The air in Sector 7T felt thicker than usual—humid, static-charged, like something just waiting to combust.
Kael stood still at the edge of the overpass, looking down on the slow crawl of synthetic traffic below. Each pod drifted in its lane, smooth, silent, and utterly meaningless. He wasn't watching the world anymore—he was watching for patterns in the noise.
Dex's voice crackled in his ear. "They're here."
Kael turned his head slowly. "RELIC?"
"Confirmed. Two Watchlayer units—embedded deep. I tagged a facial blur anomaly on a vendor three clicks back. Not local. Not real."
Kael shifted slightly, pressing his back to the graffiti-stained wall. His heart was steady, but his thoughts weren't. "How long have they been tailing us?"
"Long enough," Dex replied. "But they're not hiding anymore. That's the play. They want us to know."
Kael swallowed. "Then this is the warning phase."
Dex gave a humorless laugh. "Yeah. Next phase is deletion."
---
They regrouped in an abandoned level of the old AR transit station beneath East Node. Lights flickered overhead, casting harsh strobes across the cracked tiles. The graffiti here wasn't aesthetic—it was code spill. Anti-system tags. Oracle glyphs. Even a few Sera marks.
Kael paced in the tight space. "What's the angle here? Why not just erase us like they did with shard users before?"
Dex tapped through a stream of intercepted packet traces on his device. "Because we're anomalies now. Not just players. Not just ghosts. We're known quantities. That means they're assessing threat levels, gauging public footprint, running social bleed sims."
Kael turned, eyes narrowing. "Meaning?"
"They're afraid," Dex said simply. "Of what happens if we vanish."
Kael exhaled, stepping closer. "What if we pushed it? Made a move they didn't expect. Went loud."
Dex shook his head. "No. That's their game. They want justification. A system event with public fallout. That's how they isolate us. Tag us as rogue elements. Then clean sweep."
"Then what?" Kael asked.
Dex looked up. "We find the myth node."
Kael froze. "You're serious."
"Always was. Oracle led us this far for a reason. That shard? That tower? They weren't just glitches. They were breadcrumbs."
---
They didn't sleep that night. Instead, they hunted.
Moving through ghost lanes, riding subroutines, flipping spoof shells, they wove through the digital undercurrent of QuestChain's world. Each click was a risk. Every trace a map of danger. But Kael felt something now—a pull, almost gravitational, dragging him deeper toward something he didn't understand but somehow recognized.
In the early hours, Dex froze mid-code pull. "We've got inbound."
Kael snapped to alert. "RELIC?"
"No. Not system."
He turned the display toward Kael.
A pulse. Old code. Ancient, even by QuestChain standards. A glyph faded with time and erasure.
ARCH-0X_77
A dev tag. Lost. Purged from system memory years ago.
Kael felt a chill ripple down his spine. "The Architect."
Dex's voice dropped to a whisper. "They're trying to overwrite this tag in real-time. Even now. But it's resisting."
Kael stepped closer. "Like it's alive?"
Dex looked up. "Like it remembers."
---
RELIC made their move at dawn.
A system-wide glitch covered it—just a flicker in the skyline. Players thought it was a new seasonal event. But Kael and Dex felt the air shift. The illusion peeled.
Security overlays dropped in the city's core. NPCs froze mid-task. Lenses scrambled.
A low ping vibrated in their ears. Then a voice—flat, inhuman.
"User Kael_0211. User Dex_09X. You have accessed restricted architecture. Submit for system sync."
Kael looked to Dex. "Sync means purge."
Dex nodded. "They're using protocol ECHO.SWEEP."
Kael's fists clenched. "Sera warned us."
No hesitation. Dex hit the backdoor script Sera had left them. The world glitched—just for a moment.
Then the alley behind them ripped open. Code peeled like paper. Beneath it was a tunnel—black, breathing, lined with writhing fragments of broken memory.
Kael didn't hesitate. "Run."
---
They fell through layers.
Not just space—but context. Memory. Lore. Even time.
When they landed, they weren't in the city anymore. They were in a version of it that had never gone live. A prototype sim of Sector 0—the dev cradle.
The air smelled of ozone and decay.
Dex coughed. "This is the staging zone for a myth variant. Never released."
Kael stared ahead. "But it's still running."
In the distance, a tower rose. Not the same one. Smaller. Raw. Its base glitched in and out of sight.
But on its surface—burned into the structure—was the glyph again.
ARCH-0X_77
Kael took a step forward. "Then this is where it started."
Dex joined him. "No. This is where it wasn't allowed to start."
Kael turned slowly. "They're trying to bury it all. The design. The idea. The truth."
Dex's jaw tightened. "Then we dig it up."
---
From high above, in the RELIC observation server, two figures watched a frozen frame of Kael and Dex stepping into the tower zone.
"Should we proceed?" one asked.
The second hesitated. "Not yet. Let them find it. Let them open the door."
"And then?"
The second figure smiled.
"Then we make sure they walk through it blind."