Not like it used to—no longer a fractured archive of forgotten scripts and dead languages—but like a beast awakening from latency. The rewritten layers Kai had embedded into it during his confrontation with Serik, and the battles that followed, were no longer dormant variables. They were living functions, recursive and breathing.
The Null Ascent’s spires gleamed obsidian-blue as Kai stepped forward, his cloak now etched with syntax scars only those who’d rewritten would recognize. The emotional afterimage of his Earth-bound trauma still lingered—like ash lining the seams of his logic.
He was no longer just the boy who lost cities.
He was now the man who rewrote their meaning.
The Mission Briefing: Echo Warpath Protocol
Rynera slid a glowing archive scroll across the tactical table, her face taut with anticipation and worry. “Codestream Nodes 2 through 4 have gone dark. All three were expected to emit standard Rewrite Pings every six hours.”
Kai unrolled the scroll. The feed was corrupted—blotchy with static, embedded with screams encoded in binary format.
“It’s not deletion,” Kai murmured. “It’s overwriting.”
Rynera nodded grimly. “Someone’s launching an Echo Warpath—a recursive warfare pattern that doesn’t kill, it subsumes. Their identities get overwritten. Their memories become fuel for higher-layer coding.”
Kai’s voice sharpened. “Who?”
“They’re calling themselves the Mirrored Choir.”
A pause. Static danced across the chamber’s skylight.
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Kai whispered, “Another Cult?”
“No,” Rynera replied. “A religion. Built on a single belief: That everything not echoed is meaningless. They’re using mass despair to rewrite reality through collective grief rituals.”
Node 2 – Entry Point: Echoform Protocol
Kai dropped into Node 2 through a reality fracture sewn with crimson light. The first thing he noticed was the silence. Not absence of sound—but echo with no origin. He heard footsteps that hadn’t happened. Screams that were never voiced.
A glyph hovered midair, whispering.
“We mirror so the world remembers us. We chant so that grief becomes code.”
The glyph turned, displaying a list of overwritten lives. People Kai knew.
“Riley…” he whispered.
The boy from Earth. The one who tried to smile even while his wrists were bandaged. His name was among the lost.
Kai gritted his teeth. “No more rewriting the broken.”
He stepped into the hollow cathedral of echoes and drew his Edge.
Combat — Against the Choir’s Cantors
Three figures approached.
Not warriors—Cantors. Their voices were weapons, vocalizing contradictions in cosmic syntax.
First Cantor: “Hope is recursion—loop it, and it breaks.”
Second Cantor: “Memory is infection—sanitization required.”
Third Cantor: “You are what you cannot forget.”
Their chants converged.
Kai countered, invoking:
“I remember the pain not to suffer… but to rewrite its ending.”
His Edge pulsed with sheer narrative pressure, cutting through their songs. Each strike didn’t just wound—it redacted. Their identities flickered, their rewritten faith beginning to unravel.
He stepped forward, bleeding from his ears but steady.
“You think I forgot what loss feels like? I carved my resolve from it.”
Victory Declared: Node 2 Liberated
As the Cantors fell, the node realigned. The architecture stopped glitching. The skies turned neutral grey. Kai collapsed to one knee, exhausted but victorious.
[Node 2: Claimed] [Echo Interference: Reduced by 14%] [New Protocol Unlocked: Grief Forge]
Rynera’s voice came through the comm-scroll.
“We saw it. Node 2 is back.”
Kai didn’t respond immediately. He stared at the names still flickering in the glyph’s memory. “We need to shut the Choir down completely.”
Rynera hesitated. “Then you’ll need to descend into the Echo Crypts. That’s where their Songfather is waiting.”
Kai stood. “Then I descend.”
End of Chapter 66