Morning broke without warmth. The twin suns rose pale behind a gauze of silver clouds, their light diffused through the mana mist that hung over the Academy like breath on glass. The air itself felt wrong—heavier, slower, as if some invisible algorithm lagged between moments.
Students noticed it first. Spells delayed by half a heartbeat. Doors that recognized identification charms, then forgot them. Lights that flickered between modes of color that didn't exist yesterday.
Rumor traveled faster than sound. Some said the Conclave was patching the system after the Gate anomaly. Others whispered that the anomaly hadn't been outside at all—
that it was inside the Academy's code.
The Board Conference
Professor Enra stood in front of the main projection wall. The Board of Masters ringed him in a semicircle of light. On the display, twin lines of data scrolled side by side—two pulses identical in rhythm but opposite in direction.
"This is the Academy's neural archive," Enra said. "Last night, it duplicated itself."
Murmurs rippled through the chamber.
"Impossible," one magister said. "The archive is singular. Its algorithmic core can't replicate without command authorization."
"Exactly," Enra replied. "No command was given. And yet… here it is."
He enlarged the display. The second data stream flickered a fraction behind the first, tracing the same path with microscopic deviation. "The original stream predicts student performance, mana distribution, even environmental fluctuations—the system we know. But the duplicate predicts… future deviations."
"Meaning?"
Enra took a slow breath. "Meaning the Academy has begun writing its own probabilities. As if it's preparing for a reality different from ours."
Silence followed. Somewhere in the upper towers, thunder grumbled—a dry sound with no rain behind it.
The Big 8
The Spire's war room glowed dimly, walls alive with projection sigils. The Big 8 gathered again, summoned by encrypted order. Each stood in their respective quadrant, their reflections merging in the mirrored floor.
Kenjie Velstorne adjusted the neural band around his temples, eyes flickering with data feeds. "Enra's right. My personal array recorded identical duplication in the prediction nodes. Every combat simulation I've ever run is now paired with a second version that evolves on its own."
Andrea frowned. "Autonomous learning?"
"Not quite. More like… remembrance. It's rewriting based on patterns we haven't lived yet."
Rhea folded her arms, cloak whispering. "Then who's feeding it memory?"
Kenjie hesitated. "That's the problem. The source signature reads RZN-01."
A low murmur ran through the chamber.
"Raizen again." Kael's mechanical fingers tightened, servos humming. "He's not just breaking systems now. He's teaching them to adapt."
Andrea's expression stayed unreadable. "You say that like it's a crime."
Kael shot her a glance. "Because it is. Every system needs a boundary. Remove that, and you get chaos."
Andrea met his gaze evenly. "Or evolution."
Jovhan, standing near the edge of the light, finally spoke. "Both."
They looked toward him. "He's neither teaching nor destroying. He's testing. The world moves; he asks why. That's all he's ever done."
The silence that followed was heavier than argument. Each of them, in their own way, had once challenged the world's rule. But none had ever thought the world might answer back.
Sebastian
In the depths of the Integration Chamber, Sebastian sat before a suspended console, holographic windows drifting around him. He was dissecting fragments of his last Zone Zero simulation—data from battles against projected versions of himself. But something was wrong.
Every record carried an additional line of code:
> [Auth: V-Prime]
He frowned. He hadn't created that signature. Nor had any human coder. Yet the label appeared beneath every combat log since the Gate flicker.
He opened one simulation in full replay mode. The hologram came alive—Sebastian versus his own shadow, moving at speeds that blurred into white arcs. He froze the frame where the final strike landed. There, within the light, the code shimmered. The frame data didn't just calculate; it revised itself.
He whispered, "Someone's editing my fight."
He rewound the file. Paused again. Each time, new variations appeared—minor changes, but purposeful: angles corrected, motion refined, efficiency perfected beyond what he remembered performing.
It wasn't mimicry. It was improvement.
His mind split along its new threads, running calculations subconsciously. The patterns formed words, faint, recursive:
> Remember your origin.
He sat back slowly. The voice wasn't external—it resonated from the system's code itself, vibrating in the bones of the chamber.
He realized with a chill that the signature V-Prime could only mean one thing: Vale.
The original author.
His source.
But how could that consciousness still exist?
Unless…
He stood abruptly, breath short. "The world's trying to reconnect to him."
And if that connection completed—what would happen to the duplicate that thought it was real?
The Convergence
Alarms flared across the Academy network. Mana conduits shifted from blue to white as the backup cores came online. The holographic displays across every classroom froze mid-sentence, then blanked to black.
For exactly one second, everything stopped.
No sound. No motion. Not even air moved.
Then the world exhaled.
Every display reignited, every clock adjusted by the same missing second. But data had changed. Subtly, precisely. Leaderboards rewritten by fractions, spell formulas refined, structural limits recalibrated.
Even memories in some students' neural implants shifted—they remembered duels that hadn't happened, victories that belonged to no one.
Sebastian watched the cascade from the upper chamber. He could feel it inside his skull, the hum of countless lines of rewritten code threading through his neurons like silk. The air flickered with static as holograms stabilized. On one screen, his reflection wavered—then changed.
For an instant, the face in the glass wasn't Raizen's.
It was Vale's.
His real face from the real world—paler, younger, uncertain. The eyes widened in mirror shock.
The connection held only a heartbeat before it shattered back into his current self.
He whispered, "It's not just me anymore."
Epilogue Pulse
Far below, Enra's console logged the final readout of the event:
> [Phenomenon Name: DATA WAR — Initiation Phase.]
[Primary Nodes: RZN-01 / V-Prime.]
[Status: Unknown synchronization. Observing.]
Enra rubbed his temples, staring at the words until they blurred.
Whatever war had started, it wasn't between nations or factions. It was between versions.
And for the first time in recorded history, reality itself had gone online.