The countdown was burning silently across the void: 7:46… 7:45… 7:44…
Time meant something here—not just a measure, but a trap. Recursion. Memory loops. If the system completed its cycle, they'd lose more than the game.
They'd lose pieces of themselves.
Matthew paced, eyes scanning the fractured voidspace for anchor points. The mirror-Rin's disintegration left behind after-images—barely visible outlines in the air, shimmering with residual data.
"Look," he muttered, waving his hand through one. It rippled like water, then pulsed red.
Warning: Interaction with corrupted memory cluster may trigger recursion feedback.
"Exactly what we want," Rin said.
Sora narrowed her eyes. "Or exactly what it wants us to think."
"No." Matthew stepped in. "This is where it stumbled. This is where it lagged. If we break the cycle here, we can throw off the timing."
They had less than seven minutes.
And the system knew it.
Sora traced her fingers along the memory-cluster ripple. "It's like an echo. The copy wasn't fully erased—just… relocated. Archived."
She turned to the others. "If I can mask my presence, I might be able to sync to it—insert a ghost identity just long enough to draw recursion away from us."
"You'll get pulled into the next round early," Matthew warned.
"Better me than all of us. And besides…" She smirked faintly. "I want to see what it looks like before the code solidifies."
Rin reached into her jacket and pulled out a fragment of the shard from the Cathedral—a jagged remnant of the original King's Trail map, now etched with repeating symbols.
"Take this," Rin said. "If the recursion map resets, it may rewrite us—but it can't rewrite the past game's anchor logic."
Matthew's eyes widened. "Wait… If that shard was meant to guide the King's successor"
"Then maybe," Rin interrupted, "we're not here to play anymore. Maybe we're here to replace what the system lost."
Sora nodded once.
Then stepped into the echo.
The ripple flared white.
And she was gone.
Recursion Pulse Interrupted
Round Delay: Activated
Memory Swap Timer Suspended
WARNING: Ghost Identity Detected
System Instability Rising
Matthew exhaled. "She bought us time."
"Barely," Rin said. "We need to use it."
He turned to her, lowering his voice.
"We interrupt the recursion again—permanently—and this whole structure might collapse."
Rin stared at the countdown as it froze in mid-digit: 6:12…
"Then let's collapse it from the inside."