine clawing at the sky—its upper floors collapsed, its walls carved with glyphs that flickered, then died. Once, it had been the cradle of memory, where chosen heirs uploaded their consciousness into the System and sealed their bloodlines in dataform.Now, it whispered only loss.“This place feels… wrong,” Lyra muttered as their skimmer set down on the jagged platform. Wind howled through shattered windows above. “I thought it would feel like legacy.”Kieran stepped out first. “This isn’t where legacies were honored. It’s where they were digitized… and overwritten.”Inside the TowerThey climbed.The structure was ancient—older than even the Override archives suggested. Runes flared as Kieran passed, responding to the Sovereign glyph embedded in his palm. Each floor revealed fractured remnants of the past: me

Time Left: 00:02:37The last firewall breached.A low-frequency hum coursed through the air, rising into a steady pulse as the resistance’s strike team crossed the final corridor leading into the Central Chamber of the Override Core. Kieran stood at the helm, his breath measured, his mind hyper-aware. The walls shimmered—runes burned into metal like veins of fire beneath glass, pulsing with an intelligence too old to be mechanical.[SYSTEM ALERT]WARNING: Sovereign Protocol Layer Active.Accessing this zone may trigger irreversible code exposure.Proceed?[Y/N]He didn’t blink.“Y.”The door dissolved in a hiss of phase-light. They entered the Central Chamber.It wasn’t what Kieran expected.Not a throne room. Not a server bank or superstructure. It was…a cradle.At the center of the vast chamber, surrounded by twelve fractured monoliths, hovered a suspended mass of fragmented code and crystallized memory. The Override Core—pulsing like a heart made of lightning and memory. Around it,

[SYSTEM ALERT – OMEGA CLASS TRANSMISSION DETECTED]Identity: Unknown SovereignAuthorization: REDACTEDCode Tier: Beyond Sovereign AlphaDirective: TRACE OR TERMINATEThe message lingered in Kieran’s interface like a ghost:“The Rewrite didn’t erase me, Kieran.It freed me.”He blinked hard. The message dissolved into static glyphs, then reformed again—taunting, deliberate. A whisper from a presence that should not exist.[SYSTEM WARNING]You have entered a latent forked timeline.Designation: OMEGA LAYERTemporal Integrity: FragileUser Privilege: Sovereign Prime – Incomplete AccessSkye stood nearby, arms crossed, her expression dark with tension. “What the hell is the Omega Layer?”Kieran didn’t answer right away. His pulse was pounding too hard in his ears.“The Rewrite was supposed to be the end. A new beginning. But we missed something—someone.”He turned to the others gathered in the Vault—a newly stabilized command hub carved from the ashes of the former Override Core. Screens

[SYSTEM STABILITY REPORT: POST-OMEGA MERGE]Core Thread Alignment: 92.3%Timecode Integrity: UnstableAnomaly Detected: ∆Chrono Drift∆Origin: REDACTEDThreat Level: EscalatingThe first sign was barely a flicker.A streetlight near the edge of Emberpoint’s Nexus District blinked out, then back on. No big deal—until the surveillance footage played.At the exact moment of the flicker, the surrounding footage rolled backward for 4.7 seconds. People walked in reverse. Cars rolled back. Conversations reversed mid-sentence. And then reality stitched forward like nothing had happened.That was day one.By day three, half of the Resistance’s historical data logs had pre-written entries. Missions Kieran hadn’t led. Outcomes that didn’t exist. Entire timelines where Vaelaria never died. Where Kieran himself never activated the Legacy System.Reality was unraveling—again.“Timecode drift,” Rho muttered, staring at a hex-pattern display spitting temporal errors in red.Kieran stood behind him, a