Kael didn't land.
He stretched.
His body elongated, split, folded, then snapped back into shape as he tumbled through a dimension that hated the idea of staying still. Gravity twisted sideways, then reversed, then dissipated entirely. Colors existed that he had no names for. Sound arrived before the thing that made it. His heartbeat echoed in front of him, then behind him, then somewhere above his head.
This place wasn't broken.
It was designed this way.
As he drifted—falling upward through a tunnel of shifting geometries—the Architect's voice rippled through the fabric of the dimension.
"Here, we test adaptability. Instinct. Reflex. Resistance."
Kael snarled. "You want me to break?"
"I want you to function."
The tunnel convulsed.
Reality folded into a Möbius twist. Kael hit a plane of invisible force, bounced, then fell through it as if the surface decided it no longer existed. His stomach churned. His mind tried to interpret the environment, but every rule contradicted itself.
A sphere of rotating cubes drifted toward him, each one phasing in and out of existence. When Kael reached out, the cubes multiplied, forming a lattice that trapped his arm inside a hyper-dimensional angle that made his skin crawl.
Pain shot up his arm—sharp, electric.
Not from injury.From distortion.
He planted his feet, or what felt like feet, on a surface that rippled like warm water.
"Is this your idea of training?" Kael hissed.
"Calibration," the Architect corrected. "Your power must respond to chaos, not collapse beneath it."
The environment shrieked.
A swarm of fractal creatures—shapes made of shapes, angular bodies flickering—burst from the folds of reality. Their movements were impossible: forward, backward, sideways, all at once.
Kael raised his hands, energy crackling along his skin. A pulse shot outward—
But the pulse bent.Split.Curved around him like a ribbon and slammed into the wall of space instead.
The wall shattered.
A wave of inverted gravity washed over him, slamming him downward and upward simultaneously. His head spun. Nausea pooled in his throat.
Adapt.Move.Feel.
He forced himself to shut out the chaos and focus on one thing: the rhythm of the Nexus inside him. The pulse wasn't wild, wasn't unraveling—it was steady. It was his anchor.
He closed his eyes.
The Architect noticed.
"You choose stillness in flux. Interesting."
Kael exhaled slowly.
Then he opened his eyes—and the fractal swarm lunged.
He reacted without thinking.
A burst of energy expanded from his core, shaped not by control, but by instinct. The pulse responded to the environment rather than fighting it—bending with the distortion instead of resisting it. The blast curved unnaturally, slicing through the swarm in an elegant arc.
Creatures exploded into showers of impossible light.
The Architect's voice hummed with something like approval.
"Better."
Kael gritted his teeth. "Is that enough for you?"
The dimension darkened.
And for the first time, the Architect answered without detachment:
"Not yet. The final layer awaits."
The realm folded inward like a collapsing star.
Kael's body shattered into light.
And the ultimate trial began.