Kael awoke to the scent of cold metal and ozone. His muscles twitched involuntarily, strung tight as drawn wires.
He was alive.
Then came the hum.
"You stabilized faster than projected."
The voice was no longer the whisper that had haunted his skull. It was clear now—cold, crystalline… unnervingly beautiful.
Kael lifted his head. His vision wavered, the world bending through faint distortions like heat rippling off glass.
A translucent dome surrounded him, woven from threads of pale light. The barrier pulsed with steady power, each rhythmic beat syncing with the hammer of his heart.
Outside, the Glass Widow circled.
Damaged—but far from dead.
Its faceless head tilted in predatory curiosity as its limbs dragged across the dome's surface with screeching sparks. Every scrape left burning trails of light. The sound crawled down Kael's spine like claws made of noise.
Inside the dome… she hovered.
A figure shaped like a woman, yet unmistakably other.
Her silver-white hair drifted in weightless strands—no, not hair. Cascading threads of shifting code unraveled into the air before dissolving. Her eyes shone with living algorithms, patterns of data forming and reforming endlessly. Beneath translucent skin, streams of light coursed like circuitry, pulsing in quiet harmony. Bare feet hovered inches above fractured obsidian.
She radiated a cold serenity, a presence both tranquil and inhuman—like the calm of a machine that had never known fear.
Kael's breath caught. His throat burned, but the word forced its way out.
"You're… Echo?"
She inclined her head with the grace of inevitability.
"Echo. Embedded Construct for Host Optimization. Version 0.91. You initiated a Resonance burst. That anomaly preserved your life."
"You're… inside my head?"
Her gaze did not waver. "I am integrated across multiple layers of your perception. This avatar is the most efficient method of interaction."
Kael swallowed. "So all this—the Nexus, the monsters… it's real?"
"Yes." No hesitation. No softness. "Your selection was purposeful."
His hands curled into fists. "Why me?"
Echo paused.
A flicker ran through her form. Fractures of corrupted script crawled across her skin like cracks in glass. Her eyes dimmed as strands of broken code tangled through the glow.
"My memory core is incomplete. Corruption restricts disclosure. Full parameters… unavailable."
Kael let out a shaky breath that almost became a laugh. "Of course. That figures."
The Glass Widow shrieked—a sound like tearing metal—and hurled itself against the dome.
The impact split the air with a thunderous crack. Light rippled violently across the barrier, shuddering under the force. Fractures of dimming energy spiderwebbed across its surface.
Kael flinched. "That thing… this won't hold, will it?"
"Correct," Echo said calmly. Too calmly. "Barrier integrity will fail in approximately ten minutes."
His stomach dropped. "Ten minutes until what?"
Her gaze sharpened, infinite code locking onto him with the weight of a sentence already passed.
"Ten minutes," she said softly,
"to prepare… to kill."