The next day, the city didn't look quite real.
Kael stood in the middle of CrossGrid 9, the sky overhead simmering with artificial clouds. People moved around him in digital overlays—avatars, players, vendors, a thousand lives projected across augmented architecture. But his HUD had begun to slip. Ghosts flitted between the layers, shapes and data threads that weren't part of the surface game.
He saw flickers—outlines stitched in black-and-white code, wearing masks of fractured geometry.
"Still seeing things?" Dex's voice buzzed in his commlink.
Kael didn't answer right away.
One of the glitches turned toward him.
No face. Just a static ripple.
Then it smiled.
Kael jerked back. "Yeah. I'm seeing things."
Dex replied sharply. "Get back to the safehouse. Now."
Kael took one step before he froze.
The world around him shifted.
The overlays broke for a second—a complete shutdown of AR scaffolding. Raw reality spilled in like cold water. Every player in the grid blinked out. No more data-tags. No more motion trails.
Just silence.
And from that silence came a hum. Low. Resonant. Too perfect to be mechanical. Too precise to be natural.
It was like a song, but buried deep beneath perception. It vibrated his teeth. Made his skin tighten.
"The hell is that?" he whispered.
Dex's voice cut in, alarmed. "Kael, you need to move. That's the Hymn Protocol. RELIC's triggered it."
Kael looked around wildly. "What does it do?"
"It doesn't do. It undoes."
---
Two blocks away, in the secure lab Dex called 'the Junkwell,' warning lights bathed the shard containment unit in blood-red light. Data readouts flickered, scrolling faster than any normal human could parse.
Dex's hands flew across controls, patching blind spots, overriding fail-safes.
"They're trying to null the shard," he muttered. "Not just suppress it—wipe its architecture completely."
He glanced up at the auxiliary monitor showing Kael's location.
Except Kael was no longer alone.
Six figures had emerged from static walls around him. All wore obsidian masks. Their presence distorted light. Each movement sent pixelation crawling through the air.
They didn't attack. They sang.
The sound wasn't beautiful.
It was mathematical. Broken harmonics folding across each other, laced with recursion and entropy. The sound seemed to fold space itself.
Kael dropped to one knee, gasping. The song was rewriting the rules around him.
"DEX!" he shouted, clutching his head.
"I'm working on it—give me ten seconds—"
Kael looked up through watering eyes. "I don't have ten—!"
One of the masked figures extended a hand.
Reality between them twisted. The street cracked—glitches bleeding upward like data was bleeding through stone.
Kael felt himself sliding backward—no, being pulled. As if his own code was being read line by line and forgotten.
"Kael!" Dex's voice snapped through the pain. "Trigger the Oracle tag. Use the override glyph—NOW!"
Kael's HUD flickered, and in the corner, a symbol appeared. One he hadn't seen since the Genesis.loop.
An eye. Surrounded by eight spirals. The mark of the Oracle.
He hesitated.
The figure stepped closer. The song intensified.
Kael blinked once, whispered: "Override: Glyph Theta-Nine."
His HUD exploded with white.
---
When the world snapped back, he was somewhere else.
Floating.
No city. No ground. Just a space made of soft light and rippling thought.
He turned slowly—and found her there.
Sera Nyx.
She stood barefoot on a platform made of memory, her white hair trailing like comet residue. Her eyes shimmered with layered reflections—past, present, and code.
"You found it," she said, smiling softly. "I was starting to wonder if you'd remember your part."
Kael stared. "What is this place?"
"The Dreamlayer," she said. "A memory of what the world tried to be. Before QuestChain locked it into rules. Before they started singing it back into silence."
He stepped forward, heart racing. "The Hymn—they're trying to erase me."
"They're trying to erase what you represent." Sera's smile faded. "You woke the shard. That makes you the vector. The path to ARCH-0X_77's full unlock. And that… scares them."
Kael looked down. The ground shimmered with images: fragments of past lives, code fragments in his own voice.
"Why me?" he asked.
Sera tilted her head. "Because you never logged out."
Kael blinked. "I don't understand."
"You will," she said, and pointed toward the horizon.
There, in the endless light, a new structure was forming. Tall. Fractal. Spiraling like a tower made from thought and recursion.
He knew it instantly.
The Tower.
But this one wasn't broken. Not glitched.
It was singing back.
Sera's voice turned sharp. "You need to reach it before the Hymn locks the recursion gate. If they seal the shard before your next sync—everything resets. You'll forget again. And this time, it won't reopen."
Kael stepped back. "What about you?"
She gave him a sad look. "I'm already inside. I've been waiting. Go. Before they finish the verse."
---
Kael woke in Dex's lab, screaming.
The shard pulsed beside him—bright, then dim, then bright again.
Dex was there. Blood on his forehead. The lab was in shambles. One wall still glitched from the Hymn pulse.
"You—" Dex gasped. "You sang back. Didn't you?"
Kael nodded slowly. "Not me. Us."
And on the shard's surface, the Tower flickered into view—fully rendered now.
Alive.
Waiting.