Gravity was the first thing to die.
As my mother and Yuna fell from the apex of the Spire, they didn't accelerate. They drifted through the violet haze like feathers in a vacuum, their silhouettes flickering against the burning sky.
"No!"
My voice was a raw, jagged thing.
I lunged toward the sea of violet fire, but the Architect's hammer hit the ground again.
The sound wasn't a bang. It was a *snap*.
The white ash plains beneath my feet folded upward. The horizon tilted forty-five degrees, then ninety. The ruined city in the valley was suddenly above me, hanging like a cluster of rotted fruit.
"Akira, stay down!" Haneul screamed.
She slammed her black blade into the shifting ground, anchoring herself as the geography of the Forbidden Zone reconfigured into a terrifying, non-Euclidean nightmare.
The Architect stood on a vertical slab of obsidian, his body made of blinding white light. He didn't look like a man anymore. He looked like a tear in the fabric of the universe.
"Everything has a price, Akira Tsukishiro," the Architect said. His voice was everywhere—in the wind, in the ash, in the marrow of my teeth.
"You want to save the past? You must sacrifice the future. You want to save the flesh? You must surrender the soul."
He raised the shadow-hammer once more.
"The girl and the woman are falling through the 'Context'. They aren't just falling through space. They are falling through every version of themselves that ever existed."
I looked up.
My mother's form was blurring. One moment she was the woman in the blue dress I remembered; the next, she was a withered old lady, then a crying infant, then a smear of grey ash.
Yuna was worse. Her glass-like body was shattering and reforming a hundred times a second.
They were being unmade.
*Catch... them...*
The Shard in my head was no longer laughing. It was vibrating with a frantic, desperate energy.
*If they touch... the ground... the memory... ends.*
"Lina! Can you stabilize the resonance?" I yelled, my fingers digging into the black glass floor.
Lina was huddled near a floating debris pile, her goggles cracked, her hands flying over her handheld terminal.
"I can't!" she sobbed. "The Architect is rewriting the local physics! My sensors say we're not even on Earth anymore! We're inside the Fracture!"
I looked at my hands.
The obsidian skin had reached my chest. It felt cold. It felt permanent.
I looked at the Architect.
"You think you're testing me?" I shouted, the violet crown around my heart flaring with a light so bright it turned the falling ash to steam.
"I am showing you the truth," the Architect replied. "The God did not break because of a hammer. He broke because he tried to hold everything at once. He tried to love every version of you. It was too heavy."
"Then I'll be lighter!"
I didn't run this time. I jumped.
But I didn't jump toward the Spire. I jumped into the fold.
As my body left the ground, the "Sound" returned.
It wasn't a scream this time. It was a song.
A low, humming melody that I remembered from my childhood. The song my mother used to sing when the Church's bells were too loud.
I reached out with my mind, not my hands.
I didn't call on the King's power. I didn't call on the Archive's Core.
I called on the *Void*.
The space between the stars. The place where nothing exists, and therefore, nothing can be broken.
A bridge of absolute darkness erupted from my chest. It stretched across the folding world, cutting through the Architect's white light like a blade through silk.
The darkness wrapped around my mother and Yuna.
The "unmaking" stopped.
Their forms stabilized.
But the moment I touched them, I felt the weight.
It wasn't just the weight of two bodies. It was the weight of their entire histories. Every joy, every trauma, every silent prayer they had ever whispered was suddenly being downloaded into my brain through the Insight Shard.
My mother's wedding day.
Yuna's first time seeing snow.
The smell of the bread.
The sting of the needles in the Archive's labs.
"ARGH!"
I slammed into a floating section of the city, my obsidian skin cracking under the pressure of the information.
"Akira!" Haneul was running along the side of a vertical building, her black blade glowing. She jumped, her body spinning in mid-air, and sliced through a golden spear that Amaya had thrown from the top of the Spire.
"Hold the bridge!" Haneul yelled. "Lina and I will get to them!"
"I... I can't... hold... it..."
My vision was turning into static. The Apex Core in my chest was beginning to glow a toxic green, fighting the violet light of the Shard.
The Architect watched me, his white-light face unreadable.
"You are trying to save the pieces," he said softly. "But the pieces are what make the weight. Drop them, Akira. Become the Whole. Become the God, and you will never feel pain again."
"I... would rather... bleed..."
I pulled.
The dark bridge retracted, dragging the two women toward the floating platform where I lay.
Amaya screamed from the Spire.
"Blasphemy! The King does not serve the flesh! He rules it!"
She raised both hands.
The sky above us turned into a sea of liquid gold. Thousands of sun-glass spears manifested, all pointed at the tiny bridge of darkness I had created.
"Purify the Heretic!"
The spears fell.
It was a rain of divine judgment.
Haneul threw herself over Yuna, her black blade creating a frantic shield of shadows. Lina dived under a piece of rusted plating, her scream lost in the roar of the impact.
I stood up, my body trembling.
I let go of the bridge.
Not because I was giving up.
Because I was tired of being the shield.
I looked at the falling gold. I looked at the Architect.
"You want to see value?" I whispered.
I reached into my own chest.
