I awoke to the blinding light of Gaia’s Blank Space. But this time, the peaceful silence was broken. A figure stood facing Fortune, radiating an electrical, barely contained heat.

  He was tall, his body lean and battle-scarred. The most striking thing about him was his arms: they were solid, articulated metal, silver and obsidian, moving with a subtle, electric hum. Unlike Xenon’s smooth casing, these looked like instruments of war. They looked like his trauma.

  Zaros hissed, his voice low and vibrating like a charged wire. “You let the clock nearly run out, Fortune. You treat a world-ending event like a trip to the candy store, dangling a fraction of the truth to the Outsider while the timer accelerates.”

  Fortune, for once, didn't grin. He only shrugged. “Hey, you gotta get the kid invested, Zaros! And he did get the QLP.”

  Zaros ignored him, turning his burning gaze on me. His metal arms tensed. “You, Outsider. You wasted a full Earth day, 1,440 precious minutes, planning a simple retrieval. Do you understand what we are fighting? Do you understand the clock you are truly against?”

  I felt the old shame rise in my throat, the kind of shame I hadn't felt since I was a child getting laughed at—a feeling I assumed my chip had purged.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Zaros lowered his head, a chilling silence descending. “The Dream Universe—this space that anchors your pathetic, perfect world—has been dying. We had three days remaining. Three days before the barrier between thought and oblivion dissolved and took your entire Earth 0 with it.”

  He lifted his mechanical arms, gesturing at the endless white void around us. “Do you know what it’s like to look at the place you call home, to see every face you love, every street you walked, just dissolve? To watch your entire universe—gone—and then be thrown back here, to this ridiculous starting point?”

  “I was born with these,” he said, holding up a metallic fist, the gesture devoid of aggression and filled only with despair. “I was a mistake in a perfect world. They fixed my body, but they couldn't fix the cruelty of those children who pointed and jeered. All that time, all that fight, just to keep a world that never truly accepted me safe. And then it was erased. All of it.”

  His anger snapped back, focused and lethal. “You just bought us seven days with that QLP. Seven days, Xersa. Your next mission starts now. There is no time to sleep.”

  “And listen closely, Outsider,” Zaros continued, his voice dropping to a terrifying whisper. “The QLP will buy us seven days of life. But we need a permanent solution. After the QLP is retrieved, you will immediately begin the second mission: The Alpha-Matrix Key. It is buried in the Mars Core Central Server—the very heart of your AI. It is the only thing that can stabilize this war.” and then as the clock ticks around and my heart rate drops to what feels like 0… my consciousness to the dream universe fades.