The victory over the God-Mimesis was a silent, secret thing. When the *Pathfinder* returned to the Nexus, there were no parades. There was only a quiet, grim debriefing in the highest levels of the command center.
The data they had collected was a revelation. The Shard-Verse was not just a chaotic frontier. It was a crucible. A place that was actively forging new, and terrifyingly powerful, forms of narrative life. The God-Mimesis was not an anomaly. It was a prototype.
"It's an evolutionary arms race," Vexia concluded, her holographic display showing the Shard-Verse as a living, breathing, and rapidly metastasizing entity. "The more powerful the stories we introduce, the more powerful the Mimesis that evolve to consume them. Our very presence is making our enemy stronger."
