The city of Nocturne held its breath.
On a rain-slicked rooftop, two women stood abandoned, the discarded remnants of a god's failed crusade. Elara Von Hess, the fanatical priestess, was trying to rally her knights, her voice a mixture of confusion and desperate faith. "The lord is testing us! We must remain strong!"
Lyra, the Nemesis without a cause, simply stared at her own hands, a hollow vessel in a world that no longer had a place for her. The Architect had declared her irrelevant. She was a ghost, waiting to fade.
And then, the light began to glow in her eyes.
"My lady?" Elara asked, her bravado faltering as she saw the strange, white light emanating from Lyra's pupils. "What is happening?"
Lyra didn't answer. Her movements were stiff, unnatural, like a puppet whose strings were being pulled from a million miles away. Her hand rose, and her fingers, guided by a will that was not her own, began to trace a complex, shimmering rune in the air. The air itself seemed to hum, to thin, to buckle under the strain of a command that was violating the very laws of this reality.
She was drawing a door. A gateway.
Back in the sterile, white infinity of Floor 0, alarms screamed. The server-prisms, the silent, sleeping gods of the Tower, pulsed with a frantic, red light.
[!!! FOREIGN ANOMALY DETECTED IN FLOOR 2 NETWORK !!!] the Tower's OS boomed in the non-space. [UNAUTHORIZED PORTAL GENERATION IN PROGRESS! SOURCE: CONTAINED PARADOX K-734!]
[INITIATING COUNTERMEASURES! DEPLOYING 'ANTI-VIRUS' ENTITIES!]
The luminous white walls of my prison dissolved, revealing the true space between the servers. It was not empty. From the deepest, darkest recesses of the server room's code, things began to emerge. They were tall, skeletal figures made of black, glitching data, their faces blank save for a single, burning red optic. They were the System's antibodies, its digital executioners, and they were all turning their attention to me.
I had kicked the hornet's nest. Now, I had to survive the swarm.
"Unit 734!" I roared, the Void-Eater's Hand already manifesting a blade of pure, devouring shadow. "Status of the portal!"
[The 'Ghost's Invitation' protocol is at 37% completion,] the Librarian's voice was calm, a perfect anchor in the storm. [The Prime Homunculus vessel is an ideal conduit, but the process is unstable. Estimated time to portal stabilization: five minutes.]
[Estimated time until hostiles reach our position: thirty seconds.]
Not good odds.
The Anti-Virus entities surged forward, their movements silent, jerky, and impossibly fast. They were not physical beings; they were living pieces of code, and their attacks were not blades or fireballs, but streams of data-deleting energy.
I met their charge. It was a battle unlike any I had ever fought. My cultivator's instincts were useless here. This was a war of pure concept. I didn't block; I devoured. My gauntlet was a black hole, sucking in their deletion-streams, the raw data a chaotic but potent fuel.
But there were too many of them. For every one I erased, two more would phase into existence from the code-walls. I was fighting a literal army of ghosts in their own machine.
On the rooftop in Nocturne, the portal was taking shape. It was a shimmering, unstable vortex of white light, and at its center, an image of my own, sterile, white prison was beginning to appear.
The commotion had drawn attention. From the smoky alleys, members of the Shadow Syndicate emerged, their eyes wide with a mixture of greed and fear. From the grand cathedrals, the holy knights of the Alabaster Legion assembled, seeing a phenomenon that was either a divine miracle or a demonic incursion.
And on the highest spire of the city, Silvana, the Aethernova Codex, felt the disturbance. The chaotic ripples of my hack were a jarring note in her perfect, logical symphony. She looked down from her tower, her silver eyes narrowing as she saw the unauthorized portal forming around my two, abandoned companions. She had been played.
The fight in the server room was taking its toll. My spiritual energy was vast, but it was not infinite. The Anti-Virus swarm was relentless, their numbers endless. They were wearing me down.
