The mood inside the abandoned threadforge was quiet—too quiet for Rafael's liking.
Light from floating sigil-lamps buzzed weakly, flickering above cold stone and rusted conduits. The air felt like it was waiting to collapse. For once, no alarms blared, no collapsing timelines or strange corrupted echoes intruded. That, more than anything, set Rafael on edge.
He stood near the center of the chamber, hands twitching at his sides. His coat, stitched together from memory-thread and sealed soulcloth, fluttered slightly even without a breeze.
"Anyone else feel like we're inside the eye of a reality-hurricane?" Rafael muttered.
Clara snorted from across the room, her massive tower shield leaning against the wall. "I was about to say. This place is too intact. Last time we walked into a threadforge like this, the walls tried to digest us."
Lira looked up from her glowing scriptwork, ink-stained fingers hovering over her ritual tome. "It's holding for now. There's enough residual pattern here to stabilize the dimensional seams. But it's cracking. Slowly."
Calyx was crouched beside an inactive terminal, chewing a glowroot stem. She tapped the side of it, eyebrows furrowed. "I can feel it too. Thread density's down. Like this whole forge is gasping for breath."
Beatrice, sharpening one of her six prism-daggers, let out a small, humorless laugh. "Let's hope it doesn't exhale us into a non-Euclidean death spiral."
Stanley, standing awkwardly between two broken machines, offered, "I miss the old days. You know, when buildings didn't bleed when you opened doors."
Rafael cracked a smile despite himself. "That was never your life, Stanley."
The team had reassembled after the last major breach. Weeks ago, they'd been scattered—some lost in fragmented echoes of prior loops, others caught in recursive zones, trapped in near-identical days on endless repeat.
But against odds and logic, they'd found one another again. Brick—who suddenly disappeared to thin air, they found him some moment ago.
It was Juno—their newest member—who finally broke the silence. She emerged from the far corridor, forehead glistening with sweat. "Confirmed. There's a rupture chamber two levels down. Connected directly to a Shattercore rootline."
Everyone tensed.
Rafael frowned. "It's early. I thought we had two more anchor zones before any of the core veins emerged."
"Time's unraveling fast," said Lira, eyes haunted. "There are no sequences anymore. Everything is happening at once, just very politely queued."
Brick—Theo Harriman—stretched, cracking his massive robotic knuckles. "Then we punch the queue. I'm ready to smash something that doesn't fold into a math problem halfway through."
They all prepared. Weapons were checked. Runes etched into gear. Rituals inked into their skin. Clara led the way with her shield high, light reflecting from her armor like an anchor in the chaos. Rafael followed, heart pounding but steady.
---
The path to the rupture chamber was like walking through broken memories.
Halls warped into spirals, floors flickered between stone and bone. One corridor looped them three times before Rafael realized the trick and carved a personal anchor rune into his palm.
Juno and Calyx worked together to stabilize short-term threads. Beatrice created dimensional breadcrumbs with her prism knives.
Finally, they reached the chamber.
It was vast.
A spherical cathedral of exposed threadroots, glowing pulses of corrupted color seething across the webbing like infected veins. In the center: a wound in space. Not a portal, not a vortex. A wound.
From it oozed threads of pure instability, flickering and lashing out.
Rafael felt it in his bones. This was a direct branch of the Shattercore's influence.
He didn't wait.
"Positions!" he barked.
Clara and Brick moved forward, forming the front line.
Lira started chanting, her voice threading rituals into the very stone. Calyx began hacking the spatial protocol. Juno moved like a ghost, scimitar glowing faintly with null-energy. Stanley summoned shields of hex-ice around their perimeter.
Then the wound screamed.
Reality bent. Monsters poured from the tear—threadspawn, half-formed Shardborne, echoes of failed selves. One looked just like Rafael, except his eyes were hollow and his mouth was full of black static.
Clara bashed the first one back.
Brick roared and brought his hammer down, pulping two nightmares in a single blow.
Beatrice's daggers danced, each strike sealing microfractures. Juno flowed between opponents, her movements sharp and beautiful.
Rafael stood at the center, reaching into the code of the world.
His soul-thread burned.
He summoned the glitch.
White noise erupted around him, fractal data wings exploding from his back. He stepped through five moments at once and returned behind the Rafael-copy echo, driving a blade of broken logic through its skull.
It didn't die. It ceased.
But the wound pulsed.
Lira screamed a warning—"Second wave!"
An enormous creature unfolded from the rift, too many limbs and not enough form. A proto-Shardborne general. Its voice was the sound of deletion.
Stanley collapsed to one knee, bleeding from the nose. Beatrice staggered, her eyes bleeding code. Even Brick faltered.
Rafael stepped forward, teeth clenched.
"Hold it for thirty seconds," he said. "I have an idea."
They didn't question him.
Clara held the line. Juno redirected attacks. Calyx overloaded the space with false logic, disorienting the enemy. Lira poured everything she had into one final threadseal.
And Rafael rewrote.
He dove into the wound. Became part of it. Identified the root structure.
It was him.
Not his body. Not his mind. His presence. Rafael—across loops and reboots—had become an anchor. A virus and a vaccine. The Shattercore's breach existed because of him.
So he offered himself a choice.
And the wound closed.
***
When Rafael opened his eyes again, he was on the chamber floor. His team around him. Alive. Exhausted.
He laughed, weakly. "Well. That sucked."
Clara smiled. "You closed it. The Shattercore's tendril is gone."
Lira wiped her eyes. "You almost erased yourself."
Juno crouched beside him. "But you didn't."
Beatrice sighed. "Let's never do that again."
Brick offered a hand. "You buying the drinks?"
Stanley mumbled, "Please say reality has a bar."
Rafael took Brick's hand and stood.
"If not," he said, brushing off dust, "we reboot one in."
They laughed. It wasn't much. But it was enough.
***