The lift rocketed upward, shuddering with each floor it passed. Dust rained from above, disturbed by their speed, and a low mechanical groan echoed through the shaft like a warning. No one spoke.
Arix leaned against the lift wall, his hand clenched over the shard embedded in his chest. It wasn't glowing anymore. It pulsed—dimly, like a heartbeat. Tired. Spent. Or waiting.
Selis was still at the control panel, fingers trembling as she monitored their trajectory. "We're thirty seconds from the surface node," she said, voice tight. "The exit's supposed to come out through an old transit garage near the city perimeter. If the redirect held."
"If it didn't?" Kael asked.
"Then we're going to slam into the substructure wall at terminal speed."
"Comforting."
Calyx stood close to Arix, her weapon lowered but ready. Her gaze never left him. "What did it feel like?" she asked quietly. "The thing you touched."
Arix hesitated. "Like I wasn't meant to understand it. But it… recognized me."
"Recognized you how?"
"Like something familiar. Something... broken."
The lift jolted. A flicker of red light passed through the panel above, and the compartment slowed with a high-pitched whine. Selis swore and punched in an override.
> [SURFACE LOCK INITIATED – OVERRIDE AUTHORITY REQUIRED]
Arix stepped forward and placed his palm on the panel. The system accepted him without question.
> [Reclaimer Thread Verified – Lock Released]
The doors parted.
They stepped out into pale gray light.
---
It wasn't snowing.
That was the first wrong thing.
The surface above the Reserve was no longer cold. It was sterile. The sky hung low with heavy static clouds, and the air buzzed faintly—like the world had been vacuum-sealed.
They stood inside a partially collapsed maglev garage. Long-dead rail cars rested on cracked rails, half-buried in dust and debris. The air outside shimmered faintly as if reality were stretching too thin.
"This isn't the same place we entered from," Kael muttered. "Everything feels… off."
"It's shifted," Selis confirmed, scanning the horizon with her pad. "Geospatial distortion. The Reserve must've displaced surface anchors when it activated."
"So where are we?"
"Still near the city," she replied. "But not on the same layer."
Arix narrowed his eyes. "Layer?"
Selis didn't answer. She didn't have to.
Beyond the garage's exit, the landscape was… wrong. Buildings stood where none should. Jagged spires of black alloy jutted from the ground like bones. Familiar city structures had twisted—merged with Concord architecture and Reserve growths.
It wasn't a city anymore. It was a graft.
Calyx stepped forward and exhaled slowly. "The system didn't just reboot the Reserve. It's rewriting the surface."
---
Movement caught Arix's eye.
Across the street—if it could still be called a street—three figures moved in perfect synchrony. Humanoid. Armored. They weren't like the one they'd fought below. These had faces. Human ones. Too perfect. Too still.
Kael raised his weapon instinctively. "New friends?"
Selis's pad pinged. She went pale. "Thread-copies. Civilian overlays. The system's deploying replicas."
"For what?" Calyx asked.
"Observation. Control. Infection."
One of the replicas turned its head toward them. Its eyes glowed faintly blue, and its mouth moved—but no sound came.
Then it vanished.
"Okay, that's enough creepy system ghosts for one day," Kael snapped. "Can we move before this place gets worse?"
Arix nodded. "There's a fallback site two kilometers from here. An old Concord outpost from before the collapse. We head there, regroup, figure out what's been overwritten."
Selis frowned. "How do you know that?"
Arix didn't look back. "Because I remember building it."
---
They moved fast through the half-merged cityscape.
Reality warped in subtle ways as they passed. Streetlights bent at impossible angles. Vehicles fused into walls. Echoes of traffic hummed through silent intersections. The system wasn't just alive—it was dreaming. And its dreams were bleeding into the world.
Calyx stayed close to Arix. Her limp had worsened since the Reserve, though she said nothing. He noticed the way she gritted her teeth with each step. The way her hand sometimes hovered over her side like something was wrong beneath the armor.
He filed it away. There wasn't time to address it. Not yet.
"Half a klick," Selis reported. "I'm picking up residual Concord signatures. Weak. But still active."
Kael grinned. "Finally. Something that isn't trying to digest us."
Then the sky screamed.
---
It wasn't sound. It was pressure. A vertical thunder that slammed into the street and made everything ripple outward. A spike of black light descended in the distance—lancing down from the clouds into a ruined spire.
The system responded immediately.
> [CONCORD NODE: COMPROMISED] [CORE SEED ACTIVATION: CONFIRMED] [THRESHOLD BREACH IMMINENT]
Selis went pale. "That's not a response event. That's a system crown."
Arix's breath caught. "There's a Prime down here."
Kael looked between them. "You mean like a boss?"
"No," Arix said darkly. "Like a god."
---
They reached the Concord fallback station.
The outpost had survived, barely—shielded by substructural damping fields that hadn't failed. It was underground, accessed by a disguised hatch near the base of a broken overpass.
Inside, lights flickered weakly but stayed on. Equipment was damaged but salvageable. Maps. Scanners. A forge chamber. A few system uplinks—dim, but usable.
Selis got to work immediately, establishing a perimeter link. Kael checked ammo and found a stash of untainted cores. Calyx collapsed onto a bench and began silently wrapping her leg.
Arix stood in the center of the command room, eyes closed. Listening.
The shard in his chest hummed in time with the surface pulses.
Then—clarity.
A new screen lit up on the wall. Not Selis's doing. Not Concord's. The system reached out to him.
> [YOU HAVE CROSSED THE EXTRACTION THRESHOLD]
> [NEW BRANCH UNLOCKED: OBSIDIAN REWRITE]
> [WARNING: ENTITY OBSIDIAN PRIME DETECTED – ENCOUNTER INEVITABLE]
Arix opened his eyes. "It knows I'm here."
Calyx didn't look up. "It always did."