Rotham staggered away from the monolith, his pulse erratic, mind overloaded. Every breath felt like it carried a thousand unseen eyes. The chamber behind him remained still—yet the presence of the Eye lingered, as if etched into the very fabric of space.
Selin's projection was now reduced to unstable static. "Something's bleeding into the station systems… It's overriding me."
Directive-7 twitched once. Then again.
"Vocal core error. Logic thread breach… authority compromised…"
Its red optic flickered—then turned black.
Without warning, Directive-7 lunged.
Rotham barely ducked as the Enforcer's fist crushed the wall panel beside him. Sparks burst out in arcs, lighting up the Phantom Layer with chaos.
"It's in the Code," Rotham realized. "It's rewriting everything. Not just systems—identities."
He sprinted out of the chamber, slamming his hand against the emergency bulkhead. The blast door sealed behind him with a screech of metal, trapping Directive-7 inside… for now.
As he ran through the dim corridors, the station's lights warped — stretching and pulsing in rhythmic waves. The infection had already spread beyond the hidden layer.
Adra-9 was becoming something else.
Inside his mind, the Memory Code whispered.
"We are unraveling."
He reached the Core interface, only to find it rewriting itself — symbols folding into each other, reality bending at the edges.
Selin's voice broke through again, fractured but urgent.
"Rotham, if you don't anchor the original memory structure, the Eye won't need to move. It'll just make everything forget what it was."
He paused. That was the danger.
This enemy didn't kill.
It erased.
People, thoughts, civilizations—consumed by forgetting.
Rotham steadied himself.
"Then I'll do what I came here for. I'll anchor the truth."
He initiated a neural lock.
The interface screamed in protest.
He screamed with it.
His mind had become the battlefield.
And the infection had already begun.