The hidden chamber collapsed behind him.
Aurel emerged from the ruins beneath the city—dust-streaked, eyes sharp, pulse steady. The shard now hovered silently above his palm, encased in a floating ring of mana script. The moment he touched it, something inside him shifted. The air around him crackled faintly, like space itself recognizing his presence.
Mira had vanished again. Whether it was out of fear, duty, or manipulation, he didn't know. What he did know was that something had awoken. Not just the memories of Gray—the Darkest Knight—but a second presence.
A cold, clinical one.
[SYSTEM REBOOTED. NEW PARAMETERS UNLOCKED.][SYNC RATE: 32%][NEW QUEST AVAILABLE: "Those Who Refuse to Kneel"]
Aurel squinted as the message scrolled across his inner vision. This wasn't like the system from before. The interface was different—less game-like, more invasive. As if it had eyes, and those eyes had stopped pretending to blink.
Objective:Track the movement of the rogue Chosen Ones.Location: Outer Rings of Deepvale.Reward: ???Warning: These individuals are no longer bound to the system.
"Rogue Chosen Ones?" Aurel murmured.
He clicked the side of his glove—something Mira had given him before they parted. It hummed, then unfolded a semi-holographic map of the old world zone. His location blinked in a dull blue. And beyond that, somewhere in the broken remains of Deepvale—a forbidden zone between Earth and Fantaso's fused scars—four markers pulsed red.
They weren't bound to the Architect. They had broken free.
He had to find them.
✦✦✦Deepvale – The Riftlands
The terrain was wrong.
Trees with cracked metallic bark leaned against skyscrapers split in half by floating chunks of mountain. Rivers twisted upside down in gravity-defying spirals, their currents flowing skyward. The laws of physics bled at the seams here. Deepvale wasn't just a place—it was a wound.
And in its center stood a rusted tower wrapped in obsidian vines.
Aurel approached slowly. The area pulsed with fragmented mana. It didn't react to him—not in hostility, but recognition.
There were already three people waiting outside the base of the tower.
A woman in a blood-red cloak, her right arm missing and replaced with a floating skeletal construct.A young man, no older than twenty, covered in ritual scars, levitating without effort.And an old war machine—half-man, half-armor, with a green visor flickering dimly.
They were silent as he approached. Until the woman spoke.
"You're late, Remnant."
Aurel tensed. "You know who I am?"
"No," she said. "But he does."
She stepped aside, revealing the fourth figure descending from the tower. He wore no armor, no glowing eyes or cape. Just a simple black coat over a half-burned tunic. But the mana that rolled off of him was suffocating.
He looked at Aurel with curiosity—eyes old, mismatched, and… tired.
"Gray," the man said. "I was wondering when you'd show up. The system told us you died."
"Maybe I should have," Aurel replied.
The man laughed. "So should we all."
He extended a hand.
"My name is Vaen. I was the first to break the system. The first to say no."
✦✦✦
They sat beneath the broken sky that night, gathered around a flickering mana-flame.
Vaen explained everything.
How the Architect was not a single being—but a collective, born out of the merged consciousness of several ancient AI gods in the core of Fantaso's collapsed dimension. How the system was never meant to empower—it was meant to contain.
The Chosen weren't warriors.
They were anchors.
Points of code in living flesh used to stabilize the clash of dimensions, to prevent the full fusion of Earth and Fantaso. Every time someone was chosen, their body became a firewall—holding back a complete collapse. Until they died… and the system rebooted to find a new host.
"You're not the Darkest Knight, Aurel," Vaen said. "You're the keystone. If you fall out of alignment, the entire system destabilizes."
Aurel clenched his fists. "So my life was just… a failsafe?"
"Yes," the woman in red added. "But you're different. You're the only one with a past life. A retained soul. That means you're something else entirely."
Aurel's mind reeled. He remembered the message: The Memory of the Darkest Knight. It wasn't just a passive skill—it was a fragment of code, yes, but also a spark of divinity. A violation of the system's rules.
"So why am I still alive?" he asked.
Vaen stared into the flames. "Because someone broke protocol. Someone inside the Architect network gave you a path back. There's a traitor in the system."
Aurel sat in silence. Every answer raised ten more questions.
"But why tell me this?" he asked. "What do you want from me?"
Vaen leaned forward, his eyes intense.
"We want you to break the gate."
Aurel's eyes widened.
"If the gate shatters," Vaen continued, "the fusion begins. Earth and Fantaso will combine completely—no more Chosen, no more resets, no more control. Just freedom."
"And chaos," Aurel whispered.
"Yes," Vaen agreed. "But it will be real."
Aurel stood up, staring at the fractured horizon where both worlds bled into one another.
The Architect wanted him as a weapon.The Thorns wanted him dead.The resistance wanted him to end it all.
And somewhere, deep beneath it all, he wanted something too: a life not written by someone else's hand.