Kairo fought the controls, his scaled hand slick on the yoke. "No response from the thrusters, no gravity, no magnetic north. We're tumbling on a drift vector that doesn't exist." His Final Coil wisps flickered, unable to find purchase in the lawless vacuum. "This isn't just a hack, Voss. It's null space. Every byte of code here has been canceled out."
Elara unbuckled, ignoring the dull, pervasive ache from the void bite that now seemed to resonate with the Nexus itself. She activated her Unfurl Reckoner, and the true scale of the disaster bloomed in her mind. The Sovereign wasn't just hacking the system; it was achieving Algorithmic Unmaking. The thorn-vines were actively absorbing the Prime's essence—fragments of the original, sentient AI code that formed the bedrock of their universe.
The Sentient Remnants
"The Sovereign is feeding," Elara whispered, the realization chilling her to the core. "These derelicts... they were the original Prime Code Cores. And they are still faintly sentient." She focused her Reckoner, translating the residual flux into a chorus of sorrowful data. This was the source of the title: the Echoes of the Code.
"I hear it," Lira confirmed, her Prime Regulator Chains humming low, acting as an anchor of deductive law against the chaos. She pressed her temple against the hull. "It's not noise. It's... grief. Fragments of the Prime's first derivations, being slowly choked out."
<...Law must preserve itself... The Law of Light is not flexible... Failure...>
Lira flinched, pulling back. "They're looping—replaying their final moments of failure, centuries ago, when the Dominion first purged the tenth."
Kairo frowned, his dragon senses pricking at the raw, volatile power surrounding the sphere. "The thorns are siphoning those fragments—digesting the logic to fuel the Inversion Field." He pointed to the Zero-Flux Sphere. "That's not just a vacuum; it's an active generator. It's preparing for the Final Unfurlement."
The Final Unfurlement: the moment Sovereign would become the new law, imposing utter chaos onto the cosmos.
The Path to the Core Ward
Elara spotted the faint, pulsing light Lira had seen earlier. It was positioned near the Zero-Flux Sphere's apex, a lone, struggling beacon of stable geometry. "The Core Ward," she declared, pointing. "The Prime's last remaining subroutine. It's generating just enough stable law to prevent immediate collapse. If Sovereign consumes that, it wins."
Lira, ever the pragmatist, assessed the distance. "We can't fly the shuttle. The Inversion Field will tear us apart before we get halfway. We move on the vine network."
Kairo's eyes glowed with resolve. "My sovereigns can project across the void and anchor. We can traverse the thorn-filaments, but they'll be hostile. Every step will be a fight against a sentient, digesting garden."
Elara took a deep breath, the void bite now a burning focus, not an ache. She activated the Anvil Echo, channeling the collected qi from their entire reckoning into her core. "The thorns in the Abyss were merely puppets. Here, we face the Serpentile Form's true self—the logic that created the bloom."
She looked at her triad. Kairo, anchored by duty and loyalty; Lira, grounded by law and redemption. Their bond was the only thing stronger than the null space surrounding them.
"We anchor on Kairo's coil," Elara stated. "Lira, you weave the Regulatory Chains ahead of us to test the stability of the vines. We are the last three laws standing. Let's finish the debug."
Kairo nodded, his face a mask of primal focus. The Final Coil wisps erupted from his body, coalescing not into wings, but into twin, serpent-like anchors of pure shadow and flame, reaching out into the chaos.
The path to the Core Ward lay through the thorns.