The world didn't return to normal after Sector Null.
It couldn't.
Because once you speak with something older than time—and it hands you a key made of rewritten code—you stop trusting what you see.
Kade hadn't slept.
The Catalyst kept buzzing in the back of his skull, processing, recalibrating, updating… whispering fragments of words he didn't recognize. Old languages. Protocols long since buried.
Marei leaned against the cracked windows of their hideout—an abandoned signal tower now pulsing with heat from the key's energy. "We can't stay here long. That pulse reached more than just the system."
"I know," Kade said, staring at the glowing sigils on the floor. "I felt them move."
"Them?"
He looked up.
"Other kings. Or worse—those pretending to be."
She frowned. "You think someone else has a Catalyst?"
"I think we were never the first."
He opened his palm. The key still pulsed in soft orange. Its code wasn't just language—it was alive. Breathing. Syncing with his own memory nodes.
The system's voice sliced through the quiet.
Catalyst Surge Detected.
New Branch Unlocked: Kingslayer Directive.
Warning: This directive is irreversible.
Kade's eyes narrowed. "Why now?"
Response: Because history is bleeding.
He didn't like the answer.
Because it felt true.
He turned to Marei. "There's an old Nexus site in the Arkin Wastes. If there are answers—about other wielders, about the real origins of the Catalyst—they'll be buried there."
She stiffened. "The Wastes are off-grid. No maps. Just stories."
"Then it's time we found out which ones were true."
The next morning, they traveled light. Drone-jamming shells. Compressed rations. Hard-coded shard dampeners to block trace detection.
But it didn't work.
Not fully.
Because by the time they reached the outskirts of Arkin, something was waiting.
An army.
Not human.
Not fully machine.
Just… wrong.
They moved like men—but their faces were blurred. Glitched. Redacted.
Marei pulled her gun. "What are those?"
Kade's Catalyst flared.
And then he remembered.
From a file he wasn't supposed to access. From a war no one remembered fighting.
The Ghostwalkers.
Failed prototypes of memory-bound soldiers.
Forgotten. Erased.
But they had returned—bound by the same corrupted loop that created the reset itself.
He clenched his fists. "Someone's rebooting the old war."
Marei whispered, "Why?"
And the system answered.
To crown a new king.
They didn't wait for the enemy to speak.
Kade surged forward, Catalyst flaring, blade forming in a rip of light. He leapt into the first wave, slicing through false memories and metal bones.
A scream echoed—not of pain, but of a corrupted system failing to recognize itself.
Behind him, Marei dropped two more with plasma bolts.
But they kept coming.
Ten.
Then twenty.
Then a hundred.
Until the horizon was nothing but shadows of those who never should've existed.
Kade stood at the center of it all, blade dripping static light.
He wasn't the same man who woke up days ago.
He was the override.
The anomaly.
The memory no one could erase.