The elevator rumbled to a halt.
Jae-Won's breath slowed as the doors hissed open, revealing a pitch-black corridor lit only by faint, pulsing strips of neon blue. The scent of ozone tingled in his nostrils. This was the threshold of the Sub-Net—where time compression, memory strands, and dimensional echoes merged.
"Welcome to the Code Nexus," said Mirae, her voice thin but resolute through his earpiece. "This is where the Architects rewrote fate itself."
He stepped forward cautiously. The floor shimmered beneath his boots—semi-translucent panels floating above an endless digital abyss. Far ahead, a crystalline structure hovered in the void, tethered by fractal data streams. It pulsed with eerie familiarity.
"That core," Jae-Won murmured. "It feels like…"
"A corrupted mirror of your Glitch," Mirae interrupted. "That's not coincidence. It's the original prototype—Version Zero."
He clenched his fists. The echoes of betrayal from Chapter 1—the girl he loved, the stolen glitch—rushed back like venom in his veins. And now, standing at the source, he realized: the system had been hijacked long before he ever entered the game.
A sudden tremor shook the path. From the shadows emerged three cloaked figures—time-warped Sentinels, armed with anti-Glitch weaponry and bearing the insignia of ChronoCorp's Alpha Division.
"They're expecting me," Jae-Won said grimly.
Mirae hissed, "You're deep in their sandbox. Don't play by their rules."
The lead Sentinel raised a shimmering blade. "You're out of bounds, Subject 003. Termination is protocol."
But Jae-Won was done playing the role of subject.
The glitch flared on his arm—stronger, rawer than before. Not fully evolved, but no longer broken. Time stuttered. The Sentinels lunged. He blinked forward, leaving a glitch-shadow in his place. One blade missed, carving empty air; another met his afterimage, sparking off with a frustrated sizzle.
He reappeared behind the third Sentinel and slammed his elbow into the weak spot between the armor plates. A burst of corrupted data exploded from the impact. The Sentinel staggered, glitch-sick and unstable.
The others regrouped, adapting faster than expected.
Jae-Won ducked a flurry of slashes, his mind racing. They weren't just guards. They were evolving in real time—absorbing his moves, learning his patterns.
He had to end it fast.
Mirae's voice cut in again. "Trigger the overload. There's a convergence loop in thirty seconds. Hit the core with a sync glitch—just like you did back in the Rift."
He bolted for the crystalline core.
The remaining Sentinels chased, phasing across the floating tiles, but the environment itself had begun to distort—echoing Jae-Won's temporal interference.
He reached the base of the Nexus Core. Its surface flickered with familiar memories—Serin's betrayal, Sang-Ho's smirk, the first time he bled in the virtual abyss. All of it, woven into the structure.
"This… is where they scripted me to fail," he whispered.
But not this time.
He thrust his glitch-infused hand into the core. Time cracked. Reality folded.
A detonation of pure code rippled outward. The Sentinels dissolved mid-charge, their forms unraveling like unfinished lines of a corrupted algorithm. The world shimmered.
Then everything went still.
Mirae gasped, "You just destabilized a Nexus Point."
"Good," Jae-Won replied, his voice iron. "Now I want answers."
She was silent for a moment before saying, "Then it's time you met the one who wrote the code for your death. The true Architect."
Jae-Won turned toward a portal now forming in the air—made of broken code and memory fragments. Behind it waited his next reckoning.
To be continued…