The days bled together inside Deepvale.
Reality twisted in small, persistent ways. Sometimes the sun rose twice in one day. Other times, clocks reversed. The gravity around the tower pulsed in sync with the system's breathing—if such a thing could be imagined.
Aurel could feel it now.
The Architect was watching.
"You want me to break the gate," Aurel said again, pacing beneath the fractured remains of a pre-collapse cathedral now used as their hideout. "But what happens if I do? Worlds fuse—yes. But what happens to people like me? Like you?"
Vaen didn't answer immediately. He merely gestured to the only person in the room who hadn't spoken since their meeting.
The girl in the blood-red cloak.
She pulled back her hood.
She was young—barely twenty. Her right eye was clockwork, ticking slowly, surrounded by faint burn scars. Her missing arm, now replaced with skeletal mana-tech, hovered gently as if aware of his gaze.
"This is Noé," Vaen said. "She was once the youngest Chosen in the system. Chosen at eleven. And the first to reject her destiny."
Aurel studied her. There was no hostility—only a distant, unfocused pain.
"I was the System's first experiment with looping fate," Noé said at last, voice hollow. "I was made to die. And revive. Over. And over. And over again."
"You have died.""Checkpoint restored.""Try again."
"They made me a failsafe for failsafes. A perfect loop. Every time I failed to stabilize the dungeon node, they'd roll back my body. My memory. My timeline."
Her eyes burned now—not with power, but a kind of divine sorrow.
"I broke it when I remembered the pain."
Aurel clenched his jaw.
"You remembered… death?"
She nodded. "Seventeen thousand times."
✦✦✦
Later, when they were alone, Noé led him through a garden of withered trees that hadn't bloomed since the fusion began.
She walked ahead, slowly, letting her story continue.
"I don't know who I was before I became a loop. I don't remember my parents. Not my birthday. Not my first kiss. Not even what my voice used to sound like. I only remember what the system made of me. And the one moment it all cracked."
"What was it?" Aurel asked.
She stopped beside a rusted statue of a winged lion—its head long decayed.
"A little girl in a mana storm. I reached out to save her. I failed. I died. But I remembered it. The look in her eyes. She knew I was trying."
"That memory... it wasn't supposed to stay?"
"No," she said. "The system missed it. A glitch. A pixel out of place."
"And that made you rebel?"
Noé smiled sadly. "That made me human."
They stood in silence for a while.
Then she handed him a small, cube-like device. Its center pulsed faintly.
"This is a time fracture stabilizer," she said. "If you ever find yourself looped—caught in the Architect's 'retry' command—this will let you anchor a memory outside of time. A tether."
Aurel took it. Its weight felt heavier than its size.
He looked at her, understanding something he hadn't before.
The rogues weren't rebels.
They were survivors.
Each one had broken the system not out of hatred—but because the system had broken them first.
✦✦✦
That night, Aurel sat alone at the edge of Deepvale, watching the rift between worlds slowly pulse like a heartbeat in the sky.
He activated the cube and imprinted one memory into it.
Not of his time as Gray. Not of his rage. Not even of his parents' death.
But of the moment Mira first smiled after he'd woken up Chosen.
Because, for just a second, he hadn't felt like a weapon or a relic.
He had felt alive.
[Memory anchor successfully created.]
And somewhere, deep inside the Architect, a warning triggered.
[UNAUTHORIZED ANCHOR DETECTED.][TRACE INITIATED.][SEND: CLASS-Z ENTITY – "Apostle of Correction"]
Aurel closed his eyes.
The hunt had begun.