Somewhere between decayed subroutines and dream residue, Rei moved again.
He wasn't breathing, but he remembered how it felt. That small ache in the ribs, the tug of air at the throat. Memory, sensation—half of him was still human. The other half? Patchwork. Woven from artificial threads of the system's original framework.
"I felt it," he murmured, as the pulse of the Zero Point bloom reached him. "Jay... it's not just you anymore."
The core archives had shifted. He could see files rewrite themselves mid-sentence. Alicia's awakening had sent ripples of divine code into corners long forgotten, and Jay...
Jay was rewriting the system not as a user, but as a counterforce.
Rei flexed his hands, light cracking off his fingertips. The Archive wasn't fighting him anymore. It was waiting.
"Fragments from every failed timeline... they're waking up."
He closed his eyes.
And stepped forward.
---
Observer Fragment – The Watcher Who Waited
