The camera drone hovered like a vulture.
Three GuildNet moderators sat at the roundtable in their chromatic overlays — the usual holo-blue projection shimmering behind them. Aria sat opposite, lean and calm, wearing no crest, no badge. Just a dark tunic and her name-tag suspended in the feed:
[Aria Von | Former Guild Captain | Sector 8 Commander]
"Let's be clear," said the moderator, tone clipped. "You're here because your command issued no strike orders during the rollback convergence at the Minotaur Gate. That's a violation of Guild Protocol—"
Aria lifted a hand. "It's not a violation if the target isn't hostile."
The silence cracked.
Another host, the younger one, leaned forward. "Aria, Kael Varin broke the system. He destabilized a Class-A gate and initiated a convergence loop. Do you deny that?"
"No," she replied flatly. "I watched him do it."
"Then how can you possibly—?"
"Because *he's the only reason that gate didn't devour Sector 8 in a rollback sinkhole."
She tapped her comm-bracer.
The feed stuttered. Then flickered.
Suddenly the broadcast displayed footage — raw, unedited drone capture from within the Minotaur Gate. A swirling vortex of fractured space. Reapers circling. Kael, cracked with glyphs and bleeding light, standing against the boss entity.
And then—
The moment.
The Reaper knelt.
Silence.
The studio didn't cut the feed. Couldn't. It was live. Hundreds of thousands were watching.
"He didn't destroy the Gate," Aria continued. "He stabilized it. The system bent to him. And that… that doesn't make him the problem."
The lead host recovered first. "You're suggesting—what? That Dominion and the Guilds are wrong? That we're fighting the wrong man?"
"I'm not suggesting anything," Aria said. Her voice was calm, steel-wrapped. "I'm stating it."
"He's tampering with time, Aria."
"And what has Dominion done?" she snapped, standing now. "How many rollback echoes have we buried under your 'containment' orders? How many children disappeared in sync storms before Kael pulled them back? If he's the virus… maybe it's the code that's wrong."
The feed cut — abruptly.
The network severed her uplink.
But it didn't matter.
The clip had already gone viral.
The moment the feed died, Aria's comms detonated with alerts.
[PRIORITY OVERRIDE: Dominion Council Request - Compliance Timer: 00:30]
[Guild Authority Suspension: INITIATED]
[Strike Order Pending – Confirm Loyalty Signature]
She didn't even flinch.
Behind her, two of her officers — Yessan and Reil — stood silent, watching the blinking indicators. Neither moved.
"Are you going to answer that?" Yessan asked.
"No," Aria replied.
"They'll mark this as a defection."
"I'm counting on it."
Reil looked between them, voice lower now. "They'll strip your command. You'll be outcast by tomorrow."
Aria turned to face them both, her stance calm, deliberate.
"I saw a man stand in front of a time fracture and hold it still with his body. I watched the system kneel. And I watched the Guild call him a threat for it."
She stepped forward, placing her Guild crest — the polished silver insignia of the Sector 8 command — on the table.
"I'm not watching anymore."
Reil stared down at it. "…So that's it?"
"No," Aria said softly, pulling out a datapatch shard — hex-coded, stabilized with a signature trace. She handed it to Yessan.
"Senna gave this to me."
His eyes widened. "The daughter?"
"She's seeing the fractures before they happen. She didn't say anything. Just drew this."
Yessan activated the shard.
A glyph flared in midair — not hostile, not offensive. A stabilizing code. Old. Ancient. The kind used in anchor-socketed seals during the first rollback era. But this one… carried no Debt.
"Kael isn't breaking the system," Aria said. "He's rebuilding it. With her."
They stood in silence.
Then Reil, slowly, removed his own crest.
Yessan followed.
One by one, across Sector 8, Aria's crew made their decision.
Not with grand declarations.
But with silence.
And glyphs drawn in chalk on steel walls.
The glyph wouldn't stop pulsing.
Not on the shard.
Not on the walls.
Not even in the projection Reil cast into the center of the operations table.
It was stable — but alive.
Senna hadn't just drawn something.
She had written code.
Anchor-grade, recursive, and debtless.
The kind of thing the old Patchrunners used… before they were silenced.
Aria stared at it, fingers steepled. "How many synced?"
Yessan's expression was tight. "Twenty-three. So far. Maybe more. It's… spreading. But it's not triggering system pings."
"Why not?"
Reil pointed at the outer bands of the glyph. "Because it's not broadcasting. It's reflecting. Everyone syncing to it is volunteering. It's opt-in loyalty, encoded as identity recognition. That's never been done before."
Aria exhaled. "She's building a network."
Yessan glanced at her. "Who? The kid?"
"No," she said. "They are."
Kael had broken the system.
Senna was shaping a new one in the void left behind.
And the glyph… it was a beacon.
More crew members trickled in.
More data links synced.
More personal sigils were traced onto doorways, terminals, armor.
No longer the Guild's crest.
But a single spiral bound in radiant loops.
The Glyph of Loyalty.
No oath spoken.
No passwords needed.
If you bore it — you stood with them.
⸻
From the rooftops above Sector 8, a Reaper crouched silently, watching the glyph replicate across comm-nets and battle-frames.
A soft whisper echoed across its static frame.
"Divergence Cohort forming."
"Anchor network detected."
"Authorization… pending."
The Reaper vanished.