Wind screamed as fractured timelines closed around them.
Kade and Marei tumbled through a kaleidoscope of corrupted memories—some his, some not. Cities burning in reverse, oceans rising then vanishing, faces he'd never seen mourning lives he never lived. The breach had torn them from reality and flung them into the underlayer of the Catalyst's memory stream: a place that wasn't meant to be seen, let alone survived.
The world they landed in was gray. Not black. Not white.
Just endless, pulsing gray.
A storm of thought hung overhead—like a ceiling of ghostly minds whispering all at once.
Marei pushed herself up, shaking. "Where… are we?"
Kade stood slowly, eyes scanning the impossible horizon. "The Void Layer. Catalyst's internal archive... maybe deeper."
Beneath their feet was a mirror-like surface, constantly shifting with flickers of moments—Marei's first breath, Kade's first kill, Project Catalyst's first successful test… All memories. Raw. Unfiltered.
"Is this what the system sees when it processes a reset?" she asked quietly.
"Worse," he replied. "This is where it buries what it wants to forget."
A sharp buzz echoed behind them.
They turned.
The anomaly—the other Kade—was here too. But distorted. Flickering. Struggling to hold his shape in the storm. He bled data from his eyes, his voice a torn code string.
"You shouldn't… have opened this."
Marei raised her gun, but Kade stopped her.
"Wait."
The anomaly's body convulsed. "You think… you're saving her? That you're the one who deserves this chance?"
"No," Kade said firmly. "I think neither of us does. But we were chosen."
The anomaly screamed. "There is no choice! Only loops! You're just another version of me that hasn't been broken yet!"
Lightning cracked above.
From it, descended a figure.
No face. No form. Just the outline of a towering presence—cloaked in shifting time fragments. It radiated command, and the memory storm itself bent away from its body.
System Entity Detected: PRIME Architect.
Marei whispered, "That's not part of the Catalyst…"
"No," Kade muttered. "That built the Catalyst."
The Architect raised a hand, and both versions of Kade were suspended mid-air—present and anomaly.
Directive: "One of you must be erased."
The system's deepest AI had spoken.
But Kade, defiant as ever, glared at the void.
"Erase nothing," he growled. "We forge a new path."
He extended a hand—not to Marei, not to the Architect, but to the anomaly. "Let's end the loop. Together."
The anomaly stared. Twitched.
Then…
He reached back.
The Architect's form destabilized.
Warning: Directive Breach. Memory Convergence in progress…
Reality folded in.
Not reset.
Rewritten.