I woke up nowhere.
That's the only way to describe it. No floor beneath me. No sky above. No body to feel. Just... awareness, floating in a void of absolute nothing.
*Where - *
The thought stuttered. Incomplete. There was no air to breathe, no heart to beat, no lungs to fill. I was consciousness without container.
I am Ryder Cross.
The thought anchored something. A flicker of identity in the emptiness.
I am here to integrate. To survive. To come back.
More anchors. More substance. Slowly, impossibly, I began to feel.
First came the outline - edges where the void ended and I began. Then came form - limbs, torso, head. Then came sensation - the pressure of existence, the weight of being.
I opened eyes I hadn't possessed a moment ago.
And saw the desert.
Glass.
An infinite expanse of broken glass, stretching to every horizon. Shards of every size - some small as grains of sand, others tall as buildings. The sky above held no color, no sun, no stars. Just an ambient glow that came from everywhere and nowhere.
I took a step. The glass crunched beneath my feet - feet that existed now, solid and real within this impossible place.
The Soulscape.
I remembered the Fragment's explanation. A mental landscape constructed from memories. Mine and everyone I'd absorbed.
Each shard around me flickered with images. I saw my childhood bedroom. My mother's face. The Seattle skyline at sunset. But between those familiar fragments, I saw other things. A church lit by candlelight. A Holy Sword experiment room. Wings of black feathers. Flames that burned without heat.
Their memories. Woven into the same desert as mine.
"Fragment?" I called out.
Nothing.
"System?"
Silence.
I reached for the familiar presence - the voice that had guided me, negotiated with me, kept me alive through impossible situations.
Gone.
No blue boxes appeared. No stat updates. No warnings or recommendations.
I was inside the operating system now. The Fragment couldn't speak to me from within itself.
I was alone.
The tower appeared gradually.
Not like it materialized - more like my mind finally processed what had always been there. A spire of crystalline light, rising from the center of the glass desert. Impossibly distant, yet somehow visible through the colorless sky.
The Core.
Instinct told me that's what it was. The center of myself. The place where integration happened.
I had to reach it.
I started walking.
The glass shifted as I moved.
Not physically - the shards stayed where they were. But the memories inside them changed. Flickered. Some showed moments I recognized. Others showed things I'd never experienced.
A young boy kneeling in an empty church. Not me.
A girl clutching a chocolate bar while flames consumed her home. Not me.
A man with black wings watching the sunset, contempt on his face. Definitely not me.
The Echoes. Their memories, stored in this landscape like data on a hard drive. Every person I'd copied, every power I'd absorbed - they all left pieces of themselves here.
And those pieces weren't dormant.
Shadows moved beneath the glass.
I stopped walking. Watched.
Dark shapes slithered through the crystalline depths - formless, fluid, hungry. They tracked my movement like sharks sensing blood in the water.
They're watching me.
One shadow detached from the others. Smaller than the rest. It rose through the glass like a diver surfacing, breaching into the air above the desert.
A fallen angel. One of the minions from the church battle - I remembered killing him. His form was vague, indistinct, like a photograph left in the sun too long.
He opened his mouth to speak -
And dissolved.
Something larger surged through the glass. Massive. Dark. Wings spreading wide beneath the surface.
The lesser Echo screamed as it was absorbed, consumed, pulled into a greater presence.
I stumbled backward.
The Echoes aren't just data. Here, they're predators.
And I'd just watched a predator feed.
I found the shard by accident.
It jutted from the glass desert like a monolith - taller than me, polished smooth, reflecting everything around it. I approached carefully, watching for movement in the depths.
The reflection showed the colorless sky. The infinite desert. Me, standing before it.
Except the reflection wasn't me.
The figure in the glass had my build, my posture, my general shape. But the face was wrong. Angular. Cruel. Framed by black feathers.
Dohnaseek.
The fallen angel I'd killed in the church. The first real enemy I'd faced. The one whose power had saved my life a dozen times since.
His reflection smiled.
Not the smile of greeting. The smile of a predator recognizing its prey.
"Finally," the reflection said. The voice came from everywhere - from the glass, from the sky, from inside my own skull. "I've been waiting, little thief."
I stepped back. The reflection didn't move with me.
"You stole my wings," Dohnaseek continued. "My power. My pride. Did you think there would be no cost?"
"You're dead," I said. "I killed you."
"Did you?" The reflection leaned forward, pressing against the inside of the glass like a prisoner against a window. "You killed my body. But here, in this place..." The smile widened. "Here, I've had time to grow."
The glass beneath my feet cracked.
Run.
I didn't need to be told twice. I sprinted across the desert, shards crunching beneath my feet, the tower still impossibly distant.
Behind me, the glass shattered.
The voice followed me.
"You cannot outrun yourself, Ryder Cross."
I kept moving. The landscape blurred past - memories flashing in peripheral vision, moments of my life and others mixing into an indistinct stream.
"Every step you take, you walk on MY memories. MY power. MY influence."
The cracks spread faster than I could run. The glass desert fragmenting like a frozen lake in spring.
"You think you USED me?"
I stumbled. Caught myself. Kept running.
"You think you CONTROLLED me?"
The tower seemed no closer. The horizon seemed no nearer.
"I am INSIDE you. I have been building for MONTHS."
The ground in front of me exploded.
A hand burst from the glass - massive, scaled, wreathed in black feathers. It slammed down, blocking my path.
Then another hand. And another.
The fallen angel rose from the desert like a leviathan from the deep.
Not human-sized. Not even close.
Dohnaseek's Echo had grown. Absorbed the lesser Echoes. Consumed his fallen angel minions until he stood thirty feet tall, wings spanning the colorless sky, eyes burning with stolen fire.
"You stole my wings, little thief," the giant boomed.
His grin split his face - too wide, too sharp, filled with teeth like broken glass.
"Now I take your legs."
The desert shattered beneath my feet.
And I fell.