The air in the room beyond the steel door was electric and dense, like the moment just before a storm breaks. Shards of broken glass glittered like jewels around the empty pedestal at the chamber's center. And standing amidst this chaos was the shadowed figure, an entity that seemed forged from a different substance than the world around it. Its presence was a void, a vacuum that drank the light and sound from the room.
Liam recognized it instantly—the same nauseating, memory-eroding presence he had felt upon Elias Vance's schematics. This was not merely an enemy; it was an existential opposite. He was the Seeker, who searched for the past. Before him stood the Being that annihilated it.
"The Redactor," Liam breathed, the word a bitter taste in his mouth.
The figure turned slowly. Its face was obscured by the deep shadows of a hood, but Liam sensed that within those shadows were neither eyes nor a familiar expression. There was only pure, focused intent. In its hand, it held a small box of dark wood, covered in intricate carvings. The box pulsed with the same hateful energy of temporal erasure as the Redactor's aura, causing the very air around it to ripple.
"The Seeker," the Redactor said. Its voice was not what Liam had expected. It was neither mechanical nor monstrous. It held a calm, almost melodic cadence, devoid of emotion, as if a surgeon were explaining a terminal diagnosis to a patient. "It was inevitable that parasites such as you would eventually find the infected tissue. You are drawn to the disease of history."
Liam's mind raced. His instincts screamed at him to attack, but how? His power was to read the past of objects. What good was that against a being that consumed history itself? "What do you think you're doing?" Liam demanded, his voice steadier than he felt. "These artifacts… they are a part of who we are."
A soft, dismissive chuckle emanated from the Redactor. "You 'humans' and your petty, meaningless identities. You wallow in the muck and filth left behind by time and call it 'culture.' I am offering a kindness. A cleansing. This," it said, holding up the box, "…is one of the worst infections. A 'Chronos Paradox Box.' The seed of a collapsed, unstable timeline. To erase it is to remove a tumor. It is an act of mercy for existence."
Liam recalled fragments he'd read in the Pact's most secret archives about such artifacts. They were dangerous, yes. Unstable enough to unravel the fabric of reality. But they also held the keys to understanding why and how the Shattering had occurred. To destroy them was not just to erase a piece of history, but to forever annihilate the chance of understanding the truth.
"We don't want your mercy," Liam said, his voice firm.
"Whether you want it or not is irrelevant," the Redactor replied. "The disease does not ask for the doctor's permission."
As the Redactor took a step forward, Liam instinctively recoiled. The Aura of Erasure radiating from its being was a palpable cold that chilled the air. Liam felt the edges of his most immediate memories—how he'd entered this room, the fact that Zara and Ronan were outside—begin to fray, fading like an old photograph. It was a mental assault, crude and overwhelming.
Remembering Borin's brutal training, Liam constructed that wall of silence in his mind. He locked his memories behind it, shielding them from the Redactor's corrosive power. But this was merely a defense. He was at a stalemate.
Just then, from beyond the steel door, came a muffled shout, followed by the wet, solid thud of bone striking flesh. The chaos had begun.
Zara had watched the guard's expression of surprise curdle into pure panic at the sound of shattering glass that had erupted seconds after Liam vanished behind the door. As the guard lifted a communication device to his ear, Zara was already in motion.
"What's wrong?" Ronan asked, his voice laced with concern, but his eyes were calculating.
"Alarm," the guard hissed. "There's a breach! Stay where you are!"
Zara had no intention of complying. As the guard turned toward her, her movement was fluid and lethal. She lunged forward, ducking under the guard's outstretched arm and striking the man's chest with her open palm. It was no ordinary blow. At the moment of impact, a small, brilliant flame erupted from her fingertips. A concussive blast of the [Flame of Truth].
The guard's body convulsed, not from the physical impact, but from the sudden psychic shock. His eyes widened as every lie he had ever told, every petty deceit, every dark secret, flooded to the surface of his mind. In that instant, he was not just a guard; he was a man who cheated on his wife, who skimped on his taxes, who neglected his ailing mother. The overwhelming moment of self-recrimination paralyzed him for a fraction of a second.
Zara did not waste the hesitation. A spinning kick sent the stun baton clattering from his hand, and she drove her elbow sharply under his chin. The guard collapsed in a heap, groaning.
"That was… impressive," Ronan noted, looking down at the felled man.
"Stop talking and make yourself useful!" Zara commanded. The sound of approaching footsteps and shouts from down the corridor signaled that reinforcements were on their way. "Liam needs time. Get us a path!"
A grin spread across Ronan's face. His eyes seemed to glow, as if he could see the invisible threads beneath the surface of the world, the shimmering web of probability. "With pleasure."
The four guards who rounded the corner were confident. But as they turned, a slightly corroded joint on a water pipe in the ceiling, a joint Ronan had noticed weeks ago in a pre-mission schematic, chose that exact moment to finally give way to a decade of accumulated pressure. With a loud bang, the joint ruptured, and a torrent of rusty, high-pressure water cascaded down onto the guards.
