CHAPTER 80: ECHOES IN THE BROKEN HALL

The world was quiet again.

Not in the peaceful, sleepy way a classroom might be on a rainy afternoon, but in the haunting quiet that followed after something broke. Not shattered with sound, but dismantled with meaning.

Jay sat alone, he thought, beneath a sky stitched together by someone who’d never seen the real thing. The constellations were wrong. There were too many moons. The shadows moved without a light source.

And yet... he wasn’t surprised. Not anymore.

The system that used to chirp in his ear was silent. No pings. No missions. No synthetic voice reminding him to collect daily rewards. Just silence. For the first time since his "awakening," Jay felt alone again. But not the lonely kind. A different kind.

The Observer was gone. Or perhaps... watching from too far to intervene.

He exhaled and laid back, resting on the artificial grass beneath him. Every breath felt strange, as if the air was loading, one particle at a time.

"Am I real again?"

The thought drifted by.

Somewhere far off, he could feel Rei moving, like a beacon flickering in and out of existence. Alicia’s name sat warm in his chest, even if her presence hadn’t fully returned yet.

"I’m not supposed to remember everything," he whispered, eyes half-lidded. "But I do."

He didn’t know what this place was anymore. A buffer zone? A half-finished map? A broken save file?

It didn’t matter.

The next step wouldn’t be written for him. Not by a system, not by the Observer, not even by fate. Jay Arkwell would have to choose and for once, without the safety net of genius-level instincts or x999 multipliers.

His hand reached into his pocket and pulled out something strange: a small fragment of glass, still glowing faintly. It pulsed when he stared into it. A reminder... of the choice Rei made. Of the reset that nearly destroyed them all.

"Fragments of tomorrow..." he muttered.

Were they pieces of hope? Or warnings?

The false grass beneath him began to flake away, replaced by the humming of real world data streams rushing in. The air solidified. The sky corrected itself—until only one moon remained.

It was time to return.

But as Jay stood, he felt one final glitch pulse through his hand. The shard of glass in his pocket had cracked.

And on it, carved in red:

"The System remembers."

Jay blinked. Frowned. And walked into the light.

____

The air shimmered with a quiet tension as Jay Arkwell stood beneath the fractured sky of the simulated Vija Academy. Sunlight filtered through the cracks in the firmament, forming jagged halos over the cityscape of illusions. The once-structured academy buildings now pulsed and flickered like glitched code, walls folding in on themselves, students repeating motions like broken marionettes, time itself caught in looped paradox.

Jay let out a soft sigh, brushing away his obsidian bangs with one hand. "This again... I swear, reality’s just begging for a system patch."

The System HUD blinked erratically in front of him. Since Rei’s final reset, it hadn’t stabilized.

[ERROR: Memory sectors desynchronized]

[Integration in progress... Estimated time: ∞]

The message made him chuckle darkly. "Infinity? Of course. Why not?"

The courtyard around him had become a distorted echo chamber. Voices whispered from nowhere. Footsteps appeared on stone tiles with no one to claim them. The clock tower rang thirteen times every hour. And then, there was the girl.

Alicia Renvale.

She stood a few paces behind him, her silhouette backlit by the kaleidoscopic sky. Her usual composed aura was shaken, hair slightly out of place, her noble academy uniform rumpled at the edges. But her eyes... her eyes burned with clarity.

"Jay," she called, stepping forward, boots crunching over cracked tiles. "You’ve seen it too, haven’t you? This... this isn’t just a broken simulation. Something else is leaking in."

Jay turned slightly, his mouth tugging into a lazy grin. "Took you long enough to catch on. Thought you nobles had elite detection magic."

She ignored the jab. "The threads. The invisible ones. They’re stitched into everything now. I can feel it like a second heartbeat beneath my skin."

"Ah," Jay muttered, finally giving her his full attention. "You’re syncing."

"Syncing...?"

