The world felt… quiet.
Too quiet.
No system alerts. No breach warnings. No corrupted skies. Just the sound of wind passing through the leaves, and a subtle hum from the sealed rift now buried beneath layers of reality anchors.
Kazen sat on the edge of the fractured battlefield, staring at the fading glow of the final system notification.
> VOID SEAL COMPLETE
> Reality Stabilized: 99.8%
> Traces Remaining: Unknown
He didn't like that last part.
Rael stood a few meters away, still gripping his glaive like the void might crack open again any second. "So… now what?"
Oroth sheathed his blade. "Now we prepare for what comes next. The system may think it's over. But we saw what's beyond the breach. And it saw us."
Patchling floated between them, scanning fragments of leftover temporal data. "There's no telling how deep the contamination went. This wasn't just a threat to Nexus Core—it touched the base fabric of the system itself."
"Meaning?" Kazen asked.
She looked directly at him. "It rewrote rules. And if it changed anything tied to player origin points or memory constructs, even you might not be what you were."
Rael glanced at him, half-joking. "Imagine Kazen turns out to be the original glitch."
Kazen didn't laugh.
He opened his player profile. Nothing looked wrong—except one small line at the bottom that wasn't there before.
> Origin Trace: Undefined | Classification: Observer-Type (Locked)
Observer-Type?
He quickly closed it.
Patchling noticed. "We'll need to run deep diagnostics on all of us. There's no way that void breach didn't leave a mark."
Oroth nodded. "Agreed. We regroup. Rerun core identity syncs. And we dig."
"Dig for what?" Rael asked.
Kazen stood. "For who built the system in the first place."
Because someone—or something—had set the stage for the void breach long before they ever logged in.