Transition: With Kael's identity unraveling and the system sync incomplete, new threats surface—ones hidden inside the Guild itself.
At dusk, the citadel's upper tower buzzed with encrypted warnings. Veil stood beside a war-table littered with cracked soulstones and burned data scrolls.
"They weren't rebels," he said, voice flat. "The attackers at Dawnspire were Red Scripted."
He dropped a black object on the table: a sleek mask, its face constantly rewriting in sigil code that didn't belong to the Nexus. Kael instinctively recoiled.
"These masks interface with corrupted root-code," Veil continued. "Whoever wears them becomes overwritten—rewritten by something that calls itself The Architect."
Kael felt a chill in his spine. "So this Architect… takes people and repurposes them?"
"Not just people. Former Guild members. Initiates. Agents. Some were like you, Kael—glitched. Powerful. Unstable."
Echo floated closer. Her voice was low. "I scanned it. The mask taps into something outside Nexus law. A phantom protocol."
Kael picked up the mask. It burned cold, like a memory that shouldn't exist.
"Then the Architect isn't just creating monsters," he said. "It's reclaiming them."