TARGET LOCKED: NULL_01
BEGIN THREAD SEVERANCE IN…
6
The number burned through his ribs. His lungs stuttered in its rhythm.
5
It throbbed in his marrow, a pulse not his own.
4
Even the hollow where his thread should have been rang with the sound an emptiness counted down to zero.
And yet..
there was nothing there to cut.
No signature.No path.
No thread for the Loom to seize.
The Prototype faltered. Its mask tilted, algorithms colliding against an absence they could not parse. And in this place, where time bled thin, that hesitation was everything.
"GO!" Elira's scream ripped across the void.
She moved, faster than the countdown, faster than thought.
Her weapon did not appear—it declared.
A jagged edge, black as a censored word, tore into reality and settled in her hand. Not summoned. Not forged. Simply always there, waiting for her grip.
As if the blade did not belong to her
but she belonged to it.
The space around her convulsed—not in reverence, but in rejection.
Reality itself strained, trying to spit her out like a foreign body.
But she remained.
Because she was never meant to belong here either.
"I'll hold it back." Her voice was low, steady, and final. She didn't look at him.
"Run. Find the breach gate."
"What breach gate?!" Nox's voice cracked, raw with panic. His chest heaved, every breath fighting the weight pressing down on them.
She didn't answer. Couldn't.
Instead, she lifted her blade and cut once through the air.
The world recoiled.
The slice didn't make a sound—it removed sound. Light guttered. Threads curled inward like severed nerves.
And for a moment, Nox thought he saw the impossible:
a wound, not in space, but in the very act of existence.
The floor groaned beneath him—
a corrupted plate of system-stone fracturing, as if it remembered the pain of being broken before.
From the wound, something unfurled.
Not sight, not shape, but the taste of rupture at the edge of sense.
A tear.A door.
A promise or a lie.
Maybe all of them.
Nox's pulse hammered. His chest burned. But his legs did not falter.
He ran.
Not toward salvation. Not away from doom.
Just forward—because stopping would mean becoming nothing.
And behind him, the system did not run.
It advanced.
Cold. Certain. Unhurried.
Like inevitability wearing a mask.
Threadsignature Recognized: Elira
Class: ShadowCode
Threat Level: Dynamic
Override: Denied
Engaging: Counter-Instruction Protocol
The Prototype shifted.
It didn't strike at her blade.
It struck at the right she had to stand where she stood.
Its sword cleaved downward
not through stone, not through air
but through the principle of place itself.
A flawless arc of absence carved across the field. Light didn't shatter.
It ceased, leaving behind a silence deeper than void.
Elira answered with motion that should not have been possible.
Not fast. Not slow.
Wrong.
A paradox given flesh.
Reality snagged and tore in her wake, her footsteps leaving fractures instead of echoes.
And still, above them, the numbers ticked down.
4
5
2
But nothing burned. Nothing shattered.
Because this was no countdown to explosion. It was a countdown to erasure.
A timer to rewrite the world, line by line—
until neither she, nor Nox, nor even the memory of them remained.
Null_01 Escape Vector
Confirmed
Pattern Interference: Extreme
Containment Probability: 48.3%
Deploying: ThreadHound Units x2
Something screamed overhead.
Not a voice.
Older than voices.
The shriek of an algorithm unchained, racing through the firmament like a broken hymn.
Nox didn't look back—
not until the hum fractured, splintering the air.
And then they took shape.
Four-legged. Too long.
Every joint bent the wrong way, like puppets forced into postures they were never made to hold. Eyes—too many, spinning in sockets that never blinked.
Maws lined with glitch-teeth, each bite a shard of broken code, each tongue a needle of threads pulled raw from the Loom.
Threadhounds.
He knew their name without learning it.
Everyone did.
Because the system wrote them into fear itself.
Hunters of destiny.
Creatures that sniffed at the marrow of futures,
and tore them out of the unworthy.
Nox's stomach turned cold. His pulse staggered.
It wasn't just that they were hunting him.
It was that they had always been hunting him.
He ran harder.
The ground wasn't stone anymore.
It broke beneath him into… memory.
A school desk, its wood splintered with carved initials.
A command seal, shattered in two like a promise revoked.
A child's drawing of the Loom—lines uneven, circles crooked.
He knew it.
He remembered tearing that same picture apart when they told him he didn't qualify.
But that didn't belong here.
Not now.
The desk buckled under his step, dissolving into a child's hands.
Tiny fingers, trembling, reaching for threads that refused to knit together.
One thread shimmered like his own.
Another… did not.
Nox's chest locked.
His breath caught on the jagged truth of it.
He wasn't just running through ruins.
He was running through versions of himself
selves that never were,
selves that maybe should have been.
And he passed them.
Each one staring at him with eyes that begged, or cursed, or simply didn't know him at all.
