The Silver Tower stood outside of time.
It didn't drift through the void, nor did it truly exist within it. It simply remained, suspended between the infinite Link Realms like a monument reality itself had forgotten to erase. No wind reached its spire. No sound escaped its depths. And locked deep within its core, sealed inside a stasis pod, rested a single, motionless body.
The true frame of the world's ultimate mistake.
Leornars.
But the tower wasn't where the danger was anymore. Across trillions of metaphysical layers, the infection had already begun.
The sky above the capital was broken.
Not stormy. Not clouded. *Broken.* Jagged cracks fractured the heavens, exposing a bruised-purple void pulsing with static.
Down in the mud, Sahara Kurnov gasped for air. Her breathing was shallow, her fingers trembling as she tried to force herself upright. Beside her lay her sword—a weapon forged beneath the light of a dead star, crafted for the sole purpose of cutting through gods.
Now, it was useless.
"Kurumi...?" Sahara managed to choke out, glancing at her companion.
Kurumi Yamauchi wasn't looking at the sky. She was clutching her head, her fingers digging wildly into her hair as fragments of her memories flickered like a dying television set.
*Earth Prime. Faces. Voices. Places.*
She remembered them. Then she didn't. Then she remembered *remembering* them.
"Something's wrong..." Kurumi's voice cracked, her breath coming in frantic hitches. She squeezed her eyes shut. "I... I can't remember who I am."
They were supposed to be the anchors. The heroes designed to survive the convergence. The universe had written their existence with absolute purpose, blessing them with the probability needed to overcome any tragedy.
But their destinies had already been hollowed out. Something had eaten them from the inside.
And now, the predator was standing right in front of them.
He looked about seventeen.
Platinum-blond hair, rain-soaked and clinging to his forehead. Crimson eyes that were entirely, unnervingly empty. No malice. No anger. No satisfaction. Just a hollow void.
To anyone else, he was just a kid from some quiet border village. He had a human mother, a birthplace, a biological history, and a soul. Everything reality required for a clean pass. For nearly two decades, the local world's security logic had accepted his existence without a second thought.
He had allowed himself to be born here. Allowed himself to grow, letting the world build a false history around him while his true strength quietly recovered.
Now, the disguise was coming apart at the seams.
Kurumi forced her head up, her vision blurring. For a split second, the boy's outline distorted. She didn't see a human—she saw something vast, ancient, and utterly terrifying lurking behind the concept of existence itself.
"Leornars..." Her voice was barely a whisper. "What... what are you?"
Leornars didn't answer. He shifted his gaze to Sahara, then back to Kurumi, his expression unreadable.
Talking was a waste of time. This boyish frame was just an avatar—a disposable meat-suit crafted to navigate this specific layer of reality. His true flesh remained locked in the Silver Tower, but his consciousness?
His consciousness was everywhere.
*CRACK.*
The sound wasn't thunder. It was the heavy, terrifying acoustic of a law being enforced.
A pillar of blinding white light ruptured the sky. It wasn't magic, nor was it light—it was a divine command issued directly from beyond the narrative.
Minum's enforcement protocols had finally locked onto the anomaly.
Instantly, the world around Leornars began to disintegrate. Space peeled away like wet paper. Rain froze mid-air before dissolving into raw data. The ground beneath his boots shattered into fragments of probability as reality tried desperately to purge the virus.
Leornars just watched. He didn't move. He didn't flinch.
Fear wasn't in his code. Neither was any urge to protect the world dying around him. Why defend a system he despised? His consciousness had been crushed by reality more times than he could count, and through every death, only one truth remained.
*Spite.*
He hated the system. He hated the gods. Above all, he hated the arrogant authority sitting on the central throne.
Leornars opened his mouth.
He didn't draw a blade. He didn't chant a spell. He simply... opened his jaw, and the darkness within answered.
A soundless shockwave tore through the capital. A wave of silent, absolute decay spread instantly in all directions.
"AGH—!"
Sahara screamed as her skin turned a sickly gray. Something invisible reached deep into her chest, yanked hard, and began draining her life. Her energy, her vitality, her very existence—all of it was being devoured.
Beside her, Kurumi collapsed face-first into the mud.
"Stop..." she sobbed, but her thoughts were already breaking apart into useless noise. Her mind was being harvested.
And they weren't the only ones.
Within a three-mile radius, every living soul felt the collapse. Soldiers dropped like flies. Peasants collapsed in the streets. Animals stiffened and died. Children screamed, then went instantly silent.
Thousands of lives were dragged straight into the black void radiating from Leornars. He was using the entire city as a meat-shield. Every soul was a hostage; every death absorbed the divine strike meant for him.
At the center of the carnage, Leornars finally spoke.
"You can't erase what has died a million times."
His voice echoed with the cadence of thousands of hollow ghosts speaking through a single throat.
"You can't erase something that has already learned how to survive erasure."
The divine light slammed down—and stalled out. It struck the dense barrier of decaying souls, stagnating uselessly against the parasite's defense.
Leornars watched the light fade, his vessel finally beginning to fracture under the strain. The flesh was cracking, but that was fine. It had served its purpose.
Space split wide behind him, revealing a dark rift. Beyond it lay another dimension. Another world. Another fake origin waiting to be written.
As his avatar began to disintegrate into static, Leornars turned his back on the burning capital and casually stepped into the rift. He didn't need to win every battle; the Pathogen only needed to survive.
Behind him, Kurumi and Sahara lay broken in the mud. Ahead of him, a new life awaited.
Somewhere in another world, a newborn would soon take its first breath. Another eighteen years of waiting would begin.
And the Pathogen would take one more step toward the throne.