[Ding.]
Underworld — Layers Remaining: 3
Status: Final Ascent Initiated.
When we first fell, the map inside my logs listed seven levels. Seven phases of ruin, each with a name the game's code used like stage markers on a cinematic boss fight.
I'd lost count somewhere between screaming statues and the Hall of Echos.
But the mirrors had a way of reminding you.
Layer 1 — Ashen Threshold (cleared)
Layer 2 — Memory Core (cleared)
Layer 3 — Hall of Wrath (cleared)
Layer 4 — Domain of Reflection (cleared)
Layer 5 — The Archive (we'd just cleared)
Layer 6 — The Breach (awaiting)
Layer 7 — Root Server Gate (awaiting)
Kael's boots scuffed black glass. "Three left," he said. That shrug of his wasn't casual. It never was.
The Breach pulsed like a wound. The air there tasted like old promises and iron filings. Ghosts of the dead — not the ones he killed, but the ones who died because the world shifted — clung to the edges. They flooded the corridor with faces: mothers, knights, tiny children who'd never lived beyond a cutscene.
[Warning: Memory Overlap Risk — Host Stability: 61%]
Kael didn't flinch. He walked into the faces and they parted like paper.
We fought shadows that mirrored us but weren't echoes. They were rejections — fragments of the world that refused to integrate. Each strike we landed cleared another spectral mouth, another accusation. They hissed words that weren't true about him and about me. I preferred the lies; truth hurt worse.
At the Breach's heart we found a machine: an immense contraption of bone and circuit. Light spilled from it like a drowned sun. And standing by it, calm as always, was the Prototype.
She didn't attack. She never attacked without ceremony.
"You're persistent," she said. Voice like glass under pressure.
Kael spat ash. "Either move, or tell us where the gate is."
She smiled. "It opens if you can pay its toll." She gestured at the machine, which pulsed once and offered the choice: sacrifice required.
[SACRIFICE TYPES:]
— Bloodbinding (cost: irreversible humanity)
— Memory Purge (cost: lost recollection; gain: stability)
— Echo Release (cost: one Echo of mercy; gain: passage)
Kael's jaw twitched. "You built rules like a quizmaster."
"Someone had to hold the underworld steady," she replied.
I datablinked through protocols. Echo Release sounded the least catastrophic. But this machine read deeper than options. It read intent. You couldn't game a toll unless you bled intent into it.
Kael closed his eyes. "I'll pay," he said.
Not with blood. Not with glory. With a thing he'd carried and hidden: memory of mercy. He took a small thing from under his armor — a shard of bone with a ribbon knotted around it — and placed it in the machine.
The world screamed in a frequency I hadn't felt since the first time I'd died behind a keyboard. The shard burned, then went white as fog. The machine ate the mercy the way the world eats light.
[Echo Released. Gate Unlocking: 32%]
We fought off one last wave of self-accusation and stepped forward. The Prototype watched as if she'd been betting the whole time.
"You gave up a part of yourself," she observed. "The world will remember you as less human for it."
Kael did not answer. He never did when he'd already chosen.
The Root Server Gate opened like a wound opening its mouth — bright and terrible. The final script scrolled across my logs, brutal and simple:
[Temporal Desync Corrected — Return Window: OPEN]
[Surface Time Elapsed: 3 YEARS]
Three years. The Gate inhaled us, and the Underworld spat out dust and sunlight.