The chamber was unlike anything Rael had seen—vast, dimly lit, and alive with currents of code. Data flowed along the walls like veins beneath translucent skin, pulsing in rhythm with something ancient and sentient. At the center floated the memory engine's core, its light dimmed yet furious, like a sleeping titan ready to wake.
And before it, a figure—cloaked in a living shadow, face obscured, form barely stable—stood silent as if waiting.
Rael moved first, his blade humming with fragmented code. "Who are you?"
The figure turned. Its eyes were not eyes but swirling lines of corrupted script. It didn't blink.
"I am the Veil," it said, voice echoing both in sound and through the system itself. "Sentinel of memory. Preserver of repetition. And now… warden of your fate."
Patchling hovered closer, scanning the energy. "It's not fully digital. It's an echo, fused with the system's backup—a memory given instinct."
Kazen flinched as his console pinged. "It's drawing from every branch of the simulation. Thousands of possible timelines. It knows everything we might do."
The Veil stepped forward. "This world loops to preserve a truth long forgotten. Your presence breaks that cycle. You bring instability."
Rael lifted his blade. "Then I'll shatter it."
What followed was a blur of warping gravity, flickering timelines, and strikes that echoed across realities. The Veil moved like a phantom, splitting into dozens of versions—each one from a timeline where it had already won.
Kazen and Patchling flanked Rael, launching countermeasures. Patchling disrupted the local code around the core while Kazen flooded the system with false memory pings—tripping the Veil's perception of what was real.
In a final push, Rael reached the core and jammed his blade into the memory stream.
The system cried out—not in pain, but in release.
The Veil screamed and shattered, scattered into cascading light.
Silence returned.
Patchling floated to the core. "The guardian is gone. But something worse is starting. There's a second layer underneath all this. We've just opened the door."
Rael's eyes darkened.
"So we step through."