The command room atop Dominion Tower was nearly silent.
Not from lack of information — there were always a dozen threads running, reports streaming, combat logs rotating like orbitals. But in this moment, none of them mattered.
Only one window blinked red.
A glyph. Black-on-silver.
Burned into live field telemetry. Impossible to fake.
[System Interference Detected]
[Subject: Patchrunner – Thread Divergence]
The operators said nothing.
The Guildmaster stood behind them.
Hand clasped behind his back. Expression unreadable.
Only his eyes moved — tracking the spinning glyph as it shimmered across the screen, encoded inside the Minotaur Gate's live server feed.
"Are we sure it's real?" someone finally whispered.
"It's not a patch," said the senior sys-op. "Not recorded by any regression tool. No rollback threads. No root trail."
"It's not his daughter either," said another. "It's centered on him."
The Guildmaster's voice cut in, cold and soft.
"It was never about her first. She's the Anchor. But he—"
"He's the Trigger."
He stepped forward. The screen shifted to live combat view. Dozens of Reapers had pulled back from Kael's position. One still hovered in the distance, but it made no move to engage.
The Guildmaster watched.
"Send a Lock Echo to all Gate endpoints. Echo only. No live engagement."
A pause.
"And activate GuildNet suppression."
One operator hesitated. "Sir, it's already… it's already leaked."
The Guildmaster blinked once. "Of course it has."
He didn't sound angry.
He sounded like he was waiting for something.
Waiting for this.
There was no containment.
Not anymore.
GuildNet lit up with the speed of an epidemic. What started as a corrupted raid feed had already been ripped, re-encoded, and clipped into looping shorts across every node-layer platform.
And right in the center of the glitching footage…
Kael, mid-swing, glowing with rollback flare — and then the burn.
The black glyph, blooming from his chest like a star collapsing inward.
In slow motion, the system message stitched over the frame:
[Thread Divergence Confirmed]
Debates exploded like landmines.
"What is that symbol?"
"Did he patch the Reapers?"
"Is this Dominion propaganda?"
"Or proof he's not human anymore?"
Thousands of user threads labeled it fake. Dominion-affiliated influencers called for Kael's immediate detainment. But it wasn't enough to drown the wave.
Because someone — no one knew who — uploaded the full sequence.
Unedited.
The full rollback burst. The spatial fracture.
Kael grabbing the collapsing code and bending it.
And worst of all?
The voice.
Not his.
But a Reaper's.
"You are not Kael of this thread."
It looped.
And looped.
And looped again.
Somewhere underground — Node 7R, subGuild operations hub
Aria sat alone, two terminals glowing in the dark.
She had muted all open channels. Orders were flooding in: "Distance yourself. Condemn the act. He broke rollback protocol. We have legal precedent."
But she didn't move.
Didn't type.
Just watched the replay again.
Kael wasn't faking it. He wasn't staging a rebellion. He wasn't some cult-messiah carving reality for followers.
He was fighting to stay human inside a system that had stopped recognizing him.
She reached for her wrist-comm to shut everything off…
And it pulsed.
No ID.
No sender.
Just a glyph.
Encoded in light.
Senna's style.
At first glance, it looked like static—scribbled child-like spirals.
But the longer she stared, the more it shifted. The pattern wasn't random.
It was a defense.
A stabilizer.
Not a message to her, but a code overlay.
Instructions. Protective architecture. Like a firewall for a human mind.
And at the very center?
A symbol Aria had only seen once—burning from Kael's chest.
Only this time… it was gentle.
Not Divergence.
But Balance.
Her breath caught.
Senna hadn't just seen what was coming.
She'd prepared for it.
The chalk had long since run out.
Senna didn't notice.
Her fingers moved anyway, tracing the shapes directly onto the wooden floorboards, dust from earlier glyphs sticking to her skin, gathering in her fingernails, streaking her cheeks.
She didn't hum this time.
Didn't speak.
The house was too quiet.
Her mother sat in the kitchen, hands trembling around a mug she hadn't touched. Outside, rollback static flickered across the sky like aurora.
And inside Senna's small room — at the center of the house — she drew.
Not because she wanted to.
Because she had to.
"He's hurting," she whispered to herself, voice cracking. "He doesn't know he's unraveling."
The glyph she built was different from anything she'd made before.
There were no spirals. No symmetry.
This was jagged.
This was correction.
Where Kael's glyphs were brute-forced with intent and fire, hers flowed from something deeper. She didn't understand all of it — just felt it.
She couldn't explain how she knew the pattern.
Only that it wanted to be drawn.
Every line hummed.
Every curve vibrated.
And in the center, where her hands hovered — she didn't finish it with charcoal.
She breathed on it.
And the glyph lit.
Not bright.
Not loud.
But stable.
Like the slow heartbeat of something infinite.
At that exact moment — far away, mid-gate, surrounded by Reapers — Kael stumbled.
The weight crushing his spine vanished.
The pressure that had made his bones crack receded.
And the burning glyph on his chest?
It didn't vanish.
It harmonized.
The Divergence Mark pulsed once.
And turned from black… to violet.
A Reaper stepped back.
Another dropped to a knee.
"Thread Anchor located," one whispered.
Kael blinked, breath sharp.
Senna…
He didn't say it.
He didn't need to.
She'd heard it already.