The mist thickened again after we left the grave.
But it wasn't natural mist anymore.
It moved wrong.
Coiled wrong.
Like a living thing trying to map our path.
The Lexicon at my side fluttered restlessly, pages shifting without my touch.Each movement made the air around it hum—low, urgent, alive.
Lyra walked half a step behind me, close enough to grab if the world fell apart again.Her thread pulsed against mine—erratic, unstable, but there.
It was the only thing keeping us from losing each other in the fog.
That, and the thin silver tether of the Divergent Bind we had forged hours ago.
I checked my HUD out of habit.
No location marker.No enemy radar.
Just a faint flicker at the edge of the minimap.
A crack in the interface.
A heartbeat.
A warning.
Lyra saw it too.
"You feel that?" she asked, voice low.
I nodded.
"They're coming."
Not monsters.
Not corrupted memory echoes.
Not broken constructs left behind by the collapse.
Something worse.
The SYSTEM had noticed the Divergent Bind.It had processed the rollback resistance.It had recalculated the risk.
And now it was sending the only kind of force it trusted to solve problems like us.
Rollback agents.
The mist thinned abruptly, pulling back like a held breath.We stood at the edge of a clearing.
Wide.Open.Too open.
Nothing between us and the horizon but dead trees and broken earth.
Across the clearing, three figures materialized.
Not players.Not mobs.
Rollback agents.
Real ones.
They didn't move like normal enemies.
They didn't announce themselves.
They didn't generate enemy tags in the HUD.
They simply existed—silent, inevitable, undeniable.
Their bodies were clad in featureless black armor, each plate etched with looping rollback glyphs.
Their faces were smooth masks.
No eyes.
No mouths.
Only blank plates of polished obsidian.
The Lexicon snapped open at my hip.
The pages didn't offer a spell this time.
Just a single flashing message:
[Rollback Enforcement Team Deployed – Protocol Level: Erasure-1]Target: Divergent Root (Active Anchor Thread Detected). Immediate containment authorized.
Lyra stiffened beside me.
I could feel her panic spike through our tether.
I forced my breathing steady.
No time for panic.
Not here.
Not against them.
The rollback agents began to move.
Slow at first—measured, almost mechanical.
Each step rippled the ground around them like a stone dropped in still water.
Reality itself recoiled from their presence.
I raised my hand.
The Lexicon responded, flipping to an old glyph—one I hadn't used since the early days of Ascension.
A mobility spell.
[Glyph: Slipstep]Effect: Short-range spatial distortion — break enemy targeting lock.
I sketched the glyph in the air with two quick strokes.
Silver light folded around Lyra and me—and when the first rollback agent lunged,we blinked sideways out of its path.
The ground where we had stood shattered into hexagonal fragments,deleting themselves into pure white static.
Rollback glyphs flooded the shattered zone, rewriting it to a clean, empty patch of terrain.
If we had been standing there when it triggered—
we wouldn't just have died.
We would have been erased.
Thread.Memory.Everything.
Gone.
"Move!" I shouted.
We sprinted across the clearing.
No destination.No cover.
Only momentum.
Only survival.
The second agent shifted tactics.
It didn't chase.
It raised its hand and sketched a rollback glyph in midair—faster than I could track.
A black net of deletion algorithms shot toward us.
Lyra reacted before I did.
The instability in her thread pulsed outward—wild, unformed—but it was enough.
A ripple of memory distortion kicked outward from her body,warping the edges of the rollback net just enough for us to duck through a hole in the weave.
We tumbled behind the broken stump of a dead tree.
Cover.Thin.
But enough for a breath.
Lyra panted, clutching her side.
"I can't... hold this much longer."
"You won't have to," I said grimly.
Because I had a plan.
A stupid one.
A desperate one.
But it was better than waiting for erasure.
I flipped the Lexicon to a blank page.
Focused.
Sketched not a spell—but a command.
A new glyph.
A hybridization.
Part mobility.Part memory anchor.
[Glyph: Threadwalk]Effect: Bind movement through unstable thread pathways. Risk: Identity drift. Instability surge likely.
Perfect.
Terrifying.
Exactly what we needed.
I looked at Lyra.
"Trust me?"
Her smile was bitter.
"Always."
The rollback agents regrouped across the clearing.
Three points of deletion pressure tightening around us.
No way to fight head-on.
No way to win fairly.
Only escape.
Or destruction.
I slammed the glyph into the ground with both palms.
Threadlight exploded outward.
The earth cracked beneath us.
Silver threads spiraled into a broken network of doorways.
I grabbed Lyra's hand.
"Jump when I say," I said.
"Where?"
"Doesn't matter."
The first rollback agent charged.
The second cast.
The third raised a beacon to summon reinforcements.
I shouted.
"NOW!"
We leapt together into the broken threadway.
Reality shattered around us.
For a moment—
no ground.no sky.no SYSTEM.
Only the raw bleed of memory,pulling us sideways through fragments of forgotten stories.
I glimpsed flashes as we fell:
A town that never launched.
A class that never finished development.
A player laughing before his character froze and erased mid-frame.
Each fragment tried to grab us.
Each echo tried to claim our threads.
I held onto Lyra with everything I had.
Held onto the tether.The Divergent Bind.The fragile, stubborn existence we had carved out of nothing.
When the threadway finally spat us out,we collapsed onto rough stone.
I tasted blood.
My HUD glitched madly.
The Lexicon burned against my side, pages flaring with residual energy.
We were alive.
Barely.
I rolled onto my side.
We had landed inside a deep ravine—a crack in the world where even the SYSTEM's rollback protocols didn't reach easily.
The sky overhead was blank.No stars.No SYSTEM constellations.Only blackness.
Lyra lay beside me, breathing shallowly but steady.
I pushed myself upright.
Checked our surroundings.
No rollback agents in sight.
No minimap markers.
Only broken earth and faint threadlight seeping through the cracks.
The Lexicon finally stabilized enough to flash a new message:
[Rollback Pursuit Status: Interrupted.]New Objective: Find Anchor Refuge. Estimated Pursuit Resumption: 17 minutes.
Seventeen minutes.
Not much.
But enough to breathe.
Enough to think.
Lyra stirred weakly.
Her voice barely a whisper.
"Are we safe?"
I shook my head.
"Not yet."
Maybe not ever again.
But for now—
for this one shattered heartbeat of time—
we had escaped.
And the SYSTEM would never forget it.