The night was burning. Golden light spread across the valley like a rising tide, swallowing the trees one by one. Every flicker of it hummed with purpose, alive and merciless.Rae stood at the edge of the camp, wind whipping through her hair. Behind her, the small fires of The Fractals flickered weakly in the dark, their fragile symbol of hope trembling before the storm.Lara ran toward her, breathless, holding the scanner close to her chest. “They’re closing in fast. At least twenty Correction Units, maybe more.”Finn followed, his gun slung over his shoulder, face pale. “They’ve surrounded us, Rae. We can’t hold them all.”Rae looked out toward the glow. “We don’t have to. We just have to last long enough for the others to escape.”Lara grabbed her arm. “No. You don’t get to die for them again.”“I’m not dying,” Rae said quietly. “I’m making sure this place survives.”The survivors, the men and women they’d rescued, gathered behind her. Some were trembling, some were whispering pray

The morning came gray and heavy. A thick fog clung to the valley like a shroud, swallowing light, sound, even breath. The air buzzed faintly with static, the world’s heartbeat, unstable and tired. Rae stood at the edge of the camp.Her cloak pulled tight, staring toward the horizon where the forest ended and the strange shimmer of the Null Perimeter began. The golden haze pulsed like something alive, flickering and rearranging itself every few seconds.Lara joined her, carrying a pack of equipment and the cracked holographic map. “If we leave now, we’ll hit the perimeter before sunset.”Rae nodded. “Any word from the scouts’ signal cache?”Lara’s expression darkened. “All fragments corrupted. It’s like they were erased from the system entirely.”Finn adjusted his rifle strap, stepping beside them. “Good. Makes me feel real optimistic about walking straight into the same place that killed everyone else.”Rae glanced back at him. “You don’t have to come.”He gave her a crooked smile.

The white world around Rae trembled, like it was breathing. The light pulsed. The air vibrated. And the shattered floor beneath her feet stitched itself back together in glowing threads. For a moment, everything was quiet again. Too quiet. Rae stood unmoving, her chest rising and falling in small, shaky breaths. Finn and Lara stayed on either side of her, both tense, both unsure whether the world was about to collapse again. The last explosion still echoed in Rae’s bones. Then a ripple spread across the air, a shimmer like heat, then like water. A shape formed within it. A man. Or something like a man.Blue sparks danced around him as his body flickered, shifting between lines of code and human skin. His face was gentle, familiar, broken. His eyes glowed a soft blue that brightened, dimmed, and brightened again, as if fighting to stabilize.Rae’s breath caught. “Everett?”Finn whispered, “Oh, hell. He really is a ghost.”Everett’s projection smiled slightly, a sad, tired smile. H

The corridor stretched endlessly ahead of them, a narrow tunnel made of shifting code.Walls flowed like liquid light, rippling in slow waves. Strange symbols blinked across the surface, glitching in and out as if trying to form words.Rae felt the floor vibrate beneath each step. It wasn’t stone. Not metal. It was, memory. Soft, fragile, trembling memory holding itself together just long enough for them to walk on.Finn whispered, “I feel like we’re inside a giant computer stomach.”Lara shushed him, though her voice shook slightly. “Don’t joke. This passage is unstable. Anything might trigger a collapse.”Rae kept walking, eyes fixed ahead. The air inside the corridor tasted like cold electricity. Each breath felt sharp, like inhaling static. “Do you hear that?” Rae murmured.Lara frowned. “Hear what?”Rae closed her eyes. There, faint but real, came a distant echo. Screams. Machinery. Footsteps that were not human.Zone Null was waking up. She opened her eyes again. “We need to mov

The world did not return gently. Rae hit the ground hard, her breath knocked out of her lungs. Finn and Lara fell beside her, rolling across a rough surface that felt like stone, cold, uneven, cracked. The air was harsh and thin, scraping down Rae’s throat with every breath.When she finally pushed herself up, dizziness washed over her. Finn groaned. “Please tell me we didn’t just fall into another messed up version of reality.”Lara rubbed her eyes, blinking rapidly. “We did. But, this one is different.”The sky above them churned like a storm made of code, dark clouds folding into themselves again and again, flashes of light revealing shifting patterns.The ground beneath them was a half-rendered landscape: pieces of stone floating slightly above the surface, patches of grass flickering in and out, trees growing sideways before collapsing into static.Rae whispered, “This is the collapse layer. The place between trials.”Lara nodded shakily. “When the Mirror Algorithm breaks, the e