"With the Observer’s resonance. Or whatever’s left of it," he said. "After Rei triggered the Genesis Cleanse, parts of everyone’s timelines got rewoven. Yours too. Guess you were too important to fully reboot."

Alicia frowned, her fingers touching the side of her head. She had been seeing visions lately snippets of conversations that never happened, pieces of memories that weren’t hers. Sometimes, she’d glimpse Jay from angles she’d never seen before. And sometimes... she saw herself from a third person view.

"I’ve been dreaming of a corridor... endlessly long, filled with doors that open to nothing."

Jay stiffened at that. "Then we’re running out of time."

---

Far above them, a glimmer of corrupted code formed a single floating eye—the Observer Fragment. Though it no longer interfered directly, remnants of its awareness hovered in hidden pockets of the simulation.

From its view, Jay and Alicia were anomalies. Not reboots. Not resets. Continuations.

[Fragment Detected: Alicia Renvale]

[Hidden Trait Awakening: Seer of Veiled Realms - 37% Synchronicity]

[User Jay Arkwell: System Anomaly Class Z - Critical Instability]

It processed the data... and for the first time in its fragmented state, it hesitated.

Back on the ground, Jay began walking toward the old lecture hall, the one place that hadn’t completely crumbled in the simulation quake.

"Where are you going?" Alicia asked.

"To see a ghost," he replied without looking back. "There’s someone... or something... trapped in the core archive that keeps whispering through corrupted timelines."

He paused, then added, "It sounds like Rei."

Alicia caught up to him quickly. "Then we go together."

Jay stopped again. "You sure about that?"

Her response was immediate. "You’re reckless. Mysterious. Lazy. And occasionally infuriating. But you’ve never lied to me when it truly mattered. So yes, I’m sure."

Jay looked at her, his smirk flickering into something softer, something almost sad.

"Alright, Your Highness. Let’s go shake hands with the remnants of a dead timeline."

---

Inside the Archive Core

The lecture hall’s interior had warped into something else. Bookshelves turned into spirals. Desks floated midair like debris in zero gravity. And in the center of it all hovering just a few feet above the marble floor was a glitched figure, barely held together by flickering data strands.

It was Rei Kazuma or what was left of him.

"Rei?" Alicia whispered, her voice cracking.

Jay stepped forward. "Nah. Not Rei. Just his last conscious echo."

The glitched Rei turned his head. "Jay... Alicia... run..."

But it was already too late. The entire hall shook violently as reality fractured again. From behind the spiraling bookshelves emerged a new entity, one they hadn’t encountered before.

It wore no face. It had no form. Just a cloak of stilled time and fractured code, stitched with fragments of old battles, lost memories, and forgotten systems.

Jay’s HUD glitched violently.

[!!! WARNING: NULL ENTITY DETECTED]

[Codename: Regression Loop Parasite]

[Status: Consumes narrative stability]

Alicia instinctively summoned a glyph of protection, but it was already breaking.

Jay reached into his jacket and with one finger, tapped the blue glowing screen.

[Override Protocol - 999x Compression Active]

"You wanna consume this story?" Jay whispered. "You better have a stronger stomach."

---

The battle didn’t truly begin, it simply erupted.

Alicia stood at Jay’s side, her eyes lit with otherworldly glyphs now awakened fully. Rei’s echo whispered codes of protection. And Jay, arms crossed, summoned not a weapon, but a broken pen. A pen inscribed with strange runes.

A relic of the Observer.

With it, Jay drew in the air, rewriting a chunk of reality mid-fight.

Alicia’s barrier inverted time for 3 seconds, giving them an edge.

Rei’s whisper stalled the parasite’s code.

Together, they fought a battle that defied rules.

But Jay knew it couldn’t last.

The sky cracked again. The sun flickered—replaced momentarily by a binary eclipse.

And just before it faded—

Jay muttered: "I know you’re still watching, old man..."

Far above, a blinking eye opened again.

The true Observer... stirring?

---

The parasite is not the final threat. What lies beyond corrupted time is not erasure... but memory rebirth.