Silence followed the battle like a bruise.
The Null Fragments had vanished as quickly as they'd appeared, leaving behind nothing but a lingering sense of wrongness. Reality felt stretched. Thin. Like a piece of fabric that had been pulled just past its breaking point but hadn't quite torn.
Kai's hand still tingled from whatever he'd done. Whatever had made Lyra look at him with that mix of surprise and calculation.
"Explain," Lyra said. Not a question. A demand.
The six-eyed creature—which Kai was starting to think of as more of a companion than a beast—moved closer. Its scaled body shifted through colors like liquid light, settling on a deep, muted green that felt somehow defensive.
"I don't know," Kai admitted. And that was the truth. He'd acted on pure instinct. Something deeper than thought. Something that felt like it came from somewhere between his memories and something else entirely.
Lyra's circuit-tattoos continued to pulse, the blue lines moving across her copper-toned skin like living neural networks. "Impossible," she muttered. More to herself than to Kai.
The landscape around them seemed to breathe. The silver-leafed trees leaned in, branches twisting imperceptibly to catch every nuance of the moment. The two moons hung in the lavender sky, indifferent witnesses to whatever had just happened.
"Your calibration is accelerating," the six-eyed creature said. Its multiple gazes converged on Kai, each eye tracking something he couldn't see. Layers of reality that existed just beyond human perception.
Kai thought about his life up to this point. The convenience store nights. The half-finished computer science degree. The potential always just out of reach. His mother's final words echoing in his mind: "You're meant for something more."
"What exactly did I do?" he asked.
Lyra's laugh was sharp. Unexpected. "You interrupted a fundamental system response. Those Null Fragments are immune mechanisms. When realities become too permeable, they attempt to seal breaches. Violently."
The disk at her waist—the device that had first mapped and "calibrated" him—hummed softly. Its surface looked organic, almost alive. Like something grown rather than manufactured.
"Most humans perceive reality as a single stream," she continued. "Linear. Predictable. But reality is more like a complex network. Interconnected. Multilayered."
The six-eyed creature shifted. "He is becoming a bridge," it said. The words felt heavy. Loaded with meaning.
Kai's computer science training provided a framework. This felt like debugging. Like finding a way to interrupt a system's automatic response. To introduce a different possibility.
"Your world is dying," Lyra said. Not with drama. Just statement of fact. "Not physically. Systemically. The barriers between realities are becoming thin. What you call reality is just one layer. One possibility among infinite."
The landscape continued to pulse. To breathe. To exist in multiple states simultaneously.
"What do you need me to do?" Kai asked.
The six-eyed creature's multiple gazes converged. Waiting. Evaluating.
Lyra's smile didn't change. But something in her eyes shifted. A flicker of something that might have been respect. Or curiosity. Or something else entirely.
"Everything," she said.
And Kai understood, in that moment, that nothing would ever be the same again.