A stream of deletion-code slipped past my guard and struck my arm. There was no pain, but the sleeve of my robe, and the skin beneath it, simply... vanished. Not wounded. Erased.
"Portal status!" I bellowed, parrying another attack.
[78% complete,] Unit 734 reported. [But I must advise you, Administrator. The Architect has taken notice. It is re-routing a significant portion of the Tower's core processing power to this location. The next wave of hostiles will be orders of magnitude more powerful.]
As if on cue, the swarm of skeletal glitches dissolved. And from the heart of the server room, a single, new entity emerged. It was a perfect, golden angel, with a dozen wings of pure, geometric light and a sword that seemed to burn with the fire of a newborn star. It was a 'Firewall Archon', a piece of the System's core defense. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.
And it was looking right at me.
[Portal at 99%,] the Librarian stated, its voice now holding a note of what I could only describe as digital urgency. [The gateway is open. But it is unstable. It will not hold for long.]
I didn't wait. I turned my back on the approaching Archon and threw myself at the spot where Unit 734 had indicated the connection was strongest.
I dove through a wall of pure, white code.
Lyra's body convulsed, the rune she had drawn flaring with a final, blinding intensity. The portal stabilized.
And from its shimmering, white depths, a figure stumbled out, ragged, wounded, but blazing with a sovereign will that made the very air of Nocturne tremble.
I was back.
The portal behind me snapped shut, severing the connection, a split second before the Archon's sword of fire could follow me through.
I stood on the rooftop, breathing the cool, rain-filled air of the mortal world. I had done it. I had escaped a prison designed by gods.
But the cost was immense. My spiritual energy was almost completely depleted. My body was wounded, parts of it still flickering with the after-effects of the deletion-code. And my System...
[!!! WARNING! CRITICAL EXPOSURE TO 'ANTI-VIRUS' PROTOCOLS !!!]
[The Nexus Codex has been infected.]
[A 'DECAY' VIRUS IS NOW CORRUPTING CORE FUNCTIONS.]
[...Quest Board... offline.]
[...Map... offline.]
[...Inventory... unstable.]
[...Unit 734... entering forced hibernation to combat the virus.]
The System, my greatest weapon, was dying. The link to my own Administrator was severed as the Librarian went dark. I was truly, finally, on my own.
I looked at Lyra. Her body, the Prime Homunculus, slumped to the ground, unconscious, the task of being a living gateway having completely drained it. She was an empty vessel once more.
The crowds in the streets below—the guilds, the champions from other worlds—were all staring up at me, their faces a mixture of shock and awe.
And from the highest spire, Silvana watched, her silver eyes narrowed with a cold, calculating fury. I had escaped. I was back on her board.
I had won my freedom. But I was wounded, my System was dying, and every power in this city was now focused on the ragged, bleeding god who had just fallen back to earth.
My situation was not just precarious. It was utterly, hopelessly impossible.
And then, the final, insane twist of my grand escape plan landed. A new notification, the last one my dying System managed to push through, flickered in my vision. It was not a warning. It was a report. An analysis of the 'Deletion-Code' that was now running rampant through my system.
[...Analyzing... foreign... data-stream...]
[...The 'Anti-Virus' code is not a weapon of simple destruction.]
[...Its primary function is to 'reset' a corrupted file to its 'original state'.]
[...The virus is now attempting to 'reset' the 'Soul of Lyra (Fragmented)' which is still housed in your inventory.]
[It is attempting to restore her soul to its original, un-fragmented state by drawing upon the 'blank', unclaimed soul-data of her 'Prime Homunculus' twin body.]
[...WARNING... This will not just restore her soul. It will 'reboot' her entire existence. The regressor's memories, the trauma, the hatred... all of it is being tagged as 'corrupted data' and is being purged.]
[Conclusion: The girl who wakes up in that body will not be the Lyra you knew. She will be a new, complete, and utterly blank slate. She will be the original Lyra, as she was meant to be before the Ravencrests ever found her. She will have no memory of Aethelgard, no memory of her regression... and no memory of you.]