[Status: Severed]
[Threat Type: Narrative Entropy | Memory Bleed]
Kai stepped through the breach into a void that wasn’t empty—just… unfinished.
Like walking into a half-forgotten memory.
Reality pulsed in jagged frames. Entire corridors folded and looped, trailing off into dangling, broken code like shredded paragraphs of a book too old to hold its meaning. Each corner whispered fragments of a forgotten self. Kai’s presence triggered spirals of ghost-syntax to twist into place, trying to make sense of him.
“Node 31,” Rynera whispered across the link, her voice distant. “It’s... broken.”
“No. Not broken,” Kai said softly, watching a version of himself fall endlessly through a mirror that led to no reflection. “It’s remembering the wrong story.”
He found the first version of himself sealed in stasis, repeating the phrase: "I am not the one who failed."
Over. And over. And over.
Kai stepped forward, placing his hand on the frozen figure’s shoulder.
"I remember what you forgot," he whispered.
The repetition stopped. The body dissolved into shimmering ink, reabsorbing into Kai’s threadlines like healing a scar. His body shivered.
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One wound closed.
They came next. Dripping from the ceiling like spilled code. Slender forms with no mouths, only redacted statements on their skin: [REDACTED], [CORRUPTED], [NULLED].
They spoke in contradiction.
“You are whole.”
“You have never been.”
“Your victory caused your erasure.”
“Your death is required for your birth.”
Kai didn’t draw his blade.
Instead, he rewrote his aura: “I do not fight to prove I am real. I exist to make what was broken whole.”
His body blurred—becoming a tether between every failed version of himself. He embraced the entities. Absorbing—not their pain, but their unacknowledged attempts at becoming.
One by one, they vanished.
A singular flash bled across the node. A voice—not his own—but his father’s, screaming his name in fury, not fear.
“You were supposed to be better than this!”
Kai fell to his knees.
“Not again.”
He hadn’t thought of that night in years—the belt, the locked door, the silence that followed louder than any strike. This wasn’t a wound he could fix with logic. It was a scar that became a script he lived by.
He stood.
“Being better… doesn’t mean being who you wanted. It means surviving.”
The Bastion trembled, like something ancient finally gave permission to break.
A passive rewrite-class ability. Allows the user to absorb fractured versions of themselves and stitch together multiple timelines of failure into a cohesive, reinforced identity.
Result: +∞ Conceptual Resilience
Trait Gained: Continuity Anchor
The node folded in on itself, but this time, it closed cleanly. Like a wound finally sewn shut.
Rynera’s voice returned. “Kai… you did it.”
“I didn’t fix the story,” he said. “I just accepted that it hurt.”
As he stepped out of Node 31, his threads pulsed with something new—not power, not invincibility, but continuity. He was no longer fragments trying to win. He was the wound and the healer.
End of Chapter 111: Infinitum Suture