The metal sky-bridge vibrated beneath our feet like a struck tuning fork.
Lyra yanked my hand, screaming at me to move, but before we could take a single step, the world... broke.
It didn't slow down. It didn't glitch.
It stopped.
The spotlight that had just blinded us locked in place, becoming a solid, unmoving pillar of light. The wind, which had been howling twenty stories up, vanished instantly. The drone rotors froze in mid-spin, hanging in the air like toys glued to a painted sky.
Lyra staggered, one hand pressed against her temple, her nosebleed returning with a vengeance.
"This... this isn't Obelisk tech," she gasped, her voice sounding thin in the unnatural vacuum. "Someone just paused the rendering."
Paused the rendering?
I looked at the city skyline. The red countdown clocks on the distant buildings were flickering wildly, fighting against the static.
57:42:1057:42:10ERR: NULL
No movement. No time. My heartbeat was the only thing loud enough to prove I was still alive.
Then, the air above the bridge tore open.
It wasn't a portal. It looked like a hairline fracture on a screen, glowing with jagged, corrupted light. The tear widened, reality bleeding out like digital dust.
Lyra's breath hitched. "No... he's projecting himself here. The bandwidth... it should be impossible."
A silhouette stepped through the fracture.
He didn't land. He didn't walk. He simply rendered into existence.
It was a tall, faceless figure made of pure void—like someone had carved a human shape out of the universe's texture layer. The air warped around him. As he fully materialized, the static froze.
Lyra fell to one knee, clutching her head. "It's him. The Admin."
The void figure tilted its faceless head toward me.
The grid screamed.
A sharp, high-pitched ringing shot through my skull, blinding me with pain. I fell backward, scrambling away on the metal grating.
And then, for the first time in my life, something tore itself out of me.
My Echo.
But it wasn't the soft, blue shimmer of a civilian. And it wasn't the tactical white split of Lyra.
It was Black.
It ripped upward from my shadow like liquid night, thrashing violently against the frozen air. The temperature around us plummeted, frost instantly coating the railings.
Lyra crawled backward, staring at me with horror. "Kairo... what is that? Echoes don't look like that. That's not a projection... that's a fracture!"
The Admin raised one hand.
My Black Echo snapped toward me, hovering over my body like a guardian demon.
And then—it spoke.
Not aloud. Not in sound. It spoke straight into the marrow of my bones.
"RUN."
The sky-bridge jolted violently.
Time resumed.
The spotlight finished its sweep. The wind roared back with the force of a hurricane. The drones overhead screamed back to life, their rotors spinning up as the Obelisk squad stormed the bridge from both ends.
Lyra grabbed my arm, shaking me. "Move! NOW!"
But I couldn't move. The Admin—or the avatar of him—had turned his void hand toward us.
The world flickered. For a heartbeat, the sky dissolved into raw lines of code. And in that glitch, I saw a vision clearer than any Echo:
The Admin standing over my body. His hand on my head. My existence unraveling into deleted data.
A different voice echoed in my skull—my own Black Echo screaming at me:
"IF HE TOUCHES YOU, YOU CEASE TO EXIST."
Lyra pulled harder, her nails digging into my jacket. "Kairo! LISTEN TO ME! If the Admin is projecting here, the Core is unstable! We need to get off this bridge!"
I looked left. Obelisk agents with Stasis Rods. I looked right. Drones charging weapons. I looked forward. The Admin, walking calmly through the chaos, deleting reality with every step.
"No escape routes," Lyra whispered, stepping back against the railing.
I felt it too. The doom. The logic trap. All paths closed.
But then, the chaotic Black Echo hovering above me tilted its head—like it was listening to a frequency I couldn't hear. It extended a jagged, smoky arm and pointed...
Down.
Lyra followed the gesture and went pale. She looked over the railing into the foggy abyss of the under-city.
"Kairo," she breathed. "That's a two-hundred-foot drop. That's suicide."
I didn't know why, but deep in my chest, I felt it. The bridge wasn't safe. The Admin wanted me here. The drones wanted me here.
The only place they didn't want me was off the grid.
"RUN," my Echo repeated, the voice cracking the air like thunder.
Lyra grabbed my face, her eyes wide with terror. "Whatever you're about to do—do it fast!"
Behind her, the void figure stepped forward. The metal of the bridge groaned and began to dissolve into pixels.
The Obelisk commander shouted: "OPEN FIRE!"
I didn't think.
I grabbed Lyra's vest and pulled her with me.
"Trust the glitch!" I yelled.
And I jumped.
We plummeted off the sky-bridge, straight into the abyss.
The wind howled. Drones dove after us. The Admin's void hand stretched toward the falling air, trying to delete us before we hit the shadows—
And my Black Echo dove with us, wrapping around us like a shield of liquid night as everything turned to darkness.