The floor became an instant ice rink. The two lead guards slipped with a yelp, toppling over like dominoes. The other two hesitated, their vision obscured by the deluge. Ronan had only pushed probability once; chaos was doing the rest.
"This way!" Zara yelled, pulling Ronan in the opposite direction. "We need to get to the main archive control room. If we can cut their communications and lock the doors, we can turn this place into a labyrinth for them."
Ronan rolled his Fate Dice in his palm as they ran. "Which is the most probable route?" he murmured. The dice grew warm in his hand, as if guided by an unseen force, pulling him toward a narrower, less-used corridor to their left. "This way! Looks like luck is on our side."
"I don't believe in luck," Zara grumbled, though she followed him without question. "I believe in leverage."
Ronan smiled. "Luck is just a series of small levers, Zara, applied in the right sequence."
Inside the restricted chamber, the sounds from outside were a distant storm in Liam's mind. His entire focus was on the void before him. The Redactor's Aura of Erasure was intensifying, and Liam could feel the histories of the other artifacts in the room beginning to corrode. The script on the spines of books on the shelves subtly flickered; the patina on strange metallic spheres faded. The room was losing its memory.
Liam knew he couldn't remain on the defensive. He had to use his power differently. Closing his eyes, he focused not on the Redactor, but on the room around him. This chamber, these artifacts, had been here for decades, perhaps centuries. They had not just existed; they had observed.
He cast his mind out like a fishing line into the room's past. At first, he caught only blurry images: robed figures placing artifacts, somber discussions, the whispers of rituals. But then, he hooked a stronger echo. The echo of the shattered glass pedestal.
That pedestal had once held an artifact of extreme instability. Something the Pact's records called a "Paradox Shard"—an object that both existed and did not exist within time. Containing it was like bottling lightning. Liam focused on the echo of the moment the artifact had been placed upon the pedestal. The immense, uncontrolled burst of temporal energy from that instant.
It was a risk. To draw that echo forth was like triggering a psychic detonation. But he had no other choice.
"You say history is a disease," Liam said, his eyes still closed, his voice resonating. "But every disease has its own antibodies. Every memory has weight."
With all his will, Liam pulled. In his mind's eye, he relived the moment the Paradox Shard was set down. He felt the raw, untamed temporal energy of that instant, the blast that had shaken the very walls of the chamber and filled the air with the scent of ozone.
Then, he unleashed that echo.
The room convulsed with an invisible shockwave. It was not a physical blast, but a temporal one. For a fraction of a second, that moment from decades ago lived again inside the chamber. The Redactor was caught unprepared. Its power was predicated on erasing what exists. Liam had just attacked it with something that didn't exist—a memory, an echo.
The Aura of Erasure flickered as it met this sudden, paradoxical torrent of energy. For an instant, the Redactor's defense faltered. And in that instant, Liam felt the first true echo from the Redactor itself. A fragment of a memory.
…A cold, white room. The smooth hum of countless machines. A sterile scent. A voice, saying, "Procedure 734 complete. Mnemonic matrix wiped. The subject is now a blank slate..."
It was a momentary flash, but it was enough to freeze Liam's blood. The Redactor wasn't born. It was made. It was, quite literally, a blank page.
A pained, inhuman sound tore from the Redactor. It was not the sound of physical pain, but of existential violation. Its emptiness had been momentarily tainted by a memory, and the sensation was unbearable to it. Its aura pulsed violently, exploding with a force that sent Liam staggering backward and blasted books from the shelves.
Liam fell, his back slamming against the wall. But he was smiling. "So that's it," he whispered, gasping for breath. "You don't hate the past. You're afraid of it. Because you don't have one."
The void under the Redactor's hood seemed to seethe with pure rage. "Silence, parasite!" it hissed. It raised the Paradox Box toward Liam. "Your insignificant echoes are nothing before the absolute quiet!"
Zara and Ronan reached the steel door of the main archive control room. It was sealed with an electronic keypad.
"I can't get through that," Zara said, examining the door. "It's armored."
"Not physically," Ronan replied. He shook the dice in his hand. "Systems love to have 'accidental' failures." He closed his eyes, focusing on the probability streams of the building's electronic systems. He felt the complex web of interconnected circuits, power fluctuations, and software bugs. He searched for the perfect weak point—a moment of bad luck.
And he found it. A tiny, overlooked voltage regulator in one of the building's backup generators had been operating on the brink for years. Ronan focused all his will on sending a 'nudge' to that single, tiny component.
Deep in the bowels of the building, the regulator sparked and died. It caused a power surge that lasted only a few milliseconds. But it was enough. The keypad in front of them fizzled, its screen flashing with meaningless characters, and then—click—the door lock disengaged with a green light.
"Huh," Zara said, pushing the door open. "Sometimes you're actually useful."
The room was filled with monitors and servers. A single technician stared at them in shock. Zara had him neutralized before he could react and slid into the chair at the communications panel. "Alright, Ronan. Make some noise for me."
Ronan looked at the master security console. "What kind of noise did you have in mind?"
