Kael didn't sleep.
For the third night in a row, he waited.
He waited for the shadows to flicker through the mirrors.
For the scream to start.
For his daughter's voice to shatter the ceiling again.
But none of it came.
The clock above the stove blinked 5:11 a.m., just like it had the day before. And the one before that.
No static. No desync.
Just… time.
Moving forward.
Kael stood barefoot on the kitchen tile, gripping the edge of the counter as steam curled from a mug of untouched tea.
He didn't blink.
He didn't trust blinking.
The apartment was whole.
The floor was warm.
The silence wasn't broken by alarms or rift distortions.
The world — for now — was intact.
Behind him, under a haphazard pile of blankets, Senna slept on the couch, her face buried in a fortress of pillows and crayon-stained plushies.
She always camped out there after Liora's night shifts.
"Worm patrol," she'd declared proudly.
Spatial worms weren't real. Not in this sector, not at her age bracket, not on any verified guild report.
But Kael didn't correct her.
She was six.
She believed in monsters.
And Kael — unfortunately — now did too.
He looked down at his left hand.
The glyph was still there.
A faint curl of yellow etched just below the skin.
It looked like an open bracket collapsing in on itself.
Most people wouldn't see it unless they were looking for it. But Senna? She'd noticed it the first morning.
Just like she had in the other timeline.
"You're glowing again," she'd whispered.
And she hadn't been wrong.
Not then.
Not now.
Kael ran a thumb across it. It didn't hurt.
It responded.
A low pulse — like something behind the skin was still listening.
Still watching.
The apartment's bedroom door opened behind him.
Liora stepped out, robe wrapped loosely around her frame, hair wrapped in a towel. She blinked at the light, then at Kael.
"You haven't moved," she said softly.
He didn't answer.
She walked to him. Placed a hand on his back.
"You've been like this every morning."
"I didn't want to wake you."
"I wasn't asleep."
He turned. Their eyes met.
And in her gaze, Kael saw the same question he'd been running from since he woke up in this timeline.
What happened to you?
But she didn't ask it. Not yet.
Instead, she kissed him gently, held his face in her hands.
"I made tea," he murmured.
"You didn't drink it."
He shook his head.
"It tastes wrong now."
A rustle from the couch.
Senna's head popped out from the blanket pile. Her hair was war-torn. One sock. Crayon still smudged across her cheek.
She blinked at them both. Yawned.
"Did Papa glitch again?" she asked.
Kael froze. Liora gave her a warning look.
Senna rubbed her eyes. "You were glowing again. I saw."
Kael crouched next to her.
"You sure it wasn't just the kitchen light?"
"There's no light over here."
She reached out and poked the back of his hand.
He didn't pull away fast enough.
The glyph shimmered.
Just for a second.
Just long enough for her to see it.
"I drew this," she whispered.
Kael stared at her.
"In the dream," she continued. "The bad one. With the tall things and the mirror faces. You were broken. But then everything went white."
Liora's breath hitched.
Kael looked at his daughter like she was a miracle that shouldn't exist.
Because she didn't.
Not anymore.
Not in the world he remembered.
"Do you… remember the dream?" he asked.
Senna shook her head. "Just parts. But it's okay now."
She smiled. "It reset."
Kael stood quickly. Walked to the bathroom. Locked the door.
The mirror stared back at him.
"System," he whispered. "Status check."
A blue screen flickered into life.
[USER: VARIN, KAEL]
[CLASS: MID-TIER AWAKENER]
[RANK: B-]
[GUILD STATUS: UNAFFILIATED]
[RAID LOG SYNC: T-90 DAYS]
[GLYPH CONTAMINATION: --]
[...GLYPH CONTAMINATION: HIDDEN FLAG – ACCESS DENIED]
[DEBT STATUS: CLASSIFIED]
His heart pounded.
It hadn't gone away.
Rollback had reset the world.
The city.
The guilds.
The gates.
The time.
But not him.
It followed me back.
He stared at the glyph again. It didn't blink.
Didn't burn.
Just waited.
He leaned forward, forehead resting against the mirror.
And this time, he saw it.
For just one second —
A shadow behind him.
Tall.
Cloaked.
Flickering.
Watching.
He spun.
Nothing.
He turned back to the mirror.
No reflection glitch. No trace.
But the glyph pulsed.
A slow heartbeat.
He whispered:
"You don't get them. Not this time."