My fingers, now made of solid obsidian glass, sank into my skin. There was no blood. There was only the sound of glass grinding against glass.
I grabbed the Apex Core—the green-violet heart of the Archive.
And I ripped it out.
The scream that left my throat wasn't human. It was the sound of a universe being born and dying in the same second.
The green light of the Core flared one last time before I crushed it in my fist.
The explosion didn't push things away.
It pulled them in.
A localized singularity formed in the palm of my hand. The golden spears were sucked into the void. The violet fire of the Architect's plains was extinguished. Even the Spire began to lean toward me, its obsidian blocks groaning as they were dragged toward the center of my palm.
"Akira! Stop!" Haneul cried out. "You're collapsing the Zone!"
I didn't stop.
I turned the singularity toward the Architect.
"You said... everything has a price," I wheezed, my chest a gaping, hollow ruin of violet light.
"Well... I'm paying... in advance."
I threw the remains of the Core at the Architect.
The man of white light didn't move. He simply raised his shadow-hammer.
When the two forces collided, the Forbidden Zone vanished.
There was no ash. No Spire. No city.
Only a white void.
***
I was lying on my back.
The ground was soft. It smelled of jasmine tea.
I opened my eyes.
I was in my childhood home. The small apartment in the industrial sector. The walls were peeling, and the sound of the factories hummed outside the window.
My mother was there.
She was sitting at the wooden table, slicing a loaf of honey bread. She looked young. She looked happy.
"Akira," she said, her voice warm and real. "You're late for breakfast."
I tried to speak, but my throat felt like it was full of sand.
I looked at my hands.
They were normal. Five fingers. Pale skin. No glass.
"Is this... heaven?" I managed to ask.
My mother laughed. It was a beautiful, clear sound.
"No, silly. It's just a memory. One of the ones you wouldn't let go of."
She stopped slicing and looked at me. Her eyes were sad.
"But you can't stay here, Akira. The Architect is waiting."
"I don't care about him," I said, tears blurring my vision. "I just want to stay here. With you."
She walked over and knelt beside me, her hand stroking my hair.
"You didn't just save me back there, Akira. You saved my *context*. But the Architect... he's the one who holds the hammer. He's the one who decides if this memory remains real, or if it becomes a ghost."
She leaned in and whispered a name into my ear.
A name I had forgotten.
My mother's name.
**"Emiko."**
The moment the name left her lips, the apartment began to dissolve.
The walls turned into white ash. The honey bread turned into violet glass.
My mother—Emiko—smiled one last time as she faded into the mist.
"Don't let them tell you who you are, Akira. You are the one who chooses the weight."
I woke up.
I was back in the Forbidden Zone.
The Spire was in ruins. The Architect was gone.
Amaya was lying on the ground a few yards away, her golden robes scorched, her white eyes staring blankly at the sky. She was alive, but her spirit seemed broken.
Haneul was holding Yuna. The girl was breathing. Her eyes were closed, but the violet smoke had vanished, replaced by a dull, human brown.
Lina was sitting nearby, staring at her broken terminal.
"He's gone," she whispered. "The Architect. He just... vanished when the Core exploded."
I sat up.
My chest was no longer a hole.
The violet crown had settled into a steady, quiet glow. It didn't feel like a parasite anymore. It felt like... a part of me.
But as I looked at my hands, I realized the cost.
My fingers were still obsidian. The glass had stopped at my wrists, but it wasn't going away.
I had stabilized.
But I was no longer human.
"Akira?" Haneul looked up, her face a mask of exhaustion.
I stood up, my movements silent and graceful.
I looked at the horizon.
The grey clouds of the Divide were rolling back in. But far to the north, toward the Industrial City-States, a new light was rising.
A fleet of Black Archive airships was approaching.
Director Kwon wasn't finished.
"We need to go," I said.
My voice was calm. It carried a weight that made the air around me vibrate.
"To where?" Lina asked. "We've destroyed the Spire. We've fought the Church. There's nowhere left."
I looked at the ruins of the Spire.
Among the rubble, a single piece of obsidian was glowing.
The Key.
It wasn't a key to a door anymore.
It was a key to a map.
"We're going to find the rest of them," I said.
"The rest of what?" Haneul asked, standing up and drawing her blade.
"The Shards," I said.
I looked at my reflection in the black glass of my hand.
"The God didn't just break into pieces. He broke into *people*. And Kwon is going to harvest every single one of them unless we get there first."
I looked at the approaching airships.
"I'm not a King," I whispered.
"I'm the Debt Collector."
Far away, in the heart of the Black Archive, Director Kwon stood in his darkened office, watching the feed from the Zone.
He didn't look angry.
He looked satisfied.
"Phase One is complete," Kwon said to the empty room.
A voice replied from the shadows—a deep, resonant voice that sounded like grinding stones.
"The Vessel has accepted the weight?"
"He has," Kwon said.
"Then let the Second Fracture begin."
On the screen, Akira Tsukishiro turned toward the camera.
For a split second, his violet eye didn't look like a crack.
It looked like a door.
And something was looking out from the other side.
Something that hadn't been seen since the world began.
A smile.
**[END OF ARC 1]**