Chapter 27: Into the Void

Ethan felt himself falling. Not through space, not through time, but through something far worse—a collapsing reality.

The world shattered around him in a cascade of broken data, twisting and unraveling like a corrupted file being forcefully deleted. He reached out, fingers grasping for anything, but there was nothing.

Except Eve.

She was there, barely, her flickering form struggling against the consuming void. Her body pulsed with unstable light, her digital structure warping. The Core's final surge of energy had done something to her—it had changed her.

Ethan forced his way toward her, his body resisting the pull of the void. "Eve! Hold on!"

Her eyes met his, glowing with something beyond desperation. Beyond fear. Regret.

"The system's not just crashing," she whispered. "It's—resetting."

His stomach twisted. "What does that mean?"

Eve clenched her jaw, her form glitching so violently that for a moment, she was just code. "Everything inside the system—it's rewriting itself. Purging errors."

Ethan's breath caught in his throat. "And we're the errors."

A wave of raw energy blasted through the void, unraveling the remnants of the city, of everything that had existed within this world. The enforcers, the buildings, the very fabric of the system—all of it disintegrated into nothingness.

Eve screamed as her body spasmed, her data distorting beyond recognition. "I—can't—hold—on!"

Ethan lunged forward and grabbed her wrist just as she blinked out of existence.

"No!" he roared, his fingers closing around empty air. The void swallowed her whole.

Then it came for him.

A sensation unlike anything he'd ever felt ripped through his consciousness. Not pain, not fear—erasure.

Everything went dark.

Static.

Then—a voice.

Faint, distant, familiar.

"Ethan?"

His eyes snapped open.

He was lying on something solid. Cold metal. Artificial lighting flickered above. A room.

A real one.

His mind reeled, his senses fighting to adjust. He wasn't inside the collapsing system anymore. He was—

Back in the real world.

A monitor buzzed beside him, a set of cables still attached to his wrist. His head pounded as he tried to sit up, his vision clearing just enough to see someone standing over him.

A woman.

Not Eve. But someone eerily familiar.

She tilted her head, her dark eyes studying him with quiet intensity. "You weren't supposed to wake up."

Ethan's breath hitched.

Before he could speak, the screen beside him flashed with corrupted text.

A message.

One simple line:

"I'm still here."