The Field writhed.
Naomi's chain—bright, ethereal, impossible—stretched upward, connecting her to something older than the system. It latched onto the hidden source that underpinned every Trial, every spin, every god mask. For one moment, the Broken Field hesitated.
Reality pulsed.
Saylor watched from the Vault, his knuckles white on the console.
> ANCHOR POINT DETECTED SOURCE: LUCIA / SUBJECT NAOMI THREAT LEVEL: UNBOUNDED
He didn't speak.
He moved.
A flick of his hand, a single keystroke—and the Vault shuddered open.
He stepped out.
Not as an administrator.
As the god behind the curtain.
---
Field – Chain Site
Tomas shielded his eyes as Naomi pulled on the chain. The sky bled light. Whole sections of the Field cracked like mirrors, shards of memory falling in slow motion. The landscape twisted into older shapes—Trial arenas long erased, faces half-forgotten, code-sparks from other versions of themselves.
Eren grinned weakly. "She's doing it."
And then the chain snapped taut.
And the sky turned black.
A blast of force hurled them backward. Tomas crashed through a pillar. Eren hit the ground hard, ribs crunching.
Naomi stayed standing.
Just barely.
Because he was there.
Saylor.
Not cloaked in commands or viewed through screens.
He stood before them in full presence—barefoot on the cracked stone, wrapped in a coat made of Field-thread and purge script. His hair shimmered with code lines. His eyes were voids, reflecting only control.
He raised one hand.
The chain Naomi held froze mid-air, turning brittle and grey.
"That's enough," he said.
His voice had weight—like concrete poured into the lungs.
Naomi staggered, tried to resist.
The chain trembled.
And shattered.
The feedback knocked Naomi backward, her back arching as sparks flew from her spine. She hit the ground hard, skidding.
Lucia's voice cried out from somewhere unseen—faint, cracked.
> "No—NO—don't let him—"
Saylor turned.
And cut the air.
A slice of the Field split open, revealing a coil of memory threads where Lucia's code had nested.
He reached in.
And severed it.
The thread recoiled like a wounded nerve. Lucia's presence screamed—a sound of raw binary pain—and vanished into a collapsing core.
He resealed the space.
Lucia, now buried deeper than before, beyond even Naomi's reach.
Tomas crawled toward Naomi. "Get up! You have to—"
Saylor's gaze landed on him.
Tomas froze mid-motion.
Not paralyzed—unwritten.
His body fuzzed at the edges, details losing shape. His name blinked from Naomi's HUD. She gasped.
"TOMAS—"
Gone.
Not dead.
Excised.
Eren screamed and charged.
Saylor didn't move.
A blink—one frame of reality.
And Eren crumpled at Saylor's feet, unconscious.
Only Naomi remained, knees digging into fractured stone, her hands shaking as she tried to conjure what little light she had left.
Saylor approached.
"Your mistake," he said softly, "was believing this place could ever belong to you."
Naomi looked up, bloody and broken.
"We never wanted to own it."
She smiled.
"We wanted to free it."
Saylor stared at her for a long moment.
Then raised his hand.
> FIELD STABILIZATION: ENGAGED MEMORY THREADS: PURGED ANCHORS: NULLIFIED
Naomi's vision blurred.
The last thing she saw was the chain fading from her hand.
And Saylor, alone again.
Standing where the gods had once ruled.
The anchor was gone.
The Field was his.
Saylor stood in the silence he had carved.
Beneath him, the Field rippled with acceptance. The anomalies had receded, the broken glyphs dissolving like frost in sunlight. Lucia's trail had been extinguished. Naomi's resistance reduced to residue. Even the mist, once writhing with chaotic echoes, now sat still—docile, cowed.
He exhaled.
It wasn't satisfaction.
It was necessity.
He walked past Eren's unconscious body and Naomi's collapsed frame, pausing only to glance down. "You weren't chosen for this," he muttered. "You were corrupted by her."
His fingers twitched. Code reassembled around him like armor.
> REWRITE MODE: ACTIVATED RECALIBRATING PLAYER STRUCTURE... TARGETS: NAOMI, EREN
A glowing sphere formed over each of their bodies, lifting them gently into the air. Naomi twitched—barely conscious, eyes flickering with the last remnants of the chain's echo. She whispered something, inaudible.
Saylor leaned closer.
"What did you say?"
Naomi's lips trembled.
Then stopped.
The sphere darkened.
> MEMORY CASCADE INITIATED
The rewriting process began. Her memories—those not erased by Sigil Zero—were now being rewritten with new narrative nodes. Her mother? Recast as an illusion. Her victories? Filed as test failures. Her awakening? Rebranded as instability.
Eren's cycle followed suit.
Saylor stepped back.
And the Field responded.
> SYSTEM NOTE: PLAYER STRUCTURES STABILIZING VITAL THREADS INERT FIELD: NORMALIZING
---
But then the Vault lights flickered.
A low tone—barely audible—broke the rhythm.
Saylor turned.
On his console, one word appeared in handwritten script:
> "...Not yet."
He blinked.
A node that should have been erased—Lucia's final echo—still pulsed behind the firewall.
He moved to delete it.
> ACCESS DENIED.
Again.
> ACCESS DENIED.
The writing changed:
> "You forgot what I was made from."
A shadow—shaped like no god or player—flashed through the background of his screen. Brief. Untraceable. But it was there.
Lucia wasn't back.
But something was.
Saylor narrowed his eyes. "Then I'll erase the Field itself if I have to."
He typed a string of commands:
> ADMIN PROTOCOL: NULL SPIN FIELD CORE: PREPARE FOR TOTAL FOLD
The ground beneath him darkened. The Vault lights dimmed.
Outside, the sky began to collapse inward.
But deep within the Field, buried beneath the corrupted memory tunnels, a single voice whispered through an old fracture:
> "You can't end what you never understood."
And the crack glowed.