Location: Fracture Horizon – Between Realms, Outside the Scripted Layers
The space was neither day nor night, nor even dawn. It was the hush that came before the System remembered time existed.
Here, no notifications chimed. No mana pulsed. No character status updated.
Only stillness.
Jay stood alone on a staircase that spiraled upward without a top and downward without a base. Around him floated shards of scenes— memories, battles, confessions, regrets —frozen mid-frame like abandoned storyboards. They shimmered and occasionally played fragments of sound.
A whisper of Alicia's voice. A scream from his own alternate self. A chuckle from Echo. A single breath from Rei.
"How much of me is actually me?" Jay asked the silence.
His voice echoed too clearly.
In response, a staircase beside his flickered into visibility. On it stood a version of Jay— but younger. Wide-eyed. Less guarded. Dressed in the old academy robes before the simulation ever fractured.
