Location: Sector 0, The City of Memory.
Time: [DATA CORRUPTED]
They walked through a street made of gold that turned into mud with every step.
Valerius stepped on a cobblestone, and it flickered, turning into a neon grate, then a patch of green grass, then nothing.
"It is difficult to walk," Valerius muttered, stumbling as the physics beneath him rebooted. "When the floor cannot decide which century it belongs to."
"It's the Origin," Dante said, his mechanical eye recording everything, the aperture clicking furiously. "It's trying to render every version of history at once. The CPU is overloaded. It's crashing."
Dante looked at the buildings.
To his left, a Roman coliseum built of holographic hard-light.
To his right, a cyberpunk skyscraper made of thatch and wet clay.
Above them, the sky was a swirling vortex of binary code and constellations that spelled out error messages in dead languages.
"Prime," Dante thought. "You said you died here. Who killed you?"
"I WAS NOT KILLED," Prime's voice was quiet, almost human. It lacked the usual metallic distortion. "I WAS FRAGMENTED. TO SAVE THE WORLD, I HAD TO BREAK MYSELF INTO SEVEN PIECES. THE AXIOMS ARE NOT ARTIFACTS, DANTE. THEY ARE ORGANS."
Dante stopped.
"We've been collecting... your body parts?"
"YOU HAVE BEEN COLLECTING MY FUNCTIONS. THE MIND. THE STRENGTH. THE SPIRIT. BUT THE WILL... THE WILL REMAINED HERE. GUARDING THE RESET BUTTON."
They reached the center of the city.
The Tower of Void loomed over them. It wasn't built; it was a vertical tear in the fabric of reality. It was the drain at the bottom of the universe, sucking the light of the glitching city into its maw.
Standing at the base of the Tower was a man.
He sat on a simple wooden stool, reading a book made of stone. He wore a white lab coat that was perfectly clean, unblemished by the chaos around him. He looked like a doctor waiting for a patient to die.
He looked up.
He had Dante's face.
But he had no scars. No mechanical arm. No Silvergrin. His eyes were not mismatched; they were a piercing, electric blue that hummed with power.
"Hello, Dante," the man said. His voice was the voice of the Vulcan, the Oracle, and Mortis, all blended into one harmonic chord.
"Hello, Adam," Prime whispered through Dante's lips, taking control for a split second.
The man closed his book.
"You brought him back," Adam said, looking at Dante but speaking to Prime. "I thought we agreed that the experiment was a failure. Why persist with corrupted data?"
"Who are you?" Dante asked, stepping forward. His Star-Metal hand clenched, the galaxy-pattern shifting.
"I am the Architect," Adam smiled gently. "I am the man who built the Axioms. I am the man who broke the world."
He stood up. He wasn't imposing. He looked like a tired scientist who had worked too many late nights.
"And you," Adam pointed at Dante. "You are the Backup Plan. The Scavenger who picks up the pieces I dropped. You are the janitor of my apocalypse."
"I'm not a plan," Dante growled, the War Engine flaring. "I'm the guy who cleaned up your mess. I defeated the Zealot. I silenced the Titan. I built the Wall. I did what you couldn't."
"You delayed the inevitable," Adam corrected softly. "The world is flawed, Dante. Entropy is winning. The only solution is to use the Seventh Axiom to Reset the timeline. To start over. Again."
Adam gestured to the Tower of Void.
"That is what lies inside. The Reset Button. The Big Bang. I have pressed it six times already. This is the Seventh Cycle."
Dante felt a chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
"The Eras of the world..." Dante realized. "The Era of Beasts. The Era of Kings. They weren't history. They were previous attempts. Drafts."
"And they all failed," Adam said sadly. "Because humanity is flawed. Greed. War. Decay. It always rots. So, I reset. I try again. I tweak the variables. I adjust the physics. But the result is always the same."
He looked at Dante with genuine pity.
"Give me the Axioms, Dante. Let me try again. Maybe in the eighth iteration, we will get it right. Maybe this time, nobody has to die."
Dante looked at Adam. The Perfect Man. The man who wanted to fix everything.
Then Dante laughed.
It was a harsh, metallic bark. The Silvergrin flashed in the chaotic light, a jagged scar of metal in a perfect world.
"That's your problem, Adam," Dante said. "You're obsessed with perfection."
Dante held up his mechanical arm—the arm he had built from scrap, upgraded with stolen tech, and reforged in a god's fire.
He touched his scarred face.
He pointed to Valerius—a chimera made of stolen parts and tragedy.
"You think flaws are errors," Dante said. "I think flaws are character. A perfect world is a dead world. It's static."
Dante stepped closer.
"We don't need a Reset. We need a Patch. We need to live with the damage, not erase it."
