The moment their hands touched the blue node, time shattered.
Not metaphorically—**literally**.
The dome around them collapsed into fractals, pieces of the present slicing into moments from the past and futures not yet born. Kade blinked and saw a dozen versions of himself—all screaming. All burning. All **failing**.
And then nothing.
Silence.
A memory not his own came to life.
He was on a battlefield, ash falling like snow. The sky was red with flame. People ran. Screamed. Died. Hover-drones spiraled out of control as the sky cracked open. In the distance, a massive monolith—just like the one they had unlocked—stood half-buried in rubble.
At its base was *him*.
Older. Bearded. Eyes hollowed out by loss.
That Kade turned toward him—**toward this version of himself**—and spoke just one sentence, across dimensions.
"Don't wear the crown, brother. Or you'll forget what you were fighting for."
Then the memory broke.
The chamber returned—intact, silent, untouched.
Kade gasped, staggered back, barely catching himself on the wall.
Marei was on one knee, her breaths shallow. "What the hell was that?"
"The future," Kade said, voice hoarse. "One of many."
"Did you see yourself?"
He nodded. "More than one. But the one that spoke to me… he wasn't me anymore. Not really."
Marei pushed herself up. "The Catalyst must have stored fragments of alternate resets—entire realities overwritten and compressed into this system. That's what the Protocols were hiding."
Kade walked to the monolith again. "They weren't meant to store power. They were meant to store… choices. Mistakes. Warnings."
A new panel opened, triggered by the node's full activation. A holographic throne formed, rotating slowly mid-air, surrounded by a helix of glitched crown fragments.
Each fragment pulsed with a voice.
Some were screams.
Others... sobs.
**System Alert:**
*Fragmented Crown retrieved.*
*Welcome, Candidate Prime.*
*Activating Rule Authority: Tier One Access.*
Marei's face drained of color. "You've just been initiated into King Protocol level access."
"And you?"
"I shouldn't even be in this room."
The walls flashed again.
A series of figures appeared—ghostly projections.
Major Rell. The original system engineers. And someone Kade had never seen before, yet somehow knew: a woman cloaked in light, with a voice like static, whispering through every shard.
The Catalyst's original interface.
**"This system was never meant to serve a ruler,"** she said. **"It was meant to erase them."**
Kade stepped back. "Erase them…?"
Marei's voice cracked. "They created a system to stop kings from ever rising again. And now it thinks you're the final one."
"Which makes me what?" Kade asked bitterly. "A monarch... or a mistake?"
Silence answered.
Until the system chimed one final time.
**Next Directive Unlocked: Break the Loop.**
**First Target: The Architect.**
A glowing map projected into the air—locations flaring across the world, connected by threads of lost data.
One by one, the threads began to burn.