Alarms wailed within the Vault as the resonance from the Core Directive Review sent tremors through the decaying systems. Arcane circuitry crackled overhead, and memory caskets ruptured one by one, flooding the corridor with fragmented voices of the past.
Yuki staggered back from the Vault Core dais, his eyes still aglow with the remnants of the Glitchstream sync. His fingers twitched involuntarily as lines of cascading data swirled in his peripheral vision—phantom commands from long-dead systems.
Selene grabbed his shoulder. "Yuki! You with us? The place is falling apart!"
"I'm here," he rasped. "But the truth is... it's worse than I thought."
The Vault shuddered. Pipes burst above them, spraying iridescent mist as conduits tore free. Kai growled beside them, his glitch-markings surging with fluctuating light.
"We need to move," Kai snapped. "Whatever you did back there triggered a failsafe. We're being deleted."
Yuki nodded. But even as they turned, the walls pulsed. An ancient voice echoed through the failing speakers, distorted and fractured:
[Error Detected: Subject Z-00 unauthorized access. Initiating Countermeasure: Forgotten War Protocol. Deploying System Enforcer: ARCHIVIST-Z.]
The corridor ahead melted away, replaced by a massive chamber unlike anything they'd seen. Unlike the eerie beauty of the Vault's previous rooms, this place was pure function: rusted steel, locked-down code panels, and a circular arena that seemed out of sync with time.
Hovering at the center was the Enforcer—ARCHIVIST-Z. A humanoid figure draped in layers of corrupted Nexus robes, its face a fractured mirror reflecting endless possible versions of Yuki. Around its wrists and spine, data scrolls floated like orbiting moons, whispering forgotten commands.
"They had a failsafe," Yuki muttered. "An actual deletion protocol. A guardian to erase rogue memories."
Selene stepped forward. "If it's anything like the Hydra..."
"It's worse," Yuki interrupted. "It doesn't just want to kill us. It wants to rewrite us."
[Combat Parameters: Engaged. Target: Z-00. Subroutines Online: Loop Severance, Integrity Rewrite, Glitch Neutralization.]
With a pulse, ARCHIVIST-Z surged forward.
Yuki barely reacted in time. He invoked Shadow Step, vanishing in black mist as the Enforcer slammed into the ground, shattering the floor. Kai leapt up, unleashing Glitch Howl to distort its targeting while Selene fired a streak of crystallized mana toward its core.
It simply phased.
"It's not entirely here," Yuki said, reappearing behind it. "It's a system ghost—half memory, half code."
The Archivist turned its mirrored face toward him.
[Target Identity Confirmed. Subject Z-00 carries Contaminated Memory Thread. Origin: Project Z - Pre-War Loop.]
Suddenly, data spiked around them. Visions erupted: the world before the reset. Massive engines buried in continents. A celestial forge suspended above a dying planet. Rows of Prototypes—not just Yuki—but dozens like him, deactivated, dissected, repurposed.
Yuki clutched his head. "I saw this... in the Core. They made us for a war. We were weapons. Designed, discarded... replaced."
The Archivist roared, splitting into three mirrored forms—each representing an execution protocol. One shimmered with deletion code. The second is with loop suppression. The third is with pure anti-glitch architecture.
"Kai, Selene—each one's a different attack vector," Yuki barked. "We have to isolate and break their sync!"
Kai tackled the suppression entity. Selene wove arcane threads to trap the anti-glitch avatar. That left Yuki with the deletion protocol.
He activated Fracture Echo.
With a pulse, Yuki split into three. His Echo versions flickered into being, each from an alternate path—one with heightened agility, one with a focus on magic, and the third with resilience and brute force. They struck as one.
The deletion entity reacted quickly but struggled against the unpredictability of three divergent Yuki minds. While one feinted left, the second triggered a cascade of memory overload, and the third stabbed its data-core with the Resonant Gauntlet.
The deletion protocol shattered.
Across the chamber, Selene screamed. Her trap failed, and the anti-glitch avatar surged forward, phasing through her shield. Kai intercepted, slamming it back with a burst of raw glitch energy, but his form flickered—his link to this realm weakening.
"He's destabilizing!" Yuki shouted. He rushed over, catching Kai as the beast fell.
"I can hold it," Kai growled. "Finish the damn loop."
Yuki turned just as the Archivist—its three aspects weakened—reformed into a singular body. But now, its robes were tattered, its mirrored face cracked. It knelt, voice no longer mechanical.
"We did not want to erase you. We were told to. You were an error—a deviation. But you weren't... wrong."
Yuki hesitated. "Who gave the order? Who feared what we'd become?"
"A system that no longer believes in its creators."
The chamber buckled. A deep hum pulsed through the vault's core.
"It's collapsing," Selene said. "We need to go."
Yuki stepped forward. The Archivist looked up.
"You hold the final fragment. The truth... and the choice. Embrace what you are, or let it all end."
From its broken body, a shard of data emerged—a seed of command.
[Protocol Unstable Detected: Override Code Embedded] [Would you like to evolve Unstable Protocol? Y/N]
Yuki reached out.
"Yes."
As his fingers touched the shard, the Vault Core blazed with white-blue light. The chamber disintegrated into fragments of space and code. Gravity warped. Time twisted. And then—
The three of them fell.
Not into death.
But into the world again.
Thrown out of the Vault, deposited high in the cliffs above a crater where the structure had once been. The sky overhead swirled with auroras. The ground beneath them trembled.
Yuki looked at his hands. A new symbol burned across his palm.
[Unstable Protocol — Evolved: Origin Cascade (Lv. 1)]
"We survived," Selene whispered.
"No," Yuki said, staring at the horizon where ancient towers flickered back into reality. "We triggered the next phase."