The battlefield burned like a corrupted memory.
Aiden stood amid the wreckage of his citadel, his cloak fluttering in the digital wind. The air smelled of ozone and despair — fragments of Nullborn code flickered and died around him, turning into falling motes of black light. The sky was no longer sky but a bleeding algorithm, lines of red text scrolling endlessly overhead:
> [REALITY INTEGRITY: 88%]
[CONNECTION BREACH — MULTIPLE SOURCES DETECTED]
The war had lasted for hours — maybe days — time lost all meaning inside the fracture. He had slaughtered legions of intruders, erased their codes with his bare hands, rewritten weapons into dust. But even as his enemies fell, something had resisted his perfection. Something… familiar.
He felt it before he saw it — that pulse.
A rhythm that matched his own heartbeat.
Old, almost forgotten.
When the last echo of gunfire faded, a single presence walked through the ruins — human-shaped, but wrong in the same way he was wrong.
