(Tyler's POV)
Tyler didn't sleep.
He didn't need to.
Not anymore.
Not since that day in the Null Wastes, when the system rewrote him from the inside out.
But he sat beside the dying fire anyway, watching the embers rise into the glitching stars, a hand on the hilt of his blade, and his thoughts circling the same point like predators stalking a wound.
Violet.
Even thinking her name stirred something raw in him.
She was too much like him.
And nothing like him at all.
He remembered her scream when the Threadkeeper cracked open her mind. He remembered how she trembled, not from fear but from the truth.
She wasn't just breaking the system.
She was becoming part of it.
And Tyler had seen what that did to people.
He'd seen it before.
In the Fracture Mission.
The first time he stopped being human.
It had been three years ago.
Back when Sanctum Online was still advertised as a closed-beta sandbox experience. Tyler had joined under a burner ID "JaxHunter07" just another solo PvPer trying to make his mark.
He didn't even know what he'd signed up for.
Not until the purge began.
The Null Wastes weren't supposed to exist.
A glitched-out patch zone with no quests, no monsters, and no escape key. Players who wandered in never came out until a dev-admin recruited Tyler and five others to investigate.
Only one of them made it back.
Him.
He remembered the walls of static. The way reality looped in on itself, folding over like corrupt origami. He remembered the girl with the long black hair Siena who laughed as she fell into a pit of inverted code.
He remembered Logan, his second-in-command, who vanished mid-sentence when the Threadkeeper arrived.
No warning.
No system alert.
Just… presence.
It had appeared as a child-shaped figure draped in impossible light, whispering in a language the system couldn't translate.
"USER ERROR," it had said. "SENTIENCE EXCEEDED. ROLLBACK IN PROGRESS."
And then it reached for them.
Tyler fought.
He activated every override token, burned through every failsafe.
And then when it came for him he didn't run.
He offered a deal.
A gamble.
"I'm not like them," he'd said. "I see you. I understand the system."
The Threadkeeper had tilted its head.
"You wish to serve?"
"No," he said. "But I want to survive."
So it marked him.
Didn't kill him.
Didn't erase him.
It rewrote him.
After that, Tyler stopped aging in-game.
His cooldowns behaved erratically.
His heartbeat synced to server pings.
He could feel patches coming before they happened.
But worse than all of that
He could feel the gods watching.
He came back to the present.
Violet stirred in her sleep, breath shallow but even. She murmured something unintelligible, and a soft violet glow pulsed beneath her skin her Shared Thread syncing with his.
It made his pulse race.
The closer they got, the stronger the bond became.
And the more dangerous.
He wasn't supposed to care.
He'd been trained not to.
After the purge, he was assigned to track anomalies, not love them.
Especially not anomalies who could rewrite fate.
But Violet was different.
Not because of her power.
Because she didn't break.
She bent.
She changed.
She scared the hell out of him.
And she made him want to hope again.
That terrified him more than the system gods.
He rose silently, stepping away from the fire.
His HUD flickered half-admin access granted by the Threadkeeper itself.
He opened a private log.
[PRIVATE NOTE – T.JACKSON]
Subject: Violet Maxwell (Fatebreaker)
Emotional sync at 76%. Rising.
RP instability decreasing with proximity.
Rewriting ability evolving past projected limits.
Prediction: She will reach the Core Gate.
Prediction: I will not be able to stop her.
Conclusion: I no longer want to.
He hesitated.
Then added one more line.
If she breaks the world… maybe it deserves it.
The fire behind him cracked.
He turned half expecting danger.
But it was Violet, awake now, rubbing her eyes.
She looked at him through the firelight, her voice soft.
"You're always watching."
"I don't sleep."
"Why?"
He thought of a thousand reasons.
None of them mattered.
So he told her the truth.
"Because if I close my eyes, I might miss you choosing to leave."
She blinked slowly.
"I'm not going anywhere."
They sat in silence again.
But this time, it wasn't heavy.
It was warm.
Real.
Like the first time he remembered what it felt like to be alive.