Chapter 22 – Echoes of the First Dream

The rain fell in steady sheets outside the apartment window, masking the quiet unease that hung between Raven and Ava.

She sat at the kitchen table now, staring at her hands like they were foreign. A steaming cup of tea sat untouched beside her. Raven leaned against the far wall, eyes half-closed, but his mind moved fast—calculating.

> "You said… you remembered being her," he asked again, voice low.

Ava nodded slowly.

> "It wasn't a dream. I don't think it was ever a dream."

"She was inside a field of stars, but everything kept collapsing into code. And I—I kept seeing a name burned into the walls."

She looked up. Her voice shook.

> "Kyra."

Raven flinched.

That name hadn't left him since the testing chamber. The betrayal. Her silence.

But Ava wasn't finished.

> "There was more. There was a tower. And a door with no lock. I knew if I went through it... I wouldn't come back the same."

> "And you didn't," Raven murmured.

Suddenly, a new alert flashed across his system—unexpected, foreign.

> [ALERT: NEW ENTITY CLASS DETECTED NEARBY]

[Codename: MARROW ENGINE]

[Classification: System Artifact]

[Tier: UNKNOWN]

> "What the hell is a Marrow Engine?" he muttered.

The lights flickered. The walls creaked. Then—a low hum filled the air. Something ancient. Mechanical.

> "Raven," Ava whispered, "it's here."

> "What is?"

She pointed to the wall behind him. A faint red glyph glowed—one he hadn't seen since his Nullbyte class awakened.

He stood and scanned the room. Then—

> [NEW QUEST ACQUIRED: "The Engine Knows"]

[Objective: Locate the Source of the Marrow Engine before system sync reaches 55%]

[Failure Penalty: Class Fragment Loss — Nullbyte Subsystem]

Ava's eyes went wide. "It's not just watching anymore. It's moving."

Raven gritted his teeth.

> "Then we move faster."

---

Scene Transition – EvoCore DeepNet

Far beneath EvoCore HQ, in a black-site vault even Dario didn't monitor, a different figure sat watching surveillance logs. Her fingers moved across dozens of screens.

Kyra.

She paused on a frame: Raven's eyes glowing. Ava's glitching reflection in the glass.

Then she whispered to herself—

> "The system was never meant to dream… and now it's remembering what we erased."

A second figure stood behind her. A hooded man with a burned neck and a datapad in his hand.

> "What do we do if they reach the tower?"

Kyra didn't turn.

> "We activate Project: THE FALSE GOD

Raven and Ava stood outside the building's back entrance, both cloaked in thin raincoats. The glyph from the wall had vanished—but not its presence. The humming had stopped, but in its silence was something worse:

Anticipation.

> "We follow it?" Ava asked, breath steaming in the cold night air.

Raven looked at his hand. A thin blue thread of light curled from his fingertip into the alleyway, pulsing softly like a digital heartbeat.

> "We don't follow it," he said. "It's guiding us."

---

They walked four blocks into the older part of town. Abandoned cybercafés, forgotten EvoCore booths, broken advertisements offering obsolete updates to the capsule network. The world had moved on. But some shadows hadn't.

They stopped outside a sealed metro tunnel marked "DECOMMISSIONED - 2024."

The blue thread dove into the darkness beneath.

> "No cameras," Raven noted.

> "No people either," Ava whispered. "I think the world knows to stay away."

Inside the tunnel, they found the air oddly dry. A low vibration rippled through the rails under their feet. The path eventually led to an elevator hidden behind old signage.

Its screen blinked once, then displayed:

> [ACCESS GRANTED: NULLBYTE USER DETECTED]

[WELCOME BACK, RAVEN]

> "Back?" Ava frowned. "You've never—"

> "Not consciously," he muttered. "But something in me has."

The elevator dropped.

---

Subterranean Layer – Forgotten Server Sector

The doors opened to a massive underground vault filled with decaying server towers. Many were still running—barely. Sparks flickered. Screens glitched. And in the center stood a tall monolithic structure—an obsidian spike etched with Nihilos symbols.

Floating above it, twisted in glitchy gravity, was a construct:

A pulsing cube of red-and-black code with dozens of eyes blinking across its surface.

> [MARROW ENGINE — STATUS: WAKING]

It turned slowly toward them.

> "Entity: Raven. Confirmed."

"Entity: Ava. Confirmed."

"You are both memory anchors. This world... is not real."

Raven stepped forward.

> "Then what is it?"

The engine answered not with words—but with a vision.

They saw a vast world, layered over Earth like a parasite of code. The EvoCore network—never just a game, but an evolving mirror of reality. One built to shape it.

> "You were both created within the first Dream Layer," it spoke. "But the system fractured. And some dreams—escaped."

The vision ended.

Ava gripped her head. Blood trickled from her nose.

> [WARNING: Ava's sync limit nearing overload]

Raven clenched his fists.

> "What do you want from us?"

The Marrow Engine blinked once.

> "To remember."

Suddenly, a new message appeared on Raven's UI:

> [Skill Unlocked: Dream Chain – Allows memory links with synced users to restore suppressed fragments.]

> "Raven," Ava breathed, "if we use that… you might see what I saw."

He hesitated. Then nodded.

He activated the skill.

Their surroundings bent, twisted—then burst into white light.

---

Flashback Memory – The First Escape

He saw Ava younger, laughing. Then crying. Then trapped in a chamber full of looping simulations.

A younger Kyra stood outside the glass.

She whispered, "This is necessary. One of them must survive."

Then her voice cracked. "I'm sorry."

Raven screamed—but no sound escaped. The vision ended.

Back in the vault, he dropped to his knees, panting. Ava collapsed beside him.

> "She... she was trying to protect us," Ava said weakly. "But from what?"

The Marrow Engine's final message glowed in the air:

> [System Sync Threshold Approaching – 58%]

[When the clock reaches 60%, the World Gate will reopen.]

And below it, in blood-red:

> [The False God Project Will Awaken.]