There was no path.
Only motion.
And even that felt like a lie
a memory his body clung to when the world itself had forgotten how to hold shape.
Nox ran because his legs refused to stop.
Because the girl with no shadow dragged him forward, her grip the only thing real in the collapse. Because behind them, the Loom screamed as it tried to stitch reality back together to erase what should not exist.
But this place did not want mending.
It tore wider with every step,
a wound that rejected healing,
a fracture that longed to stay broken.
The void warped with every step.
Floors dissolved into static, reforming beneath his feet a beat too late.
Walls sweated half-born glyphs, their shapes burning bright, then collapsing into whispers curses in tongues that scraped at the edges of his mind.
Each breath clawed its way in, carrying echoes that were not his.
Memories of strangers slid through his lungs before turning into air.
This place was wrong.Bent.Twisted.
Yet the deeper he ran, the stronger the pull inside him grew.
It was like stepping into a wound that had been waiting for him all along.
"It should have repelled him.Instead
it felt like coming home."
Loom Pursuit Status: Jammed
Commander-Level Trace Displaced
Estimated Lock Recovery: 5 minutes 44 seconds
CAUTION: Nullspace Threshold Breached
Pattern Density: 0%
Threat Response: Disable
Welcome, Unwritten.
The words rippled through the void, not sound but intention.
Nox stumbled to a halt only because she did. No warning. No signal. She simply
stopped.
He nearly crashed into her. His chest heaved like a furnace, every breath scraping fire down his throat. His legs screamed with every tremor of exhaustion.
But the girl stood motionless.
As if frozen mid-strike, a blade suspended in time.
She had not spoken once since their escape. Not even a whisper.
And in the silence, Nox realized something that chilled him more than the Loom's collapse:
She wasn't breathing.Not ragged.
Not calm. Not at all.
She simply existed, as though breath had never belonged to her in the first place.
Around her, broken strings drifted like dead leaves adrift in zero gravity.
Glyph shards flickered mid-glitch, caught in some unseen snare.
The space itself bent toward her, every line, every fragment, as though the world could not help but lean closer.
Not gravity. Something colder.
Like terror given shape
the kind that claws at the ribs before the mind can name it.
Nox's lips parted, a question dying in his throat.
But then she turned, and her eyes found his.
The void seemed to lean with her gaze, and for a heartbeat, Nox felt less like he was looking at someone and more like something vast, unspeaking, and patient was finally looking back.
They were strange, her eyes.
Not shining. Not void-black.
Just… empty. Motionless.
Like they had already seen too much, and nothing in this world could surprise them anymore.
"Null-type," she murmured at last. "Still online. Huh."
"Okay—" Nox wheezed, clutching at his ribs as if holding himself together. "That's… that's great. I just ran through a wall that screamed at me, and you want me to calm down?"
His voice cracked, half fury, half disbelief.
"Start explaining."
She tilted her head, hair shifting like it wasn't bound by the same air he was choking on.
"Which bit?"
"The bit," Nox snapped, "where I'm being hunted by a sword-wielding avatar of system law. The bit where I supposedly shouldn't even exist. The bit where you—" he jabbed a shaking finger at her "—pulled me out of a dying system with a gun that shouldn't exist! Take your pick!"
She didn't flinch. Didn't even blink.
Instead, she simply raised a finger slow, deliberate and pointed upward.
He followed her gesture.
Through the half-ruined ceiling of Nullspace, threads dangled above them.
Not glowing. Not taut.
Just… hanging like veins slashed open, frozen mid-bleed.
And among those severed strands drifted something else. A shard.
A splinter of memory caught in the tangle.
It pulsed with a dim, fragile light.
Not bright, not blinding
but alive, like an ember refusing to die.
Nox's breath hitched. His chest tightened.
Because inside that flicker, suspended in impossible stillness
he saw his own face staring back at him.
Asleep.
Eyes closed.
Suspended in a cradle of red threads that writhed like veins, trying and failing to bind him.
"That," she said softly, "was your beginning."
Nox's throat tightened. "I don't… remember that."
"You weren't supposed to."
She drifted closer to the shard, one pale fingertip reaching out.
The surface trembled at her touch like water about to break then shattered into a rain of fading light.
What came out was not sound.
Not language.
But weight.
A rush that pressed against his bones, seared through his chest.
Grief too old for tears. A sorrow that wasn't his, but pierced him all the same.
The ghost of a name, spoken too late to save anyone.
Nox staggered. His lips moved before he could stop them.
"…Kiris."
He didn't know why.
The name bled out of him like a reopened wound, raw and unasked for.
Elira's body went still.
Her eyes narrowed, sharp and searching.
"You remember her?"
"I…" His hand clawed at his forehead, heat pounding against bone. "No. I don't know her. But the name it echoes. Like a warning I was never meant to hear."
Elira's voice dropped, low and bitter.
"She's the reason you're here. Or… the version of her who still believed broken things deserved a chance."
Silence fell between them.
Not tense. Not expectant.
A silence that hollowed the air, stretching wide and endless.
For the first time, Nox truly looked at her
not the shadowless figure dragging him through collapse,
but the stranger who seemed to know too much about him.
"Who are you?" he whispered.
