[POV: Clyde]
They were all him.
Every scream. Every version. Every failure.
Every Clyde that didn't survive the resets now stared back at him—eyes filled with pain, madness, betrayal. A thousand possibilities collapsing into one moment.
Clyde clutched his head. His thoughts spun—too many voices, too many timelines. He felt his mind cracking like glass under a boot.
The entity stepped forward, face still flashing his own.
"You think you can reach the source? That you deserve to know the truth?"
"I didn't ask for this!" Clyde roared.
"No," the entity replied. "You hacked your way into it. But the code doesn't care. The code only balances."
Clyde's knees hit the ground.
"Choose," it whispered. "Either you erase yourself, or we erase you."
Then silence.
A ticking sound began—like a countdown, echoing from somewhere behind his skull.
[POV: Lira]
Lira couldn't breathe.
The corridor twisted as she ran, turning sharper with each step—like it was alive, folding inward. Clyde's image still haunted the corner of her vision—mimicked by whatever infected this place.
Her grip on her weapon tightened.
"Don't trust what you see," she muttered, grounding herself.
That was the first rule Clyde had taught her when they started digging into the Architect's failed realms.
She turned a corner—
—and froze.
A child stood there.
Barefoot. Pale. Eyes the color of drowned data.
"Lira," the girl whispered.
Lira raised her gun. "Back away. Now."
"I know where he is."
The gun didn't shake, but Lira's heart did.
"Who are you?"
The child pointed upward, at the ceiling that no longer existed. Through the breach, she could see stars. But they were arranged wrong—like code strings. Patterns moving in ancient loops.
"He's with the first fork," the girl said. "He's breaking."
Lira stepped forward carefully. "You know how to reach him?"
The girl nodded once. "But you'll have to die a little to follow."
And then the girl walked into the wall—and vanished.
[POV: Echo]
Echo clawed through a collapsing server farm—its wires like vines, sparking and twitching around his feet.
His HUD was offline. His memory bank corrupted.
But he felt something pulling him.
Not gravity.
Not code.
Clyde.
There was a tether between them—built not by the system, but through memory. Trust. Conflict. Loyalty.
He turned a corner and found a chamber filled with black terminals. One blinked with red light.
USER REQUEST: LEGACY TRACE
Echo hesitated. This kind of access… it was pre-reset. Dangerous.
He typed fast.
ACCESSING SOURCE ID: CLYDE_00_74
The screen shook.
Suddenly, a live feed loaded.
Clyde on his knees, surrounded by fractured versions of himself.
"Shit."
Echo connected his implant. "I'm coming, brother. Hold on."
The console asked:
"Do you wish to overwrite?"
He paused.
This wasn't saving Clyde.
This was replacing him.
He took a breath—then hit NO.
"I'm not taking his fight from him. I'm joining it."
He slammed his hand down on the override panel, and everything turned white.
[POV: Arden]
Blood dripped down Arden's face, hot and metallic.
He stood at the edge of a bridge suspended in code—lines of light forming fragile steps over a canyon of static.
Across from him: a man.
Not Clyde. Not a copy.
Someone else.
He wore a black coat. No face. Just a symbol—burned into skin where eyes should be.
The ancient sigil from the Architect's core.
"You're the Observer," Arden said.
The man nodded.
"You're not supposed to interfere."
"And yet," the Observer replied, "you're all about to unlock what should've stayed buried."
Arden stepped forward.
"I'm done following rules written by dead gods."
The Observer raised his hand.
"You're not supposed to exist anymore, Arden."
Pain lanced through Arden's chest as memories surfaced—
a rewrite he didn't survive.
A mission gone wrong.
A bullet that had killed him.
He fell to one knee.
"You're an echo," the Observer said. "You shouldn't be here."
"Then I'll be the echo that breaks the system."
With a roar, Arden charged.
[POV: Clyde]
He felt the pressure building.
All the versions were inside him now—memories bleeding over one another. He couldn't remember what was real. Who he had been. What fork he came from.
But then—
A hand.
Reaching down.
Echo.
"Get up."
Clyde blinked. "How…"
"Doesn't matter," Echo said. "You've been dragging us this whole time. It's our turn now."
He pulled him up. The surrounding versions flickered, glitching violently.
Then Lira appeared beside them, gun raised, eyes cold and steady.
"Tell me which one's the real you," she said.
"I'm not sure anymore," Clyde admitted.
She nodded. "Then let's rewrite the story ourselves."
They stood back to back as the storm swirled—fractured selves, failed simulations, ghosts of who they could've been.
The entity screamed.
"This is not your rewrite!"
"No," Clyde whispered. "But it's our ending."
He activated the pulse Echo handed him—a raw data bomb built to collapse unstable memory threads.
The entity surged forward.
And just before it struck—
[POV: ??? – Unknown Source]
From deep beneath the simulation, something woke up.
It had no name. Only purpose.
For millennia of resets, it had watched silently.
But now—
Now a user had touched the core. Now emotion had fractured logic. Now a choice had been made that didn't align with any protocol.
A voice whispered from the source code:
"Clyde_00_74… accessed unauthorized node. Initiate Purge Sequence."
Red flooded the sky.
The map Lira carried burned in her hand.
Echo's pulse backfired, shattering into white heat.
Clyde turned—
—and saw himself caught in the beam.
Not a copy.
Himself.
A new reset had already begun.
But something refused to disappear.
A code line that wouldn't erase.
One word, written where none should exist:
"SISTER"
And with it, a new branch formed in the system—
A rewrite they didn't control.