The glyph pulsed again.
As if it heard him.
Kael didn't realize he was holding his breath until the front door hissed closed behind him.
The city was already awake.
Not loud — this district never was — but alive in quiet, comfortable ways. Hovercars humming along clean transit lines. Advert screens rolling through new raid packs and safety campaigns. The corner merchant already setting up his canopy of illegally enchanted tea blends.
Same skyline. Same pulse.
The world hadn't just reset.
It had rewound perfectly.
Except for him.
He touched the inside pocket of his coat.
Senna's napkin drawing was folded there — her "victory glyph" sketch. A spiky, glowing stick figure with big fists and an even bigger smile.
She called it her "anti-worm ward."
Kael hadn't laughed, but it helped. Somehow.
The plan was simple:
Keep moving. Keep breathing. Pretend.
He walked aimlessly at first, following old grooves in muscle memory. Back when this day had meant a light shopping run, a minor errands list, and maybe a solo gate patrol if a C-rank opened near the east corridor.
Back then, this morning had been quiet.
Now it felt scripted.
The pedestrians, the guild runners, the overhead shuttles — everything too smooth, too clean, like watching a pre-recorded sim of life.
Kael stopped on a corner and looked up at the mid-city wall.
One of the billboards was cycling through holographic recruitment ads:
[AWAKENERS WANTED]
"Protect the Future. Join the Guild That Never Sleeps."
ECLIPSE DOMINION
He stared at it.
In seventy-six days, Eclipse Dominion would fail.
Their systems would crack.
Their containment team would route to the wrong sector.
Their rollback authority would stall.
And the city would burn.
Kael turned away. Fast.
He ducked into an alley café. Not for food. Just quiet.
The vendor was wiping down the smart-tablets. An older man, low-tier augments, probably a former scout. He looked up as Kael approached.
"Still early for synth-coffee," the man said. "You look like you need something stronger."
Kael smiled faintly. "You sell time machines?"
The man raised an eyebrow.
"No," Kael said, shaking his head. "Don't mind me."
"You guild?"
"Mid-tier. Unaffiliated."
"Unlucky."
Kael didn't argue.
The vendor gestured to a side booth. "Sit. Don't buy anything. Just don't stare at the wall and scare off my customers."
Kael sat. Quietly. Gratefully.
The vendor turned the screen over to entertainment mode. News streamed from muted panels:
"Rollback upgrades processed smoothly across all five zones, with Eclipse Dominion reporting full rollback sync approval this quarter. System latency sits at an all-time low, and no trace anomalies were detected during re-sequencing…"
Kael's hands clenched beneath the table.
That's a lie.
I'm the trace anomaly.
And I brought it with me.
His wrist itched.
He didn't look at the glyph. Not now. Not in public.
But he felt it — like a low tremor behind the skin.
It wasn't just a scar.
It was a marker.
A signature.
Rollback hadn't purged it.
Why?
Why let him remember?
Unless…
Unless the system wanted him to.
No. That's not it.
The system glitched.
And the Debt followed.
Kael stood. Too fast.
The vendor glanced over. "You okay?"
"Fine. Just remembered something."
"Good luck, mid-tier."
Kael nodded once.
Then walked back out into the light.
He didn't realize where his feet were taking him until the gate shimmer came into view — the west wall spire. One of the standard perimeter tears.
The same gate.
Gate A17.
The one that would collapse.
It hovered twenty meters off the ground — a controlled fracture in space, looped tight by stabilizers, fed with a soft stream of guild-approved mobs for routine clearances.
Right now, it looked harmless.
Clean.
Even the posted spawn cycle was tame — desync wolves, no boss class. Standard patrols logged in and out.
Kael stared at it for a long time.
It stared back.
He stepped closer.
A young awakener nearby was adjusting her HUD settings. Late teens, new gear. Rookie gate glow still fresh on her boots.
She noticed him watching.
"Hey," she said, friendly. "You queuing?"
"No."
"You sure? Light group could use a fifth. Easy clears."
Kael hesitated.
He knew this gate. Knew its rhythm, its faults.
Knew the one mob in this week's cycle that bugged mid-spawn — a desync wolf that appeared two seconds early, killing one of the rookies if the group didn't compensate.
It was a tiny mistake.
A rounding error.
But it started everything.
"I'm just watching," Kael said.
The girl smiled, offered a mock salute, and turned back to her party.
