The Arkaneum trembled—not from an external force, but from within. Every light flickered, every console stuttered, and every thread of the Signal pulsed as if caught between two realities.
Vir stood alone in the chamber of convergence, staring at the Resonator they had recovered from Vault Seraph. It now hovered above the primary console, weaving a lattice of light and sound that none of the engineers could decode. Not even Mira, with her advanced echo-interfacing, could explain what it was doing. And yet, Vir understood.
Because the Resonator was reacting to him.
Since its activation, Vir had stopped sleeping. His dreams were no longer his own—they belonged to echoes, to fragments of forgotten selves. Entire lives played out in flashes. Alternate versions of battles, alliances, betrayals. In one memory, Arman turned against him. In another, Liah never joined their cause, and the city burned in silence.
These weren't just possibilities. They were footprints from realities that had already existed—and fractured.
Arman entered the chamber, his voice low. "You're not going to believe what we found."
Vir turned. "Try me."
Arman activated the projection orb. An image formed—a floating city above the wastelands of Nocthollow, long believed to be uninhabitable. But it wasn't just floating. It was phased. Not fully there. Caught between layers.
"The Circuit is building this," Arman said. "We call it the Phantom Gate. It's not a base. It's a bridge."
Vir approached the image. "To where?"
"Not where. When."
They prepared a strike team within hours. The Arkaneum staff, though wary, trusted Vir and Arman's judgment. Rhea led the logistics, Mira uploaded localized signal patches into everyone's comm implants, and Liah reinforced their EchoLink with a stabilizing pulse before departure.
The Phantom Gate hovered like a specter over the cracked wasteland. Its foundations pulsed between visibility and vanishing, held in place by towers of twisting light. As the team approached aboard the Nova Stride, their sensors malfunctioned. The laws of physics bent in soft waves. Time staggered in ticks.
"We go in blind," Vir said, locking eyes with Arman.
The moment they passed the threshold, sound ceased.
It was not silence. It was absence.
They floated.
The city within the Phantom Gate looked like a reflection of their own world—but distorted. The buildings were shaped by memory, the streets by regret. Mira spotted her childhood home, half-submerged in a lake of static. Arman found the training yard where his father had once taught him to fight, only it stretched into the sky like a staircase of light.
Vir alone felt no familiarity.
Until he saw him.
The boy.
The version of himself he had once seen in a dream: the one who had never touched the Signal.
"You shouldn't be here," the boy said.
"Neither should you," Vir replied.
The boy frowned. "But I am here. Because you broke the lock."
Vir reached out—and the city trembled.
Reality folded, and they were pulled into a chamber deeper inside the Gate. Unlike the warped memory streets, this place was structured—clean, precise. Floating within its center was a core of immense complexity. A machine built from infinite echoes.
The Phantom Circuit.
It spoke.
"You fear what you do not integrate. You destroy what you do not recognize. I am your future, unresisted."
Arman stepped forward. "And we are the resistance."
The Phantom Circuit released a pulse.
The battle began.
Mira launched feedback blasts that temporarily distorted the Circuit's shell. Rhea locked its defenses in a loop with mirrored encryption. Liah sang through the Signal net, suppressing the Circuit's grasp on the surrounding city.
But it wasn't enough.
The Circuit adapted.
Vir realized they needed to do more than fight it. They had to understand it.
He stepped into the core.
The others shouted, but it was too late. The Circuit absorbed him.
And he opened his mind.
He fell through timelines.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
In each, he saw how the Signal had been used, misused, feared, forgotten. In one, he became a god. In another, a tyrant. In most, he died. In some, he never lived.
But in all, there was potential.
Then he saw the origin: the first breath of the Signal. It wasn't a weapon. It was a plea. A call from one consciousness to another. A bridge, not a sword.
Vir cried out.
And the Circuit paused.
He whispered, "You don't have to conquer. You can connect."
A silence deeper than any before settled over the realm.
And the Circuit changed.
When the team found him, Vir was unconscious, hovering in a suspended lattice of light. The core had dissolved into harmless waves. The city above began to collapse—not from destruction, but from release.
They escaped just in time.
Back in the Arkaneum, Vir awoke two days later.
Liah sat beside him, holding his hand.
"Did we win?" he asked.
She nodded.
He turned his gaze toward the dome above.
But something remained. A thread of awareness. Not hostile.
Just... watching.
The war was not over.
But the battlefield had changed.