The world we enter is not the one we left behind.
Ruins stretch as far as the eye can see, skeletal remains of cities abandoned mid-breath. The old world—built on cycles, lies, and control—left nothing behind but silence and ash.
We travel mostly on foot.
No more hidden gates. No more jump nodes. Just cracked roads that crumble under each step.
It's strange, how heavy freedom feels.
On the third day, we find survivors.
A handful of them huddle in what used to be a marketplace—a ragged cluster of tents stitched from old banners and scavenged cloth. Faces gaunt, eyes hollow. Some are armed. Most are too tired to lift a weapon even if they wanted to.
They stare at us like we're ghosts.
Maybe we are.
Kara approaches first, hands raised, her blade sheathed. She speaks low, careful.
"We're not your enemies."
A woman steps forward—her hair gray with dust, not age. She watches us with a tired kind of hope, the dangerous kind that has been broken before.
"Then who are you?" she asks.
No one moves.
No one breathes.
Until Liora speaks.
"We're the ones who broke the Cycle."
The camp murmurs. Disbelief. Fear. Flickers of something else: wonder.
The woman studies us for a long moment, then gestures stiffly toward a fire pit.
"Come. Talk."
Later, around a fire that barely warms even our hands, they tell us their stories.
The Cycle's collapse wasn't clean.
Whole sectors fell into chaos. Communications shattered. Systems died. Some settlements fought each other over scraps. Others simply vanished, swallowed by storms of corrupted memory that still linger at the edges of the horizon.
"We heard rumors," one of the survivors says. A boy no older than fourteen. "About the Heart Sector. About... a battle."
He looks at us with wide, uncertain eyes.
"Was it really the end?"
I glance at Liora.
She pulls her coat tighter around herself.
"No," I say honestly. "It was just the beginning."
The boy swallows hard and looks away.
They don't ask us to stay.
But they don't ask us to leave, either.
That night, as the wind howls through the ruins, Kara stands watch. Navi sleeps fitfully, one hand always near his weapon.
And me?
I sit beside Liora, watching the fire burn low.
"I thought winning would feel different," she says quietly.
"How so?"
"Lighter. Brighter. Like all the weight would just... lift."
I poke the fire with a stick, sending sparks into the air.
"Maybe real victory isn't about feeling lighter," I say. "Maybe it's about choosing to carry the weight anyway."
Liora smiles faintly.
"For someone who used to dodge philosophy classes, you're getting good at it."
I smirk. "Trauma's a great teacher."
Her laughter—soft, real—fills the space between us.
For the first time in what feels like a lifetime, I allow myself a fragile hope.
Not that everything will be fine.
Not that the road ahead will be easy.
But that it exists.
That tomorrow is ours to shape—flawed, fractured, but ours.
At dawn, we leave the survivors behind, heading east toward the broken skyline.
The woman—the leader—presses something into my hand before we go.
A worn pendant. Old. Scarred.
"For luck," she says.
I nod, tucking it into my jacket.
We walk into the rising light, toward whatever wai
ts beyond the ruins.
Not as heroes.
Not as saviors.
Just as people who refused to break.
End of Chapter 16