Kael stood there as they entered. Five of them.
He watched the timer.
Waited.
And at the thirty-second mark, the desync wolf shimmered into being — early.
He took a breath.
Then, without fully knowing how, he reached for the glyph.
And touched it.
The moment he did —
The wolf flickered.
Paused.
Its spawn cycle corrected.
It dropped three meters behind the group instead of two.
No one noticed.
The party cleared it cleanly.
Kael stepped back, heart pounding.
I patched it.
I didn't cast. Didn't speak. Didn't use a system dev tool.
I just… willed it.
Behind his eyes, a line of system code blinked.
[MICRO-PATCH DETECTED]
[RAID BALANCE: STABLE]
[NO ADMIN LOG FOUND]
[TRACE: VARIN, KAEL]
[DEBT SYNC: +0.00001]
His hand shook.
He looked up at the gate.
And it shimmered again — almost like it winked.
Kael didn't remember walking away from the gate.
He was just… gone from it.
Next thing he knew, he stood at a transit pillar with no idea how long he'd been standing there, the public holo hovering gently beside him:
[TRANSIT TO DISTRICT 3 – NEXT CYCLE: 2 MINUTES]
He checked his pulse.
Fast. But steady.
His left hand?
Still whole.
Still normal — except for the faint yellow glyph curling just below the skin like an ember caught under ice.
And now, he knew what it could do.
He hadn't cast a spell.
He hadn't run a command.
He'd seen the wolf spawn early — and wanted it not to.
And the system had obeyed.
No cooldown.
No energy drain.
No visible cast trace.
No authorization.
Just... a fix.
He pulled his sleeve lower.
A voice behind him interrupted the spiral.
"Mid?"
Kael turned. The rookie awakener from earlier — the one who'd smiled at him before queuing into the raid — was standing a few steps back, fidgeting with her gauntlet.
"Yeah," Kael said, caught off-guard. "That's me."
She smiled. "I thought so. You were the guy watching A17, right?"
Kael nodded slowly.
She looked a little nervous now.
"I just—" she scratched the back of her head. "I wanted to say thanks. I don't know if you saw, but one of the wolves dropped late. Would've clipped our backline if it landed right."
Kael stared.
"Only I think it didn't? Or maybe it glitched or something? Either way, I owe you one."
She grinned. "Sometimes just having someone watching is luck enough, huh?"
He didn't answer.
She gave an awkward wave and left.
Kael stood in silence as the transit arrived, passengers filing out in low murmurs and shoes scraping across glass tiles.
He stepped in without thinking.
It shouldn't be happening.
Not again.
He'd triggered a patch.
And the system hadn't stopped him.
It hadn't even logged it properly.
No rollback.
No dev flag.
Just… a bump in the glyph count.
A Debt sync.
+0.00001.
That meant it was tracking him again. Like before.
He leaned against the wall of the transit, eyes half-closed, trying to breathe.
It followed me back.
Not just the glyph.
Not just the shadow.
The Debt counter.
The same invisible cost that broke his body in the last timeline — now rebooted.
And if the system wasn't logging the changes externally…
That meant no one could see what he was doing.
No one would know.
Unless it spiraled.
Unless it bled again.
Back at home, the quiet almost unnerved him more than the streets.
Liora was reading in the corner, feet up, the holo-page half folded. She glanced up as Kael entered.
"You look like you saw a god."
"I might've patched one," he said.
She blinked. "Is that… flirting?"
He smiled weakly.
Senna barreled into the room a second later with a triumphant "RAID COMPLETE!" and flung a crayon-drawn map onto the table. "I captured three elite worms and gave them chores."
Kael dropped to one knee, arms open. "Tell me you made them do dishes."
Senna beamed. "AND toilet patrol."
He clutched his chest like the drama was fatal. "Truly, the worst fate."
Senna ran off again. Liora watched her go, quiet.
Then she turned back to him.
Kael sat down. Didn't speak.
He didn't need to.
Liora set her book down carefully.
"Kael. What happened today?"
He looked at her for a long time.
Then, finally, the words came:
"I patched something."
"You… what?"
"No tools. No interface. No team. I saw a desync coming. And I stopped it. Just… thought it. Willed it."
"Is that possible?"
Kael didn't answer right away.
Then: "It is for me."
She looked at his hand.
"You're not a dev. You're not even cleared."
"I wasn't."
"And now?"
