[1:37 A.M.] The Refuge – Underscript Lab
The room was barely a room—more like a collapsed code packet suspended in stable collapse. Walls flickered with symbols. Time here moved sideways.
Seth stood over a glyph circle that wasn't made of chalk or light but syntax. Words layered atop each other, alive, crawling like insects.
"This isn't just a training session," he told Kairo. "It's a suicide attempt with an escape clause."
Kairo swallowed, uneasy.
"I'm not sure I'm ready."
"You're not," Seth said bluntly. "But if you wait until you are, you'll be dead code."
The Binder had given Kairo access to the Binding Glyph, but it wasn't passive. It was uncompressed. It lived in him like a volatile archive. Every time he tapped into it, the narrative around him bent—but so did he.
"You said this Glyph is keeping me together," Kairo said. "But it's also...pulling at me."
Seth nodded. "Because it wants to remember what it is."
Kairo stepped into the circle.
Seth activated the Compression Sequence.
Suddenly, Kairo's mind fractured.
[Internal Simulation Layer – Glyph Core]
He was nowhere.
And everywhere.
His body was gone—he existed as presence. As concept.
Then—memory shards exploded around him like glass.
A flash of the Manuscriptorium.
The white void.
His first moment of self-awareness.
A dream that wasn't his but felt more real than life.
Each fragment pulsed. A voice spoke, without language:
You are not a name.You are the tension between what is written and what resists.You are contradiction incarnate.To bind something... you must first break.
Suddenly, the white void returned—but this time, it spoke in glyphs.
Hundreds of them. Alive. Breathing. Crawling over him like fire ants of meaning.
He screamed.
[External – Refuge]
Seth watched the body convulse. "Come on, glitch-boy," he muttered. "Compress or combust."
[Internal]
Kairo's thoughts blurred.
But he clung to one truth:
"I'm not meant to exist. But I do. That's the point."
One Glyph—just one—glowed brighter than the rest.
The Binding Glyph.
It twisted, burned into his mind, and for the first time, he saw it not as a shape, but as a story:
A man chained the sun so the night would never end.Not to kill the light—But to preserve it from becoming corrupted.
He understood.
And the glyph compressed—folded down into his chest, like origami snapping shut in reverse.
[External]
Kairo gasped, collapsing to his knees as the circle of syntax disintegrated.
Seth caught him before he hit the floor.
"You compressed it?"
Kairo nodded, trembling. "I didn't just learn it. I remembered it."
Seth stared at him. "That's not normal."
Kairo met his eyes. "I'm not normal."
They didn't say anything for a moment.
Then a whisper passed through the walls—cold, synthetic, and untraceable.
"Niro has entered the Gridline."
Kairo stood.
"We don't have time," he said. "We train while running now."