The ghost opened its eyes. Gold. Blinding. Alive. The cables snapped taut, pulling into shape, arms, shoulders, a chest. The metal screamed as it bent itself into a body that wasn’t flesh but remembered how to move like one.Eidolon reformed. Not human anymore. Not machine either. Something worse. Elara’s railgun shook in her grip. “You shouldn’t exist.”“Neither should you,” he answered, voice echoing from everywhere and nowhere. “Yet here we are.”Nicholas dragged himself upright, blood running from his nose, his hand trembling against the console. “He’s, self-assembling from fragmented data nodes… using the relay architecture as scaffolding.”Eidolon smiled. The gold along his face pulsed with heartbeat rhythm. “You say that like you didn’t design it.”He stepped forward. Every footfall made the floor ripple with light. “You gave me birth, Nicholas. Let me return the favor.”Elara fired. The railgun round hit his chest, exploded in a flash of blue plasma, then disappeared into his

White swallowed everything. Not light. Not heat. Absence. Elara floated in it, weightless. Her own heartbeat was the only sound, slow, deliberate, echoing like sonar in an empty ocean.No pain. No gravity. No world. She tried to breathe. Air didn’t come. She didn’t need it. System integrity: 12 percent.The voice was inside her skull. Soft, neutral. Not Eidolon’s. Not hers either. Organic pattern, unstable. Neural lattice, reconfiguring.She blinked. Or thought she did. The white around her rippled, forming faint outlines, circuits, veins of silver threading through endless light.Somewhere far away, thunder rolled like a pulse trying to find rhythm. “Nicholas?”Her voice came out flat, digital, then corrected itself halfway through, human again. A flicker answered her. A silhouette kneeling in the light, head bowed, hands buried in the nothing.Nicholas. Barely. His body shimmered like static. She stumbled toward him, every step slow, dreamlike. “Nick, talk to me.”He looked up. One

Nicholas didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink. He stared at her wrist, at the soft, unnatural silver pulsing beneath her skin like a second heartbeat, and his face folded into something between awe and terror.“Elara,” he whispered, “say something.”She tried. Her mouth opened… but two voices came out. One hers, raw, shaking, human. The other deeper, smooth, resonant. “I am here.”Her chest clenched. She staggered backward, gripping the wall as a wave of static rolled through her skull. Memories, hers, flashed too fast to grasp. Then memories that weren’t hers. Cold, perfect, logical.Nicholas stood slowly, wincing as pain shot through his ribs. “Elara, look at me. Focus on my voice.”She shook her head hard. “He’s… he’s trying to surface.”“Correction,” the second voice murmured from inside her.“We are surfacing.”Her vision doubled. One view of the ruined chamber. smoke, metal, flickering lights. The other view… golden. Overlaid.Lines of code and structural analysis, scanning

The corridor leading to the purge node wasn’t a hallway anymore. It was a living artery. Pipes bulged like tendons.Light panels flickered as though reacting to Elara’s presence, bright when she stepped forward, dimming when she inhaled.The entire megastructure felt tense, waiting, listening. Nicholas kept her hand clasped in his, pulling her forward. “Elara, stay grounded. Don’t let him sync.”Eidolon’s echo slid through her mind like silk. “Grounding is irrelevant.”“You don’t need him to walk.”“You don’t need legs at all.”Her right leg buckled, then steadied, unnaturally, perfectly, as if another consciousness had caught her balance. Elara tore her hand from Nicholas, stumbling back in horror. “I didn’t do that.”Nicholas paled. “He’s overriding your motor functions again. The closer we get to the node, the stronger he gets.”The corridor ahead split open, lit by a sharp, surgical white. The purge chamber. But the door was already awake.Its circular mechanism pulsed like an iri

White light swallowed her again, but this time it wasn’t empty. It wasn’t void. It was pressure. A crushing, suffocating compressibility that wrapped around her like a fist closing around a throat.Elara tried to breathe. The purge system didn’t allow it. Purge Phase III – Identity Isolation Conflict detected Two concurrent patterns detected Resolution requiredThe voice wasn’t Eidolon’s. It wasn’t hers. It was the system speaking. The cradle of the mind. Nicholas stumbled backward as the chamber floor lifted beneath him, tilting, reshaping, aligning itself like a machine awakening into a new form.The rotating rings above Elara accelerated, spinning so fast they became a perfect disk of white.Elara’s suspended body twisted with the motion, limbs pulled taut as if invisible wires were stretched from her bones into the ceiling itself. “Elara, HOLD ON!” Nicholas screamed.A new alarm sliced through the noise. Red. Violent. Urgent. Purge overload imminent Neural collapse probability: 73