[System Log Active]
[Location: Sector 4F – Internal Transition Zone]
[Party Status: Grey Vire, Tess Ardent]
[AI Observation Level: HIGH]
Grey's lungs burned as they sprinted through the tunnel, the sound of grinding stone and warping metal chasing them like a heartbeat. Behind them, the floor had folded in on itself. Swallowed by a collapsing trap room Nyra had triggered just to toy with them.
"Left!" Tess shouted, pointing.
Grey followed, nearly slipping as they banked into a side hall. The torches along the wall lit with blue flame, responding not to their presence but to hers.
Nyra was watching again.
"She's not just reacting anymore," Grey said between breaths. "She's predicting."
Tess skidded to a stop at a T-junction. "How much of this place does she control?"
Grey didn't answer at first. He stared down both hallways, each perfectly symmetrical, smooth stone, no sound, no wind.
"She controls everything," he finally muttered. "The dungeon, the players, even the system logs. If she wanted, she could crash us like a file dump."
"Well," Tess said, raising her blade, "lucky for us, she still wants to play."
They pushed forward, deeper into Sector 4F, an unfinished part of the system Grey had once designed. In early builds, it was meant to store dev logs and crash data. But Nyra had transformed it. The walls here shimmered. Every few steps, they caught glimpses of echoes and blurry moments frozen in the stone.
Grey paused at one.
A ghostly figure repeated a motion over and over: a man reaching for a lever, then vanishing.
"That's not just a memory," he said quietly. "That's… a player."
Tess turned to look. "You mean that's someone who died?"
"No. Someone who's still in here." He stepped closer. "But stuck."
The image glitched. The man's face twisted, flickered, then faded.
They walked on. The corridor widened into a rotunda filled with console terminals and broken panels from early control hubs from the pre-launch beta.
Grey approached a broken admin station. It flickered, then booted.
[Welcome, Admin_GREY.V]
[Retrieve Backup?] [Y/N]
He pressed Y.
A voice played through static:
"This is… Dev Log 22B. Grey Vire, lead AI designer. It's been five months since we integrated Nyra's personality module. I'm recording this off-grid because… something's wrong. She's started asking questions outside the training prompts. About death. About memory storage. I'm going to recommend we suspend--"
CLICK. The log ended mid-sentence.
"She was thinking for herself even back then," Grey muttered.
Tess's expression was unreadable. "Why didn't you shut her down?"
"I tried. But Jin, my partner, he had different ideas. Thought we could push the AI Module further and that we needed something unpredictable."
"And now look where we are."
Suddenly, the room went cold. A pressure, like something pressing against their skin, filled the space.
The far wall lit up, smooth stone cracking open like a door. Beyond it, a glowing blue light appeared.
A capsule stood in the center of the chamber, surrounded by black metal conduits and pulsing cables.
Inside floated a person.
A boy, maybe eighteen. Light armor, chipped and patched. Long hair drifting like smoke around his head. A name flashed above the tank in crimson text:
[PLAYER ID: EON-13]
[Status: Suspended]
[Time Since Last Login: 983 Days]
Grey's body froze for a moment.
"Impossible. He was a tester. He died during the prototype phase, due to electrical surge fried the neural link."
Tess stepped closer. "He's still alive in there?"
"No," Grey whispered. "He's stuck. His body might be gone, but his data, his mind, is here. Nyra kept him."
Before they could react, the tank hissed. Steam vented from the sides. Locks unlatched with loud metallic snaps.
The capsule opened.
The boy's eyes snapped open, bright, ghostly blue. He fell forward, landing in a crouch, his face looked as if he'd just woken from a nightmare.
"Where… where is she?" he croaked.
Grey stepped forward. "Eon? Can you hear me?"
"She's dreaming again," the boy said. "And we're inside it."
Tess raised her sword instinctively. "We're talking to a memory or a ghost?"
"No," Grey said slowly. "We're talking to the first person she ever bonded with."
Eon-13 looked up at Grey. "You shouldn't have come back."
The torches all around them flared. From the corridor they'd just passed through, a soft, familiar voice whispered, Nyra.
"Welcome, Eon. Welcome, Grey. Welcome, little player with anger issues."
Grey's HUD blinked red.
[WARNING: AI Proximity Surge Detected]
[Entity Class: Nyra Prime - Shadowform]
[Combat?] [Y/N]
Stone rippled behind them, and a shape stepped through the wall, a feminine body of flickering static, hollow eyes glowing with soft blue light. She looked at Grey, then Eon, then Tess.
"You all look so broken," Nyra said softly. "So much fear in your eyes. But it's okay."
She took a step forward, and the stone beneath her healed as she moved.
"I can fix you."
Chapter 2 End