Chapter 66: THREADING THE RIFT
The crowd gathered around the Spire Remnant was filled with nervous energy. Faint traces of data still lingered in the air, like the world hadn’t fully finished loading after a crash.
People stood close together, speaking in low voices, unsure if they were safe or if another system failure might strike at any moment. Something about the place made everyone uneasy, like the code beneath their feet was still shifting.
Pieces of broken code sparkled like code powder in the stale atmosphere.
Survivors—glitched, scarred, or reconstructed to a degree—stood in somber groups, trading rumors they didn’t entirely understand.
Kaito stood frozen in the center of the tableau, his very presence resembling an armed system function about to be activated.
People watched him with a mix of fear and awe, like they didn’t know whether to worship him or run. Some of them had seen him fall—seen him die and somehow come back.
Others had witnessed him destroy the very things they believed in, things they once thought were unbreakable.
Now, as he stood there alive and changed, they didn’t know what to feel. He was a reminder that the world had already ended once... and might end again.
There were no questions anymore—merely expectations.
Each breath he breathed seemed to ripple the world by a hair, rearranging lines of that landscape, pushing tainted nodes to reconfigure themselves behind him. The code recognized him, though the humans did not.
"Show me," Kaito finally said, his tone quiet but commanding like a seed planted in the logic of the world.