The world tore open around Kai before he even had time to breathe. “Don’t move,” Tessa snapped, her voice half-command, half-plea as the air folded into a spiraling vortex of fractured symbols.“It’s choosing a target.”Kai steadied himself, eyes narrowing at the shifting rift hovering above the ruins of the Liminal Path. “Choosing or hunting?”“Same thing, this time,” the Child murmured. Her voice sounded smaller than usual, drained. “The Architect’s Echo isn’t finished with you.”A crackling pulse rolled through the air like thunder in reverse. And then the vortex spoke. Not in a voice. In his voice. “Kai Miller. You took what was not yours.”Kai stiffened. “That’s impossible. I shut that loop. I closed it.”“No,” the vortex replied. “You only delayed it.”Tessa stepped closer to him, her hand brushing his wrist, steadying him or steadying herself, he couldn’t tell. “Kai… something’s wrong. It’s reading you like a system, not a person.”“Maybe that’s what I am now.” He exhaled throu

Kai hit the ground hard. The world around him shattered into white fractures, like glass refusing to decide whether it was solid or liquid.The air hummed with a pulse he recognized instantly, because it matched his own heartbeat. But it wasn’t him. Something else was mimicking him.And it was getting closer. He pushed up on trembling elbows just as a voice behind him said: “Don’t turn around.”Kai froze. The tone was familiar, too familiar. Calm. Precise. Detached. His voice. “Another copy?” he whispered.“No,” the figure replied. “Not a copy. The one you tried to erase.”Kai spun anyway. Standing in the half-formed corridor of light and ruin was a man shaped exactly like him, but eyes brighter, sharper, alive with a logic that refused to die.His posture was effortless, as if gravity obeyed him instead of the other way around. It was the Anomaly Kai, the version born from the world’s optimization process, the one Kai destroyed in the Choice That Broke the World.Except he wasn’t gon

The world ended in the time it took Kai to blink. One heartbeat before, the sky was whole. The next, It tore open like paper soaked in fire.A jagged seam of white-hot silence ripped across the heavens, swallowing sound, color, and logic.Everything beneath it, mountains, streets, cities, shivered as if caught in the breath of something enormous trying to inhale the entire world.Kai staggered. The Child, small, luminous, impossibly calm, grabbed his wrist. “Don’t look at it too long.”Kai forced his eyes away. “What is it?”“Not what,” the Child whispered. “Who.”He turned. “That seam in the sky is a person?”“No,” she said. “It’s a memory… of someone powerful enough to be mistaken for a god.”The ground lurched. A wave of distortion rolled across the plains, bending the horizon until it folded into itself like an origami sheet being crushed by unseen fingers. Kai braced himself. “We need to stabilize the layer.”“We can’t.”Her voice didn’t shake. That worried him more. “Why not?”“

The world did not wait for Kai to breathe. It split first. A shriek, metal-bright, reality-thin, ripped through the half-rebuilt skyline as an anomaly fissure tore downward like a lightning bolt that refused to complete its strike.Glass quivered. Streets stuttered between past and present. And the child, Echo, lurched as if someone had reached inside her code and yanked hard. “Kai” Her voice doubled, one human, one digital. “Something’s coming through.”He didn’t even have time to ask what. Because the fissure answered for her. A figure clawed its way out. Not a creature. Not a machine. A memory wearing flesh. Kai’s own face. But wrong.More angular. More empty. More… finalized. A version of him that had completed the rewrite without mercy. Echo gasped. “No… you shouldn’t exist.”This alternate Kai smiled, thin, carved, and false. “And yet I do. Because somewhere, somewhen, you hesitated. And your hesitation became me.”“Talk,” Kai snapped, stepping between Echo and the intruder.Alt

The first gunshot wasn’t loud. It was wrong. Sound bent inward instead of outward, collapsing like a thought being erased mid-sentence.The street froze, rain suspended, neon flickering in static frames, as Kai staggered backward, hand pressed to his chest, eyes wide. “No,” he said hoarsely. “You don’t get to start like this.”Across from him, the figure lowered the weapon slowly. It wore his face. Not a mirror. Not a copy. An optimization, sharper eyes, steadier breathing, posture stripped of hesitation.The perfected Kai stood beneath the fractured skyline, rain hovering around him like obedient code. “Conflict acknowledged,” the other Kai said calmly. “Phase Final: Resolution.”Tessa’s voice crackled through the air, fragmented, everywhere and nowhere. “Kai, don’t listen. The shot didn’t hit your body. It hit your index.”Kai coughed, tasting static. “He’s deleting me,” Kai said. “One layer at a time.”The optimized Kai nodded. “Correction. I’m preserving humanity by removing you.”