The battlefield was silent.
Not the peaceful kind of silence, but the heavy, suffocating quiet that comes after too much screaming. The twisted monsters had dissolved into shards of static, their corrupted forms scattering like broken glass into the void.
Arin stood in the center of it all, his blade lowered, chest heaving with ragged breaths. The ground beneath his boots was scorched black where his System Rewrite had burned away reality itself.
And then he saw it.
[Corruption: 7.9%]
The number flickered in the corner of his vision, glowing a sickly red. Almost double from before. Almost at the threshold.
Arin clenched his fist. He had won. He had survived the surge. But the system wasn't wrong—every time he tapped into that power, a little more of himself slipped into the cracks.
He felt it now. A buzzing at the edges of his mind. Whispers that weren't his own, murmuring in a language of static and code. He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his palms to his temples, but the whispers only grew louder.
"Arin."
Lyra's voice cut through the haze.
He opened his eyes to find her standing a few steps away, her silver hair catching the fractured light. Her glow, usually steady, flickered faintly—as if even she had been shaken by the corruption storm.
"You pushed it too far," she said softly.
"I had no choice," Arin snapped, though the edge in his voice was aimed at himself, not her. He dragged a hand down his face. "If I hadn't used Rewrite, we'd be dead. You saw what they threw at us."
Lyra didn't argue. She didn't need to. The silence in her eyes said enough.
Arin turned away, staring at the jagged scars left in the ground. "Every time I use it, the corruption climbs. It's not just numbers anymore—I can feel it crawling inside me. My thoughts don't… line up. My memories flicker. Half the time I don't even know if what I'm seeing is real."
His voice cracked. "What if one day I don't come back?"
Lyra stepped closer. She didn't touch him, but her presence alone was grounding, like an anchor keeping him from drifting into the void.
"Listen to me," she said firmly. "The system was built to control, to overwrite, to delete what it doesn't understand. But you? You've defied it since the moment you arrived. That's why it's afraid of you."
Arin laughed bitterly. "Afraid? Or just waiting for me to break myself so it doesn't have to?"
Lyra's expression softened. "Even if that's true… you're not alone in this fight."
For a long moment, they just stood there—the broken world flickering around them, the silence heavy but less suffocating.
Then, Arin's HUD pulsed again.
[System Message: Warning – Data Integrity Compromised.]
[Glitched Core Response Imminent.]
His stomach dropped. "It's not done. It's sending something else."
Lyra's eyes darkened. "It knows you're a threat now. Every move you make draws it closer."
Arin tightened his grip on his blade, though the weight felt heavier than ever. "Then I'll have to keep moving faster than it can erase me."
But even as he said it, doubt gnawed at him. How many more times could he push his exploit before there was nothing left to save?
Lyra seemed to read the thought on his face. She stepped beside him, her silver glow brushing faintly against his arm. "When the Core comes again, we'll face it together. Not as system pieces. Not as errors. But as ourselves."
Arin exhaled slowly. The whispers in his head didn't vanish, but they quieted—just enough for him to breathe again.
"Together, huh?" he said, forcing a crooked smile. "Guess I can live with that."
The world groaned, reality bending as another instability surged in the distance. The ground cracked like glass, light bleeding through.
The next trial was already coming.
And Arin wasn't sure if he was more afraid of losing to the Core… or losing himself.