“Fuck me,” Cyrus laughed madly. He didn’t have enough control or power to win this fight. Not without his memories or help… Pressure built in his skull. Was this the ominous tide of approaching death? Nanite infestation by Machina?

  “Fuck. Off!” Cyrus pooled his power, grasped the Overseer’s left blade like arm telekinetically, and threw. Only the Overseer didn’t go sailing across the room. In fact, the Overseer’s left arm ripped clean off when Cyrus hurled it. It crashed through the ruins, leaving an arm shaped hole a multiple feet thick into the dense metallic walls.

  ::Futile,:: the Overseer laughed—silver ribbons flowed from its shoulder, forming a new arm.

  The pressure in his skull intensified, becoming a crystalline pain that threatened to explode and split him apart from the inside. Visions flashed through his consciousness—fragments of meory, or perhaps something else.

  A woman’s face, beautiful and familiar, slipping away into darkness before he could name her.

  A figure standing over him, features obscured but radiating a cold, implacable hatred.

  His own hands, glowing with power that wasn’t mere telekinesis, but something more fundamental—the ability to rewrite reality itself.

  ::You cannot be permitted to fully reactivate, Terminus Vector. The cycle must not repeat.::

  “What cycle?” Cyrus demanded and summoned another blast of telekinetic might to hammer the Overseer in the chest. “What am I?”

  ::You are a convergence point—a consciousness that resonates with particular frequencies of existence. Your existence is untenable.::

  Something in those words—perhaps the clinical assessment of his nature as an equation rather than a being—triggered a surge of rage, unlike anything Cyrus had experienced since he woke up without memories. The pain in his skull crystallized into a single point of absolute clarity.

  He stopped fighting against the fragmentation of his thoughts, and instead, he embraced it. The chaotic swirl of memory and power ripped through him unimpeded.

  The effect was immediate and terrifying.

  Cyrus’s body seemed to blur at the edges, as if he existed simultaneously in slightly different positions. The air around him thrummed with potential energy, and when he raised his hands, they left trailing afterimages like a multiple-exposure photograph.

  “Get down,” Cyrus warned his companions, his voice distorted as if he were speaking underwater.

  None of them questioned him, instead each dropped and found cover, even if it was only their hands above their heads.

  Cyrus brought his hands together in a sharp, decisive clap. The sound he produced wasn’t physical but conceptual—a momentary hiccup in the continuity of existence. The scouts froze in place, their circuitry flickering wildly as internal systems attempted to process what had happened.

  ::Partial reactivation detected,:: the Overseer announced. ::Containment protocols insufficient.::

  Was that.. fear…? Yes, yes, that was fear Cyrus heard in the Overseer’s mechanical voice.

  Cyrus felt the power building within him, demanding release. He raised his hand. It was trembling. He clenched his hand as if he were grabbing something invisible.

  “I don’t know what the fuck I am,” Cyrus growled. Reality distorted around him, pulsing with his heart-beat, begging to be reshaped to his will. “But I know I’m not some fucking equation to solve.”

  The telekinetic force that erupted from him wasn’t as simple as a push or pull. It was a fundamental reordering of physical laws within a localized area. The Overseer’s form destabilized, its carefully maintained balance between organic and synthetic components collapsing into unregulatable chaos.

  What came out of the creature defied description—not quite a scream, nor a mechanical failure, but it was a death knell. The body contorted, techno-organic components separated and recombined in desperate configurations, but there was no stability to be found, as reality itself thwarted the machine.

  ::You canno—:: it began, but the words became static.

  Cyrus finished clenching his hand. Something strange, but essential, surrendered within the Overseer’s being. With a final wave purple and black energy engulfing the Overseer, Cyrus released his hold.

  The Overseer imploded—not with violence, but with a quiet inevitability like a star collapsing on itself over eons. Where the Overseer stood remained a perfect sphere of absolute darkness, which hung in the air for three heartbeats—heartbeats that Cyrus used to telekinetically fling the scouts into the dark void—before it collapsed into nothingness and was gone.

  The men and women of Wayfinder Expeditions were all still on the ground, looking up at Cyrus with awe.

  And fear.

  “What… what was that?” Maija asked with an unusual amount of trepidation.

