The storm broke as the Echo Remnant lunged.
Lightning tore the sky sideways, revealing the mirrored figure—Ike's face, his voice, his stance, but wrong. Fluid. Fragmented. Each movement glitched a half-second behind itself, like corrupted footage.
The real Ike barely blocked the first strike.
Steel rang. Sparks flew in impossible colors.
Calyx was already moving, a blur of shadow and misdirection, flickering between warped gravestones that jutted from the fractured terrain of the Grey Divide. Syla didn't move—not yet. She was watching, calculating.
"Don't fight it like a boss," she warned. "It doesn't want to win. It wants to overwrite."
[WARNING: Cognitive Sync Breach Detected] [Echo Protocol Engaged - Memory Integrity Threatened]
The Remnant smiled with bloodless teeth.
"You made me when you stopped choosing."
The Threshold wasn't just a gate—it was a veil.
As Ike stepped through, reality folded.
The mountains inverted. Time lost its forward direction. Sound became color. And for a moment—maybe longer—he wasn't Ike. He was every version of himself he'd ever imagined being, splintered across endless maybes.
And then it passed.
He stood on a bridge of starlight, arcing over a void that whispered.
Syla stepped through next. She blinked hard, gripping her knives like anchors.
"This isn't a zone. This is..."
"A dream inside the dream," Calyx said, emerging last. "Where the devs gave up and something else took over."
Above them, constellations drifted like jellyfish. Below, memories swam through the dark—visible only when you weren't looking directly at them.
[Zone Entered: The Waking Dream] [Dreamstate Sync: 79%]
The bridge pulsed underfoot. It responded to intention, not movement. When Ike thought of forward, it bent ahead. When he doubted, it frayed.
"Careful," Syla muttered. "If you second-guess your path here, the floor starts to forget you exist."
Ike focused. One step. Then another.
A tower rose in the distance—half-code, half-cathedral. Its shape kept changing when no one looked.
"That's it," Calyx said. "The Dream Archive."
"What's in there?" Ike asked.
"Everything you forgot."
The first guardian appeared without warning: a figure made of static, wearing a dozen masks.
It didn't speak. It only echoed.
"Coward." "Parasite." "Ghost."
Syla stepped forward to fight. Calyx held her back.
"No blades. Not here. This one's his."
Ike stared at the figure.
"I've heard you all my life."
The masks trembled.
"And I'm still here."
He reached out—no weapon, just presence.
The masks cracked.
One by one, they fell into the void.
[Guardian Dissipated: Inner Voice Pacified] [Path Cleared: 300xp]
Inside the Archive, silence lived.
Tomes floated in zero-gravity shelves. Data wrapped in dream-matter. Fractals of memory locked in translucent orbs.
Ike was drawn to one: an orb that pulsed red.
When he touched it, he saw her again—the girl from class. Not rewritten. Just as she had been. Kind. Patient. Disappointed.
"You could've said anything," she whispered. "But you didn't."
"I was scared," Ike said.
She smiled. "So was I."
She vanished.
In her place: a new fragment.
[Core Skill Acquired: Lucid Recall – Allows controlled entry into Memory Echoes without Drift Penalty.]
They stayed longer than intended. Each found pieces of themselves. Syla recovered the memory of her brother's laugh. Calyx retrieved a note he wrote to someone he never got to meet.
The Archive didn't judge. It simply showed.
And when they emerged, none of them were quite the same.
Outside, the dreamscape had shifted again. The bridge behind them was gone. Ahead, the starlit path fractured into forks—each glowing with a different hue.
[New Zone: The Looming Veins]
Calyx knelt, touching the ground.
"These paths lead into the Lucid Core. But the deeper you go, the less you stay...you."
"Then we hold each other accountable," Syla said. "If one of us drifts too far, we pull them back."
Ike nodded. He had the Lucid Recall now—he could anchor.
But something stirred beyond the nearest fork: a pulse. Not hostile. Not friendly. Just watching.
[Attention Acquired: Subsystem Echo]
"We're not alone," Ike whispered.
Calyx smirked. "We never were."
They advanced. The path wound downward, into a hollow where the code frayed like torn cloth. Dreams leaked through the cracks—some beautiful, others nightmarish.
One figure passed them—a man in a business suit, muttering stock prices in his sleep. Another floated upside down, tethered by a golden cord.
[Dreamstrays: Harmless unless engaged]
They kept moving.
The world narrowed to a tunnel of glass and ink.
At the end: a door. No keyhole. No handle. Just a phrase carved into the surface.
"Speak the name you fear to remember."
Ike stared at it.
His throat dried.
"Eli," he said.
The door opened.
Beyond was the Lucid Core.
Not a chamber, but a sea of suspended light. Threads of memory, emotion, code. All converging.
And at its center: a sleeping version of himself.
Not Ike the player. Not Ike the avatar.
But him.
The version who never left bed. Who never logged in. Who never tried.
He knelt.
And placed his hand over the figure's heart.
"You don't have to wake up," Ike whispered. "But I do."
The Core pulsed.
The sleeping self vanished.
[Subsystem Integration: Complete] [Lucid Sync: 91%]
Syla and Calyx stood back, silent.
"Is that it?" Syla asked.
"No," Calyx said. "That was just the door."
Behind them, the sky fractured like glass.
Something huge was coming.
And it had Ike's name.
Ike's blade met his own—a twin steel flicker.
But the Remnant didn't just parry. It remembered.
Every dodge was something Ike had once done. Every feint, every reversal, every moment he'd taken in solitude and made into muscle memory—it all came back to haunt him.
"I was there when you gave up."
"I never—"
"Didn't you?"
A surge of static slammed him back. His HUD flickered.
[Sync Ratio: 71%] [Fragmentation Accelerating]
The dream was turning on him.
Calyx appeared at his side.
"You can't outfight your own data. But you can corrupt it."
He tossed something—an object that shimmered like glass coded in fire.
[Item Received: Reversal Glyph - One-Time Memory Edit]
"Think of a choice you didn't make. Feed it to him."
The battlefield slowed.
Ike closed his eyes.
And remembered her.
The girl from the art class. The one he'd sat next to, week after week. The one who always waited for him to say something.
He never did.
He rewrote it.
In the dream, he reached across the table. Said her name. Smiled.
Gave himself a different memory.
The glyph flared.
The Remnant stumbled, glitching hard. Its form split—one face screaming, one silent.
"That's not... real..."
"Neither are you," Ike said.
And he ran it through.
The storm stilled.
The Echo Remnant fractured into particles of silver code, which spun upward into the clouds and vanished.
[Anomaly Resolved: Self-Acceptance Event Triggered] [Sync Ratio Stabilized: 74%] [Shard of Self Upgraded → Core of Becoming]
Syla approached, studying him.
"You rewrote a memory?"
"No," Ike said. "I rewrote who I was in it."
She blinked, impressed. Maybe even relieved.
Calyx gave him a slow clap.
"Didn't think you had the spine."
"I didn't," Ike replied. "Now I do."
The clouds above the Divide parted.
A massive gate emerged—stone and light, engraved with symbols that looked like scars.
[WORLD PATH UNLOCKED: Threshold of the Waking Dream]
The three of them stood before it.
And Ike, with the Core of Becoming pulsing in his chest, stepped forward first.