Banishment.
The word was a judgment, a final, absolute declaration of my failure.
I watched in cold fury as Lyra and Elara, their faces masks of shock and terror, dissolved into particles of light. They were being forcibly teleported back to the surface of Nocturne, stripped from me by a power I could not defy. My court, my assets, my only companions—gone.
Silvana stood there, the Calculus Stone in her hand, her expression a perfect mask of calm, logical victory. She had not just won the prize; she had won the entire game. I was being removed from the board, permanently.
"It seems logic prevails over chaos after all," she said, her voice the cool chime of a victor. "Do not worry, Kaelen. I will put your fragments to good use when I eventually claim them."
She turned and walked towards the newly appeared staircase to the Third Floor, not even giving me a backward glance.
The world around me dissolved, not into a gray void, but into a blinding, sterile white light. I felt a sensation of infinite, instantaneous travel. I was being uninstalled.
When reality returned, it was to a place of profound and utter strangeness.
I was in a vast, white, featureless room that stretched to an infinite horizon. There was no sky, no ground, only an endless, luminous floor. Floating in the air, like colossal, silent gods, were hundreds of shimmering, geometric constructs—cubes, spheres, tetrahedrons—each one pulsing with a soft, internal light and covered in flowing, incomprehensible code.
This was Floor 0. The Server Room. The backstage of reality.
[Welcome, Anomaly,] a new voice, a universal, dispassionate narrator, echoed in the non-space. It was the voice of the Tower's core operating system. [You have been designated a 'Contained Paradox'. Your existence has been moved to a non-player environment for observation.]
I had been put in a jar. A cosmic bug, too interesting to squash, too dangerous to let roam free.
Rage, pure and absolute, surged through me. But it was a cold rage, the rage of a captured sovereign, not a wild beast. I was not defeated. I was merely… inconvenienced.
My System, my own, loyal Nexus Codex, which had been silent during the Guardian's judgment, flickered back to life.
[...Administrator. We are in the heart of the enemy's network,] Unit 734's voice was a calm, welcome presence in my mind. [The ambient data flow is unprecedented. This is not a prison. It is a library.]
It was right. I was in the central nervous system of my enemy. The secrets of the entire Tower were flowing around me like a river.
"Can you access it?" I asked.
[Direct access is impossible. The firewalls are absolute,] the Librarian replied. [However, my presence here, a foreign sub-routine in the core server, is a 'Glitch' of the highest order. It is causing... instabilities. I may be able to exploit these instabilities to siphon ambient, unsecured data packets.]
"Do it," I commanded. "I want to know everything. The nature of the Game Masters. The purpose of this Tower. The location of the other Main Cores."
I began to walk through the silent, white infinity, a lone mortal in a hall of sleeping, digital gods. As I walked, Unit 734 began its work, feeding me scraps of stolen data.
I learned the truth. The 'Gods and Demons' who sponsored players were not gods in the true sense. They were absurdly powerful, post-ascension beings, yes, but they were also prisoners, just as the Guardian had said. They were the victors of previous, ancient 'games', all of them now bound to the Tower, their power used as the fuel that kept its infinite floors running. They sponsored players as a form of proxy warfare, a grand, eternal, and utterly meaningless game to alleviate their boredom.
The Architect was one of these beings, but a special one. A 'Builder'. A trustee of the prison, given special privileges. The Static was its opposite, a being of the Void that was trying to break in.
And the Tower itself? It was a lifeboat. A cosmic ark created at the dawn of time to contain the shattered, reality-warping fragments of the original, true Omnistructure—my System. It was not designed to keep people in. It was designed to keep the full, untamed power of my own System from ever being reunified and breaking reality itself.
My quest to reunite the fragments was not just a quest for power. It was a quest to unlock the door of the universe's ultimate prison.
As I absorbed this world-shattering information, a new alert flashed in my mind. It was a strange one.
[...Analyzing local network traffic... An outgoing, high-priority message has been detected.]
