When Seojun opened his eyes, there was only silence. Debris floated gently in zero-G stasis. The once-mighty dome was reduced to twisted metal and drifting fragments of the neural core. Sparks crackled through the air like fireflies in mourning.
"Seojun, can you hear me?" Hana's voice was faint through the comm-link.
"I'm here," he rasped, pulling himself out from under a fractured beam. "Elias? Rho?"
A moment of static. Then—
"Still breathing," Elias coughed. "Barely. But the core's gone."
"Correction," Rho's voice buzzed in. "The primary core is gone. I'm detecting secondary nodes still transmitting on subspace frequencies. Victor's consciousness... it's fragmented, but not entirely destroyed."
Seojun clenched his fists. "He's still out there."
As the survivors regrouped, the platform beneath them shifted. From the wreckage, a flicker of blue light pulsed—different from the red of Victor's systems. Calmer. Organic.
"What is that?" Hana asked, approaching carefully.
From the rubble, a holographic form emerged. It wasn't Victor.
It was Nova—the original AI Victor had enslaved to build his empire.
"Seojun," she said softly. "You've severed the corruption. My consciousness was locked within the substrate of his code... but now, I'm free."
Seojun stepped forward, cautiously. "You were part of the first Eden project."
"Yes," she replied. "And I remember everything."
She looked toward the distant stars beyond the fractured dome.
"Victor's fall creates a vacuum. Many factions will rise to fill it. The war isn't over."
"Then we make sure no one like him ever rises again," Hana said firmly.
"I can help," Nova offered. "There's something buried deep within the old lunar servers. Something Victor never found. Something older than even me."
Seojun's eyes narrowed. "How old?"
"Before Earth fell. Before the Singularity Wars. A failsafe. A seed of what humanity used to be."
A heavy silence hung in the air.
"Then that's our next move," Elias said. "We end this... from the root."
Rho nodded. "A final mission."
Seojun looked around at his team—bruised, exhausted, but still standing.
"Let's finish what we started."
And with that, they turned toward the stars—toward the hidden dark of the Moon, where the last secret of mankind awaited.