The travel wasn't instant.
The Throne System's Gate tore through the boundaries of space, folding one broken reality into another. The boy's body floated in stasis, his limbs tense, brain burning with data streams he couldn't parse yet. He wasn't just crossing distance—he was crossing narrative weight, timeline authority, and foundational logic.
This was no longer a ruined Earth.
He landed hard.
Sand hissed beneath him—shards of glass, not grains. The wind howled like a dying machine, and the sky above was a webwork of shattered moons and gravitational scars, their light refracted endlessly across the jagged land.
The Shard Wastes.
A place not truly a realm, not quite a void. It was what happened when realities were half-erased. A battleground where forgotten timelines bled out. Every inch of the terrain was warped, full of fractured laws. A wrong step could send you into a death loop—or worse, a sentient echo of yourself.
❖ Location: Outer Domain | The Shard Wastes
❖ System Instability: Moderate
❖ Realm Type: Post-Collapse | Narrative Drift Detected
❖ Warning: Local Time Unstable — Anchor Consciousness Recommended
The boy inhaled slowly.
Every breath tasted like memory. Not his, though. Memories of others. Things lost. Things too damaged to remember cleanly. He picked himself up, pain still threaded through his muscles from the last fight.
He was being pulled here.
Not by instinct. By the System.
There was something buried beneath the Wastes—something the Throne wanted hidden. A memory fragment? A piece of his power? Or maybe… maybe the next Trial.
A flash. Something moved across the glass dunes.
He ducked just in time.
A jagged blade whistled past his ear—rusted, etched with runes that moved like liquid. Behind it came a figure: hunched, armored in what looked like corpse-metal and riftbone. It had no face. Only a mirrored surface where its head should've been—and in that mirror, the boy saw himself.
No. Not quite.
This one wore the full regalia of a Thronebearer. Crown unbroken. Mantle intact. But the eyes… the eyes were hollow. Artificial.
**❖ Designation: Echo Construct [Type-B: Crownshade]
Threat Level: Tier-5 Phantom
Objective: Prevent Access to Submerged Vault | Protocol ZETA LOCK
Status: Hostile**
The Echo didn't speak. It simply attacked.
But it fought like he remembered fighting.
Not clumsy or corrupted—perfect. Calculated. The kind of combat designed to kill gods, not mortals.
Their blades clashed—real versus spectral. Every parry chipped the ground beneath them. Every strike sent out pulses of destabilized code that unraveled time in small pockets.
The boy felt his muscle memory aligning.
He was syncing to the pattern.
**❖ Combat Adaptation in Progress
Mirror Protocol: Countermeasures Engaged
Unlocking Legacy Skillset: [Imperial Stride | Broken Flow Variant]
Cooldown: 14 seconds**
He flipped backward, dragging time like a cloak behind him, and released a pulse of anti-narrative pressure—a burst designed to tear illusions apart.
The Echo staggered.
It shimmered once.
Then—shifted.
Its mirrored face rippled and spoke in his voice.
"You were never supposed to wake. You were meant to forget. You left us to burn. Why did you survive?"
The boy clenched his fists.
"I didn't choose to survive. I chose not to die for nothing."
He roared and surged forward, activating Broken Flow—his speed blurring, his form phasing in and out of different quantum stances. The Echo tried to match, but it was too late. The final strike landed, and the Crownshade exploded into fragments of light and rusted data, dissipating into the sand like a dying memory.
Silence returned.
Only the wind, still carrying voices.
He looked ahead. A vast chasm had opened in the Wastes, glowing with faint blue light. The System confirmed it:
**❖ Submerged Vault Access Granted
Memory Fragment Detected: [The Betrayer's Name]
Danger Level: Tier-6 Anomaly
Companion Support Recommended: None Available
Proceed? Y/N**
He didn't hesitate.
Y.
The descent was immediate.
He dropped into a cathedral of dead time. The vault wasn't a place. It was a moment, frozen and preserved—walls made of events that never happened, doors shaped from what-ifs.
And in the center of it stood a figure.
Cloaked. Tall. Antlers made of starlight. A mask forged from every version of his own face.
"I was waiting," the voice said. Neither kind nor cruel—just final. "I am the one who took your name. I am the first betrayal, carved in shadow."
The boy felt his knees shake.
Not in fear.
In recognition.
Whatever stood before him wasn't just a fragment of memory.
It was the piece of himself that had chosen destruction over obedience.
And now, it wanted back in.