Second Stratum – Arc 7
Sector: Temporal Corridor 3A
The hallway stretched impossibly long—lined with broken pendulum clocks, each swinging at a different speed. Some moved in reverse. Some were frozen mid-tick.
And others… ticked forward for a while, then rewound without warning.
Kael didn't trust them.
The Tower doesn't build walls. It builds moments, he reminded himself.
He walked the path in silence, blade sheathed, ears open. The echo fight had drained him. His shoulder was still raw from the last clash—but something worse gnawed at him.
The Tower knew too much.
He wasn't just climbing anymore. He was being read.
Then he felt it.
A shift in pressure. Like air folding inward.
He turned.
Someone stood there.
A girl—no older than sixteen, draped in mismatched armor and cloaked in violet thread. Her left hand was fused to a cube of floating crystal that ticked faintly like a heart.
But it wasn't her appearance that shocked him.
It was her eyes.
They looked at him like they knew him.
"Kael," she breathed. "Gods, you're real. You're still... whole."
His blade was at her throat in a blink.
"How do you know my name?" he demanded. "Who are you?"
She didn't flinch.
"You won't believe me," she whispered. "But I knew you. From the future."
Silence.
"Liar."
"You taught me how to survive the fourth stratum. You showed me how to bend time without losing myself."
Kael's grip didn't loosen, but something inside him froze.
"What's your name?" he asked, voice like ice.
"Sael," she replied. "You called me your shadow."
That word—shadow—sent a sharp chill down his spine.
He didn't believe her. Not fully.
But the Tower didn't create lies. Only truths wrapped in danger.
And her presence here meant something had broken.
The girl—Sael—winced suddenly. The crystal pulsed with red light.
"They're catching up. The timeline's slipping."
"What do you mean?" Kael asked.
"You weren't supposed to meet me yet. You meet me in the fifth stratum, after the recursion gate. But something's pulling the threads too early."
Kael stepped back. "The Tower."
"No," Sael said, blood leaking from her nostrils."You. You're unraveling the path. Your memories, your resistance—it's destabilizing the climb."
A deep tremor shook the corridor. The clocks along the walls cracked. Several exploded, bleeding gold dust.
Tower Correction Protocols activating.
Temporal Sync Failure. Conflict Detected.
A booming voice, ancient and cold, echoed from the ceiling.
"Unauthorized convergence. Divergence event: Kael//Sael."
"Correction: Initiated."
The far end of the corridor split open.
Something crawled out.
Not a beast. Not a man. A broken time-clone of Kael himself—eyes melted, mouth stitched shut, wielding a blade made of screams.
The Tower was sending a correction assassin—a warped version of Kael pulled from an alternate failed timeline.
"You're going to have to kill yourself again," Sael whispered, drawing a short knife."I'll help you—if you still trust me."
He didn't answer.
But he didn't stop her when she stepped beside him.
The creature screamed.
The clocks all shattered.
And Kael lunged forward—into the storm.
[System Notice]
Anomaly Triggered:Temporal Convergence (Kael//Sael)— All timelines are now unstable.— Expect inconsistencies. Expect truths that never happened.— You have begun rewriting your climb.