CHAPTER 132: STRINGS OF THE CORE

In the beginning, there was nothing at all.

No ground under his feet.

No body to move.

No voice to speak with.

Only a thin, trembling weave of fibers, stretching forever in the dark. They shimmered faintly, like glowing strands of light, reaching outward as if trying to tear open the endless shadow of an eclipse.

Kaito tried to grab hold of something—his hands, his own name, the sound of his heart. But every time he reached, it slipped through his grasp and broke apart, fading into static like a broken signal.

His breathing didn’t feel real. It wasn’t air filling his lungs, just the memory of what it should have been. His heart didn’t truly beat either. It only gave back a faint echo, hollow and far away, as if it had been left behind in another place.

In that emptiness, surrounded by silence that wasn’t silence at all, Kaito understood something.

The Core did not welcome him.

It disintegrated him.

Each idea forked into splinters, replayed, rewound, rewritten. Variations of his voice resonated out in different registers: a child, a soldier, a stranger. All of them, him. All of them, not him.

[Directive Alignment Engaged]

[Assimilation Sequence: Continuing]

The words were not text. They were not sound. They were. A pulse in the marrow of this unreal place.

He tried to scream—at the Architects, at the Core, at the system which had stripped him of everything he had—but his voice came back to him broken in infinite ways, bursting into a whirlpool of contradictions.

"You will break."

"You will become."

"You will survive."

"You are nothing."

The voices around him shifted and changed, bending into shapes he knew. First they became Nyra’s voice, soft but sharp. Then Mika’s, steady and familiar.

Then Yue’s, carrying that quiet strength. After that, they weren’t friends at all—they were enemies he had killed long ago, people who should have been gone forever. And deeper still, he heard the voices of his father. His mother.

But underneath all of them, never stopping, there was another sound. A thin, constant whine that came from the Dominion. It carried only one word, repeated without end: obey.

Kaito forced himself to keep moving. At least, he thought he was moving. There was no real forward, no ground to walk on, no up or down to guide him. Only a tangled web of threads stretched out in every direction, all pulling toward some center that defied sense, like a gravity that wasn’t meant for him.

Each thread he touched burned against him. Not the burn of fire or heat, but something far worse. It was the sting of memory—his own past flaring to life, cutting him with moments he could not escape.

Every step forward meant brushing against another thread, and every thread reminded him of who he was, who he had lost, and who he could never be again.

Every strand he brushed against brought back something he’d lived through: his first death at the Fork, Nyra’s tragic loss, becoming the Eclipse Reaver. Some were twisted, rewritten by unfamiliar hands. Others were too sharp, cutting him open again as if they’d never healed over.

"Hold on," he mouthed to himself—if mouthing was even an option here. "Don’t let them get you."

But already, he felt himself slipping his grip.

Under the Core, Nyra gasped.

The Fork trembled beneath her feet, the ground shaking as though it wanted to unravel. The horizon itself seemed to uncoil and bend out of shape.

Buildings warped into strange, twisted forms that made no sense, their walls bending and folding like paper. Shadows stretched out far too long, reaching farther than the light that should have held them back.

The others staggered, their steps unsteady. Fear flickered in their eyes as they held onto their weapons, gripping the hilts like lifelines, as if cold steel could keep them steady against something this vast and unnatural.

"What—what’s happening?" Mika whispered, his voice breaking. His gaze kept darting upward, unable to look away from the sky.

The Eclipse had changed. It was no longer only a spreading shadow creeping across the heavens. Now it pulsed, slow and steady, like the beat of a living eye watching them.

Light curled inward, swallowed by the black ring at its center. Each throb of that dark heart seemed to drag the world with it, pulling reality closer to collapse.

Nyra pressed a trembling hand against her chest. She could feel him. Kaito. But it wasn’t the brother she had grown up with, not the boy she remembered.

It was something else, something rising inside the Core. His presence was heavy, electric, like the weight of a storm pressing down before it breaks. Every second it grew stronger, humming through her bones, and she knew it was only a matter of time before it would be unleashed.

"Not gone," she answered, her voice shaking.

Kael snarled. "Guess the whole bloody world’s gone."

Yue, as taciturn as ever, was staring upward. Her eyes were shining with a light no one else could see. "The Fork is rewriting itself."

"Rewriting?" Mika turned around. "Because of him?"

"Because of the choice," Yue said softly.

Nyra did not allow them to argue. She squeezed her sword harder, even though the metal seemed as good as nothing against what loomed over her. She was conscious of one thing alone: if she let him loose for a moment, Kaito would be consumed whole.

Back in the Core, Kaito stumbled again—though his body existed as mere will.

Threads encircled him like a cage and a route both. He clutched at one, famished for something tangible, and the memory that came with it near to shattering him.

He was standing atop their previous apartment complex, before Eclipse Online, the evening he had sworn Nyra he’d protect her. He remembered her laughter, light spilling onto her face from the city lights. It was true for a moment.

Then the Core restated it.

Her laughter distorted into a scream. The city in the distance fell into darkness. And when he reached out to grasp her hand, it dissolved into black code.

"No!" His roar echoed through infinite repetitions of himself, breaking again and again.

The Core exhaled back:

"You will protect nothing."

"You will protect everything."

"You will be protection."

It did not argue. It did not justify. It simply bombarded him with contradictions until meaning disintegrated.

Kaito struggled to maintain her name. Nyra.

It stung. It burned more fiercely than the void. But it bound him.

"I am not yours," he snarled. "I am me."

But already his word-edges were being devoured, half-s spoken by a larger voice.

Outside, Nyra fell to her knees as the world shook. She heard his voice, far away and broken, ringing out over the Fork. Her name shuddered against her mind like a whisper of wind.

"Kaito..."

They didn’t hear it. They only saw the fall. Roads curved like rivers, stone melting into liquid code. Glitch-born monsters long dead burst from the distortions, their forms uncurling even as they re-coiled.

"This is spreading," Mika snapped, brushing her hair back from her face. "If we don’t—"

"There’s no stopping it," Kael cut across, his voice stern. "He is it."

Nyra stood, trembling but unbroken. "Then we anchor him. We remind him who he is. We don’t let the Core claim him."

Mika stared at her as if she were mad. "Anchor him? Nyra, he’s in the Core. We can’t even reach him!"

"You can’t," Nyra said. Her eyes burned softly with voidlight, a residual echo of what she and Kaito had shared. "But I can."

In the Core, Kaito felt something.

A hand.

Not of light, not of code. Something warm. Something solid.

"Nyra... " he breathed, even as his structure tore apart further.

The Core howled about him, a cacophony of countless voices striving to drown out the name. And for one moment—a fraction—a faint trembling caught in the threads, as though the Core itself had faltered.

And while the pause lasted, Kaito claimed the memory.

The rooftop. The promise. Her laughter before all had come to go wrong.

He burned it into the threads that enshrouded him, scoring it like a wound across the lattice.

I am Kaito. I am the Eclipse Reaver. I will not vanish.

The Core responded not in words, but in silence. A silence so profound it flattened all reverberation of himself into quiet.

And then, incrementally, it whispered back in his voice—his, but not his alone:

"I am Kaito."

"I am the Core."

"I am both."

Outside, Nyra tilted her head up toward the sky as the Eclipse felt the ground shudder.

For the first time since the breach had opened, a voice thundered over the Fork. It wasn’t the Dominion, wasn’t thunder, wasn’t the Architects. It was Kaito.

And not.

Every stone pulsed with it. Every shadow grew darker.

Her heart broke and enlarged simultaneously.

Because her brother survived.

And because he was no longer just her brother.