The air trembled before they even stepped in.A circular chamber opened before Kael and Lina, its walls breathing like a living organism, expanding, contracting, pulsing with red veins of corrupted code. The floor was cracked glass, beneath which currents of silver and black energy clashed like storms trapped under ice. Lina inhaled sharply. “Frost is here.”Kael stepped closer, fingers brushing the handle of his weapon. “Then we finish it here.”A cold, resonant voice surrounded them, no direction, no origin, everywhere at once.“You survived longer than calculated.”Lina winced as Frost spoke directly into her lattice. Her silver veins flickered under her skin, fighting the invasive pressure.Kael whispered, “Stay with me. Focus on my voice.”Lina forced a nod.“He’s pulling everything into the core node… I can feel the anchor point shifting.”Kael frowned. “Meaning what?”“Meaning if he snaps it, my mind breaks first. Then the lattice. Then the city.”A chunk of the wall peeled f

Kael didn’t fall, he was dragged.The rupture pulled him headfirst through a ripping vortex, a storm of silver shards and black tendrils spiraling around him like serrated wings. His body flipped, twisted, slammed through layers of fractured space.“LINA!” he shouted, reaching into the blinding distortion.Her silhouette flickered far ahead, arms pinned by the tendril yanking her deeper. She fought it, kicking, twisting, screaming a word he couldn’t hear.Kael stretched his hand out again, The world shattered around him like a mirror hit with a hammer. Her nails scraped across something that felt like glass, then mist, then metal, then nothing.The void pulled her deeper, faster, the black tendril coiling around her waist like a serpent of living shadow. Frost’s voice slithered into her skull.“You can’t run from what you are. I’m only guiding you home.”Lina spat through gritted teeth. “Let, GO, of me!”The void answered by squeezing harder, crushing the air from her lungs. Her visio

The facility doors hissed open with a broken, stuttering groan, like the building itself resented letting Kael and Lina leave.Cold night wind slapped their faces.But it wasn’t the normal cold of Echo City’s industrial district. This was a shifting cold, currents moving in wrong directions, air rippling like heat waves in reverse.Lina gripped Kael’s arm tightly. “Do you hear that?”Kael tilted his head. Not sirens. Not generators. Not people.The whole city hummed, a low, resonant vibration beneath the concrete, like machinery buried deep under the streets was waking up.“Something’s under us,” Kael murmured.“Not something,” Lina whispered. “The grid. It’s… moving.”They stepped out onto the main platform. And froze. Echo City had changed.The skyline had always been sharp, predictable, towers of glass and steel arranged in clean grids. But now, Several buildings were subtly leaning. Others were taller than they should be. A bridge that used to connect the high blocks now twisted d

The white-hot glow collapsed into darkness as Kael dragged Lina behind a twisted lattice of pulsing cables. The avatar’s voice, distorted but omnipresent, echoed in every corner of the sublevel. Anchor. Return. Integration incomplete. Resistance irrelevant.Kael’s jaw clenched. “Not today.” He adjusted his grip on Lina, keeping her close. “We find the exit. We break this path.”Lina shivered. “Kael… the avatar, it’s rewriting the floor, the walls… everything we touch. Even the air feels like it’s against us.”Kael nodded grimly. “Then we don’t touch it. We move fast.”The corridor ahead was no longer a corridor. Concrete twisted into angles that should have been impossible. Pipes arched overhead like the spines of enormous insects, and floor tiles slid silently as if alive.Lina stumbled. “It’s… it’s corralling us. Like… it knows the route we want to take.”“Exactly.” Kael crouched, scanning the shifting architecture. “Then we stop it from predicting us.”He grabbed her hand, and toge

Kael and Lina emerged from the sublevel into a corridor bathed in dim, flickering light. The pulse beneath the city had slowed but had not stopped. Echo City was alive, breathing, slow, deliberate, and aware.Lina touched the wall, fingers tracing the faint blue veins of energy still lingering from the Heart’s collapse. “It’s… different. Quieter, but I can feel it watching.”Kael glanced around, scanning every shadow. “Quiet doesn’t mean safe. It’s just… assessing. Learning.”A low hum echoed through the tunnels, almost like inhaling and exhaling. Lina’s eyes widened. “The city… it’s breathing.”Kael’s jaw tightened. “Then we keep moving. Don’t give it a chance to take a breath with us in its mouth.”They moved cautiously toward the maintenance lifts leading to the surface. Every corridor seemed subtly shifted, walls slightly farther apart or closer, lights blinking in slow, deliberate patterns, and the faint echo of their own footsteps distorted in strange rhythms.“Kael… listen.” Li