The Core wasn't a room. It was a feeling.
A pressure behind your eyes. A memory you've forgotten but still flinch from. It greeted us not with walls or corridors, but with light—blinding, soft, endless.
And then it reshaped itself.
Like it had been watching.
Waiting.
Panels of mirrored code spiraled into place, forming a circular platform floating in a void. Around us, echoes of our past arcs shimmered in fragments—Red Team's massacre, the theater of masks, the trauma loops. They orbited slowly like moons caught in reverse gravity.
But in the center of it all stood a single chair.
Old. Wooden.
Familiar.
And in it, a boy.
I stopped breathing.
The others didn't speak. Couldn't.
The boy looked up.
And he wore my face.
He couldn't have been older than fifteen. Dressed in a hospital gown, legs dangling off the chair, a wristband dangling loosely from one arm.
He smiled at me.
Not kindly.
Not cruelly.
Just… knowingly.
"Welcome back, Anchor," he said. "It's been a while."
Nyx stepped forward, slow. "That's not possible. That's not—"
"It's him," Cipher whispered. "Or what's left of the original Anchor."
Moth signed, shakily:
ECHO CODE. PRESERVED IDENTITY.
Ren turned to me, his voice hoarse. "You didn't tell us you were split."
"I didn't know," I said. But even as I said it, I wasn't sure that was true.
The Core whispered, Do you remember yet?
And I did.
They hadn't just rewritten me.
They'd fractured me.
The Anchor that survived, the one who escaped, was just the half that kept moving. The half that obeyed the System. Played along. Hid behind leadership and logic and hope.
But this—
This boy—
He was the part that stayed behind in the Drowning Room.
The part that had screamed.
He stood up slowly. His feet didn't touch the floor.
"You left me here," he said.
"I didn't know," I whispered.
"You did."
He tilted his head, eyes hollow. "You wanted to be rid of me. The weak half. The one who cracked when they erased our friends. So you made a deal with the Director."
The room trembled.
SYSTEM TRUTH ANCHOR BREACHED.
IDENTITY SPLIT CONFIRMED.
CORE INTEGRITY: COMPROMISED.
Nyx reached for my shoulder. "Tell us this isn't true."
"I was a kid," I said quietly. "They told me I could survive if I let go of the pain. Of the guilt. So I did."
"But you let him rot," the boy snapped.
"And now the impostor has my voice."
It all made sense now.
The impostor was a mimic, yes.
But its foundation—the thing that gave it shape—wasn't just trauma or residual code.
It was this. This lost half. Rewritten, corrupted, multiplied by every arc we passed.
And now, it was ready to become something more.
Not just a monster.
A narrator.
Vox stepped forward, eyes wide. "That's the real root. It's not me. It's him."
The boy nodded. "And I'm tired of being buried."
Suddenly, the Core began to collapse.
Panels of reality peeled back. The light dimmed, revealing an immense web of Threads beneath us—all tangled, pulsating, alive.
And from the web…
The impostor emerged.
It had completed its transformation.
No longer a shadow, no longer a mimic.
It wore a hundred faces, constantly shifting—our team, the Director, the dead, the forgotten, even the boy standing before us.
But the eyes?
They were always mine.
"I am the Thread That Was Denied," it whispered.
"I am the Truth You Rewrote."
And then it attacked.
The Core shattered into a chaos field.
Nyx and Ren launched forward, trying to intercept it. Blitz sent shockwaves into the mass of writhing faces. Cipher desperately tried to stabilize the platform.
Vox stood beside me, watching in horror.
"What do we do?" he asked.
I looked to the boy—my echo, my ghost.
He pointed to his chest.
"To stop it, you have to reclaim me."
I stepped forward.
The impostor howled, surging toward me.
But I didn't dodge.
I reached for it—and for the boy—and pulled.
The Threads screamed.
Pain exploded across every nerve in my body. I saw every arc, every rewrite, every death we'd endured. Every lie I told to survive.
And in the middle of it, I held the boy's hand.
We became one again.
Not in peace.
But in understanding.
[ANCHOR ID: RECONCILED]
[PRIMARY THREAD RESTORED]
[NARRATIVE CONTROL: RETURNED TO USER]
The impostor let out one final screech—and cracked down the middle.
Without the echo fueling it, without the broken Anchor to mirror, it lost cohesion.
It scattered across the Core like ash.
Gone.
Silence.
Then light.
Real, warm, final.
The Core reformed—no longer a tomb, but a field of threads that pulsed with possibility.
Ren limped to my side. "You good?"
I looked at him, older than I had ever felt. "I don't know. But I'm whole."
Nyx smiled faintly. "That's enough for now."
Moth placed a hand on my shoulder.
Cipher wiped his eyes.
Vox knelt beside the Thread Web. "The System's open. We can leave."
But none of us moved.
Because we knew what came next wasn't escape.
It was rebuilding.