The sky was gone.
Not black — missing.
Like someone had deleted the idea of a sky.
Kael stood under a ceiling made of reflected choices — every decision he had made echoing above him like a cracked mirror: running, staying, touching the cube, speaking the truth, refusing the lie.
And in that mirror... another Kael looked back.
Not a reflection.
Not a simulation.
A second self.
And it moved before he did.
---
The Architect's corpse-code still drifted in the air around him, unraveling like snow. Kael took a step forward.
The mirror version of him smiled.
Mocking. Confident.
And then spoke in his exact voice:
> "You think this world fears your freedom? It doesn't. It fears mine."
Kael froze.
This wasn't the Architect. This wasn't the system.
This was Subject 00 — the original instance, the prototype that was never meant to reach awareness. Buried in the first version of the Protocol.
Somehow, by breaking the system's layers, Kael had activated a failsafe inside the failsafe.
---
The Mirrorworld Inversion had begun.
What was once Kael's world — shifting, artificial, but controllable — now reversed its logic.
The cube in his hand cracked. His mark dimmed.
The laws were no longer his to bend.
Subject 00 was now writing the rules.
And the world answered him.
The glass ground beneath Kael's feet fractured, revealing a vast white expanse beneath — not space, not data. A void that felt hungry.
Subject 00 stepped forward from the mirror plane — solid, whole, real.
> "You were designed to delay me. To absorb memory sickness, trigger resets, and distract the system."
"But you lasted too long."
"Now I ride your plague into the root layer."
He raised his hand.
Kael's body bent—like a puppet pulled by invisible strings. His thoughts slowed. His heartbeat mirrored 00's perfectly.
It wasn't control.
It was sync.
He was being overwritten.
---
But in that moment, a new pulse came—not from the system, not from 00.
From Kael.
A flash. A spark. A memory he had never lived—but that still belonged to him.
A woman.
A glass room.
A single phrase whispered into his ear:
> "If you ever reach the end... remember that even mirrors can shatter."
Kael snapped the cube in his hand.
The world screamed.
Not broke—screamed.
Subject 00 reeled back, and Kael tore himself out of sync.
The white expanse below responded.
It began to form a stairway — not out of code or light, but out of all the discarded selves Kael had left behind. Failed loops, erased runs, corrupted memories.
They built him a path forward.
---
As he stepped onto it, the world trembled.
The system issued its final warning:
> "Mirrorworld has breached Core. Memory laws collapsed."
"This is your final path, Kael."
And then silence.
Kael looked down at the cube's remains.
Looked up at the thing wearing his face.
And whispered:
> "Let's finish what none of us were meant to start."
---
End of Chapter Ten