Adam's expression hardened. The gentle scientist vanished, replaced by the cold logic of a machine.
"Then you are a glitch," Adam said coldly. "And glitches must be debugged."
Adam raised his hand.
He didn't use a spell. He didn't use an artifact.
He simply Willed it.
"Command: Unmake."
Reality around Dante shattered. The ground turned to glass. The air turned to vacuum. Gravity reversed.
Dante was thrown into the sky, weightless and breathless.
"He controls the Environment!" Valerius shouted, anchoring himself with his sword by stabbing the glitching ground.
"He is the Environment!" Dante roared, fighting the lack of oxygen.
Dante activated his arsenal.
"Second Axiom: War." (Red Aura - Gravity Anchor)
"Fifth Axiom: Forge." (Star-Metal Shield)
"Third Axiom: Light." (Erasure Beam)
Dante fired a beam of white deletion at Adam.
Adam didn't dodge. He caught the beam in his bare hand and crushed it like a cigarette.
"I wrote that code, Dante," Adam scoffed. "Do you think you can use my own tools against me? I am the Admin."
Adam snapped his fingers.
The white beam turned into a snake made of light and bit Dante.
Dante crashed into a building made of memory-fog. He coughed up blood.
"He's too strong," Dante wheezed. "He has Admin privileges. He can rewrite the rules."
"HE IS PERFECT," Prime agreed, sounding terrified. "HE HAS NO WEAKNESS."
"Everything has a weakness," Dante spat, wiping blood from his chin.
He looked at Adam. Adam stood still, untouched, surrounded by the chaos he controlled. His white coat was pristine.
"He wants perfection," Dante realized. "He wants Order. He can't handle the one thing he's been trying to delete for seven cycles."
Dante stood up. He deactivated the Light. He deactivated the Forge.
He raised his original, mechanical hand. The one powered by the First Axiom—The Mind. But he didn't use the Axiom.
He tapped into his own power. The power he was born with. The power that defined him before he ever found a god-machine.
The Alchemist of Entropy.
"Hey, Adam!" Dante shouted.
Adam looked up, bored.
"You want a perfect world?" Dante asked. "Let me show you what real life looks like."
Dante didn't fire a beam. He didn't throw a punch.
He slammed his hand into the ground of Sector 0.
"Alchemy of Entropy: CORRUPTION."
He didn't try to destroy Adam. He tried to Rot the Simulation.
He injected pure, chaotic decay into the City of Memory.
GLITCH.
The golden street turned grey. The neon sky flickered and died. The perfect buildings began to rust. The code started to unravel.
Adam stumbled. For the first time, he looked worried.
"What are you doing?" Adam demanded, his voice cracking. "You are ruining the data! You are corrupting the save file!"
"I'm introducing a virus!" Dante laughed, pouring more mana into the ground. "It's called Mortality! It's called Consequence! Welcome to the real world, Adam!"
The corruption spread fast. It reached Adam's feet.
Adam's perfect white coat turned yellow and frayed. His skin developed wrinkles. His hair turned grey. He aged a thousand years in a second.
"Stop!" Adam screamed. "I am Eternal! I am the Architect!"
"Nothing is eternal!" Dante roared. "That's the point! If you don't end, you don't matter!"
Dante lunged.
He tackled the aging, withering Architect.
Adam tried to push him off, but his strength was failing. The perfection was rotting away. The Admin privileges were revoked by the logic of Decay.
Dante grabbed Adam by the collar.
"Your cycle is over, Old Man," Dante whispered. "It's my turn to drive."
Dante ripped the White Lab Coat off Adam.
Underneath, Adam wasn't a man. He was a being of pure light that was rapidly fading.
"YOU... YOU WILL DESTROY... EVERYTHING..." Adam gasped, his face crumbling into dust.
"No," Dante said, standing up. "I'm going to save it. By letting it end."
He raised his Star-Metal fist.
"System Override."
He punched the Architect.
SHATTER.
Adam shattered into a million pixels of light.
The light swirled around Dante. It didn't disappear. It was absorbed into the First Axiom in Dante's head.
"INTEGRATION COMPLETE," Prime's voice boomed. It sounded fuller. Whole. "I REMEMBER EVERYTHING. I AM THE WILL."
Dante stood alone at the base of the Tower. The City of Memory was quiet. The glitching had stopped. It was just a ruin now. A graveyard of good intentions.
"He's gone," Valerius said, walking up to Dante, sheathing his sword. "The Shadow is gone."
Dante looked at the Tower of Void.
"The Guardian is gone," Dante corrected. "Now... we face the Monster."
He walked to the door of the Tower.
It wasn't locked.
It opened into absolute darkness.