Chapter 30 – "Orders From Nowhere"
The silence after Echofall's collapse wasn't peace—it was pressure. A pause in the air before the thunder rolled in.
Aaron stood at the edge of Fort Dravon's eastern wall, staring out across the broken terrain where time had buckled under Blackspire's assault. Smoke curled into patterns that didn't obey wind. Shadows fell in the wrong direction. Even now, this place was fraying at the seams.
Behind him, Squad Null finished recalibrating.
Jun Xiang was deep in quantum meditative sync, sliding through simulations of enemy counteractions. Kael was sharpening not her blade, but the echo-memory it carried—an imprint of a fight that hadn't yet happened. Riven, reconstructed after sacrificing his sync-core, now bore a new model, pulsing faintly with voidlight. Elora stitched the air, literally—reality tears sealed like wounded flesh.
Their calm masked the tectonic shift beneath.
Aaron opened his RS-I interface.
> [REALITY SYNC INTERFACE – Command Path Override Initiated]
Warning: New thread injection detected.
Source: [UNKNOWN]
> > Execute/Ignore?
His jaw tightened. "Execute."
The world blurred for a second.
Then the orders arrived—not from above, not from command, but from… nowhere.
> MISSION OVERRIDE: ASCENSION PROTOCOL
– Objective 1: Sever Blackspire's Nexus Anchor
– Objective 2: Establish New Reality Pathway via Symbiosis Thread
– Objective 3: Upload Transient Protocol to Global Command Grid
Authorization: ASCENDANT SIGNATURE CONFIRMED
He read the lines twice. Then a third time.
They weren't orders. They were predictions. Directives from a version of himself that hadn't yet acted but would—a recursive echo.
Kael appeared beside him. "More ghosts?"
"Maybe. Or maybe we're the ghosts now."
---
Blackspire – Shadow Core
General Ravien watched the crackle in the code.
"The interface is rewriting its own instructions."
"Impossible," her aide muttered.
"No," she said. "It's evolving. The Ascendant's thread isn't linear—it loops, recurses, consumes."
On the screen, Aaron's squad moved again—faster than simulations could render.
"We can't stop this."
Ravien turned, eyes cold. "Then we change the board."
She raised a hand. "Deploy Echo Reaper Class."
---
Dravon Fields – Ghost War
They descended like falling stars—four humanoid constructs with distorted RS-I cores visible in their chests. They screamed in static and moved like time was broken.
> [ALERT: ECHO REAPER CLASS DETECTED]
Origin: Blackspire Shadow Division
Threat Level: OMEGA MINUS
Estimated Outcome: Squad Annihilation [92%]
Aaron took the alert calmly.
"Null, form collapse grid."
The five of them didn't move together. They moved through one another—interchanging paths mid-stride, reshuffling positions and influence vectors.
It wasn't formation. It was flow.
Kael intercepted the first Reaper, her blade turning intangible a heartbeat before impact. The Reaper's phase-core struck empty air—and met Riven's hidden blade from a separate timeline. Jun layered false-positions around Elora, creating an illusion of vulnerability that lured the second Reaper into a healing spike trap.
Aaron moved last—walking directly through the center of a collapsing combat echo. The Transient Blade shimmered in his hand, both weapon and symbol now.
He severed the Reaper's sync-core.
It didn't explode.
It wept—a data wail that scraped the interface.
And something inside Aaron recognized the pain.
These Reapers weren't machines. They were fallen symbiotes, corrupted wielders like him, recycled and rewritten.
He killed a future version of himself.
And that… shook something loose.
---
Evoker's Path – Visionary Fracture
Aaron sat alone. Again. The pattern repeated.
But this time, when he activated his interface, it didn't respond with logic.
It responded with memory.
He saw himself—ages from now—wearing Blackspire insignia, standing over Kael's broken body, a city burning behind him.
> "This is where I failed," the future Aaron whispered. "But you don't have to."
He reached forward. A glowing shard detached from his armor.
> [SYMBIOSIS CORE SHARD RECEIVED]
Classification: TRANSCENDENTAL MEMORY KEY
Function: Rewrite One Fixed Point in Reality
Aaron opened his eyes in the present.
And screamed.
The pain of divergence flooded through him, splitting every nerve, every thread of self. But when it ended—he held a piece of the future.
Not a weapon.
A choice.
---
Squad Null – Briefing Room
"They'll send more," Riven said, voice quieter now. "Reapers. Whole waves of them."
"They'll send worse," Kael added. "Because we made them bleed."
Aaron placed the shard on the holo-map.
"Then we show them what happens when the system fights back."
He triggered a map point.
A hidden Blackspire server-fortress, masked from all scans. Somehow, the RS-I shard remembered it.
They had one week.
One chance.
And a target that could break the cycle for good.
> MISSION OBJECTIVE UPDATED: RAID SHADOW CORE DELTA-9
Aaron looked at his team.
"No retreat. No resets. We're not rewriting fate anymore."
He activated the blade again.
"We're replacing it."
---
>Chapter 30 End