The Hollow Crown

The Kleio Institute did not appear on maps.

Not even Trix's global black-site sweeps picked it up.

They found it only because the ghost of Cassian had embedded its location inside Kael's recovered dream-sequence — stitched into a lullaby his mother used to sing.

A lullaby he didn't remember.

Greenland.

Nothing but ice. Silence. Abandonment.

But under the veil of eternal snowstorms, they found it: a monolith of obsidian glass and steel buried in the ice shelf, humming with psychic resonance.

No guards.

No defenses.

Just a door that whispered Kael's name before sliding open.

As if it had been waiting.

The team entered armed and masked. But inside, they found no enemies.

Just rooms.

Memories.

Every hallway was shaped like one of Kael's childhood homes.

The wall textures were precise — same posters, same stains on the floors, same faint scent of his mother's perfume… even the crack in the window he'd broken when he was seven.

Trix muttered through gritted teeth:

"This place is... reconstructing his past in real time. Based on the neural imprint left by Obsidian."

Kael clenched his fists.

"They stole my memories. And now they're rebuilding them into a weapon."

At the institute's center lay the Hollow Crown Chamber.

A sphere of shifting light. Inside it, suspended in zero gravity, floated a boy.

Kael stopped breathing.

He was staring at himself.

But not the man he'd become.

The child he once was.

Eyes closed. Unscarred. Innocent.

Seiryu approached cautiously. "This isn't a clone. It's a mirror host. A growing psychic avatar built from extracted fragments of your soul."

Thalia whispered, "Is that... Reaper Five?"

Trix confirmed it.

"Yes. And it's not designed to destroy Kael. It's designed to replace him."

Suddenly, the boy opened his eyes.

And smiled.

The lights dropped.

The Hollow Crown pulsed.

The institute came alive.

Rooms reconfigured into nightmares. Kael's team was scattered through an endless maze of Kael's possible pasts.

Thalia was trapped in a version of Kael's childhood where she was his sister, bound by a fate where both parents burned in the fire and Kael never saved her.

Seiryu faced Kael's version of betrayal—where Seiryu was the assassin who poisoned his mother.

Each was tailored to break the bonds between them.

And Kael himself?

Kael was thrown into a version of reality where he never lost.

Where Lucan was dead, his parents alive, and he sat at the top of the world with no war to fight.

A perfect dream.

The boy sat beside him.

"You could live here," the boy said. "No pain. No regret. Just victory."

Kael studied the illusion.

"It's beautiful."

"It's yours."

Kael stood.

"It's a lie."

He reached for the boy.

The illusion shattered.

Reality snapped back.

Kael stood once more in the Hollow Crown Chamber — but now, the boy was no longer still.

He floated, radiant with impossible energy, speaking in Kael's own voice.

"You are wrath. I am potential. You are vengeance. I am vision. I will save the world the way you couldn't."

Kael stepped forward, eyes burning.

"You're not me."

The boy smiled. "Not yet. But I will be."

And then he attacked.

The Battle of Mirrors.

Kael fought a version of himself with all the skill, memory, and pain he'd ever carried — stripped of doubt and enhanced by stolen clarity.

He was outmatched.

Every strike he made, the boy countered faster.

Every strategy he tried, the boy predicted sooner.

But Kael knew one thing the boy didn't.

Something that could not be cloned.

Growth.

"You're me before the scars," Kael said.

"But the scars are what made me strong."

He feinted, dropped low, activated a pulse grenade filled with emotionally coded trauma bursts — each calibrated to overload the mirror host with unpredictable memories.

The boy screamed as flashes of grief, rage, betrayal, and despair flooded him.

He didn't understand them.

Because he'd never lived them.

He was only the shell of a life.

Kael crushed the Hollow Crown's control sphere.

The boy dissolved into stardust and ash.

Silence returned.

Trix and the others rejoined him, shaken but alive.

Kael retrieved the core data logs from the Hollow Crown's remains.

And there — buried beneath layers of psychic encryption — he saw it.

The truth.

Reapers were never random.

Each one is part of the same mind.

One source. One creator.

Lucan Sterling.

Kael didn't speak.

He only stared into the snowy horizon outside the shattered institute.

And smiled — but this time, it was cold.

"I'm done hunting children," he said.

"Time to hunt the father."