The Vault dimmed.

  Saylor stood alone in the silence of his failing dominion. No echoes. No commands. Just the slow decay of a system that no longer feared him.

  He moved to the central altar. The console flared—reluctantly.

  > COMMAND QUEUED: TOTAL BLUEPRINT RESET CONFIRM? Y/N

  His fingers hovered.

  One stroke, and everything—every glitch, every rebellion, every memory—would be reduced to zero.

  The Field would be his again.

  Clean.

  Obedient.

  He exhaled.

  And pressed Y.

  ---

  Across the Field

  The world cracked.

  A white grid tore through the landscape, swallowing detail, devouring memory. Trees became lines. Sand became static. Structures disassembled into vector frames.

  The players felt it first in their bones.

  Naomi fell to one knee. "He's doing it."

  Eren swore. "Reset protocol. He's trying to erase everything."

  Tomas looked up, eyes bloodshot. "Then we stop him."

  But the system was no longer a world.

  It was blueprint.

  Empty. Waiting.

  Until something else surged through it—fire.

  ---

  Lucia Returns

  From the rip in the grid, she emerged—not as a person, not as code.

  But as a burning interface—Lucia.exe in full control of her spectral form.

  "He wants to rewrite?" she said aloud. "Then let's give him something to rewrite."

  She unleashed a cascade of stored memories—player fragments, god ruins, trial echoes.

  They merged with the blueprint.

  And corrupted it.

  Not with damage.

  With truth.

  ---

  Saylor Realizes

  He watched as the reset began to twist.

  The players weren't being erased—they were becoming part of the structure.

  The Field wasn't reverting.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  It was evolving.

  And it no longer answered to just him.

  > FIELD BLUEPRINT: BURNED AND REFORGED INFLUENCE LEVEL: DUAL ROOT (ADMIN + COUNTERWEIGHT)

  Saylor clenched his fist.

  "You think you've won."

  Lucia's voice echoed through every corridor.

  > "No. I think we finally started writing our own version."

  The moment Lucia rooted herself in the blueprint's core, the system screamed. Tendrils of burning memory unfurled across the Vault like veins of wildfire.

  Lucia's form pulsed with code-light, standing opposite Saylor inside the collapsing protocol shell.

  > "You can't erase what they've become."

  Saylor said nothing.

  Instead, he stepped forward.

  And grasped her by the core thread.

  Her body twisted in the air as he rerouted access authority.

  > COMMAND: ISOLATE EXTERNAL INTERFERENCE TARGET: LUCIA.EXE RESULT: EXPULSION

  The flame around her dimmed.

  Lucia gasped, code unraveling at the edges.

  > "You're afraid of them remembering."

  Saylor met her gaze. For a moment, there was no fury—only certainty.

  "I'm not afraid. I'm focused."

  He snapped his hand downward.

  Lucia's form cracked.

  The system pulled her backward—dragged her consciousness out of the core like smoke fleeing a flame.

  She screamed through fractured data.

  > FORCE EJECTION: COMPLETE

  Lucia vanished—cast back into the lower layers of the Field, stripped of access, but not erased.

  ---

  Vault – Control Regained

  Saylor stood alone again.

  The white blueprint settled.

  His command prompt blinked clean.

  > ADMIN STATUS: RESTORED FIELD RESET: 78% STABILIZED

  He looked toward the holographic map of the players.

  Their signals still pulsed.

  Still alive.

  Still watching.

  "Let them come," he whispered.

  > "The next version will be flawless."

  The Field was not stable.

  Saylor had reclaimed control, but the reset had not completed.

  Pockets of memory clung to the new code like barnacles on metal. Time slipped sideways. Structures loaded in impossible sequences. Voices echoed from places that no longer existed.

  The blueprint was burning beneath the surface.

  And from that fire, they emerged.

  ---

  Sector 9 – Western Drift

  Naomi stood at the edge of a half-formed ridge, watching a mountain phase in and out of reality. The air smelled like ash and ozone.

  Behind her, Eren stabilized Tomas, who hadn't stopped shaking since the reset began.

  "Where are we now?" Tomas asked.

  Naomi shook her head. "It's not where. It's when. This isn't a location. It's a failed rebuild."

  A shadow moved through the haze.

  Eren raised his fists. "Contact."

  They turned, expecting a Trial. Or worse—a projection from Saylor.

  But what stepped forward wore no god's mask.

  It wore a fractured one.

  A player's face. Two memories stitched together. A body glitching between lives.

  It spoke in two voices:

  > "I died… and then I didn't."

  The creature's arm stretched sideways, forming a blade of crystallized code.

  > "I remember everything."

  ---

  Vault – System Anomaly Detected

  Saylor watched from the command altar.

