The first year of peace was the loudest our world had ever known.
The silence of Alaric's sterile utopia had been shattered, replaced by a vibrant, chaotic, and glorious symphony of life. The city of Ironcliff, now renamed Arbiter's Peak by a populace with a flair for the dramatic, was no longer just a mountain fortress; it was the bustling, multicultural heart of a new civilization. The streets, once orderly and quiet, were now a constant, beautiful mess of Fenrir warriors arguing with dwarven blacksmiths over the proper way to temper Shadow-Iron, of Earth-born children seeing snow for the first time and weeping with a joy their parents were only just beginning to understand, and of merchants from a dozen different fledgling settlements haggling over the price of glowing cave fungi and other demonic commodities we now exported from our outpost in Sheol.
We had not just saved our world; we had made it infinitely more interesting.
My own existence had settled into a strange and beautiful equilibrium. The fusion with ARIA and the Abyssal entity was complete. I was a god, yes, my consciousness a silent, ever-present network that underpinned our entire reality, but I had learned to be a man again. With ARIA acting as my divine operating system, filtering the overwhelming torrent of omniscience into manageable streams, I could walk among my people not as a distant, all-powerful deity, but as their king. A flawed, tired, and deeply human king.
The 'Queens' Council,' the governing body of our new Althean Federation, was a masterpiece of controlled chaos. Elizabeth, my brilliant Queen of the Council, had designed a system of governance that was a perfect reflection of our pack: a fusion of logic, strength, and heart. She presided over the daily, often-frustrating, but always-passionate debates with the cool, detached air of a master chess player who had finally found a game worthy of her intellect.
Lyra, my Queen of the Hunt, had found her new purpose not in war, but in exploration. She led her 'Glitch Raider Explorers' into the vast, unknown territories of our reborn world, charting new lands, discovering new resources, and occasionally, for old time's sake, punching a particularly arrogant mountain troll. She was a pioneer, a legend, her joyous howls echoing from the highest peaks, a constant, wild reminder that our world was no longer a cage.
Luna, my Queen of Hearts, was the soul of our kingdom. Her Academy of Feeling had become a beacon of hope for two worlds. She was a healer of spirits, a teacher of emotions, her quiet, empathetic strength the foundation upon which our new society was built. She had taken the broken, empty souls of the Earth-born and had patiently, lovingly, taught them how to feel again.
We were at peace. We were happy.
And it was a peace that was, fundamentally, a lie.
The truth of our existence was a constant, quiet hum at the edge of my perception: the faint, desperate, and unending psychic screams of other dying worlds. The distress signal from the reality of Xylos had not been an anomaly. It had been the first of many. Since our victory, ARIA had detected dozens of similar signals, faint echoes from across the multiverse. They were all splinter timelines, alternate realities born from the chaos of the System Origin's collapse. Worlds where I had failed. Worlds where the pack had been broken. Worlds that were now being consumed by their own unique apocalypses.
We were an island of impossible success in an ocean of tragic failure. And the cries of our other, drowning selves were a constant, agonizing reminder.
The debate in our War Council was the most difficult we had ever had.
"We cannot be the saviors of every broken world," Elizabeth argued, her voice a tight, logical line, though I could feel the pain behind her pragmatism. "Our own kingdom is still fragile. Our resources are finite. To open a gateway to every dying reality, to take on their wars, their plagues... we would be spreading ourselves thin until we, too, collapse. We must be logical. We must protect what we have built."
"And what of the hunt?" Lyra roared, her hand slamming the obsidian table. "What of honor? There are other packs out there, other versions of us, fighting and dying alone! We leave them to their fate? We listen to them scream and do nothing? That is not the way of the Fenrir! That is the way of cowards!"
The council was divided. The heart and the mind at war.
It was Luna who provided the final, quiet, and unanswerable argument. She did not speak. She simply opened our 'Shared Senses' link to the entire council, allowing them to feel, just for a moment, what she felt every day. The raw, unfiltered despair of a dozen dying worlds. The agony of a thousand other Lyras dying alone. The cold, brilliant sorrow of a million other Elizabeths watching their plans turn to ash.
The silence in the room was absolute. The debate was over.
"We cannot save them all," I said, my voice heavy with the weight of the decision. "But we will not abandon them. We will not be the gods who turn a deaf ear to the prayers of the lost. We will be the glitch that breaks their cycle of failure."
