Falling wasn't the right word.
We were being translated.
Reality blurred into code. My HUD collapsed, reformatted itself into pure glyphs I couldn't understand. My body felt weightless—but not because gravity was gone. It was because I was gone. Dismantled at the atomic level and rebuilt inside something else.
And then we hit bottom.
Or rather, we stopped.
We were standing in the Data Crucible—a chamber that shouldn't exist in any physical structure. No coordinates. No entrance. No schematics. Yet there it was: a perfect sphere of shimmering latticework, walls pulsing with memory and motion.
A holographic console floated in the center, running a countdown: 00:16:08:44.
"Sixteen hours," Hara whispered, reading it. "Until what?"
The system answered her.
"Until Nyxari breach complete."
I approached the console, and it recognized me. Not like facial recognition or biometric scans. It remembered me. My choices. My failures. My guilt.
"Architect Kai Solis: Compromised. Partial resistance authorized. Begin system override?"
"Yes," I whispered.
Cables, thin as hair and glowing white-hot, shot from the floor and latched onto my suit. I felt the data pour into me—images of other realities, failed timelines, aborted loops. I saw civilizations building structures to house Nyxari's prison. Saw them fall. Again and again.
We were just the latest iteration.
"Kai!" Hara shouted. "Something's coming through!"
From the far end of the Crucible, a rift cracked open. Not a door. Not a portal. A wound.
And through it, something crawled.
It had too many limbs and no face. Its body was made of synthetic skin and tangled fiber-optics. Like it had tried to become technology—and failed. It screeched, and my neural implants flared with burning pain.
I activated the Overclock protocol.
Time slowed.
I spun around the creature's lunge, releasing an explosive charge from my wrist. It detonated in a burst of magnetized light, shredding half its torso. It didn't stop. It regrew.
This wasn't just a glitch.
It was a manifestation—a Nyxari echo made physical.
Hara engaged her neuro-slicer, a disk of pure data that slashed through the thing's shoulder, destabilizing it briefly. It turned on her.
I didn't hesitate.
I tackled the thing from behind, jammed a pulse-blade into its core node, and overcharged it with every ounce of energy I had left.
It screamed—long, digital, furious.
Then dissolved into red dust.
Panting, I turned to Hara. "This Crucible... it's a forge."
"A forge for what?" she asked.
I looked up at the countdown.
"For the final key."