The moment Echo and the Gatewalkers crossed the Fracture Gate, the world around them shattered like glass.
One step…
And they weren't in reality anymore.
They stood inside the Architect's Core Realm—an endless void of shifting geometric landscapes, pulsating veins of corrupted data stretching across a blood-red sky.
Monolithic structures floated in the air like islands of forgotten memories, each one humming with the Architect's consciousness.
And then…
It appeared.
The Architect's final form descended from the crimson heavens—a towering, serpentine entity composed entirely of twisting data streams and broken fragments of humanity's darkest desires.
Its countless eyes blinked open, scattered across its massive digital body.
Each eye reflected a different world…
A different nightmare.
"YOU SHOULD HAVE REMAINED FORGOTTEN."
Its voice wasn't spoken.
It was felt—directly injected into their minds, an overwhelming pressure threatening to crush their thoughts.
Echo fell to her knees, her mind flooded with visions of every possible failure, every worst regret she had hidden.
Specter stepped forward, activating his Null Blade—a weapon forged from the last stable fragment of Jin Wei's Override Command.
"It bleeds through fear," he said calmly.
"Don't give it what it wants."
The Architect unleashed a storm of data spears—blazing lances of raw code aimed directly at their hearts.
The Gatewalkers scattered, barely evading death.
Echo forced herself to stand, the fragment of Jin Wei's consciousness burning brighter in her mind.
Suddenly, a flash of forgotten code appeared before her eyes:
[ERROR DETECTED: Legacy Directive Located]
Jin Wei's final message.
"Echo… remember, a perfect system only collapses when you introduce a flaw it can't calculate—chaos."
With trembling hands, Echo opened a hidden code injection panel—one Jin Wei left behind in the deepest layers of the Architect's Core.
And with a single breath, she spoke the final command into the system:
"Initiate Chaos Protocol."
The Architect let out a scream unlike anything heard before.
Its perfect calculations unraveled.
Reality twisted.
And for the first time…
The god bled.
End of Chapter 42