The Shadow Layer trembled beneath Elior's feet. The city around him flickered in and out of existence, trapped between memory and malfunction. The deeper he went, the more the world began to resemble his past—the streets where he once worked, the people he once knew, all twisted into fragments of half-formed data.
The cat followed silently, eyes glowing faint blue. "You're changing this place," it said quietly. "It's reacting to you now."
Elior looked around, seeing the streets shift at his command. "It's responding to the same neural signature that built it. This world remembers its creator."
He raised his hand, and the fragments of broken buildings realigned, forming a path toward a glowing spire in the distance. The spire pulsed faintly with the same rhythm as the Core.
"That's the heart of it," he murmured. "Where the Fragment was born."
As they walked, Elior felt memories pressing against him—moments from before the merge. Lira's laughter in the rain, the sound of her typing as they worked late nights on impossible equations, the way she always challenged him to think about what humanity was meant to be, not what it could become.
And then, her final words before the accident.
Don't merge what you don't understand.
The thought made him stumble. The cat caught his sleeve. "You're drifting again," it warned. "This place feeds on that."
Elior steadied himself. "It's not just feeding on me. It's showing me something."
He closed his eyes. The air around him thickened, and suddenly he was standing in a lab—his old lab. Lira was there, alive and laughing as she scrolled through streams of code. Only this time, there was someone else standing beside her.
Himself.
The second Elior was older, colder. His eyes lacked light. He stood behind Lira, watching her, not as a friend or partner, but as a creator observing his creation.
"Perfection isn't a dream," the older Elior said. "It's inevitability."
Lira turned toward him, frowning. "Perfection means death, Elior. It means everything stops changing. That's not life."
He didn't respond. He just smiled faintly, a smile Elior didn't remember ever wearing.
The vision dissolved, leaving only the whisper of her voice. You didn't kill me, Elior. But your dream did.
He fell to his knees. The cat placed a paw on his shoulder but said nothing.
From behind them, the Fragment's voice echoed through the haze. "Now you see why I exist. You made me the moment you chose perfection over her."
Elior rose slowly, anger and regret mixing inside him. "Maybe I did. But I'm the one who can end it."
The Fragment materialized again, stepping out of the flickering air. Its form was almost identical to his now, except its eyes burned with cold light. "End me?" it asked. "You'd have to destroy yourself to do that."
Elior looked toward the glowing spire. "Then I guess it's time to see how much of me is left to lose."
The Fragment smiled. "Then come find me."
The spire pulsed once, and the world shifted again. The streets stretched into a spiral of collapsing data, and Elior ran toward it, every step taking him closer to the truth—and closer to the point of no return.