"Trip all the alarms at once," Zara said, her fingers flying across the keyboard. "On different floors. Fire, containment breach, unauthorized access... Send them in so many wrong directions they won't be able to find where we really are."
Ronan grinned. "This is going to be fun."
Liam braced himself for the blast of energy from the box in the Redactor's hand. But the Redactor didn't attack. Instead, it turned and walked to the far wall of the chamber. On that wall, unlike the others, was a single, large, circular stone disk.
The Redactor placed the Paradox Box into a recess at the disk's center.
"You think this place is a tomb," the Redactor said. "But it is a weapon. And I am about to pull the trigger."
As the box made contact with the stone disk, carvings on the disk began to glow with a bright, sickly green light. The room began to tremble. Liam felt time itself bending, stretching. The geometry of the room was shifting, corners sharpening, the ceiling seeming to lower.
Liam understood the Redactor's plan. It didn't just want to erase the box. It wanted to use the box's unstable energy as a catalyst in a single, massive act of Erasure that would consume the entire chamber—and all the dangerous artifacts within it. It wouldn't just be the destruction of an archive; it would be an unhealable wound torn in the fabric of reality.
Liam scrambled to his feet. Ignoring the pain in his legs and the exhaustion in his mind, he ran at the Redactor. The Redactor turned as if expecting him and held out an empty hand.
Liam hit an invisible wall. But it wasn't a physical forcefield. The Redactor's aura was targeting the very concept of motion. For a moment, Liam forgot how to move his legs, what it meant to run. His mind was a blank.
As he fell, his hand brushed against the broken pedestal in the center of the room. And in that moment, he felt another echo. The echo of the constant, abrasive temporal radiation the pedestal had endured while holding the Paradox Shard. The pedestal had soaked up that energy for years. It was a battery.
In a final, desperate act, Liam poured his consciousness into the pedestal and released that stored, raw energy.
This was not a targeted echo like his previous attack. This was an uncontrolled detonation. A wave of pure temporal energy erupted from the pedestal and collided with the Redactor's field of Erasure. Two opposing, absolute forces met in the center of the room.
The result was a silent explosion. Colors inverted. Sound became muffled, as if heard through a thick woolen blanket. Liam saw the past and future simultaneously—the building's construction, its collapse, the stars turning to dust.
The shockwave threw both the Redactor and Liam in opposite directions. Liam hit a shelf hard, barely holding onto consciousness. The Redactor was slammed against the stone disk, and the green glow from the disk faltered for a moment. The Paradox Box was knocked from its housing, skittering across the floor to land a few feet from Liam.
The Redactor recovered faster than Liam. But it was damaged. A black, smoke-like energy bled from the edge of its hood, a sign that its aura had been weakened.
"You…" the Redactor hissed, its voice no longer melodic, but grating and furious. "You are filth."
But before it could move again, the steel door to the chamber was thrown open. Zara and Ronan were there. Zara held a stun baton taken from one of the neutralized guards. Ronan's eyes were wide at the sight of the impossible energies still crackling in the room.
"Looks like we missed the party," Ronan said.
The Redactor saw it was one against three. It was weakened. It did not hesitate. It moved toward the wall behind it, and for a moment, the wall liquefied, rippling like ink. The Redactor stepped into the wall without hesitation, and the wall became solid again. It was gone.
An eerie silence fell over the room, broken only by the faint, flickering glow of the stone disk and Liam's ragged breaths.
"Liam, are you alright?" Zara asked, rushing to his side.
Liam coughed and nodded, his eyes locked on the small, wooden box on the floor. "We have to… get it," he whispered.
Ronan took a cautious step toward the box. "The bad luck rolling off that thing… it's off the charts. Touching it feels like holding a lightning rod in a thunderstorm."
But they had no time to hesitate. The sound of alarms blaring throughout the building signaled that their sabotage in the control room was wearing off. The entire facility was going into lockdown.
Zara carefully retrieved the box, wrapping it in a swatch of cloth, and then slung Liam's arm over her shoulder. "We're leaving. Now."
The three of them limped out of the damaged chamber and into an archive that had been turned into a warzone. Toppled shelves, scattered documents, and several unconscious guards. The chaos Ronan had created had given them perfect cover.
"Exit," Ronan said, pointing them not the way they had come, but down a different corridor. "The luckiest path is this way!"
With the shouts of guards and the shriek of alarms chasing them, they ran through the labyrinthine halls of the Society. Ronan's incredible luck guided them past locked doors, security patrols, and unexpected obstacles by a hair's breadth. Finally, they reached a service exit at the back of the building and burst out into the cool, rain-swept air of the midnight city.
They took refuge in a dark alley, breathless and bruised, but their mission was complete. Liam looked at the wrapped box in Zara's hands. They had succeeded. But it didn't feel like a victory.
They had seen the Redactor. They had witnessed the devastation of its power and the coldness of its philosophy firsthand. And in a corner of his mind, Liam could still feel that disturbing fragment of memory.
The subject is now a blank slate.
They hadn't just stolen an artifact. They had poked a stick into a monster's hive. And now, that monster knew who they were. The war was just beginning.