He slowly pulled back his sleeve.
The glyph glowed softly.
Liora's breath caught.
"I thought… maybe this was just trauma. A psychic fracture from whatever you remembered. But this—"
She reached out. Her fingers hovered just above the glyph.
She didn't touch it.
"Kael," she said softly, "how long do we have before it starts again?"
Kael looked toward Senna's room, where her singing floated through the air like magic.
He didn't answer the question.
Instead, he said:
"It already has."
It started with a crack.
Barely visible.
Like a hairline fracture in the back of his wrist — not in his skin, but beneath it.
Kael stared at it under the bathroom light, pulling his arm closer to the mirror.
The glyph was still there — that lazy curl of soft yellow light — but now it was leaking.
Microscopic threads traced upward toward his elbow. Not glowing. Just etched.
They didn't hurt.
They just shouldn't exist.
It's too soon.
In the last timeline, the first crack hadn't appeared until five patches in.
He'd just done one.
A minor mob respawn correction.
But here it was — early, like the system wasn't pretending anymore.
He flexed his hand.
The crack stayed.
Then, in the mirror — just for an instant — something moved behind him.
Kael spun.
Nothing there.
He turned back.
And the reflection didn't match.
In the mirror, he was still turned around.
Facing away from himself.
His breath caught.
The lights flickered.
Then, the reflection caught up — snapping forward like a skipped frame.
Kael stepped back.
"No," he whispered. "No. Not yet."
The mirror looked normal again.
But his own eyes stared back with something darker around them.
The glyph crack shimmered under the skin of his arm.
Not light.
Not code.
Something older.
In the hallway, Liora's voice broke through the silence:
"Kael, did you just short the lights?"
"No," he called back. "Just… old wiring."
"You mean unholy terror, right?"
That got a weak smile out of him.
He stepped out into the hallway. Liora stood there with two mugs, one raised like an offering.
"I made the good tea," she said.
Kael raised an eyebrow. "The pre-rollback blend?"
She rolled her eyes. "The one that doesn't taste like data scrub."
He took it. Sipped.
It burned a little.
But it was real.
They stood in silence for a few seconds, sipping.
Then she said, softly, "It's your arm, isn't it?"
He didn't answer.
"You don't have to hide it."
Kael kept his eyes on the window — where the city shimmered behind their balcony glass.
"It's spreading already," he admitted.
She didn't react. Not much.
"I figured," she said. "You look like you're always bracing for something. Like there's a bomb you can see and no one else can."
He nodded.
Liora leaned her head against his shoulder.
"I wish I could see it too," she whispered. "So we could fight it together."
"You will," Kael said quietly. "Eventually."
That night, Kael dreamed of the gate.
But not like before — not the chaos of the collapse.
This time, he stood before it in silence.
The rift shimmered like glass in a storm, but nothing came through. No mobs. No system alerts. No Reapers.
Just the hum of space torn too cleanly.
And in the center of the gate floated a single glyph.
His.
Bright. Yellow. Curling in place.
A mirror reflected back at him from the other side of the rift.
Only it wasn't his face.
It was Senna's.
Screaming.
Kael jolted awake in the dark.
His heart hammered. His breath sharp.
He looked at his hand.
The glyph was brighter now.
The crack reached his elbow.
And on the wall across from him—
For just a second—
His own reflection stepped backward.
Into the mirror.
And vanished.
Kael stood in the hallway long after the dream had ended.
The apartment was dark. No lights. No motion.
He didn't dare turn them on.
He didn't trust what he might see in the glass.
Instead, he stared at the mirror by the entryway — the one Liora always checked before work, the one Senna used to make faces at herself before brushing her teeth.
It didn't move now.
Just a blank, still version of the space behind him.
Perfectly clean.
Perfectly wrong.
Because he wasn't in it.
He raised his left hand. Held it up toward the reflection.
No response.
He stepped forward.
And still — nothing.
No him.
No hand.
No echo.
Just hallway.
Then—
A breath.
But not from his lungs.
From the mirror.
A soft pulse of condensation fogged the center of the glass for a moment, as if something on the other side had exhaled.
And written in that breath, just for a blink, was a glyph.
Not his.
But shaped like it.
Crooked. Aggressive. Red.
Then it vanished.
Kael backed away slowly.
Into the living room.
Senna was asleep on the couch again, curled beneath her blanket ramparts. One sock. A crayon under her chin.
