Neptune's upper storms had thinned, but the air still shimmered as if light had forgotten where to go.
Kaelen stood alone on the observation ridge. The city below was a skeleton of steel and vapor, flickering between ruin and reflection. The Forge's presence was quieter now, reduced to a steady hum behind his heartbeat.
For hours, he'd been watching the horizon.
Not because there was something to see, but because space itself no longer looked right.
Shapes behind shapes. Edges that seemed to double. A tower that leaned one way when he focused, and another when he blinked.
His Cortex kept trying to map it, recalibrating thousands of times per second, but the data refused to resolve. Every algorithm ended in paradox.
Then, a pulse.
Soft. Low.
Like a breath through glass.
For a second, the world curved.
He staggered, gripping the rail.
The Forge stirred within him.
"Aetronic interference detected."
The voice wasn't spoken. It bloomed inside his thoughts, smooth and clinical.
Kaelen exhaled slowly. "Define Aetronic."
"Not definable within local dimension metrics."
"Observed as energy of directional multiplicity, motion across all orthogonal planes."
"Fourth-layer presence confirmed."
He froze. "You mean four-dimensional?"
"Higher than current spatial set. Partial descent detected. Harmonic bleed increasing."
Lightning struck somewhere in the distance, except it didn't travel down. It folded sideways, curving midair, its trail forming a spiral before vanishing into nothing.
Seris's voice crackled over comms. "Kaelen, atmospheric readings are..., no, that can't be right. The charge vectors are... overlapping."
He didn't answer. His attention was fixed on the space before him.
For a moment, something moved there.
Not a shape, something beyond shape. The light around it bent wrong, angles folding in directions that made no sense. He felt it rather than saw it, as if the idea of the thing had brushed his thoughts.
Then it was gone.
The Cortex flared, and Kaelen saw the numbers, hundreds of data points streaming across his vision. Mass, trajectory, density, none of it stable.
Each line flickered between real and impossible.
His body trembled, but not from fear. It was adaptation. He could feel his mind straining to understand what it was sensing, to build a logic for something that shouldn't exist in his universe.
The Forge whispered again.
"Exposure to Aetronic field accelerating cortical adaptation. Neural density increasing. Physical limit thresholds shifting."
Kaelen took a slow breath.
"So this is what comes next."
He flexed his hand. The blue light beneath his skin deepened, spreading like veins of living circuitry.
He didn't need the distortion tools anymore. The Cortex alone was enough.
He looked toward the horizon, where the Titans hung above the clouds, motionless, watching.
"I can feel them reacting to it," he said softly.
"Correction," the Forge replied. "They are shielding themselves from it."
That made him pause.
Titans..., those colossal, ancient intelligences, shielding themselves.
From what?
Far above, the sky split open again, silently this time.
A thin plane of light cut across the atmosphere, like a mirror cracking along an invisible axis.
Beyond it, Kaelen glimpsed something vast.
Not physical, no detail or surface, only depth upon depth, a movement that shouldn't have fit inside the visible world.
It turned slightly, and for one impossible instant, Kaelen felt its attention touch him.
His heart stopped. The Cortex froze. Even the Forge went silent.
Then it was gone.
When his breath returned, he was on his knees. The air shimmered around him, charged with faint blue motes that drifted like ash.
He knew what he'd seen wasn't fully here. Not yet.
The Fourth Layer had begun to bleed through.
And whatever existed there, was starting to notice him.
Behind him, Lyra approached quietly. "How long have you known?"
He turned slightly. "Known what?"
"That you're… not like us. That this" she gestured to the swirling motes "was going to happen."
Kaelen stared at the horizon for a moment, then shook his head. "I didn't. Not like this."
"Then why you?"
He didn't answer. He didn't have one.
Inside his mind, the Forge pulsed.
"Anomaly confirmed."
"Subject Kaelen's neural lattice pre-coded for Aetronic adaptation."
"Not random."
Kaelen's jaw clenched. Pre-coded. By who?
He pushed back mentally. "Explain."
"Insufficient data."
"But this pattern existed before my integration. Cortex architecture not standard issue."
Kaelen blinked hard. His Cortex, the very system he thought he'd built and tuned himself, wasn't entirely his. Or at least, it hadn't started that way.
He looked down at his hand. The blue veins had deepened, bright now, forming geometric threads under his skin, patterns he'd never seen before, shapes that shifted like living equations.
Far above, the Titans were still hovering, their formation tighter now. One of them turned slightly, and for an instant its vast shadow cut across the city like an eclipse.
Ryn's voice came faintly through comms. "They're… recalibrating. Your readings have them on alert."
"Alert how?" Seris asked.
"Like they've seen this before."
Kaelen's eyes flicked upward. The Forge pulsed again, this time not as words, but as an image:
A figure standing on a black plain beneath an unlit sky.
A thousand Titans bowing their heads slightly, their fields dimmed.
A symbol burning on the figure's palm, the same geometric threads now glowing under Kaelen's skin.
He gasped, gripping the railing as the image vanished.
Lyra caught his arm. "Kaelen, what is it?"
He looked at her but didn't speak. His heart was hammering too fast. He didn't know what that vision meant, but the Titans did. He could feel their fields changing, harmonic pulses growing heavier, resonating with the pattern in his veins.
The Forge whispered faintly, almost like awe:
"Fulcrum signature confirmed."
Kaelen shut his eyes. "Stop calling me that."
"Designation not mine. Designation assigned."
"By who?" he hissed under his breath.
The Forge was silent.
Far off at the edge of the system, the Fractal Armada shifted formation. Their silver arcs moved in a spiral, converging slowly, like iron filings around a magnet.
On the surface, Kaelen felt it as a pressure behind his ribs, a gravity pulling inward, not from distance but from direction.
Lyra saw his face pale. "What's wrong?"
He exhaled. "Something's aligning."
Seris glanced upward at the Titans. "With them?"
Kaelen's eyes glowed faintly blue. "With me."