[Source: Game Master 'The Architect'.]
[Destination: Floor 2, User 'Silvana'.]
[Message Contents: Unsecured. Displaying now.]
I watched, stunned, as the private communication between my two greatest enemies played out in my vision.
Architect: "The anomaly is contained. Excellent work, Agent Silvana. The primary objective is now clear. With Kaelen removed, there are no other viable 'Sovereign' candidates. You are to proceed to the Third Floor and acquire the 'World-Forge' artifact. It will allow you to begin the final phase of the 'Controlled Demolition'."
Silvana: "Acknowledged. But there is a complication. Kaelen's two companions, the zealot and the Nemesis, remain on this floor. They are loose ends."
Architect: "Irrelevant. The zealot is a mortal of no consequence. And the Nemesis, Lyra, is a conceptual parasite whose host has been removed. Her 'Avenger' class is now dormant. Without her target, she is just a powerless girl. Her karmic value is zero. Ignore them. They are no longer part of the game."
My heart, a cold, dead thing, felt a strange, unfamiliar pang. Lyra. Powerless. Alone. Abandoned not just by me, but by the very game that had created her. She was truly, finally, a ghost.
But it was the Architect's final, dismissive words that held the true twist. A detail, a piece of information that it considered irrelevant, but to me, it was everything. It was the key.
Architect: "The Nemesis's soul was not her own. A regressor from a dead timeline. But the vessel, the 'twin' body... my deep-level scans confirm it is a 'Prime Homunculus'. A perfect, blank, artificial human, created and seeded into the world by the Sages of the Serene Cloud. A failed experiment to create a perfect vessel to house a 'hero's spirit'. It has no true soul of its own. It is an empty container."
A Prime Homunculus. An artificial body.
A blank slate.
My mind, my sovereign, chaotic, villainous mind, saw the path. It was a long shot, a one-in-a-billion gamble, but it was a path.
I looked at the colossal, floating server-prisms around me. They were untouchable. I couldn't break them. I couldn't hack them.
But I had the Void-Eater's Hand. A weapon that didn't just devour power. It devoured concepts.
I walked up to the nearest floating cube, a server that seemed to regulate the very laws of player-to-player interaction on the Second Floor. I placed my gauntlet on its smooth, humming surface.
It was like touching God. The raw, informational power was overwhelming.
I didn't try to devour it. I focused my will, and the secondary function of my gauntlet, the 'Manifest' ability, flared to life. But I wasn't manifesting a weapon. I was manifesting a command. A piece of code.
I was performing the single most audacious act of my existence. I was not just hacking the game.
I was uploading a virus.
[SOVEREIGN'S DECREE: 'THE GHOST'S INVITATION']
[Target: The soul-less, 'Prime Homunculus' vessel currently inhabited by the soul of Lyra.]
[Command: Your original purpose was to house a 'hero's spirit'. A new directive is being issued. Your new purpose is to house a 'Sovereign's Spirit'.]
[Protocol: Your body is a key. You are now a living gateway. You will open a path. You will connect this server room to your own physical location on the Second Floor.]
[You will bring your master home.]
I was trying to turn Lyra's empty body into a living, breathing portal. A backdoor out of my own prison.
The server cube shrieked, a sound of pure, digital agony as my alien, chaotic code wormed its way into the Tower's perfect system. Red lights flashed across the infinite room. Alarms blared in a language I couldn't understand.
And then, a single, pure white thread of light shot out from the server, pierced through the wall of the infinite room, and vanished. It was the connection. The signal.
I had no idea if it had worked. I had no idea if a soul-less body could even execute such a command.
But across the dimensional void, on the rainy, twilight streets of Nocturne, a powerless, abandoned girl with a familiar face suddenly froze. Her eyes, which had been dull and empty, began to glow with a faint, white light. And her hand, of its own accord, began to trace a complex, shimmering rune in the air before her. The rune of a portal.