She didn't answer right away.
Her gaze lingered on him, weighing, measuring, deciding if he was worth the truth.
"…Elira," she said at last. "I used to have a longer name. But the system cut it away."
Nox's breath hitched. "You're not with the academy?"
Elira turned from him, shoulders shifting like a door closing.
"No one who remembers the truth stays with the academy."
The air trembled.
From above came a thin metallic whine
soft, but furious, like a blade being sharpened inside the bones of the world.
The system was rebooting.
And it had found them. Again.
Nox's voice broke into the hum.
"You called me… Null-type. What does that even mean?"
Elira's eyes flicked toward him, unreadable. She studied him the way one might watch a dying flame uncertain if it would sputter out quietly, or erupt and devour everything.
"You weren't born from a threadline," she said at last, her voice a low fracture in the silence. "You weren't bound. You weren't chosen. That makes you dangerous."
Nox swallowed hard, ribs aching as if the words themselves pressed against him.
"Why? Dangerous to who?"
"To everything," she whispered.
"Because the system doesn't know what you'll become."
System Interruption:
60 Seconds To Realignment
Warning: Threadsignature Reboot Imminent
The words pulsed through the void, each one hammering against Nox's skull like a verdict being read aloud by the universe itself.
All anomalies will be targeted.
You are an anomaly.
Elira stepped closer. The air thickened around her, pressing on Nox's chest as if the weight of some forgotten future had suddenly remembered him.
"Hear me, Nox." Her voice cut against the system's droning. "You've got a minute, maybe less, before the Loom locks onto you again. And when it does… it won't send Rin. It'll send what waits beneath her."
A chill scraped down his spine. He swallowed hard.
"What then?"
Elira didn't answer. Not with words.
Her hand rose slowly, deliberately, until her fingertips rested just above his heart.
Fire lanced through him. His back arched, muscles convulsing, the air tearing out of his lungs.
But beneath the agony, something stirred.
Not pain.Recognition.
The click of a lock undone, a secret door within him forcing itself open.
For the first time, Nox felt the system wasn't just hunting him.
It was afraid of him.
Unwritten Core - Activated
Threadsignaturd: Null_01
Access: Deeproot Level 0.01
You have no destiny.
Therefore… you may choose one.
Nox's vision blurred not from exhaustion, but from memories that were not his own.
A girl, weeping in a white room that smelled of iron and dust.
A machine tearing open its own kernel, code spilling like blood.
A sword hammered not from steel, but from desperation.
A thread shrieking as it was ripped screaming from the Loom.
And then... a voice.
Not Elira's.
Not Rin's.
Older. Deeper.
A name spoken like molten metal cooling into shape.
"Nox."
Not given.
Forged.
Elira's hand left his chest.
His legs buckled. He crashed to his knees, gasping, hands clawing at the ground as though the world itself had tilted.
"What… what did you do to me?"
"I unlocked what they sealed," she answered, her tone flat, almost cruel in its simplicity.
Then the Loom roared.
Not static this time.Recognition.
It had seen him. It remembered.
And somewhere far above, something vast stirred. Not a commander.
Not a warning.But a weapon.
Not a will. A function.
Awakening.
Protocol: Echo Execution Intialized
Asset: Null_01 Termination Authorized
Deploying: Prototype Zero
The ceiling of Nullspace tore open.
Not broken. Not shattered.
Erased.
As if an eye had cracked wide in the heavens and, with a single blink, deleted what it saw.
And when it opened, the world tilted.
The air screamed against itself.
Threads bent sideways like grass in a storm.
Nox's stomach lurched as gravity forgot which way was down.
Something was watching.
And reality knew it.
New Threadsignature Registered
Prototype Zero: Online
Status: Core-Stable
Threat Level: Undefined
A message pulsed across the void, every letter etched into the air like a decree:
"If it walks outside the Pattern… remove the Loom."
Then..
it descended. No face.
Only a threadmask, smooth and featureless, glowing faintly blue like a dead star.
Its body gleamed with mirrored fabric that rippled with a million shifting commands, each fold alive, each shimmer rewriting itself. At its back hovered a blade. Not held. Not sheathed. Simply… anchored there, by rules older than steel.
Nox's breath hitched. "What the hell is that thing?" It did not walk.
Instead, reality rewrote itself beneath its feet to carry it forward.
Elira's face drained.
"No…" Her voice cracked into a whisper. "They used it this soon?"
Her hand drifted to her ripper blade yet even she hesitated. Because across the gap now stood the one thing she had hoped would never appear.
Prototype_00.
Its HUD flared across the air like scripture:
TARGET LOCKED: NULL_01
BEGIN THREAD SEVERANCE IN 10…
9…
8…
7…
Nox turned sharply toward her, fear carving through his voice.
"What if it catches me?"
Elira's eyes stayed locked on the mask. She didn't dare look at him when she answered.
"If it severs your thread…" Her tone dropped, flat, stripped of all disguise.
"…you don't die. Not really."
His chest tightened. He forced the word out. "Then what?"
At last, she met his gaze. For once, her expression betrayed something fear, pity, regret tangled together.
"You're not even you anymore," she whispered.
"No. You're rewritten."