  Cyrus glanced at his hands, which seemed to be perfectly ordinary hands.

  “I… don’t know? But I think…” Cyrus looked up, then looked at each of his companions. “I think I remembered what Machina are afraid of.”

  Before anyone could respond, the massive door behind him cycled through an elaborate unlocking sequence, symbols illuminating in a precise pattern. With a pneumatic hiss, it swung open to reveal a figure standing at the threshold—pink and rainbow hair dishevled, eye catching black armor adorned in a skull motif, eyes with the normal sclera and pupils inverted and pink irises, a staff gripped tightly in one hand.

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  Lyessa surveyed the aftermath of the confrontation, her gaze lingering on the empty space where the Overseer had been, before they shifted to Cyrus.

  “So,” Lyessa said with a wan smile that contained neither humor nor warmth, “you’re starting to wake up. How inconvenient for everyone.”

  Cyrus met her gaze, and felt a strange resonance between her nature and the power he had manifested. “You know what I am.”

  It was not a question, but it verged on a demand.

  “Not exactly,” Lyessa responded, stepping aside to let them access the chamber behind her. “But I know what you represent. Come inside, quick, quick. They’ll send more when they realize this Overseer failed.”

  “Lyessa!” a blur of white and red dashed in front of Cyrus and wrapped the strange girl in hugs. Cassandra.

  “Hey, Cass. Welcome back. Told you I’d be fine down here. You on the other hand…” Lyessa grimaced painfully as she eyed the sizzled burns and cuts across Cass’s robes, the scorches on Matti’s metallic skin, blood seeping from Alor’s forehead, and Maija looked about to collapse.

  Cyrus waited until the others had stepped into the chamber before he followed them in. The way things were going, if he had stepped in first, the doors would’ve shut, and his friends would have been at the mercy of whatever Machina or Encoded made it to the door next. Suspicious thoughts to have. Why was he suddenly feeling so distrustful and cynical?

  When he stepped past the threshold, he felt justified in his paranoia. He had the undeniable feeling he had just crossed a point of no return on his journey to reclaim his identity. Although, summoning a sphere of total annihilation and obliterating unkillable robo-men with ease did put a slight damper on his desire to know who he was. Nice people didn’t do that kind of thing.

  Behind him, the massive door sealed, symbols glowing briefly before fading into dormancy. Yet the Overseer's phrase—Terminus Vector—echoed in his mind. Was it a name? A title? A power? It felt foreign and like he could wear it like a glove.

  The chamber unfurled before them like a midnight bloom, ancient and expectant. Shadows shifted across walls of material that had no business existing in this forgotten corner of reality—metal that wasn’t metal, stone that wasn’t stone. The darkness seemed almost courteous, parting reluctantly before Lyessa’s spectral light, as if introducing honored guests to its most treasured secret. There, at the chamber’s heart, stood a monument of impossibility: a cenotaph of neutronium, denser than a dwarf star’s heart, yet somehow not collapsing the floor beneath it—and more impossible still, pierced by a blade that shimmered with golden runes that danced like fireflies trapped in obsidian.

  “Well,” Maija said, her voice weak and horse, barely above a whisper, “this certainly wasn’t in the expedition brief.”

  Light from Lyessa’s staff cast their shadows in five different directions at once, as though reality couldn’t quite agree which way was forward. They stood in the chamber, the doors sealed, but all of them looked back as if maybe they weren’t meant to be there.

  “The air tastes like mathematics,” Lyessa observed. She extended her hands, let her fingers dance through possibilities that weren’t quite visible, but very present, and then she licked the air in an obscene way, only to pluck a lollypop from out of no where. She plunged the candy into her mouth, and smirked at the others.

  Cyrus felt the room reach for him—or maybe he was reaching for it. The distinction seemed academic, and he walked forward towards the cenotaph. Their footsteps created ripples in the dust that had lain undisturbed for what have been billions of years, or perhaps mere moments until Lyessa had stumbled into the room.

  The walls were carved with symbols that defied cataloging. Not quite hieroglyphs, maybe mathematical formulae, but certainly not circuitry diagrams. Instead, they occupied some uncomfortable intersection of all three, and worse, they shifted subtly whenever observed directly, as if embarrassed to be caught in the act of meaning something.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Maija plead. Her words vibrated through the chamber, echoed off walls, and were repeated to them repeatedly as if hammering home the common sense words.

