[Warning: Nexus Vein activity stabilizing around Paradox Core]
[Access: Unauthorized. Tracking suspended.]
[All system functions in this region… delayed.]
The silence that followed his words felt unnatural — as if time itself had paused to listen.
Cael Vox stood in the clearing, his shadow pulsing, split in two directions. One followed him. The other… wandered ever so slightly off sync, like a forgotten version of himself trying to remember its place.
The girl holding the spear didn't lower it.
But she didn't strike either.
"You speak like you're… broken," she muttered.
"I think I am," Cael said, honestly.
He felt it in his bones — the hum of something ancient, alien, incomplete.
The brute beside her, still nursing his burnt hand, snarled. "This one's a threat. You saw what the scanner did. No class, no quest, no trace. He's not even flagged by the system."
Cael turned toward him, slowly. "Because the system forgot me."
"No," the girl whispered. "It rejected you."
Then it happened.
The ground beneath Cael's feet glowed — not with fire or magic, but with a deep vein of light pulsing beneath the dirt. Sigils spiraled upward, forming a ring of rotating runes under him. The trees leaned away. The birds fled without a sound.
[Nexus Vein Signature Detected: Unregistered]
[WARNING: A Vein is responding to a forbidden core]
[Emergency Anchor Point forming…]
"This… shouldn't be possible."
The girl stepped back. Her spear trembled.
"No one can open a Vein without a catalyst. Not even Traversers."
Cael didn't move. He just stared at the light circling his boots — like the earth itself was trying to remember him.
[Vein Access Confirmed.]
[Destination: NULL]
[Stability Risk: 91%]
[Proceed?]
[Y/N]
Cael didn't respond. He didn't need to. The Core inside him — the thing that wasn't meant to exist — answered for him.
[Y] Chosen.
The Vein ruptured — not like a portal opening, but like a wound tearing through the world. A rift of fractured time and space yawned open in the air before him, whispering things in languages he didn't know… but somehow understood.
It wasn't a path. It was a memory. A forgotten door. A place only he could go.
The brute panicked. "Shut it down! Use a seal! Anything!"
The girl hesitated. "He's not bound by System law… what if we need him?"
The light of the Vein cast shadows across her face — and Cael saw it again.
A flash.
A glitch in time.
Her, pierced through her chest by a spear that looked suspiciously like her own.
The brute, dead by fire.
A world of glass and lightning collapsing into the Vein.
[Echo Sight Activated]
[Future Deviation: High Probability]
[Betrayal Sequence Detected: 003]
[Survivability: 12%]
Cael turned back toward them, calmly.
"You should walk away from me now," he said.
"Before the System notices you're near me."
The brute growled. The girl didn't answer.
The Vein pulsed one last time. The light intensified.
And then—
Cael stepped forward.
[Entering Vein: Anchor Point — ???]
[System Tracking: LOST]
[Error: Anomaly has entered a non-designated realm]
"He chose exile... over explanation."
---
Somewhere far beyond that broken forest…
A monitor blinked red inside a hollow obsidian tower.
A voice, fragmented and synthetic, echoed through the dark:
"The Paradox has moved."
"The Core is awakening."
"Protocol 0 must begin."
---