The sky above Sector 12-C flickered.
It wasn't lightning.
It was rollback tension.
As if the very air knew something was out of sync.
The duel had barely ended an hour ago, and already the Net was on fire.
Clips of Rex's forfeiture. The shimmer around Kael's body. The moment he whispered something that made Rex break.
Forums spun theories. Dominion PR called it "visual artifacting." The Choir flooded the web with the phrase: "The Thread Breaker has arrived."
But Kael had no time for any of it.
He stood at the edge of the Minotaur Gate.
It pulsed.
Not just with mana — but something older. Rollback surge. He felt it humming in his bones.
"You feel it too, huh?"
Aria's voice broke the silence as she approached from behind. Her jacket was half-zipped, and her sword was sheathed. She wasn't here to fight him.
She was here to fight with him.
Kael nodded, eyes fixed on the gate's fluctuating surface.
"It's not stabilizing," he said. "It's folding."
She frowned. "Folding what?"
"Time."
The gate rippled again.
A distant scream echoed — but when they looked, the crowd outside was silent. No one had made a sound.
"I'm seeing echoes," Kael said. "Not visual. Temporal. The gate's bleeding across layers."
Aria activated her visor, scanning the structure.
"...I'm reading double terrain patterns. Mobs we already cleared two weeks ago are registering again."
Kael stepped forward, slowly. His palm tingled — the glyph burn was active, syncing to the pulse.
"This isn't just corruption," he said.
"What is it, then?"
Kael didn't answer right away.
He moved closer to the threshold. The barrier shimmered. For a second, he saw two versions of it overlaid — one dark and broken, the other pristine.
His patchsense flared.
And that's when he saw it.
A figure — tall, faceless, cloaked in static — standing inside the threshold. Not crossing. Not speaking. Just… observing.
"Reaper," Kael muttered.
Aria stepped back, eyes wide.
"Is it waiting?"
"No," Kael said. "It's listening."
The gate surged again.
This time, the ground shook.
Dust fell from the upper gates. Lights flickered in the control towers. Dominion scanners lit red across the entire city grid.
Then a system voice echoed over the channel:
Rollback Sync Detected.
Anomaly Class: TIER UNKNOWN.
Source: [Minotaur Gate – Anchor Layer Breach]
Kael's jaw tightened.
"It's beginning."
A mechanical voice echoed over the comm-net, flat and absolute.
"LOCKDOWN CODE: BLACK THREAD. GATE ACCESS REVOKED."
All across the upper towers, red barriers shimmered into place — Dominion's answer to breach events. But this wasn't a normal breach. No guilds had reported entry. No monsters had spilled out. And yet… the response was immediate and extreme.
"They're sealing it," Aria muttered, watching the overlays collapse.
Kael's jaw clenched. "No. They're not sealing it. They're quarantining it."
He stepped forward, fingers already pulling the edges of a soft patch glyph. He wasn't patching the world — just the local logs, enough to peek into the system's residual layer.
His palm sparked.
Lines of code appeared across the field of view — rollback echoes, mana threads, pattern fractals.
"This isn't a destabilization," Kael said, scanning faster. "It's an anchor breach. The gate's not corrupting from the outside — it's being rewritten from the inside out."
Aria blinked. "How is that possible?"
Kael froze.
Because the glyph in the center of the scan wasn't Dominion's. And it wasn't the Reapers'.
It was Senna's.
Drawn in that soft, rounded hand. The fractal spiral signature only she used. And worse — the timestamp was thirty minutes ago.
"She's never been here," Kael whispered.
"Then how—"
He turned toward the Gate.
It pulsed again.
This time… more violently.
Environmental echoes sharpened. The ground split a few inches — then reformed. Mobs shimmered in and out of existence along the perimeter. In one shard of vision, Kael saw himself — older, bleeding, holding a blade he didn't recognize.
And then it was gone.
"Time shadows," Kael muttered. "Future threads bleeding into now."
Aria activated a higher-level decrypt scan, trying to follow. "I'm seeing Reaper traces. They entered the gate…"
She paused.
"But none of them exited."
Kael's eyes narrowed.
"They're not meant to."
He looked back at the threshold.
The Reaper was still there — static-cloaked, motionless — except this time, its head turned. Toward Kael.
Not fully.
Just enough to acknowledge him.
And the system flared:
Anchor Glyph Detected.
Source: Thread Divergence Class-B
Kael stepped closer.
He whispered, almost to himself:
"She's already inside the system."
Kael dropped to one knee.
The feedback hit like a spike through his spine — the glyph on his palm igniting with rollback static, bleeding raw data into his veins.
"Kael?!" Aria was at his side instantly. "What the hell did you just—"
"Not… now," he gritted. "Soft-dive… started. Keep watch."
His body slumped forward — but didn't collapse. His breath steadied, eyelids fluttering.
Aria blinked. "You're patch-phasing? That's suicide!"
Too late.
Kael was already inside.
⸻
The system wasn't a place. It was a pressure.
Data spun around him in silken threads — not like code, but like time rendered visible. Broken timelines wept across shattered world-fragments. A battlefield still bleeding. A city mid-collapse. A girl's scream, frozen mid-frame.
