Varaan exhaled sharply, her chest rising and falling as if the breath had been dragged from somewhere deep and ancient. "Did we just… win?"
Kai didn't answer right away. He stared at the sword—his sword—still vibrating faintly in his grip. Smoke curled in lazy spirals from the scorched edge, where reality had briefly torn open and something wrong had emerged. Now, only emptiness remained, like a missing line of code in a crucial system file.
"No," he said softly, voice hollow. "We just bought time."
Somewhere, deep in the code that underpinned everything—the terrain, the sky, the illusion of gravity—something shuddered. A ripple passed through the simulation like a breath held too long.
And then, without fanfare, the system began to reboot.
