Night fell across Nexus Core, but the sky didn't turn dark—it turned static. Flickers of void-light bled through the cracks left by the unreality breach. Stars glitched, constellations rewrote themselves, and whispers slipped between frames of time.
Rael stood at the edge of the breach. It pulsed like a wound in the code, humming in a language even the system didn't understand.
"We stopped User Zero," he said quietly. "But this thing… it's not him."
Oroth nodded. "He was a herald. This is the source."
Kazen paced behind them, Patchling hovering close, her glow dim. "It's trying to talk," she whispered.
"Talk?" Rael asked.
Patchling's eyes dimmed for a moment, then widened. "No—not talk. It's… calling."
A voice slipped out of the breach. Not in words, but in thought. It bypassed language and pushed directly into their minds.
return
Kazen felt his systems lock for half a second. His HUD glitched. For a moment, he saw an identity field with no classification. No name. Just—
> Origin: Unknown
> Nature: Echo of the Void
> Level: Outside Classification
"System's never logged this," Kazen muttered.
Then the breach pulsed. Something stepped out.
It wasn't a creature. It wasn't even a being. It was a memory shaped like a man, stitched together from deleted data and system remnants—like someone forced code to remember a soul.
Patchling stammered. "That's… impossible."
Oroth drew his blade. "That's me."
They all froze. The thing was Oroth, but not quite. Older. Wounded. Eyes hollow.
It spoke. "I crossed the void and returned… but I should have never come back."
Rael raised his glaive. "Is it a doppel? An echo?"
"No," Kazen said. "It's a future."
A version of Oroth that had lost. That had become part of the breach. That now stood here as a warning—or a weapon.
The echo-Oroth raised a corrupted blade.
Kazen activated combat protocols. "It's not just rewriting the past anymore."
Patchling finished the thought.
"It's importing failed timelines."