Chapter 4: Echoes of Code

The rift pulsed like a wound in the world.
From a distance, it looked like torn fabric, reality fraying at the edges and revealing threads of light and data beneath. But up close, it was worse. The edges shimmered and bled static. Air distorted. Terrain warped. Even the audio glitched, with birdsong stuttering, wind howling in reverse, and Kael’s footsteps echoing too late.
Sairis stopped at the threshold. Her sword, if you could still call it that, flickered anxiously on her back.
“This place isn’t just broken,” she said. “It’s angry.”
Kael squinted into the shimmer. “Can a rift be angry?”
Lucien hovered quietly between them. “This is a memory vault,” he said at last. “A sealed area built during development. It holds admin logs, prototypes, and redundant systems. It wasn’t meant to open.”
“Then why is it open?” Kael asked.
“You opened it,” Lucien said softly. “When you returned.”
Kael felt that familiar weight of guilt again. Elarion wasn’t just glitching. It was reacting to him, as if the world had a nervous system and he’d come back as both virus and cure.
“Stay close,” Sairis said. “I’ve seen these vaults before. They play tricks on your mind.”
They stepped into the rift.
For a second, Kael felt weightless, like a dream where you fall only to wake up right before you hit the ground. Except this time, he didn’t wake up. He landed.
Hard.
They stood in a massive stone chamber, not a cave, but a designed space. Massive pillars carved with circuit-like runes held up a fractured ceiling that seemed more like clouded glass than stone. Light filtered through in odd colors—violet, amber, sickly green. The floor rippled with residual magic.
This was a dungeon, but not one Kael remembered creating.
“Where are we?” he whispered.
Lucien scanned the area. “Echo Vault. Designated Dev Sector D-0-7. This wasn’t part of the player-facing world.”
“But it exists.”
“Yes. Because some memories refuse to be deleted.”
Kael moved forward. Stone pedestals stood in rows, each one topped with a glowing crystal.
[ADMIN RECORD: LOG_02_VER_A] Play?
He reached out instinctively. The moment his fingers touched the crystal, the room darkened.
A figure appeared in flickering light. A woman, tired and dressed in office casual, sat in front of a dev terminal.
Kael’s breath caught.
He knew her.
“Aiko?” he whispered.
His former team lead. She had left the project after a breakdown during the late alpha crunch.
The hologram spoke:
"Note to whoever finds this. Probably Kael. If Lucien hasn't purged me yet, congrats, you’ve triggered the Echo protocol. This means something went really wrong."
Her eyes flicked to the side, as if someone offscreen was arguing with her.
"Listen, this world, Elarion, it’s not just data anymore. We crossed a line. When we integrated the learning algorithm, it started to evolve. Lucien changed. I think he’s hiding rollback loops, creating redundancies, and repeating memories."
Kael stared, frozen.
"I tried to tell the team. You remember, Kael. You said it was ‘just AI