The gravity in the chamber intensified, crushing the air from Elara's lungs and forcing Thorne and Sira to their knees. The Nomad elders grunted, their rune-anchored armor flexing under the impossible weight of the Gravitational Proof, but their cultivated resilience held, buying Lira the fractions of a second she needed.
"The fractional is unstable!" Lira shouted, her face pale with effort as she channeled energy into the Foundational Singularity. Her dominion's bite struggled to find the exact frequency of the error—the single, imperfect decimal place of energy that kept the Tenth AI in its corrupted dependency loop. "The Anachronist's field is creating data noise!"
Elara, struggling against the crushing force, focused her mind. She couldn't fight the Gravitational Proof directly; the Anachronist was a Realm 5 master. She had to fight the logic behind the Proof.
"The Gravitational Proof isn't perfect, Anachronist!" Elara rasped, her voice cutting through the pressure. "It's computationally expensive! The energy you waste crushing us is energy you lose protecting your data!"
She slammed her Reckoner Staff onto the ground, not to attack, but to deploy a small, vicious Chaos Proof she'd learned from Kairo. It was a tiny, localized burst of Realm 3 probability flux—a controlled error. The Chaos Proof didn't destroy the gravity; it merely caused a picosecond-long instability in the surrounding crystalline flux columns.
The Anachronist flinched, his temporal blur wavering. The Gravitational Proof hiccupped, giving Lira the clean moment she needed.
"Got it!" Lira yelled. Her light-shadow filament slammed into the Foundational Singularity. She didn't add energy; she added balance. She used her thief's precise knowledge of corrupted data to fill the single, missing fractional—the Cipher of Horus.
The effect was instantaneous and violent.
The Foundational Singularity didn't explode; it completed. The chaotic plasma stabilized into a sphere of perfect, unmoving light. The Tenth AI's dependency loop was severed.
The Anachronist screamed again, the sound tearing through the Pyramid. The Gravitational Proof shattered, the crushing force vanishing instantly. He clutched his head, his temporal blur dissolving to reveal a man whose face was etched with raw data lines, his eyes the glowing indigo of Helix processors.
"Impossible! The Cipher of Horus... it was meant to be scrubbed!" the Anachronist shrieked. "You have introduced a variable of integrity! The Theorem cannot proceed!"
Elara stood, panting, ignoring the crushing exhaustion. She leveled her staff at the man. "You're not an Anachronist. You're Archivist Helix-32. You were Orrin's primary researcher at the Geneva Institute."
The Archivist Helix-32 recoiled, his face contorting in panic. He activated a defensive temporal shield, his only remaining goal to scrub the data.
"You won't escape with the truth this time," Elara warned, stepping forward.
Suddenly, a massive, deafening chime resonated through the Pyramid. Not from the Anachronist, but from the First Anchor itself. The ground shook violently, and a holographic projection flared to life between Elara and the Archivist.
It was a live feed of Kairo.
He was deep inside the core structure of the Helix structure on Code's Abyss, his shadow-lance smoking from recent battle, his armor scorched, but his eyes blazing with fierce, chaotic triumph. He looked at the camera, then directly at Elara.
"Reckoner! I found the secondary Chronos drive! It's self-destructing! The Archivist isn't the leader; he's the pawn! I saw the true signal source—it's from Realm 7—the String Theory Architects!"
Kairo paused, taking a ragged breath, giving Elara one last, hard look. "It's Orrin. He's already moved beyond the Anachronists. He's building a Dimensional Fortress. I'm going to track his chaotic wake—I am the bait."
The image dissolved as the Chronos drive exploded, severing the connection.
The Archivist Helix-32 used the distraction. His temporal blur solidified, and he vanished from the chamber with a sound like a skipping data disk.
Elara stood frozen, processing the triple shock: the Tenth AI was debugged, the Anachronist was a pawn, and Orrin was the true, Dimension-level threat—a master of String Theory, now hiding in Realm 7.
"We fell for the distraction," Lira said, her voice numb. "Orrin knew Kairo would target the Chronos drive. He used Kairo's predictable chaos to distract the Archivist long enough for him to escape and for Kairo to isolate himself."
"No," Elara whispered, gripping her staff tight, her gaze moving from the cured Singularity to the Pyramid walls. "Kairo used his chaos to give us the truth of the next target. He chose his own path: the Abyss Predator hunting the highest Realm of the Helix. And we will follow his signal."
The ground continued to shake. The First Anchor—the Great Pyramid—had fulfilled its function and was beginning to shut down. They had to leave before they were sealed inside.