Rael stood on the edge of a world that didn't quite exist.
Althera—the city of beginnings—was whole again. Not scorched. Not abandoned. But pristine, humming with life, as if the war, the recursion, and the system collapse had never happened.
The streets buzzed with market noise, the scent of baked bread and spice oils drifting on a soft breeze. People smiled, called out greetings. And in the middle of it all, standing beneath the shade of a rustleaf tree, was his mother.
Alive.
Unaged.
Unaware.
Rael couldn't breathe.
> [Thread Divergence Detected]
[Synchronizing Host Memory with Recursive Branch: R0-Alpha]
[Warning: Identity Integrity Risk – 83%]
The interface pinged over and over, but Rael ignored it. His hands trembled as he stepped forward.
"Mom?" he whispered.
She turned, smiling with eyes that carried no weight of death or separation. "You're late again, Rael. Did you forget today's festival?"
Festival?
He didn't remember any festival. Not from this life.
Not from any life.
Children ran past, waving colored flags. People laughed. Somewhere in the distance, bells chimed from a tall spire that didn't exist in his memory. The whole world was wrong—but it was wrong in a way that felt like home.
Then a voice broke the illusion.
"Rael. You need to get out."
It was Patchling, distorted, struggling to break through. Her signal stuttered like bad reception.
"This is a false loop," she warned. "You're caught inside a recursive echo. It's rewriting your memories to stabilize itself."
Rael shook his head. "But she's here. Alive. She's real."
"No," came another voice—his own.
He turned—and faced himself.
Not a mirror image, but a parallel version: cleaner, straighter posture, wearing the black-gold uniform of a system executor.
"You're not supposed to be, Rael," the echo said. "You were a failed seed. I was the one meant to inherit the Overlord thread."
They circled each other.
"You chose freedom," the echo said. "I chose purpose."
Rael narrowed his eyes. "Then let's see which one the system really wants."
The two collided.
Not with blades—but with memory. Every moment Rael had lived was turned into code and flung against the echo like weaponized emotion. They fought in spirals of light—each strike a shattered reality, each block a refusal to forget who they were.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the simulation…
Oroth broke through a firewall of burning script, his fists glowing with overload energy. Revenant was already at his back, slicing through specters of corrupted data soldiers. Kazen rewired the corridor, realigning the frequency of time itself to breach the barrier Rael had vanished into.
"Is he still intact?" Kazen shouted.
"Barely!" Patchling responded, flooding the thread with her own stability code.
Inside the recursive loop, Rael's other self stumbled.
"You don't understand what's at stake," the echo hissed. "The recursion needs us."
"No," Rael said, stepping forward. "The recursion needs someone to believe it's unbreakable."
He reached out—and pulled the mask off the echo's face.
There was no face underneath.
Just a spinning void of code, replaying his past over and over.
Rael let go.
The echo screamed—and disintegrated into raw memory.
> [Branch Collapse Initiated]
[Stability Core Reestablished]
[User Identity: Rael Althys – Confirmed]
Reality blinked.
The false world shattered.
And Rael awoke, on his back, with the others standing over him—worried, battle-scarred, but alive.
"You back with us?" Oroth asked, offering a hand.
Rael nodded slowly. "Yeah. And I know where we're going next."
Kazen narrowed his eyes. "Where?"
Rael looked toward the horizon.
"To the First Tower. Where the recursion began."