The sky tore open like paper set aflame.
A beam of black light cascaded from above, not illuminating the city ruins below but consuming them—code unraveling, structures warping, physics bending. It wasn't just a weapon.
It was Nephros rewriting reality.
Clyde gritted his teeth as debris warped mid-air, reshaping into impossible structures. Echo knelt beside him, scanning the distortion. "He's not rewriting the world… he's corrupting the laws that govern it."
Arden's voice crackled through the comms. "I've isolated the signal. He's hijacking the remnants of the Architect's core and reconfiguring the entire world's foundation—logic, memory, even identity."
"That means he can unwrite us," Echo whispered, horror on her face.
Clyde stood, dusted himself off, and clenched his fists. "Then we move before we're nothing more than forgotten lines of code."
They made their way toward the Nexus—what remained of the old Command Center where the Architect once operated. On the way, reality continued breaking down. Buildings floated sideways, time stuttered, gravity pulsed like a heartbeat.
In one shattered plaza, they came face to face with it.
A creature, humanoid in form but flickering like corrupted data. Its face was a collage of Clyde's memories—both real and altered. It spoke in a voice layered with every person Clyde had lost.
"You… gave us a reason to return," it hissed. "We are not broken. We are free."
Clyde drew his blade—a weapon encoded with resistance to corruption. "You're just code drunk on chaos."
"We are truth unfiltered. And you, Clyde, are still a prisoner of legacy."
They fought.
Every clash distorted the world around them—Echo anchoring reality, Arden rerouting Nephros' influence through old Architect firewall scripts, and Clyde? Clyde fought like a man not trying to win…
…but trying to stop a god.
In the end, the creature dissipated into static.
But as it vanished, it whispered: "This was only one vessel. Nephros has many."
And in the distance, the sky blinked again—seven more satellites activating, forming a ring around the planet.
Echo looked up, terrified. "He's building a rewrite matrix."
Clyde turned to Arden. "How long until it's complete?"
"Hours. Maybe less."
Clyde stared at the warping skyline. "Then we rewrite the end before he writes over our beginning."