He walked through echoes.
And they began to whisper.
"You hesitated."
"We died because you ran."
"This is your ninth loop. You still haven't learned."
"She always draws it, even when you don't tell her."
"Don't trust the Choir."
"She's the patch. We're the cost."
The voices came from fractured shadows.
Kael stepped into one — saw himself, bloodied and wild-eyed, patching mid-duel while Senna screamed behind him. Another version stood in silence, his back to a burning city.
Each Kael had made different choices.
Each one had paid the price.
At the system's heart, past the fracture-line of all these echoes, he saw it.
A spiral.
Glowing white.
Not like Dominion's glyphs. Not Reaper-red. Not his own cracked code.
Pure.
Clean.
And drawn by a child's hand.
"Senna…"
Kael approached — and the glyph responded. It pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
Not a defense.
A door.
He touched it.
And saw her.
⸻
Senna stood in a twilight space — a mirror-horizon stretching in every direction. She was barefoot, wearing her favorite oversized hoodie. Her eyes glowed like rollback stars.
"Hi Papa," she said, smiling. "You're late."
Kael couldn't breathe.
"How—where are you?"
"I found where the broken pieces go," she said. "The ones you left behind when you tried to fix things."
"Senna, you're not supposed to be—"
"I can fix it," she said, as if it were simple.
She raised her hand — and the spiral behind her expanded into dozens of threads. Patch overlays. Stability zones. Protected timelines.
And at the center of them all… her.
"I'm the Anchor," she said.
"No," Kael whispered. "You're my daughter."
"I can be both," she replied. "But I need you to finish your part. You're still leaking."
Kael blinked. "Leaking?"
She pointed at his chest.
Where the glyph burned.
A black glyph.
Thread Divergence Confirmed.
"I'll hold the gate," she said. "You keep the world from breaking."
And the light surged—
⸻
Kael gasped as he slammed back into his body.
His chest burned.
His eyes… glowed.
He looked up at Aria. "It's not just rollback anymore," he said, voice shaking.
"What is it then?"
Kael turned toward the Gate.
"The system's not resisting me."
He rose to his feet.
"It's waiting for me to finish what I started."
Far above Sector Twelve, the sky shimmered — not with light, but with commandlines.
Thin white filaments hovered in the clouds, each a live-thread broadcast from Dominion's aerial relays. Inside them, red warnings pulsed like heartbeats.
[CLASS-7 SYSTEM SYNC DETECTED]
[THREAD CONVERGENCE INITIATED]
[POTENTIAL ANCHOR ACTIVATION: LOCATION REDACTED]
[REAPER-CLASS INTERVENTION: PENDING]
Inside the Dominion central vault, deep beneath the Guildmaster's observatory, a dozen analysts stared at the spiraling anomaly logs.
None of them spoke.
Until the Guildmaster entered.
He was silent, hands clasped behind his back, robes trailing a ripple of glitched light.
"Thread singularity," he muttered, voice too calm. "How long until convergence?"
"Unknown," one analyst replied. "The Anchor signature is fluctuating—drawn but unstable. The Patchrunner's phase-loop is incomplete."
The Guildmaster smiled.
"Good. If it stabilizes… we'll kill the seed before it takes root."
He turned toward the primary hologram — Kael standing at the edge of the Minotaur Gate, surrounded by temporal fracture and glyph-fused sky.
"And if he stabilizes it?"
A beat of silence.
"Then we deploy the Reapers."
The Guildmaster raised a hand — and spoke a single command:
"Activate Protocol Tempest."
⸻
Aria's private channel pinged.
Encrypted Dominion string.
She decrypted it mid-flight over the Gate.
As she read, her face went pale.
The words were simple:
[TARGET: THREAD ANCHOR]
[AUTHORIZED: LIVE CAPTURE OR TERMINATION]
[PRIORITY: ABOVE PATCHRUNNER]
She whispered, "It's not about Kael anymore…"
Her aircraft spiraled downward — not toward Kael, but toward the city outskirts.
Toward Senna.
⸻
In the Varin residence, Liora stood at the window.
She didn't know why, but her chest tightened.
Senna was on the floor again, drawing in quiet focus. The spiral was larger this time, and her fingers bled faint light as she traced the lines.
"Almost done," Senna whispered.
"What's that, sweetheart?" Liora asked gently.
Senna looked up.
"The sky's about to break," she said. "I have to hold it."
Outside, the first of the Dominion warships passed overhead — silent, black, and pulsing with anti-Reaper suppression coils.
⸻
Kael stood beside the flickering Gate, glyphs still sparking on his palm.
He could feel the air thickening — not with magic, but with intent.
Aria's voice cracked through his comm.
"Kael, listen. They're not after you."
"What?"
"They're coming for your daughter."
Kael froze.
The glyph on his palm pulsed once, then began crawling up his arm like ink spreading through veins.
"Then they're too late," he said, voice colder than steel. "She's already part of the system."
He looked up at the sky.
Where six warships now hovered — shields pulsing, hatches unfolding.
And inside those ships?
Not soldiers.
Reapers.