  The cenotaph occupied the exact center of the room. It stood approximately waist-high, a perfect cube of black material that seemed to pull light into itself rather than reflect it. Neutronium—the collapsed heart of a neutron star—should have been impossible to extract, transport, or even shape. Yet there it sat, defying physics with the casual arrogance of a god ignoring a parking ticket.

  “Impossible,” Maija breathed in wonder. She circled the cube, eyes wide with disbelief. “This-this is neutronium! A cubic foot would weigh as much as a mountain range.”

  “And yet,” Lyessa said, “here it is, not crushing us into quantum paste. Fascinating.” Her lollypop made a big sucking sound as she pulled it out of her mouth, offered her sister a lick, then popped it back into her mouth.

  Cyrus barely heard them. His eyes were transfixed by the blade embedded in the top surface of the cube. The sword—it was unquestionably a sword—had been thrust halfway into the neutronium as if the impossible material were nothing more challenging than softened butter.

  The blade was obsidian black, not the glassy black of volcanic glass, but something deeper, as if a slice had been cut from the space between stars. The crossguard curved slightly toward the blade, like talons grasping for prey. The golden runes might have been the most impossible thing. They shimmered across the flat of the blade in patterns that constantly changed. They never settled into readable forms but somehow conveyed meaning nonetheless. Maybe. Cyrus had to assume they conveyed meaning, but maybe they were utterly meaningless. Perhaps they were just pretty decorations, like schools of colorful fish floating through the inky depths of the sword’s surface, occasionally forming constellations and letters through sheer coincidence.

  “It’s a key,” Lyessa said, her inverted eyes gleaming. “Or maybe a lock. Sometimes the difference is merely a matter of perspective.”

  Cassandra laughed.

  “Swords are but keys that unlock the death of those they stab,” Cassandra joked with Lyessa. The severe redhead's demeanor had soothed considerably now that Lyessa was safe.

  Cyrus knew it was neither. He knew what it was with the bone-deep certainty that transcended his fractured memory. His fingers twitched at his side, remembering its weight, balance, and way of singing through the air when properly wielded.

  “It’s mine,” Cyrus said. His voice seemed strange to his ears. The words had emerged unbidden, surprising him as much as the others.

  “What did you say?” Maija’s head snapped to regard Cyrus.

  “The sword. It’s mine.” Cyrus repeated, taking another step closer.

  “And you know that how?” Maija demanded. “Let me guess, you can’t explain it. Convenient.”

  “Sorry. It isn't very pleasant, I know, but that’s how it is—its like the way you know your own reflection.”

  The golden runes along the blade flared brighter at Cyrus’s approach, as if in greeting, or recognition. They swirled faster, no longer random, but purposeful, rearranging themselves in patterns that almost made sense to Cyrus, like words written in a language he had once been fluent in, but had forgotten with disuse—amplified by amnesia.

  A fragment of memory flickered through his mind—the blade singing through the air, cutting not flesh, but reality itself, opening a path between worlds. His hands remembered the action even if his mind did not, fingers curling into the precise grip needed to wield such a blade.

  “Volta,” Cyrus whispered, the name sneaking through some locked vault in his memory.

  “Well, at least its not named the Big Blade of Killing All Your Friends,” Maija muttered unhappily. “Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like we should back away slowly and run away?”

  Lyessa stared at Cyrus with something approaching awe. “You’ve named it,” she said. “Names have power. Names create connections. Names bind.”

  Cyrus looked at Lyessa and mulled her words but didn’t say anything. Instead, he approached the cenotaph. The runes on the blade danced frantically, golden light spilling out to illuminate the entire chamber. The shadows fled to the corners, huddling together like frightened children.

  “I… don’t think that’s a good idea, Cyrus. Cyrus?” Maija cautioned, but even she seemed captivated, unable to pull her eyes away from the unfolding moment.

  “Oh please, when’s the last time any of us had a good idea? Our best stories never begin with a good idea.” Lyessa joked, but her humor was forced.