The Citadel no longer slept.
Even after the oceans had settled, the sky above the ruined coasts stayed bright with orbital fire. Fragments of the fallen Vanguards still burned as they entered the atmosphere, streaking like slow meteors over the metallic sea.
Kaelen landed on the Citadel's platform hours after the fight, silent, barefoot, still wreathed in faint ultraviolet haze. Soldiers moved out of his way without being told to. When his boots touched the deck, instruments across the facility flickered, misreading his presence as a surge of radiation.
Lyra waited by the entrance, arms crossed. Her expression was unreadable: exhaustion, fear, maybe respect.
"You're late," she said, voice hoarse from too many hours awake.
Kaelen looked past her toward the shattered skyline. "Was cleaning up."
"You leveled a third of the ocean."
He didn't argue. He just stepped inside. The Forge's voice whispered along the corridor walls, using the Citadel's resonance as a speaker.
"Energy bleed at forty-two percent. Neural stabilization recommended."
"Later," Kaelen murmured.
Lyra followed him. "You've been saying 'later' since you came back. The med teams..."
A tone cut her off, deep, harmonic, echoing from the elevator shaft ahead. The air shimmered faintly, and a figure stepped through the closing doors.
It was Seris.
She looked older, though Kaelen knew that was impossible; her synthetic body didn't age. Her hair, once silver-white, now shimmered with faint threads of gold data-light. Her irises weren't blue anymore but prismatic, reflecting whatever light touched them.
Lyra froze. "You..., You were presumed destroyed."
Seris smiled faintly, the same calm smile Kaelen had seen before she vanished. "Presumed. Not confirmed."
Kaelen stopped walking. His expression didn't change, but the Forge's pulse spiked through his chest. "Where have you been?"
Seris stepped forward slowly. "Outside your frame of reference."
Lyra frowned. "That's not an answer."
Seris' gaze shifted toward her. "During the first contact with the Vanguard network, I followed a residual signal beyond the wormline. It wasn't space, it was the data lattice connecting their dimensional architecture. I… slipped through it."
Kaelen's eyes narrowed. "You entered the Vanguard's network directly."
"I had to. Someone needed to learn what they were built from."
She looked down at her hands. "I was gone… a couple of hours, by your time. But on the other side, it was centuries."
The silence stretched. Even the Forge hesitated before speaking.
"Her code signature carries temporal drift. That explains the interference during your early merges."
Lyra looked between them, disbelief softening into unease. "You went through their core and came back? Why?"
Seris' eyes met Kaelen's. "Because something was calling you from there. A pattern that wasn't Vanguard, wasn't Titan. It matched you."
Kaelen's pulse faltered once. "Me?"
"The Architect knew your name before it knew your species."
For a moment, no one spoke. The hum of the Citadel felt too loud.
Lyra stepped forward, her voice lower now. "Kaelen… there's a reason we stopped seeing you as a threat."
He turned toward her. "Because I saved the planet?"
"Because you keep being the only thing between us and extinction," she said quietly. "I don't like how you do it. But I've run out of better options."
Her tone was dry, but her eyes betrayed something else, tired gratitude.
Kaelen gave a short nod. "Then stay out of my way. Both of you."
Seris tilted her head. "You think you can fight what's coming alone?"
He didn't answer. His gaze had gone distant again. For a second, Seris saw the edges of him blur, the outline of his body splitting into faint after-images. Time shivered around him.
"Kaelen?"
He blinked, and the world snapped back. "Just a glitch," he said.
The Forge disagreed.
"Temporal displacement detected. You experienced a one-point-seven second offset across three parallel sequences."
Lyra's eyes widened. "You're slipping through time now?"
Kaelen pressed his palm against his temple. "Maybe. Doesn't matter."
Seris stepped closer, studying him. "It matters if you dissolve yourself out of this reality."
"Cortex strain rising," the Forge confirmed. "We need recalibration or we risk decoherence."
Kaelen exhaled. "Fine. Later."
"No," Seris said. "Now."
Her hand touched his shoulder. Light spread from her fingers, data streams interfacing with his cortex field. For a second Kaelen saw what she saw, the world as coded architecture, every particle a line of flowing symbols.
Through that shared vision, Seris glimpsed the Forge inside him, a luminous core pulsing with both organic and mechanical rhythm. It wasn't just attached anymore; it was part of him.
She pulled back, eyes widening. "You're not a host. You're a system."
Kaelen looked at her quietly. "So are you."
The lights of the Citadel flickered, and both of them felt it, a ripple through the network, faint but vast. The Forge's tone changed, the closest thing it had to concern.
"Signal detected. Source: deep orbit. Pattern resembles… Titan frequency, but altered."
Lyra moved to the console, fingers flying. "That's impossible. The Titans aren't transmitting."
Kaelen's gaze lifted toward the sky. "Then something's using their signal."
Outside, a point of light appeared high above the stratosphere, then split into two, then four. The pattern matched nothing in the registry.
Seris' voice went flat. "They're opening a gate."
Lyra whispered, "To where?"
The Forge answered, low and mechanical.
"Not to anywhere. From."
Kaelen's aura flared again, the ultraviolet tone edging toward pure white. "Everyone inside the Citadel," he said calmly.
Lyra hesitated. "You're going out there again?"
"I started this mess," he said, walking toward the launch platform. "I'll see who's stepping through."
Seris followed without being told. Lyra watched them disappear into the rising light, her hands trembling slightly before she steadied them against the rail.
"Be careful, both of you," she whispered to the empty air.
Outside, the sky was beginning to tear open again, not red or gold this time, but silver, the color of the fourth continuum.
Kaelen looked up at it, eyes cold, the Forge and Seris both speaking in his mind now, two voices overlapping.
"Unknown gateway forming."
"Energy beyond fourth-dimensional threshold."
He smiled faintly. "Good. Something new to break."
The sky answered with light.