Our new, impossible mission was set. We would become multiversal troubleshooters. The ultimate Glitch Raiders.
Our first destination was a foregone conclusion. Xylos. The dying world where we had rescued the other Lyra and Elizabeth, the world we had left in the care of a newly-reformed Blight Lord.
"The Blight Lord has done well," ARIA reported, displaying a holographic image of Xylos in the center of the room. The vast, grey wastes were now dotted with small, vibrant pockets of green. "It has halted the spread of the Blight. It has become a 'gardener,' as it promised, cultivating these 'sanctuary zones.' But it cannot reverse the damage. The world is too far gone. It is a terminal patient, being made comfortable in its final days."
"Then we will not just give it comfort," I declared. "We will give it a cure."
The plan was a fusion of all our powers, a final, beautiful, and terrifyingly ambitious act of creation. We would not just heal Xylos. We would merge it with our own reality.
"The 'System Fusion Protocol' I used to save our world was a defensive measure," I explained, ARIA feeding me the complex, divine-level code. "It was a reboot. This will be different. This will be an 'integration.' A copy and paste. We will use the Genesis Core as a bridge, and we will pull their entire, dying reality into a new, stable, and pocket dimension, anchored to our own. We will give them a new server."
The ritual was the most complex thing we had ever attempted. It required the full, focused power of our entire pack, our entire kingdom.
We stood once more in the Grand Arena, now a sacred space for our people. The thirty thousand souls of Ironcliff gathered, not as spectators, but as participants. They would be the psychic anchor, their collective hope the foundation upon which we would build a new world.
My queens stood with me in the center. Elizabeth, the mind, would provide the logical architecture for the new pocket dimension. Lyra, the body, would provide the raw, primal energy to fuel the transfer. Luna, the heart, would be the empathic bridge, ensuring the souls of Xylos were not shattered by the transition.
And I, with ARIA, would be the Arbiter. The one to execute the command.
I raised my staff. "Let the two worlds become one," I said, and I began the final, great work.
The portal to Xylos opened above us, a swirling vortex of grey despair. I reached out with my consciousness, through the portal, and I found them. The survivors. General Crimson and her handful of soldiers. The other Lyra, her spirit a fierce, flickering flame. And the collective, weeping soul of a world that had given up hope.
Come home, I whispered to them, a psychic call across the void. Your pack is waiting.
I pulled.
The power that flowed through me was immense, a river of grief and despair. But my own world, my own people, pushed back with a tide of hope and love. The two forces met, and in the heart of that cosmic collision, a new reality was born.
The portal did not close. It transformed. It became a shimmering, stable gateway, a permanent bridge between our world and the new, healing pocket dimension of Xylos.
Through the gate, we saw them. The survivors of a dead world, standing in a field of new, green grass, looking up at a sky that was, for the first time in their lives, a brilliant, hopeful blue.
Our mission was a success.
In the days that followed, the true reunion began. We did not just offer them a new home; we offered them a new family.
The two Elizabeths, the strategist of hope and the general of despair, became the joint heads of our new Inter-Reality Council. They were two sides of the same coin, their combined wisdom and experience creating a form of governance that was both pragmatic and visionary.
The two Lyras... their reunion was a more... boisterous affair. They did not talk. They fought. For three days and three nights, the mountains echoed with the clash of their steel and the sound of their furious, joyous roars. They were not fighting for dominance. They were healing each other, blow by blow, a brutal, violent, and beautiful therapy of the warrior's soul. When it was over, they stood bruised, battered, and whole, two sisters, one spirit, the twin swords of our new kingdom.
And Luna... Luna simply took the hand of the first child born in the new Xylos, a small, fragile orc-baby, and she began to sing him a lullaby. A song of a world that had been saved, a song of a hope that had been reborn.
I stood on the highest tower of Arbiter's Peak, watching the two worlds, now one, begin to heal. The war was over. The story was complete.
But as I looked out at the infinite, star-dusted void of the multiverse, at the thousand other flickering, dying lights of other lost worlds, I knew that this was not the end.
This was the beginning of a new, grander, and far more interesting game. We were no longer just the saviors of our own world. We were the Glitch Raiders, the troubleshooters of the multiverse.
And we had a lot of broken games to fix.