Allison stepped into the dimensional rift wearing the Knights' badge, and the roots of her crown of thorns resonated with the "Spatial-Temporal Anchor Spear" issued by the organization. Her first mission was to repair the "London 1862 Temporal Wormhole," which parasitized a collapsing Victorian theater, hybridizing steam-era gears with future nanobots to devour the audience's memories and weave them into a temporal spider web.
"Objective: Capture the 'Temporal Hunter' at the core of the web," the Knights' holographic briefing projected onto her retina. "It plunders emotional energy from memories to manufacture 'eternal emotional commodities' for higher-dimensional buyers. Your grandmother's parasite embryos may have been co-opted by it."
Inside the theater ruins, Allison's roots pierced the walls, detecting pulses from the web's veins. Audience seats transformed into mechanical spiders, spewing nanothreads to entangle her thorny armor. She swung the anchor spear to fire a spatial-temporal freezing wave, and within the frozen threads, encrypted symbols from her grandmother's laboratory became visible—the hunter was a hybrid of Lancaster clansmen and Knights traitors.
"Subject #07, you've become our prey," the hunter's face was Francis's, but its body was stitched from countless memory fragments. It tore through the freezing wave, and threads injected with plague village rot and Berlin ruin smoke caused Allison's roots to corrode.
"You feed commerce with family suffering?" She embedded the Reversal Wheel into her heart's core, her roots reverse-devouring the memory venom in the threads, forging them into purifying thorns. But the hunter tossed her grandmother's backup parasite embryos, which split into thousands of micro-rifts in midair. Theater collapse synchronized with a temporal flood's eruption.
Allison activated the "Dimensional Fold Shield" granted by the Knights, compressing the flood into a controllable energy sphere. She leaped into the rift interlayer, discovering the hunter's true core—a beating heart carved with Winston and Lancaster crests, its veins flowing with all plundered emotional data.
"A curse-breaker turned knight is just a prisoner in a new cage," the hunter's heart erupted with webbing, attempting to extract Allison's memories. But she drove the anchor spear into the core, her roots directly tampering with the heart's code chains, reversing the emotional data back into the hunter's body. Traitors' screams and Francis's face dissolved in the reversal, and the web collapsed.
Upon mission completion, Allison found an unactivated Knights badge in the ruins, its back engraved with "Traitor Elimination Program." When she contacted Knights headquarters, only signal interference responded. Her encrypted phone suddenly received an anonymous message: "The Rift Knights sell repaired temporal resources. The secret of your heart is their highest bid item."
Abnormal fluctuations appeared on the crown of thorns' dial, pointing to Dimensional Management Committee headquarters—where a larger temporal wormhole than the hunter's existed. Allison embedded her roots into the badge, reverse-decrypting its encryption layer, and discovered transaction records between high-ranking Knights and her grandmother's un-dead Experiment #12. She tore open the badge, and nanocircuits oozed samples of her grandmother's blood.
"The identity of a stitcher was always a new game," she snorted, uploading evidence to an anonymous cloud. The Dimensional Management Committee's bounty alert suddenly blared, her profile marked as "Traitor Suspect." Thorny roots automatically reconfigured into combat form. Outside the window, the hunter's remains were re reassembling, and web threads seeped into the badge fragments.