The gate's light didn't just blind Kael—it dismantled him.
His bones dissolved into strings of code, his thoughts became threads of light, and his heartbeat became a rhythm syncing with the Crucible's colossal pulse.
He was no longer in a place.He was inside the rewrite.
At first, it felt like drifting through warm water—every pain, every doubt, slipping away. The Crucible whispered fragments of peace into his mind.
"You don't have to fight anymore, Kael. Let the burden end."
But then—The warmth shattered into glass.
Kael's memories slammed into him all at once—his first kill in the Spiral War, his father's voice before the mutation spread, the moment Liora's face turned pale when she saw the truth in the Archive.Except… something was off.
His father's eyes were wrong—too bright, too perfect.Liora's voice was soft in a way it had never been.
The Crucible wasn't showing him his past.It was rebuilding it.
A shadow moved across the horizon of light, and Kael's stomach dropped.
It was Kael again—but this time not the pure version he'd seen before. This one was armed, wearing an armor of jagged memory-fragments, each shard reflecting a different version of him.
"You're not the only Kael who made it here," the doppelgänger said, his voice cold and clipped. "The Crucible pulled all of us—every choice, every outcome. Only one will remain after the rewrite."
Before Kael could react, the other him lunged. A blade formed from erased moments sliced past his face, cutting into a memory—he felt the absence instantly, like losing a tooth from his mind.
Pain unlike anything physical hit him.
He countered by pulling on the Stream around him, shaping it into a shield of his own—images of battles, people he'd fought beside, mistakes he'd sworn never to repeat. But each block weakened him—because every use meant burning his own past as fuel.
Above them, the Crucible's voice deepened.
"Merge or vanish."
The duel wasn't just physical—it was existential. Every strike stole a choice, every parry risked erasing a bond.
Then, the real twist hit—Liora appeared in the rewrite space, but this Liora wasn't the one Kael had brought in.
Her eyes glowed faintly, her skin threaded with Spiral code.
"Kael," she said, but her tone was wrong. "This isn't the enemy. This is the cure. You can't see it yet, but I can."
The armed Kael smirked. "She's from my stream. In my version, we accepted the merge. There was no war, no loss—only unity."
Kael's chest tightened. Was this the Crucible's final trap? Make him doubt the one person he trusted most?
The rewrite accelerated—entire landscapes flickering past in seconds. Kael saw flashes of futures where he was king, where he was dead, where he never existed at all.
And then—A silent scene locked in front of him.
The hospital corridor.The place he'd started this fight.Only this time, the door at the end wasn't marked Quarantine.It was marked "Final Choice."
Both versions of Kael—and both Lioras—looked at him.
"Open it," they said together.
The Crucible's pulse thundered. The door handle turned on its own.
And Kael realized—whatever was on the other side wouldn't just decide who survived.It would decide which reality would exist at all.
To be continued........