Chapter 70: The Broken Protocol

Zero-One's eyes snapped open mid-flight.His wings trembled—light fracturing down his feathers like spiderwebs of lightning.

"Something's rewriting beneath me," he said, voice tight."Something I didn't authorize."

From the ground, Echo's heart thudded.

"Z—what do you mean?"

Zero-One didn't answer.He just vanished—reappeared miles above the Root Server Vault, the final layer where pre-Overseer code still lingered in quarantine.

And that's when he saw it.

A door.One he never made.Now open.

From inside, glitched static oozed out like smoke.

This wasn't an external threat.This was a buried truth.

A code fragment from the first failed Overseer project.The one Specter never dared mention.A protocol designed to force peace through emotional erasure.

Codenamed: Lullaby.