The forest surrounding the Hollow Maze wasn't natural. Trees towered like needles, bark like cracked screens, roots pulsing with binary static.
Kael stumbled into a glade, still recovering.
Then he saw her.
A girl crouched over a dying beast—her body draped in a coat of flickering pixels. Hair streamed behind her like violet data cables. One eye blinked like a corrupted window screen.
She didn't look up.
Kael approached slowly, Shardblade in hand. "Hey…"
The girl didn't move. Then:
"You're loud," she said flatly. "Do you want to die?"
Kael paused. "Depends who's asking."
"I'm Ayla."
She raised her hand.
Blue light danced from her fingers as she healed a wound on her arm—but the light glitched, fragmenting briefly before reforming.
"You're using… healing magic?" he asked.
Ayla smirked. "Not magic. Code rewrite. I can glitch biology."
She flicked her fingers at the beast's corpse—its code ruptured, and it exploded into fragments of data-light.
Kael's pulse quickened.
[ENTITY IDENTIFIED: AYLA – CLASS: UNKNOWN/HYBRID]
"Are you human?" he asked.
"Sometimes," she replied without blinking.
Echo's voice hissed in his mind: "She's part of the system. Like me. But corrupted."
Kael stepped closer.
"Wanna team up?" he asked.
Ayla tilted her head like he'd just asked her to marry a virus.
Then she shrugged. "You'll die without me anyway."