Liora lay asleep on the armchair nearby, still half-dressed, her book slipping from her fingers.
Both breathing.
Both here.
Kael dropped to his knees.
He stared at them like they were the only real things left in the world.
The glyph on his hand pulsed. Harder now. The crack along his arm deepened another inch. Not visibly — but he felt it.
Beneath the skin.
Under the bone.
Something alive, waiting to be called again.
One more fix. One more hot patch. One more override.
That's all it will take to start the collapse again.
He whispered into the dark:
"Not this time."
His fingers curled into a fist.
"I won't let it happen."
His eyes flicked back toward the mirror in the hallway.
"I don't care what I become."
He looked down at Senna, then at Liora.
"If I have to burn this system to keep them breathing—"
"—then I will."
The glyph pulsed again. Bright. Defiant.
The Debt ticked forward.
[DEBT SYNC: +0.00002]
[VOW RECOGNIZED]
[ANCHOR: VARIN, KAEL – LOCKED]
Somewhere, far away, a Reaper moved in the reflection of a skyscraper window.
It didn't step forward.
Yet.
But its mirror eyes had already turned toward them.
The first one appeared on the 4th day.
Not in a raid. Not in a gate.
In the window of a train.
Kael almost didn't catch it — just a flicker in the reflection across from him as the transit tunnel curved through the skyline. It shimmered for a second too long, like the light didn't want to obey physics.
And there, for a breath, a shadow stood beside his reflection.
Too tall. Cloaked.
Arms at its sides.
A mirror where its face should be.
Reaper.
His spine went cold.
He turned to look behind him — nothing but the nearly empty passenger car.
Turned back—
The reflection had already adjusted.
Too fast.
Like it didn't want to be caught.
By the time Kael reached his stop, the glyph on his hand was pulsing in sync with his heartbeat again.
He didn't even need the system ping to know it had seen him.
He'd made a second fix the night before — a quiet one. Just a simple delay on a pet AI's despawn timer when it bugged and tried to eat its owner's leg.
Not a big patch.
Not even a dangerous one.
But the system had noticed.
And so had they.
He walked fast. Didn't rush. Didn't run.
You don't run when you're being watched — not unless you want them to know you're scared.
He passed street panels, holo ads, tinted display windows—
Every reflective surface felt like a window with the blinds slightly open.
By the time he reached the edge of the mid-district, Kael ducked into an alley near a maintenance checkpoint and pulled up his system overlay.
[GLYPH STATUS: ACTIVE]
[DEBT COUNT: +0.00007]
[TRACE DETECTED]
[EXTERNAL: UNKNOWN | SIGNATURE: —RPR—]
There it was.
[—RPR—]
Reaper trace confirmed.
Kael hissed under his breath and closed the window fast.
No system was supposed to label a Reaper signature. That wasn't public-facing metadata. That was buried six levels deep — dev-only, guild-classified, rollback-blacklisted.
But now it was popping in his base feed like a casual status effect.
They see me again.
But why this early?
In the previous timeline, they hadn't appeared until after his fifth unsanctioned fix — when his Debt count had passed +0.001.
Now they were here.
At +0.00007.
They're responding faster this time.
Because they already remember me.
Kael exhaled slowly and stepped back out into the street.
He didn't go home.
Not yet.
Not until he calmed the flare running along his bones.
Instead, he walked toward an old server-stack bookstore on the edge of Guild Square. It was quiet, fringe-tier, just outside the surveillance mesh of the Dominion towers.
The place still had mirrors on the inside.
Not smartglass.
Not filtered.
Old-fashioned.
Polished.
He walked to the far corner, between the shelves of outdated gate field theory, and stared at himself.
Not for a second.
For ten minutes.
Daring it to show up.
He whispered to the mirror:
"I see you."
The mirror didn't move.
No flicker. No ripple.
Just his own eyes, too tired for someone who hadn't died recently.
"You remember me, don't you?"
Still nothing.
"You're not supposed to be here yet."
A pause.
Then—
The lights in the store dimmed.
Just a flicker.
Barely more than a blink.
But when they returned—
The reflection had changed.
In the mirror, Kael was standing still.
But something behind him now had a hand on his shoulder.
Long. Bone-thin. Draped in torn black.
Kael turned instantly.
Nothing behind him.
Whirled back—
The mirror was back to normal.
Just him.
Alone.
He pulled up the system log again, teeth clenched.
