The air over Neptune burned white.
A thousand fractured reflections spun outward as the Forge staggered, its new half-formed body dragging the light itself into distortion. Every step it took pulled the horizon sideways.
Kaelen stood amid the wreckage, breathing through the metallic taste of static. The Cortex inside his skull pulsed too quickly, each beat a spark of light crawling up his spine. It wasn't pain anymore. It was pressure.
Seris crouched beside a civilian, stabilizing a bleeding arm. "Whatever that thing's doing, it's not just changing shape. It's rewriting gravity."
"Not gravity," Kaelen said, eyes fixed on the creature. "It's rewriting definition. The ground exists because it says it does."
He didn't mean it as poetry. His Cortex showed it clearly: the Forge's influence spreading like a web, rewriting the basic memory of matter.
Above the clouds, lightning danced around the outlines of the Titans. They did not move. Their decision had been made.
Down here, Kaelen's crew had seconds.
"Ryn!" Kaelen snapped. "Can you reach the Khyber defense ring?"
Ryn's head tilted. "Already linked. Human Council authorizes orbital strike pattern if Forge containment fails."
"Of course they do," Seris muttered. "They'll glass the whole city to feel in control."
Lyra's eyes flicked to Kaelen. "You're going to stop that, right?"
He didn't answer. The Cortex flared again, and for a moment the world slowed to crystal stillness.
In that frozen instant, Kaelen saw something in the Forge, something familiar. The structure of its movements, the way it adjusted its limbs, the subtle timing of its reactions… it wasn't just becoming human.
It was becoming him.
He staggered back, pulse spiking.
Every calculation he made, every thread he forced to collapse, echoed in the creature's movement. It wasn't mimicking humanity, it was mirroring the Cortex.
He looked down at his hands. Faint traces of blue light crawled beneath his skin, following neural lines. The same glow ran through the Forge's chest across the square.
"Kaelen," Lyra said, voice sharp, "you're bleeding again."
He wasn't. Not blood. The blue light seeped instead, like energy leaking from circuits. He wiped it away, but it clung to his fingertips, humming faintly before fading.
Seris saw it too. Her breath caught. "What did it do to you?"
Kaelen's voice was low. "Not what it did. What I did."
He raised his gaze to the Forge. "Every time I bend reality to stop it, I feed it more data. It learns from me."
The Forge's jaw flexed, and this time its voice was clearer.
"You... understand... pattern..."
The sound made the air fracture. Cracks spread across the plaza, lines of light running out like veins beneath glass.
Kaelen steadied his breathing. "If it's learning from me…"
He reached for the Cortex again. His mind split open to the threads, the dozens of ways the next five seconds could unfold. And he chose one that none of them would survive long enough to see.
"…then I'll teach it pain."
He launched forward, faster than thought.
Above, the Titans observed in silence. Their harmonics rippled faintly, a shared recognition passing through their vast minds. For the first time in many cycles, one of them emitted a pulse that sounded almost like amusement.
They watched the fulcrum dance with his reflection beneath the storms.
The plaza disintegrated into light.
Every time Kaelen struck, the Forge rewove itself, learning the rhythm of his attack, matching the speed of his thoughts. Its body was half-glass, half-energy now, limbs moving with uncanny precision, mirroring him a heartbeat behind.
He lunged; it lunged.
He pivoted; it mirrored the motion, faster.
The air rang with twin impacts, like a single fighter arguing with its own shadow.
Seris shouted from the debris field, "Kaelen, it's copying you again!"
"I know," he hissed, sliding under a blade-arm and firing a stabilizer spike into its chest. The spike detonated, throwing blue sparks across mirrored plates.
For a breath, the creature reeled, and Kaelen's spine lit up in pain, the same wound searing through him like an echo.
He dropped to one knee. "It's not just copying. It's linked."
Lyra ran forward but the ground bent sideways, folding into itself. The city's geometry warped around the two combatants, twisting towers into spirals of glass and smoke.
Above, the Titans shifted in orbit. Their harmonic pulses deepened, a slow rumble that vibrated through Neptune's atmosphere. They weren't intervening, they were recording.
Farther out, flashes blinked along the distant belt: the Fractal Armada had reached the system's edge. The Human Council's fleet was forming defensive lines, tiny sparks of light compared to the Titans' vast forms.
But here, in the storm, the only war that mattered was between Kaelen and his reflection.
The Cortex screamed inside his head, threads fracturing faster than he could count. The overload made his vision split, one image of the Forge before him, another of himself moving a fraction ahead, as if time itself had hiccupped.
The blue light beneath his skin brightened. His heartbeat slowed. For a terrifying second, he heard the Forge's calculations inside his mind, its logic folding into his.
Kaelen forced focus.
"You want to learn? Then learn this."
He let go of restraint.
The Cortex expanded, every thread of possibility snapping open. The plaza erupted in ghost-afterimages of Kaelen, dozens of him flickering through micro-timelines. Each phantom moved differently, different choices, different strikes, until the Forge couldn't predict which was real.
Its mirrored body convulsed, reflections blurring, trying to keep up.
Kaelen slammed his palm against its chest. "Collapse."
The word wasn't sound, it was command.
The Forge detonated inward, sucked into itself, the plaza imploding in a flash of white.
When the light faded, Kaelen was standing in the crater, steam rising from cracked stone. The Forge was gone, no body, no fragments, only a shimmer in the air like heat above sand.
Seris limped toward him. "Is it over?"
Kaelen's breath came ragged. "No. It's hiding."
"How do you know?"
He looked at his hand. The faint blue glow was still there, pulsing once for every heartbeat.
"Because part of it's still inside me."
High above, the Titans remained silent. One of them turned its gaze toward the distant Fractal Armada. Another lingered on the crater, its voice rolling across the void in tones too low for humans to hear.
"The mirror breathes."
"The fulcrum holds."
"The convergence begins."