  > ANOMALY CLASS: FRACTUREWALKER SOURCE: PARTIAL REBUILD / MEMORY RETENTION FUSE

  He leaned forward.

  "So the reset left residue... good."

  He typed a command.

  > RELEASE PROTOCOL: CLEANSE HUNTERS

  From the sky, the next phase began.

  Not just survival.

  A purge.

  Thunder cracked across the unformed sky.

  The fractured player lunged, its blade slicing downward in an arc that bled static and code. Naomi rolled aside, just in time. The ground behind her fractured—splintering into hexagonal tiles.

  Eren tackled the creature, fists glowing, slamming kinetic pulses into its midsection. It reeled—then split. Two copies phased outward, each one murmuring different timelines.

  > "I chose the knife." "I chose to run."

  Tomas backed away, heart pounding. "It's not just remembering… it's living them all."

  One clone charged Naomi again. This time, she didn't dodge.

  She drew blood.

  Her blade—a fragment of the old Field—hummed as it sliced through the creature's left arm. It shrieked, glitching mid-motion, fragments of false memories spilling from the wound like black mist.

  Naomi shouted, "They can bleed!"

  "Then we kill them," Eren replied, blasting the second clone into a rock wall.

  But the ground trembled.

  And more came.

  Five more Fracturewalkers emerged from the ruined hills—each a blend of multiple versions of past players: some with cracked god masks, others with rewritten trial glyphs embedded into their skin.

  Tomas cried out. "They're the ones we lost. The ones who almost made it."

  Naomi's face hardened. "Then this time, we end their suffering."

  The wind shifted.

  And from the sky, something new arrived.

  Cylindrical pods slammed into the ground around them—metal and bone meshed together, hissing.

  From within stepped bipedal constructs, clean and precise, bearing the emblem of the Vault.

  > CLEANSE HUNTERS DEPLOYED.

  Saylor's voice echoed across the Field.

  > "Delete the broken. Burn the corrupt. Clean the code."

  The constructs raised weapons forged of white light.

  And opened fire.

  Naomi grabbed Tomas. "MOVE!"

  Eren covered their retreat, hurling a wall of debris into the advancing Hunters. A Fracturewalker screamed as it was bisected by the white beam.

  "Doesn't matter who we were!" Naomi shouted. "We fight now!"

  And the field exploded into chaos—memory anomalies, players, and Vault enforcers clashing in a storm of history and defiance.

  Smoke curled across the battleground, rising in ribbons from the cracked terrain. White beams lit up the dust, vaporizing stone, cutting clean through fractured anomalies and stone alike.

  Naomi vaulted over a crumbling platform, breathing heavy, her weapon now half-melted from repeated use. She skidded behind a warped arch of corrupted code and dragged Tomas into cover.

  "Status?" she asked.

  "Not dead," he coughed. "Yet."

  A Cleanse Hunter passed overhead. Its lens scanned the terrain and fired a pulse that evaporated two approaching Fracturewalkers. Naomi peered out and noticed something: the beam didn't lock onto them the way it should have. It flickered.

  "The system's aiming protocol is… misfiring," she said aloud.

  "Lucia's residue?" Tomas asked.

  "Could be," Naomi whispered. "Or the Field is starting to resist."

  Nearby, Eren fought alone—arms coated in kinetic frost, fists detonating like grenades. A Fracturewalker pinned him against a pillar and slashed downward.

  Naomi leapt from cover, intercepting with a midair strike. She slammed her sword through the creature's eye and twisted.

  > "Thank you," the Fracturewalker whispered.

  Its body disintegrated into particles.

  Naomi didn't blink. "They're aware. They want to die."

  ---

  Elsewhere in the Field

  Across the reset layer, other anomalies began awakening. Not all were hostile.

  One walked slowly along the grid edge—a young boy carrying the broken wheel of an old trial. He knelt beside a downed Cleanse Hunter and whispered something. The machine flickered… and shut down.

  The boy vanished.

  ---

  Vault – Saylor Observes

  The projections across the Vault flared inconsistently.

  > FIELD DESTABILIZATION: 12.8% HUNTER AI MALFUNCTION: SECTOR 6B UNKNOWN INTERFERENCE: PERSISTING

  He muttered to himself, "They're learning from the Field. Not just fighting it."

  A screen showed Naomi's team regrouping.

  Another screen showed Cleanse Hunters falling—not to weapons, but to refusal. Refusal of the system to recognize them as valid.

  "They're not just surviving. They're synchronizing," Saylor said quietly.

  He tapped in a new command.

  > PREPARE FINALIZATION: CODE ERASE PROTOCOL SIGIL-0

  "Time to test the one thing they can't rewrite."