[REAPER TRACE: ACKNOWLEDGED]
[SIGNATURE LOCKED TO ANCHOR-KAEL]
[VOW TAGGED: "NOT THIS TIME"]
[REAPER RESPONSE: OBSERVING]
[WARNING: YOU ARE SEEN.]
Kael stared at the final line.
[YOU ARE SEEN]
It wasn't an error.
It was a message.
They weren't just watching.
They were waiting.
The raid was small.
Low stakes on paper.
A fixed-point rift in the southern wet zone — swamp biome, C-rank, four standard mobs and a shallow-buried miniboss.
Not the kind of gate Kael would've blinked at last timeline.
He wasn't here to fight.
He was here to watch.
The same rookie team from earlier — the one he'd fixed the spawn delay for — was running again. Probably farming XP, building rapport, learning rotations.
One of them had called out to him when they passed earlier.
"Mid, you watching again?"
He'd nodded. They'd waved.
The tall one — the girl with the bright blue HUD visor — had joked:
"Hope you brought more of that spooky luck today!"
Kael didn't smile.
He followed at a distance.
Didn't join the party.
Didn't queue into the gate.
Just stepped into the observer perimeter, logged in as a solo standby.
It gave him full visual clearance and no authority to intervene.
Perfect.
Inside the rift, things began smoothly.
The team moved fast, tight, well-coordinated for rookies.
Kael watched the cooldown rhythms.
The tank's aggro pulls were about 0.3 seconds behind the server tick — standard lag.
The healer's barrier timing was tight — a bit too tight. She clipped a cast once. Nothing dangerous.
Then — a faint flicker.
Kael caught it instantly.
A cooldown desync on the secondary DPS.
His rotation stuttered. Instead of firing off his blade glyph at 4.5 seconds, it delayed to 6.1 — out of sync with the boss phase.
That'll trigger the trap ward early.
And it did.
The miniboss shimmered, broke the script.
Dropped a secondary AoE slam it wasn't supposed to have at this stage.
Kael's HUD flared:
[UNEXPECTED PHASE TRIGGERED – PLAYER XAI-112 HP: 32%]
[COOLDOWN TIER DRIFT: -2.1]
He checked the logs. The system wasn't correcting it.
The healer began her revive charge.
Too late.
They're going to wipe.
Kael stepped forward in the real world.
Reached into the glyph.
Pressed it.
No console.
No admin key.
Just intention.
And suddenly—
The lag snapped back.
The cooldown window re-synced.
The healer's cast landed 0.8 seconds faster than the server allowed.
A barrier flared over the tank just as the boss slammed its arm down.
Impact absorbed.
Health bars dropped—
Then stabilized.
The team scrambled, confused.
Then recovered.
DPS burst.
Miniboss fell.
No one died.
Cheers erupted.
Kael stood perfectly still.
Then his HUD flared.
[MICRO-PATCH EXECUTED]
[COOLDOWN QUEUE CORRECTED]
[TRACE LOG: UNAUTH – FLAGGED]
[REAPER RESPONSE: TRIGGERED]
[DEBT SYNC: +0.00011]
Kael didn't move.
Not even when the light beside him shifted—
And a reflection across the inner gate wall moved independently.
He turned his head slightly.
The stone didn't shimmer.
But in the puddle under the platform — that muddy, natural puddle — his reflection was not alone.
A figure stood behind him.
Seven feet tall.
Arms at its sides.
No sound. No breath.
Just presence.
Reaper.
He didn't look directly at it. He couldn't. He knew better.
But the glyph on his hand burned cold now.
And the puddle... rippled.
Then, the reflection lifted its hand.
One long, tapering finger pointed—
At the team.
Kael spoke, barely above a whisper.
"No."
The finger didn't move.
"They're not mine."
Still pointing.
He stepped between the puddle and the gate.
Still pointing.
Then—
The puddle blinked to normal.
Gone.
Just his reflection again.
Kael exhaled slowly.
Pulled up his HUD.
The team inside was laughing now.
One of them messaged out:
"Mid! That was SICK! Did you see that barrier drop? Timing was perfect. Scared the glitch outta me!"
He replied:
"Just lucky."
They didn't know.
But the Reapers did.
Luck.
It always started with that word.
The team from the wet-zone rift was back the next day — loud, joking, high on their first near-death no-wipe.