Warning: Trajectory Unfixed
Orientation: Bleeding
Map Anchor: Lost
You are discarding all authored constructions.
You are beyond the last paragraph.
He wasn't running toward safety anymore.
He was running out of narrative.
And deep inside—
where the Loom had locked something away
a thrill flickered. Terrible. Exhilarating.
Then came the light.
Not pure. Not coded.
Not approved.
It pulsed like an injury, a wound in reality itself.
The breach gate.
It spun in directions that shouldn't exist, folding and unfolding, screaming with every flicker as if the universe itself was protesting its existence.
Behind him—
claws raked static ground,
howls of corrupted data fractured the air.
Threadhounds.
The first leapt.
Nox turned, no thought. Only instinct.
His hand tore a strip of red thread from the glitching wall.
It writhed, wet and hot, like an amputated heartbeat.
He swung it.
Not like a blade. Like punctuation.
Like an ending carved mid-sentence.
The thread struck the hound mid-air.
No scream. No death cry.
Just static—then absolute nothing.
Unmade. Shattered into error-script and unsaved memory, as though it had never been written at all.
Silence hit harder than any howl.
Nox stared at his hand.
At the trembling thread still alive in his palm.
Still pulsing. Still waiting.
And his stomach turned—
not because it was wrong,
but because part of him wanted to do it again.
Unwritten Tool Detected
Threadname: ??
Usage: Undefined
Danger Index: Unrated
Do you wish to caption this?
He didn't think.
Didn't weigh. Didn't hesitate.
The word tore itself out of him like it had been waiting since before he was born.
"Threadcutter."
And the Loom obeyed.
Threadcutter - Class: Unwritten
Status: Soul-Bound
Signature: Null_01
Fate Rating: Immune
The air itself recoiled from the name.
Nox's grip tightened on the pulsing strip of thread.
For the first time in his life, something belonged to him. Not given.
Not assigned.
Chosen.
The second hound lunged.
All claws, all hunger, a glitch's promise of oblivion.
He didn't parry.
He didn't fight.
He turned—
and ran. The breach was closing, spinning tighter, light bleeding out of itself.
The hound's shadow fell over him, teeth splitting into a thousand impossible angles
—and Nox leapt.
The tear swallowed him whole.
And the world broke like glass around him.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing.
No system. No law.
Not even self.
Only the echo of the name he had given his sin.
Threadcutter.
Re-Entry Complete
Location: Unwritten Expanse
Pattern Saturation: 3%
System Connection: Lost
Observation: Suspended
He hit hard.
Not simulated rock. Not logic-ground.
Just dirt.
Damp. Cold. Real.
The breath left his lungs in a ragged cough. Mud clung to his palms.
No static gnawed at his ears. No HUD screamed warnings.
The Loom's whispers were gone.
For the first time since he had opened his eyes in Astralis—
there was only silence.
Silence… and the ragged thunder of his own heart.
He forced his gaze upward.
And froze.
The sight above him emptied his chest, stole the air, stole everything but the chill running through his veins.
Stretching across the heavens, from one torn horizon to the other, hung the Loom.
But not the Loom he had seen before.
This one was broken.
Its threads sagged loose, bleeding across the sky like ruptured veins.
Glyphs drifted without power, their once-bright glow dulled to ash.
At the very center gaped a hollow
throbbing, hungry, vacant a wound where something had been torn away.
Not healed.Not gone.
Waiting.
And as he stared, he realized the worst part.
It was still watching.
A sound reached him.
Not through his ears.
Through the thread still coiled in his hand.
It pulsed once.
And a memory cracked open behind his eyes.
"Nox… if you're hearing this, then you were never meant to survive."
Elira's voice.
But quieter, stretched thin, like it had traveled across ruins of time to find him.
Like it wasn't hers anymore.
Unwritten Zone Entered
Threadsignature_01: Recognized
Initiate: Personal Narrative Protocol
Start writing your own Pattern.
He stood unmoving.
Breathing. Listening.
Not to the broken sky above.
Not to the dirt beneath.
But to the hollow between them—the space where rules had seeped out and left only him behind.
No interface. No command. No destiny.
Just silence.
And the silence was not empty.
It was… waiting.
Like the ground had ears. Like the air had eyes. Like the whole fractured world leaned closer, expectant.
The thread pulsed again in his hand.
Not pulling. Not binding.
Asking.
What now?
His throat worked. His mouth opened.
No words came.
But something else did.
Something the system had buried when it forged him.
Something Kiris had dragged into existence and the academy had tried to cage.
Not command. Not thread.
Not fate.
Will.
Raw. Dangerous. The kind that frightened systems into building cages.
And when it stirred in him, the broken sky responded.
Far away, in the cracks of this dead Loom, a spark flickered.
A single flash. Almost nothing.
But it remembered his name.
And it was coming.