The boy or whatever piece of software occupied that frame, didn't run. He drifted. Each step displaced the air like he was a glitchy projection of a frame rate that hadn't quite caught up to reality. He held a jagged, white-hot dagger that hummed with the same frequency as a server undergoing a massive power surge."You have been wandering for a while," the Prototype said. His voice was Reyhan’s own, stripped of every shred of history, warmth, and trauma. It was clinical, like a notification ping in an empty room. "But the marrow has memory, Reyhan. Even if the mind is conveniently flawed."Reyhan braced himself, but his muscles felt sluggish, weighed down by a lethargy he couldn't explain. Every time the boy’s gaze hit his skin, the violet light inside his own chest, Aeros, dimmed and flared like a flickering lightbulb. "Stay back, Soph," Reyhan rasped, shifting his weight. Sophia didn't back down. She was already hovering over the terminal controls, her hands dancing through the h

The erasure protocol didn't scream; it hummed—a sickening, low-frequency oscillation that vibrated inside Reyhan’s teeth. The white void was fracturing, grey streaks of ‘deletion’ radiating from Sophia’s frozen hand, creeping toward her shoulder like mold on an overripe fruit."Eight seconds," the disembodied voice pulsed, its tone devoid of mercy.Reyhan lunged, ignoring Sophia’s warning. He didn't use his hands, that would have bridged the corrupt data to his own bloodstream. Instead, he reached out with his mind, grabbing the volatile, suffocating chaos of Aeros that resided behind his ribs and dragging it to the surface. He wasn't trying to heal her; he was trying to replace the data-pathway the system was attacking."Stay with me, Sophia!" he snarled, his eyes bleeding a frantic, violent amethyst. He shoved a focused spike of cosmic entropic energy into her arm—a gamble so catastrophic it defied the logic of the entire engine.Aeros hissed inside him. ‘You would use divine ruin t

The white-out wasn’t an ending; it was a sensory stripping. Reyhan felt his identity being peeled away, layer by agonizing layer, like scorched skin under a medical peel. He wasn't falling, he wasn't standing; he was data being parsed, weighed, and measured. Beside him, Sophia’s presence—that familiar, comforting anchor of her digital heartbeat, was growing dangerously faint.When the light finally bled into the muted tones of a simulated reality, they were no longer in the cathedral. The vast, cavernous hall was gone. Instead, they stood in an impossibly clean, stark-white chamber. It smelled of absolutely nothing—no rust, no ozone, no decay. Just the chilling neutrality of an uninitialized buffer zone.Directly across from them, hovering slightly above the polished floor, sat a figure. It was humanoid, dressed in a sharp, slate-grey suit that seemed to be woven from active liquid-crystal pixels. Its face was a shifting interface of high-definition geometry, constant triangles and po

The stranger, the mirrored Reyhan, struck with a violence that lacked any hesitation. He was a creature of kinetic precision, every movement stripped of the clumsy friction that weighed down organic existence. Reyhan barely had time to blink before a white-hot knuckles connected with his jaw, sending him skidding across the ferro-concrete floor of the subterranean chamber. He slid, his boots etching grooves into the platform, and came to a stop at the base of the control console. His vision vibrated, red diagnostic text scrolling across his sightlines, but he forced it away. Elena was still partially phased into the desk, her expression caught in a permanent loop of grim, calculating focus.  "Rey!" Sophia shouted, but her warning was cut short as a swarm of gravity-shards—sharp, black glass formed from broken geometry—zipped past her position, pinning her against the bulkhead. She wasn't fighting the newcomer; she was trying