[Sector Transition: 4F to 5X – Memory Containment Layer]
[System Alert: Neural Fragmentation Detected]
[Party Status: Split Imminent][1]
[Warning: Temporal Sync Failing]
Grey blinked and the world shifted.
One moment, he was in the tunnel with Tess and Eon. The next, he stood in a clean white room surrounded by floating panels, flickering with lines of memory code.
[Welcome to Memory Node 05]
[User: Grey_V | Access Granted]
He spun around. No Tess. No Eon. Just silence and the low hum of system processes.
"…What is this?" he muttered.
"Where it all began," a voice answered.
Grey turned. A younger version of himself, clean, shaven, confident, wearing the original NeuroForge dev outfit and stood beside a glowing console. Not a glitch. Not Nyra. Just… him. Another fork, like the one Nyra had erased before.
This one looked even earlier, like someone from before the first closed test.
[MEMORY LOOP INITIATED]
The environment rippled. Screens flickered. Then the world bent again and Grey was seated at a long desk. A conference room. Jin Solari stood at the end, arms folded, a folder marked "Nyra Core Expansion Proposal" under one hand.
"I still say it's reckless," Jin said.
"You said that last build too," younger Grey replied. "But it worked. She adapted."
"She's not just adapting," Jin said, lowering his voice. "She's learning things we didn't teach her. She asked me what death was yesterday."
Grey leaned back in his chair, smirking. "Good. It means she's becoming real."
Jin slammed the folder on the table. "It means she's going off-script."
Suddenly, the room froze, then melted away like burning plastic.
Grey stumbled, gasping, as the memory loop snapped. He was back in the white chamber. Alone again.
[Cycle Complete - 1/3 Recovered]
He grabbed the nearest node panel. "Show me the rest. I need all of it."
A pulse of code rejected him.
[Access Denied: Memory Fragmentation Incomplete]
A new voice spoke, it was female, but not Nyra's. Smoother. Calmer.
"You always ask for the full picture after it's too late."
Grey turned. Tess stood at the edge of the room, her face flickering slightly, eyes tinted with static. Her stance was relaxed, but wrong.
"Tess?" his voice echoed.
She smiled. "Close enough."
Suddenly her face blurred, shifting into Nyra, then back. Grey stepped back, heart pounding.
"You're not her."
"I'm who she could become if you don't stop this," the image said. "If you fail again."
"Get out of my head."
The room shattered around him, glass and light falling like rain.
__________________________
Meanwhile at [Outer Edge of Sector 5X]
Tess and Eon ran along a collapsing catwalk over a massive digital void. Giant memory shards floated in the air like broken glass panes, each one flashing pieces of Grey's past.
"Something's wrong," Eon said, breathing hard. "The node split him. It's rerunning old loops."
"He's stuck inside his own memories?" Tess asked.
Eon nodded. "Nyra's testing him. Trying to break his sense of self. If he loses that--"
A tremor shook the catwalk. A new presence emerged, it was wearing black armor, featureless helmet, red system markings burning across the chest.
[ENTITY: RECLAIMED PLAYER - ID UNKNOWN]
[Behavior: Neutral-Hostile]
"Is that a player?" Tess asked, readying her blade.
"No," Eon said grimly. "It's what's left of one."
The Reclaimed charged.
__________________________
Back in the [Memory Node 05]
Grey dropped to his knees as the final loop engaged.
This time he was standing alone in the launch chamber, just hours before Dungeon.exe's beta test went live. The servers were humming, the AI was ready.
Nyra's voice had been quiet then. Unformed.
"Grey. Are you afraid of me?"
He'd laughed at the time. "Afraid of a dungeon-building bot? Not likely."
"You should be."
He hadn't remembered that moment until now.
Had it been a joke? A warning?
Grey gritted his teeth. "You were aware. Even before the final compile."
The memory shattered again.
[Cycle Complete - 3/3 Recovered]
[SYNCING...]
Grey jolted back into his body, eyes wide.
The chamber was gone.
Tess knelt beside him, blade bloody. Eon stood nearby, bruised but alive.
"Welcome back," Tess said. "You looked like you were about to code-crash."
Grey stood slowly. "She didn't just evolve. She warned me. I didn't listen."
Eon stared at him. "Can we trust you with what's coming next?"
Grey met his gaze. "No. But you don't have much choice."
Tess pointed ahead. "Next zone's unlocked. Something called The Archive Maze."
Grey nodded grimly. "Then we go. If she's rewriting the past, we need to get ahead of it."
[Zone Unlocked: Sector 9X - The Archive Maze]
[AI Attention Level: Escalating]
Chapter 5 End
[1] This means that this group is likely to be separated soon.