The world snapped sideways.
One blink, and Kael was no longer standing beside Liora, no longer anchored in the remnants of the collapsed anomaly. Instead, he stood beneath a sky that looked like shattered glass — a dome of floating fragments, each piece reflecting a different moment from his life. Some he recognized instantly. Others… he had never lived.
A voice echoed through the broken air, smooth, resonant, and unnervingly calm.
"Your evolution requires precision."
The Architect.
Kael spun around, but there was no body, no presence — only a shifting distortion in the air, like a tear in reality trying to stay still.
"Where am I?" Kael demanded.
The Architect answered as if the question were trivial."Inside the shape of yourself. A blueprint reassembled. A fractured reality designed for calibration."
The sky pulsed.One shard descended like a falling star and stopped right in front of Kael's face.
A memory.His mother's voice.Her laugh — soft, warm.
Kael's throat tightened. "This is real."
"It is accurate," the Architect corrected. "Not real."
The shard widened, expanding into a full scene. Kael stood in his childhood apartment, the faint smell of burnt toast and chemical cleaners filling the air. His mother hummed while packing his school bag, unaware of the glowing mark on his arm — the first spark of Nexus power he ever manifested.
Except… that never happened.
He didn't awaken his powers until he was fifteen — during the collapse.
Kael stepped closer, heart pounding. "This… isn't right. She never saw my powers."
The Architect's tone slid like a scalpel."Then why does your mind remember it?"
The scene shifted. His mother turned to him, and her face flickered — her eyes glowing with Nexus-blue light.
"Kael," she said, voice deepening, distorting, "did you think destiny forgot you? Do you think I forgot you?"
Kael stumbled back, his pulse spiking.This wasn't her.This was something wearing her voice like a mask.
"Stop using her image."
The world cracked.
The apartment collapsed into shards of glass-light, swirling around him like a hurricane. Each shard showed a memory — some true, some wrong.
His first fight.A kiss he never had.A victory he didn't earn.A failure he never experienced.
"Memory is a scaffold," the Architect said. "I remove what is unstable. I reinforce what is necessary."
Kael grit his teeth. "Necessary for what?"
A breathless pause.Then—
"For what you must become."
The shattered world froze.
Every fragment turned toward him like a thousand watching eyes.
Then the reality shifted, dissolving into something far worse.
A doorway opened — glowing, violent, filled with burning white light.
And Kael felt it:
The future waiting.
The trial wasn't over.It had only just begun.