The hallway didn't exist on the map.
Kael stepped through the glitched checkpoint node — and the world broke.
One moment, the Minotaur Gate buzzed with ambient system hums and rune-etched walls. The next, everything stretched.
Walls jittered. Air vibrated. His HUD scattered like pixels caught in a storm.
ERROR: POSITION LOST.
SYSTEM TIME: [UNKNOWN THREAD]
Kael paused, one hand on the wall. It felt… warm. Alive.
Shapes flickered through the mist ahead — mobs, maybe. No. Players.
Echoes.
A tank screamed as he took a blow he hadn't seen. Then rewound. Then died again. Looping.
Rollback loops.
Kael's breath caught in his throat. He'd seen echoes before, but never like this.
These weren't system ghosts.
They were trapped timelines.
Kael moved forward slowly, each step pushing against air that felt too dense — like trying to walk through submerged code. The flickering figures around him played out fragments of past raids, mismatched gear, scattered formation calls, all broken.
But then, one turned.
Not a glitch.
Not a ghost.
Him.
A version of Kael — younger, cleaner, eyes sharp but not yet tired. He blinked at Kael, as if recognizing something. Then faded.
Another flickered in.
Older.
Beaten. Scarred. A broken left arm bound in glyph-tape. He was mid-sprint, dragging a wounded Aria. He shouted a command Kael couldn't hear — then vanished as a Reaper burst through the wall behind him.
Then another.
And another.
Some alone.
Some dying.
Some… winning.
Kael fell to one knee, clutching his head.
The noise wasn't sound.
It was memory.
Instincts he didn't have were pulsing inside him. New reactions. Reflexes. Paths through the room he hadn't seen before.
[PATCH NOTIFICATION: Echo Integration – Divergent Threads Detected]
Initializing Sync...
His fingers flexed. He blinked, then stood.
And moved.
Not like Kael had ever moved before — but like he always had.
A blade swiped through the space where a rollback echo charged.
Kael had already sidestepped.
He wasn't watching anymore.
He was anticipating.
Kael moved through the glitched raidspace like he was reading from a memory he hadn't lived — but had.
A Wraithborn lunged from a collapsed corridor. He turned his wrist mid-air, not just dodging but redirecting the arc of the creature's blade into a self-loop. The Wraithborn exploded in light, destabilized by its own momentum.
He hadn't learned that.
He had remembered it.
[⚠ PATCH THREAD SYNCING – TEMPORAL BIAS STABILIZING…]
His HUD flickered with ghost glyphs. Dozens of them, half-completed loops and spirals crawling across the edge of his vision like forgotten code. But they didn't feel threatening.
They felt like… reinforcements.
Kael turned a corner and saw another echo—this one clear, distinct.
It was him, mid-cast, holding Senna in his arms as Reapers closed in. He didn't speak, just looked up… and nodded.
The scene shimmered, and Kael felt something click.
A rush of experience. Not facts. Tactics. Training routines. Timing. The edge of a forgotten glyph-blade style he'd never practiced.
His body moved cleaner.
Sharper.
And heavier.
Because this wasn't just instinct — it was burden. Weight of lives, of losses. Every rollback version of him that had died here… had tried.
And now they were all converging.
He slid into the next chamber just as Aria's voice crackled through the comm.
"Kael—there's a convergence flare spiking around you. What the hell are you doing?!"
He didn't answer right away.
Instead, he looked at his hand. A glyph was forming on its own — not by will, but by sync. The threads weren't waiting for permission.
They were catching up.
"I think…" Kael murmured, tracing the spiral with his thumb.
"…I'm becoming all of me."
The walls narrowed. Light fractured.
Kael moved deeper into the heart of the Minotaur Gate — where geometry no longer obeyed rules and time moved like breath: held, shaken, and finally released.
The chamber ahead pulsed like a wounded heart.
His feet crunched over broken time.
Yes — not just debris, but literal fragments of past loops. Spikes of memory shimmered across the floor, shuddering with echoes from prior raids. Some of them were his. Some of them weren't.
[🌀 GLYPH INTERFERENCE DETECTED]
Thread Interlace: Unbound
Divergence Level: Severe
The HUD was practically screaming.
Kael didn't blink. He stepped through.
And in the center of the spiral-cracked chamber — half-digital, half-stone — stood the Minotaur Core.
But it wasn't just a monster anymore.
It was fused with rollback fractures. Glyphs ran through its veins like code injected into DNA. Its horns burned white. Its shadow split into two directions — one past, one future.
The system had evolved it to fight him.
Good.
He stepped forward, voice steady:
"I'm not here to win."
"I'm here to finish the thread."
The Minotaur turned.
And spoke.
Not in a roar.
But in glitching, rollback-stuttered language:
"Y̴̰͑Ȍ̷̫U̶͍̍ ̸̜͘Ă̷͚R̷̖͂E̷̱̔ ̵̩̾N̷̝͒Ó̷̪T̴̲̐ ̴̘̒M̶̢͌E̷͇͐A̵̪͒N̸̖̈́T̵̥͋ ̵̺͝T̵̲́O̷͈͌ ̷̻̈́B̴̡̀E̸͎͒.̸̥͊"
Kael smiled grimly.
"Tell that to the thirty-seven other versions of me that died getting me here."
Then he cast the next patch.
Not to heal.
Not to roll back.
But to descend forward.
A contradiction only he could survive.
Light exploded from his body. The glyphs along his spine ignited. The air tore open — and time folded.
He didn't flinch.
Because Kael Varin wasn't just fighting anymore.
He was remembering the future.