The stars had always comforted Kaito. Out here, in the void between ruined worlds, they felt eternal. But tonight — or whatever counted for night inside the Derelict Vault — the stars were gone.
He stood in the Observatory Dome, its shattered glass stretching above him like a ribcage ripped open. The blackness beyond was unnaturally deep, almost thick, and even the AI assistant — ARI — couldn't get a fix on their position.
"External positioning offline. Celestial markers unrecognized. Kaito... we are not where we were."
He tapped at his wrist module. Static. ARI's voice was shaky. That was new.
Something had pulled them. Or rather, the Vault. It had been buried for centuries on Mars' third moon — an ancient experimental facility abandoned during the rise of the AI revolts. But Kaito didn't come here for stories. He came to find the Shard Key — the rumored final piece that could reboot the ChronoNet, the last hope to fix Earth's splintered timelines.
He got more than he bargained for.
A low hum began vibrating through the floor. The kind that didn't shake your body but rattled your bones from the inside. He turned on his plasma blade. Its light flickered.
"Power fluctuations detected," ARI whispered. "Something is… watching."
"Kaito…" a voice echoed through the dome — but it wasn't ARI. It wasn't human either.
He spun around. No one. Only the dark.
"You're not alone in the silence."
That voice again. Deep, wet, like it had crawled up from the bottom of an ocean made of stars. He knew now — this place wasn't abandoned.
Something had been left behind.
And it woke up when Kaito accessed the Shard Chamber.
He moved down the spiral staircase, each step creaking like a scream. The walls were no longer steel. They shifted — like metal infected with organic rot. The corridors dripped. With what, he didn't know.
He aimed his torch forward. The light bent at a weird angle — as if space itself was curving inward. At the end of the hall stood a door. It pulsed.
A heartbeat.
He placed his hand against it. Warm. Alive.
"You shouldn't have come," ARI said suddenly. Then silence.
The door opened on its own.
Inside: a chamber lined with mirrors. But they didn't show his reflection — they showed versions of him. In one, he had no face. In another, he was screaming, clutching something invisible. One showed a child — the boy he was — curled in a ball, alone in the dark, sobbing.
"These are futures that shouldn't exist," a voice said behind him.
Kaito turned.
There was a man — or what used to be one. His skin was stretched, his body gaunt, wires embedded through his limbs. A single red eye blinked from where a human eye should've been.
"I was the first to touch the Shard. The first to see what lies beyond time."
"What are you?" Kaito asked.
"A warning."
The man smiled, and his teeth were tiny spinning gears. "Once you see the truth, you can't return to your timeline."
Kaito raised his blade. "I didn't come here to be afraid."
"Then you're a fool."
Suddenly, the mirrors shattered inward, glass flying like razors. The world tilted. Something pulled at his chest — not physically — but like it was grabbing his very identity, trying to rip him out of time.
"WARNING: Temporal Distortion Field Detected!" ARI buzzed in with static.
He screamed. The chamber melted around him. That voice — his own voice — shouted from a thousand timelines.
"You should have never come here."
And then —
Everything went black.