Earth-Aurora was beautiful once—lush floating cities above oceans of clouds, powered by harmony-based quantum engines. Now it was a storm-ridden wasteland. The sky was a swirling kaleidoscope of black and crimson. Lightning curved upward. Gravity broke in random pockets.
The Firstbreaker had arrived.
It had not taken shape like the Architect. It needed no form. It was entropy—the absence of law, the unmaking of meaning. Where it walked, reality refused to comply.
The Kael echo here had been consumed early. His form now walked as a shell, eyes burning black with voidfire, his voice a chorus of silenced timelines.
Elara and her team arrived through a phase drop.
"It's not just corrupted," Lira said. "It's merged."
Kael's essence and the Firstbreaker were sharing the same body—locked in an eternal loop of war, tearing the echo apart and destabilizing the realm.
"We need to extract him," Elara said.
"We need to separate him," Astra corrected.
They formed a perimeter and activated a reality anchor—binding the area to a single quantum state. Korr deployed a Drift Spear, and Elara stepped forward, the Kael-core inside her reaching out.
"Kael, I'm here," she said softly.
The corrupted echo staggered. "Elara… run…"
But the Firstbreaker roared through him, its voice layered with decay: "You bring light into darkness. I am the end of light."
Lightning erupted, and the sky screamed.
Elara didn't move. She closed her eyes and reached deeper with the core. She felt Kael, buried deep beneath the entropy. She offered him an anchor. A name. A memory.
He took it.
The echo screamed as light burst from within. The Firstbreaker was cast out in a wave of blinding blue energy. The shell collapsed.
Kael's voice echoed in the silence: "One more saved."
But the Firstbreaker was not destroyed—only cast back. And now, it knew Kael had returned.
Worse—it now hungered for him.