And Kael was part of the story now. Not the center. But a name that got dropped.
"Mid guy. Think his name's Kael? He watched the whole fight. He's got timing like a dev's kid on debug mode."
"Nah, he's just one of those quiet sync freaks. You know the type. Can read tick flow from HUD lag."
"Bro, that barrier cast landed in sub-one. That's not reading lag. That's rewriting it."
Kael heard the first round of it in a gear market, two floors up from the guild plaza. He wasn't even close to the raid zones, just browsing old mod chips for a half-broken gauntlet rig when the two hunters nearby said his name.
Not his call sign.
His name.
Not "that mid."
Not "the quiet guy."
"Kael."
He froze.
They didn't notice.
One of them kept talking:
"You didn't see the pulse? Barrier fired too early. Way too early. There's no cooldown buffer for that unless someone's intercepting the cast queue and forcing a manual re-alignment."
"You're saying he hacked the cooldown stack?"
"I'm saying it looked like someone hotfixed reality."
Kael quietly slid the chip back onto the rack.
He left without buying anything.
The next few hours were worse.
A message ping hit his overlay mid-transit.
[INCOMING – UNKNOWN TAG]
[TEXT ONLY]: "Yo, you part of the sync squad? Heard you were a barrier ghost. Wanna teach me how?"
Kael blocked the sender.
[BLOCKED]
[TRACE REFUSED]
Then another ping, minutes later:
"Mid? You around? Got a tip on a cooldown bug, figured you'd wanna see it."
He didn't reply.
The third was the one that stuck.
"I saw the puddle too."
That one wasn't signed.
Kael sat still for a long time after that.
Not on a bench.
Not at home.
Just… leaning against the steel skeleton of an unfinished scaffolding level, high enough that no one would casually walk past him.
The city blinked below.
Gates shimmered across districts.
Skytrains echoed through fog.
He stared at his hand.
The glyph hadn't stopped pulsing.
[DEBT SYNC: +0.00014]
[REAPER TRACE: SHADOW-TAGGED]
[SPOKEN NAME: 3 PUBLIC MENTIONS – FLAGGED]
He wasn't hiding well enough.
I need to go quieter.
But the cracks were growing.
And worse—
The world was noticing before the Reapers acted.
That wasn't how it had gone last time.
Last time, the guilds had ignored him until it was too late.
He was just a mid-tier oddity.
A rumor.
Now?
He was a bug in the system.
A whisper in the glass.
A patch note no one remembered installing.
That night, Senna ran up to him with a new page in her glyph diary.
"Papa," she said, beaming. "Look!"
Kael knelt. "Show me."
She flipped the page open.
It was a spiral.
Not a glyph exactly. Just looping lines — yellow crayon in her careful scrawl.
"It moves when I look at it for too long," she whispered.
Kael's breath caught.
"Does it glow?"
"Only in the corner," she said. "But I think it's trying to say hi."
He smiled, trying not to look as shaken as he felt.
"It's just a drawing," he said.
She nodded. "But it remembers me."
Luck.
It always started with that word.
The team from the wet-zone rift was back the next day — loud, joking, high on their first near-death no-wipe.
And Kael was part of the story now. Not the center. But a name that got dropped.
"Mid guy. Think his name's Kael? He watched the whole fight. He's got timing like a dev's kid on debug mode."
"Nah, he's just one of those quiet sync freaks. You know the type. Can read tick flow from HUD lag."
"Bro, that barrier cast landed in sub-one. That's not reading lag. That's rewriting it."
Kael heard the first round of it in a gear market, two floors up from the guild plaza. He wasn't even close to the raid zones, just browsing old mod chips for a half-broken gauntlet rig when the two hunters nearby said his name.
Not his call sign.
His name.
Not "that mid."
Not "the quiet guy."
"Kael."
He froze.
They didn't notice.
One of them kept talking:
"You didn't see the pulse? Barrier fired too early. Way too early. There's no cooldown buffer for that unless someone's intercepting the cast queue and forcing a manual re-alignment."
"You're saying he hacked the cooldown stack?"
"I'm saying it looked like someone hotfixed reality."
Kael quietly slid the chip back onto the rack.
He left without buying anything.
The next few hours were worse.
A message ping hit his overlay mid-transit.
[INCOMING – UNKNOWN TAG]
[TEXT ONLY]: "Yo, you part of the sync squad? Heard you were a barrier ghost. Wanna teach me how?"
