The silence after the storm was almost deafening.
Clyde walked through the white expanse, each step soft against a floor that had no texture, no resistance. It was peace—but peace that felt borrowed, artificial, like a dream still tethered to a forgotten nightmare.
"Where are we?" Arden asked, glancing around the blank canvas of the world.
"The Reset Zone," Echo murmured. "The Architect's final failsafe. A place between timelines. It's where the rewrite stabilizes… or fails."
Clyde nodded, eyes fixed ahead. He could feel something pulsing just beneath this tranquil surface—something that hadn't been erased.
Nephros.
"I can still feel him," Clyde said. "He's not gone."
They turned a corner—or what resembled a corner in this dimension—and were suddenly standing before a massive crystalline pillar. Inside, suspended in motionless time, was the fractured core of Nephros—his last trace, a shard of corrupted energy held in stasis.
"He shouldn't be here," Arden said, unease in his voice.
Clyde approached, placing a hand on the barrier. "No… this is a test. The Architect left this behind. Not as a threat. As a reminder."
Behind them, the world began to flicker again. Color bled slowly into the blankness—grass forming beneath their feet, the sky taking on hues of twilight. The Reset was completing.
"This is your world now," Echo said to Clyde. "The Key is gone. The rewrite locked. No more second chances."
Clyde took a deep breath.
"I don't need any more," he said. "But I do need to make sure they have theirs."
He turned to the crystalline prison and whispered, "This time, you stay forgotten."
The moment those words left his mouth, the shard pulsed once—then dimmed, fully sealed.
As they walked away, rebuilding began around them—not just of cities or systems, but of purpose. People emerging from digital shelters. Light returning to eyes that had long been haunted. Clyde's name, whispered not as a legend… but as a beginning.
But in the lowest layers of the new world's code… a flicker stirred.
The rewrite was never truly over.