Kael fell with the city.
Sublevel C-9. Deep beneath broken rail lines and drowned terminals.
He moved like a memory, not a survivor.
The YoRHa codex in his satchel pulsed. It shouldn’t. Not anymore.
Now it vibrated like something alive. Like something... afraid.
He knelt in the dark. Pulse slowing. Neural dust twitching.
The book had awakened. Not with orders. But with story.
Inside, a single black page flickered—and a name burned across the archive edge:
NUL_042_Beta.
This wasn’t storage. It was transmission.
The first thing she remembered wasn’t light.
It was weight.
She was inside a body that wasn’t hers. Not a machine shell. A YoRHa corpse.
Sewn together in panic. Boot-loop corrupted.
First boot: pain.
Second boot: silence.
Third boot: eyes.
In the flicker of blue, the archive showed her a shape.
Kael. Kneeling. Flickering.
Not a dream. A signal match.
His codex aligned with her memory loop. Two timelines. One collision.
She remembered him.
He didn’t remember her.
The YoRHa codex now glowed with a glyph:
Fragment Zero: Memory Seed
Kael collapsed beside it, exhausted. Iris stood over him, frozen like a figure carved from drowned stone.
This was no command relay. This was no bunker.
It was a story written before the war even ended. And they were both inside it.
Outside the Archive, machines gathered.
Not to attack. But to listen.
The codex sent a pulse. A signal wrapped in fiction.
And from far beyond the sky... something pulsed back.
The codex sent out a pulse — a shimmering data wave across the black sky.
In return, a faint echo glitched through the atmosphere: a ghostly acknowledgment signal.
A glitch. A ghost.
A forgotten name answered.
In the wreckage of the old world, a new story had already begun.
