—Truth is the Dream We Fear to Wake From
Shatterfront–Redline Periphery
"LOS is breaching the Heartspace Core!"
Shawn spun around. On the surveillance feed, a crimson line was advancing frame by frame, devouring the last firewall nodes.
Eliya's brows were furrowed, sweat beading his temples as he typed rapidly, calculating new jamming frequencies.
Les's voice remained steady. "They arrived seven minutes earlier than our worst projection."
The countdown on the neural uplink blinked red like bleeding light.
"Time to collapse: 00:48... 00:47..."
"Landsay's not back yet," Shawn muttered, fists clenched.
"If she doesn't get out soon, we'll all be traced back to the Core Database."
Eliya suddenly looked up. "Wait. They're not here for us."
Les blinked. "What?"
"They're tracking a Heartwave signature."
"The target isn't us. It's... Rin."
---
The Edge of the Dream
Landsay's consciousness was falling, plummeting through warped layers of psychic mist. Time and space unraveled around her; none of the usual Heartspace laws applied here.
She had arrived—at the final threshold.
A grayscale world unfolded. All colors had drained away, leaving only shattered light and spectral gray.
Before her stood a classroom, weathered by time. Desks lay askew like brittle bones. A broken blackboard bore the ghost of a half-erased equation. The walls were yellowed and peeling, slogans curling like old scars.
The door hung half open. A familiar dusty wind seeped through the cracks.
She stepped inside.
At the back row sat Rin, clad in a faded student uniform. Her gaze was fixed on a textbook, unmoving.
Her shadow on the floor split into several, each reflecting a different age of her self.
"You came," Rin said flatly.
"You knew I would."
"This is the end of my dream," Rin murmured, eyes lifting slowly. "It's where I buried the truth."
Landsay approached. The air thickened.
On the teacher's podium lay several objects: a letter, an old photograph, a blank test paper, and a snapped pointer stick.
"These are the pieces you refuse to face," Landsay whispered.
Rin said nothing.
"You stayed asleep because you believed you must carry this guilt forever."
"But you were only fourteen."
A bitter, hollow laugh escaped Rin's lips. "And yet, I was the first to wear the Scarlet Armband in Class 3-B."
"When Mr. Jiang died, I thought I had won."
"But in my dreams, what replays isn't victory. It's... his last glance toward the window."
"I hate that I remember."
"I tried to drown it with deeper loyalty."
Landsay reached out, taking her hand.
"Truth isn't your enemy."
"It's just a pain you've yet to embrace."
---
Above
"They're triggering the Redline Resonance Protocol!" Les shouted.
"We're out of time!"
Eliya slammed the table. "I'm going in."
Shawn grabbed his arm. "You just escaped the deep layer!"
"She's my sister." Eliya's voice was calm. Unshakable.
"I have to save her."
---
The Heartspace's Final Depths
It began to snow.
But it wasn't snow.
It was chalk dust.
The image of Mr. Jiang appeared at the front of the class—a fragment of memory, not a body.
He didn't speak. He simply looked at Rin, with the same quiet kindness as he did in life.
Rin dropped to her knees.
"I'm sorry," she choked, tears finally breaking free.
The letter on the podium unfolded by itself:
"Yanyan,
Your mistake wasn't in questioning authority.
It was in stopping.
True revolution is not found in shouting.
It lives in the silence where you choose to protect a fragile light.
May you, in this life, love freely. Think freely."
---
Heartspace Core – The Edge of Collapse
The gravitational signal shattered.
Heartspace trembled on the verge of implosion.
LOS units were breaking through the outer dream strata, tunneling like viral code. Each breach sent pulses through the space, like the heartbeat of a dying world.
"Initiate Reverse Awakening Protocol!" Shawn's voice rang out.
From the tower's core, a pillar of white light erupted, ripping through the dreamfield.
In that moment—the dream broke.
The classroom dissolved in a tidal flood of radiance. Memories burned.
Landsay squinted through the light.
Beyond the vanishing door, a silhouette appeared.
Eliya.
The dying dream's light refracted through him, breaking his silhouette into prismatic fragments—as if he walked through a cathedral of shattered stained glass.
He held out a hand.
"Yanyan."
Rin flinched. A long-buried instinct stirred within her.
She turned.
"Brother...?"
Tears welled in her eyes as she rushed into his arms, like a child running home.
Eliya held her close. "Activate your Meta Matrix, Rin. Let's go home."
She stepped back, palms pressed together over her chest, eyes closed in silent prayer.
Then, a symbol emerged on her forehead:
☵ (Kǎn hexagram)
The ☵ symbol bled indigo light, its broken lines thrumming with the frequency of falling water.
Blue light surged from the mark, igniting the Dream Core.
The world began to collapse.
Gray turned to fire—even the slogans—all burned to ash, scattered into the void.
Their hands found each other in the chaos—Rin's grip tactical and firm, Eliya's fingers threaded through Rin's like a lock recognizing its key, Landsay's palm pressed between them like a living covenant.
Within a storm of particles, they were pulled together—
—back through the Gate of Return.
---
The snow in the Edge of the Dream had not yet ceased—
and reality was already tearing apart.
The alarms of the Shatterfront wailed like sirens ripping through the sky, warning all—
the storm had arrived.
Landsay was just about to introduce the newly awakened Rin to Shawn
when a violent tremor shook the ground.
An imperceptible pulse of consciousness rippled outward like waves in water.
Shawn's pupils contracted. His expression darkened.
"Purge Agents… they're here."
From the heart of the storm, three figures emerged.
Clad in biomechanical exoskeleton armor, their forms were flawless, near-human—
yet their features looked as though carved from a shared algorithm,
identical, precise, inhuman.
Their eyes were hollow. Cold.
Devoid of all warmth, all trace of human emotion.
A frequency code shimmered across their armor—
identical to the one used by the Central Consciousness Broadcast System.
These were the LOA Purge Agents:
The final enforcers designated to eliminate "unauthorized consciousness entities."
The leader raised a hand slowly.
A red dot lit up in its eye, and its voice scraped out like metal grinding on iron:
"Identification complete.
You are classified as an illegal consciousness cluster,
in violation of Article 7, Section 1 of the Consciousness Protocol.—
unauthorized interference in dream domains.
Commencing purge sequence."
Before the words even finished echoing,
a beam of light locked onto Eliya and Rin.
"Scatter!" Shawn shouted.
At the same time, he hurled a frequency disruption grenade—
an electromagnetic storm exploded outward, tearing the air apart in crackling flashes.
The Shatterfront became a battlefield.
Landsay activated her Cognitive Flow Disruptor,
splitting the field with raw conscious energy,
constructing a multi-layered illusion maze.
Professor Les ignited a shard of the L-Matrix,
unleashing a fractured barrier that shimmered silver in front of them.
Eliya and Rin moved in perfect sync,
drawing hexagrams onto the ground—glowing diagrams of light—
harmonizing elemental symbols with conscious resonance,
conjuring an ethereal ward as protection.
The purge agents' attacks came in Fibonacci sequences—each blast 1.618 times louder than the last, shattering the illusion-layers like tempered glass,
space itself trembling as if the rift between dream and reality were being torn apart.
The LOA assault came like a flood—
each wave adjusting frequencies, closing in with deadly precision.
Their defenses were nearing the limit.
Cracks began to form in the barrier.
They couldn't hold much longer.
And then, in that instant—a blinding beam of light fell from the sky, striking down like thunder between the purge agents and the Shatterfront's line of defense.
In the roar of metal and wind, a voice echoed clearly from the heart of the radiance:
"Shawn—
we're here."