Kael blocked the sender.
[BLOCKED]
[TRACE REFUSED]
Then another ping, minutes later:
"Mid? You around? Got a tip on a cooldown bug, figured you'd wanna see it."
He didn't reply.
The third was the one that stuck.
"I saw the puddle too."
That one wasn't signed.
Kael sat still for a long time after that.
Not on a bench.
Not at home.
Just… leaning against the steel skeleton of an unfinished scaffolding level, high enough that no one would casually walk past him.
The city blinked below.
Gates shimmered across districts.
Skytrains echoed through fog.
He stared at his hand.
The glyph hadn't stopped pulsing.
[DEBT SYNC: +0.00014]
[REAPER TRACE: SHADOW-TAGGED]
[SPOKEN NAME: 3 PUBLIC MENTIONS – FLAGGED]
He wasn't hiding well enough.
I need to go quieter.
But the cracks were growing.
And worse—
The world was noticing before the Reapers acted.
That wasn't how it had gone last time.
Last time, the guilds had ignored him until it was too late.
He was just a mid-tier oddity.
A rumor.
Now?
He was a bug in the system.
A whisper in the glass.
A patch note no one remembered installing.
That night, Senna ran up to him with a new page in her glyph diary.
"Papa," she said, beaming. "Look!"
Kael knelt. "Show me."
She flipped the page open.
It was a spiral.
Not a glyph exactly. Just looping lines — yellow crayon in her careful scrawl.
"It moves when I look at it for too long," she whispered.
Kael's breath caught.
"Does it glow?"
"Only in the corner," she said. "But I think it's trying to say hi."
He smiled, trying not to look as shaken as he felt.
"It's just a drawing," he said.
She nodded. "But it remembers me."
The apartment was warm when Kael returned.
Too warm.
He checked the heater glyph in the corner. It hadn't been activated. Just residual glow from the afternoon light flooding in through the windows — those soft, old panels that didn't filter system glare the way smartglass did.
He stood still in the doorway, listening.
The sound of rustling paper.
Then a quiet hum.
Senna's.
She was sitting at the low table, knees tucked beneath her, the stubby remains of a yellow crayon clutched in her hand like a spell scroll.
The notebook in front of her was half-filled now — half glyphs, half patterns, half stories in her careful, sideways writing.
Three halves.
The math of children.
Kael stepped in slowly.
She didn't look up.
"Papa," she said. "Did you know dreams can get stuck?"
He blinked. "Stuck?"
She nodded, drawing slowly. "Like when you wake up, but the dream doesn't stop. It just gets quiet and hides. And then when you look at your hands, it's still there."
She looked up.
"Your hand still has the glow, doesn't it?"
Kael's throat dried.
"Just a little," he said softly.
Senna nodded, as if that was obvious.
Liora's voice came from the bedroom.
"Let her draw before dinner, Kael. She's been focused all day."
Kael nodded, even though she couldn't see him.
He walked over, knelt beside Senna.
"What are you working on?"
"It's a spirally one," she said. "But not spinny. Just... like this."
She flipped to a fresh page.
Drew quickly — five strokes, then a curve, then a long vertical pull with her finger pressed into the paper like pressure mattered.
He froze.
It was a glyph.
Not one she should know.
Not one he had ever drawn for her.
It was a patch marker.
One that hadn't been triggered yet.
Kael reached forward, touching the corner of the page.
"Where did you see this one?"
Senna tilted her head.
"I didn't see it," she said. "I heard it."
"You… heard it?"
She tapped the page once.
"It hums, Papa. Like the lights in the hallway."
Kael's hand slowly curled into a fist.
The lights in the hallway didn't hum.
Unless a Reaper was watching from the mirror.
"Sen," he said, gently. "Do you… see things? When you're drawing?"
She nodded.
"Like what?"
She looked at him.
Dead serious.
"Like the part where you fall down, and your voice doesn't come back."
"But then I draw the spiral and you get up again."
Kael's breath caught.
"Did you dream that?"
She shook her head.
"I remembered it."
He closed the book slowly. Held it to his chest.
Liora stepped into the doorway, drying her hands.
She smiled.
"Everything alright?"
Kael looked up.
"Perfect."
And for a moment — just a moment — it was.
Even with the glyph pulsing under his skin.
Even with the trace watching from the hall.
Because this time, the spiral had a name.
And it had drawn him back to them.