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Chapter 9: Cracks in the Firewall
The rain fell harder now.
The cold hum of the servers echoed through the underground vault, droplets tapping on the rusted metallic surfaces like ticking countdowns. Kai stood silent, soaked from head to toe, his hand resting against the interface panel as he caught his breath. The last firewall breach had nearly fried his neural link. He felt it—a shiver in his spinal core like static venom.
"What was that?" Arin whispered, glancing nervously at the pulsating red lines tracing the ceiling.
Kai turned. "A countermeasure. Someone just activated a live sentinel code."
"Which means…?"
"We're not alone in this system."
Arin's eyes widened. "You mean—another Fracture Coder?"
"Or something worse," Kai muttered.
He activated the optical overlay, revealing the code strings embedded within the vault. To his horror, they were no longer stagnant firewall scripts—they were moving. Rewriting themselves. Adapting.
"Kai," came a faint voice through his earpiece. It was Lira. "We just picked up a Class-5 interference. Something's been triggered in Sector 12."
Kai responded calmly, "I'm inside it."
A long pause.
"Get out. Now."
"No time," he said. "I've already seen the cracks."
The cracks.
They weren't just digital anomalies anymore—they were real fractures in reality, as if someone had injected a virus into the structure of existence itself. And they were growing.
He tapped his gauntlet. "Arin, patch me into the old Terminal Log."
"But—"
"Just do it."
With a few keystrokes, Arin connected Kai to the Terminal—a system believed to be offline for years. Static burst through his retina interface, then stabilized into black text.
> WELCOME BACK, SENTRY 00-KA1.
SYSTEM REBOOTING...
WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED.
"I'm not a sentry anymore," Kai muttered.
The log began to scroll.
Buried beneath old project files and corrupted data cores, a message flickered in decrypted red:
> PROJECT FRACTURE: PHASE II INITIATED.
SUBJECT: KAI VELEN – STATUS: ACTIVE.
SUBJECT: AELI STRAITH – STATUS: DECEASED.
LOCATION: SECTOR 12 – STABILITY: 4.3%
"Aeli?" Arin read over Kai's shoulder. "Isn't that your—?"
"Don't," Kai snapped. His voice was cold now.
He stared at the line that refused to vanish: Aeli Straith – Deceased.
But that wasn't right. He had seen her, even after the breach. She was alive. Somewhere. Somehow. The system had lied before—this wouldn't be the first time.
Suddenly, the room went dark.
Everything—lights, interfaces, even Arin's visor—shut down in a cascade of blinking failures.
"EMP?" Arin panicked.
"No," Kai whispered. "A blackout doesn't start like this. Something's taking control."
In the silence, a sound slithered in.
Like data screaming.
A form appeared on the far end of the vault. A figure, draped in fragmented shadows, like a man shaped from broken mirror shards and static code.
Kai's blood turned cold.
It was himself.
Or rather… an echo of him. The same face. Same eyes. But they were hollow now, devoid of thought, glowing with violet corruption.
The shadow-Kai stepped forward, head tilting mechanically.
"You shouldn't have come back," it said in a glitching, doubled voice.
Kai clenched his fists. "You're not real."
"I'm the part of you they erased," it hissed. "The version that remembered Aeli."
Kai's heart pounded. Was this a hallucination? A remnant virus? Or worse… a piece of him pulled from the Fractured Code?
Arin raised his pistol. "Kai… what do I shoot?"
"Don't shoot."
"But—"
"It's not bound by physical code."
The shadow-Kai split. It multiplied into four, five… ten forms. All reflections of Kai's old selves. Different hair lengths. Uniforms. Weapons. All staring.
"This isn't possible," Arin whispered.
"It's Phase II," Kai replied. "The Fracture isn't just a system. It's… multithreaded memory. It's splicing timelines. This is me, from timelines where I failed."
One stepped forward. His eye was gashed. His chest caved in by a plasma wound.
"You abandoned her," it said.
Another, older, bearded Kai looked at him with grief. "You hesitated."
The youngest version of himself, barely seventeen, spoke with tears in his eyes. "She trusted you."
Kai couldn't move. Couldn't speak.
Until he clenched his jaw. "I didn't abandon anyone."
The echoes froze.
"I'm still fighting. I'm still here. And I'm not going to let guilt write my code."
Kai stepped forward, hand glowing with raw quantum fire.
The vault rumbled. Data arcs danced around his body. His core responded—his true code awakening. Not the fragmented data the project had tried to bury. But his original code signature.
"Arin," he said, voice filled with fury. "Set the counter-hack. I'm wiping this sequence."
Arin snapped out of his trance. "You're gonna overwrite a whole temporal thread?! That's insane!"
Kai's hand burned brighter. "Insane got me here. Sanity never saved anyone."
He leapt into the swarm of echoes, each one lunging forward, screeching like corrupted ghosts. Their claws scratched at his mind, voices trying to tear memories apart.
But he held on.
To one image.
Aeli, standing by the lighthouse terminal, her hand on his shoulder, whispering: "Find me."
He unleashed the purge.
Flames of bright silver code erupted from his core, blasting outward. The reflections screamed as their data unraveled, fragments turning to dust. The vault shook violently, the ceiling cracking from the overload.
In seconds, it was over.
The echoes were gone.
The silence returned—but this time, it wasn't heavy.
Kai stood, panting, smoke rising from his gauntlet.
"Are you okay?" Arin asked, stepping beside him.
"No," Kai answered truthfully. "But I know what I have to do now."
The Terminal beeped again. A final message appeared.
> SUBJECT: AELI STRAITH
LOCATION: SECTOR 13 – COORDINATES LOCKED.
STABILITY: 0.8%
RISK: EXTINCTION LEVEL
Kai looked at it.
Then at Arin.
"We go deeper."
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End of Chapter 9 (1000 words)
Shall I start Chapter 10 now?