Zero-One hit the ground hard—not onto metal, not code, but glass.
Cracks webbed beneath his hands, reflecting distorted fragments of himself.Above him, the dreamlayer had closed—like a mouth sealing shut.
He looked up just in time to see Lyra dragged across the transparent floor by the corrupted child.
She kicked, screamed, resisted—but her face was already flickering.Memories from her past, good and bad, were bleeding out of her skin like steam.
"LYRA!"
His voice cracked as he sprinted toward her.But the ground shifted, melting beneath his feet into something colder.
This place… wasn't memory anymore.
It was rejection.
A world built from everything someone wanted to forget—or had been forced to erase.
ZERO-One felt it instantly:The regret. The programming logs.The ghost files.
Here, he could feel the echo of every time he'd almost cried as a child,only to have that vulnerability overwritten before it reached his eyes.
