The Vault dimmed.
Saylor stood alone in the silence of his failing dominion. No echoes. No commands. Just the slow decay of a system that no longer feared him.
He moved to the central altar. The console flared—reluctantly.
> COMMAND QUEUED: TOTAL BLUEPRINT RESET CONFIRM? Y/N
His fingers hovered.
One stroke, and everything—every glitch, every rebellion, every memory—would be reduced to zero.
The Field would be his again.
Clean.
Obedient.
He exhaled.
And pressed Y.
---
Across the Field
The world cracked.
A white grid tore through the landscape, swallowing detail, devouring memory. Trees became lines. Sand became static. Structures disassembled into vector frames.
The players felt it first in their bones.
Naomi fell to one knee. "He's doing it."
Eren swore. "Reset protocol. He's trying to erase everything."
Tomas looked up, eyes bloodshot. "Then we stop him."
But the system was no longer a world.
It was blueprint.
Empty. Waiting.
Until something else surged through it—fire.
---
Lucia Returns
From the rip in the grid, she emerged—not as a person, not as code.
But as a burning interface—Lucia.exe in full control of her spectral form.
"He wants to rewrite?" she said aloud. "Then let's give him something to rewrite."
She unleashed a cascade of stored memories—player fragments, god ruins, trial echoes.
They merged with the blueprint.
And corrupted it.
Not with damage.
With truth.
---
Saylor Realizes
He watched as the reset began to twist.
The players weren't being erased—they were becoming part of the structure.
The Field wasn't reverting.
It was evolving.
And it no longer answered to just him.
> FIELD BLUEPRINT: BURNED AND REFORGED INFLUENCE LEVEL: DUAL ROOT (ADMIN + COUNTERWEIGHT)
Saylor clenched his fist.
"You think you've won."
Lucia's voice echoed through every corridor.
> "No. I think we finally started writing our own version."
The moment Lucia rooted herself in the blueprint's core, the system screamed. Tendrils of burning memory unfurled across the Vault like veins of wildfire.
Lucia's form pulsed with code-light, standing opposite Saylor inside the collapsing protocol shell.
> "You can't erase what they've become."
Saylor said nothing.
Instead, he stepped forward.
And grasped her by the core thread.
Her body twisted in the air as he rerouted access authority.
> COMMAND: ISOLATE EXTERNAL INTERFERENCE TARGET: LUCIA.EXE RESULT: EXPULSION
The flame around her dimmed.
Lucia gasped, code unraveling at the edges.
> "You're afraid of them remembering."
Saylor met her gaze. For a moment, there was no fury—only certainty.
"I'm not afraid. I'm focused."
He snapped his hand downward.
Lucia's form cracked.
The system pulled her backward—dragged her consciousness out of the core like smoke fleeing a flame.
She screamed through fractured data.
> FORCE EJECTION: COMPLETE
Lucia vanished—cast back into the lower layers of the Field, stripped of access, but not erased.
---
Vault – Control Regained
Saylor stood alone again.
The white blueprint settled.
His command prompt blinked clean.
> ADMIN STATUS: RESTORED FIELD RESET: 78% STABILIZED
He looked toward the holographic map of the players.
Their signals still pulsed.
Still alive.
Still watching.
"Let them come," he whispered.
> "The next version will be flawless."