"Where am I?" Zephyr thought out loud. A large white expanse spread out before him, glyph lines running across the clear, mirror-like ground in beautiful chaos. He felt at peace here. A sense of natural belonging, like he was nestled in his mother’s embrace. The whole place, from the cold clear ground beneath his feet, to the chilly air he breathed in through his nostrils, and most especially... that.
He stared longingly at the— would he call it a shard?— that floated right in the center of the expanse, all glyph lines leading toward it and from it at the sa ti. He longed for it like nothing else he had ever longed for...
And what had he ever even longed for?... A vague, distant feeling bubbled up nearly to the fore of his mind, making him pause in confusion. It felt like he was forgetting sothing. But just as quickly as the feeling ca, it faded away, the previous longing dominating his mind again.
It wasn’t even a longing fueled by a desire to possess, rather, to give. To give himself to this thing... this entity. As he drew nearer in a trance, he realized that it wasn’t the shard in particular that drew him. Instead, it was what it was connected to. He could see it now from the closer distance. The shard was only a fragnt, a sort of gatekey— his gatekey to accessing... that.
He looked up at the faint glyph lines stretching into the sky and connecting to sothing distant that he couldn’t make out. The lines were harder to see the further up he looked.
Suddenly, it beca extrely difficult to even keep looking. Like the place he was looking up to was sacred. A place not ant for his eyes. He cast his gaze down sharply in reverent sha, like a child being chided by his mother. The feeling he got from gazing up lingered like an aftertaste. It was very familiar. Again. But familiar to what?
He paused his steps, feeling frustrated as he tried to latch onto the vague sense of familiarity that was threatening to disappear at any mont.
He knitted his brows in concentration. What was it familiar to? He felt like it was important. He could sense sothing like urgency, mixed within the increasingly fading feeling of familiarity.
"Origin!" His eyes snapped open. "Origin." That was the word he could glean before the familiar feeling faded again. He’d once used the word Origin to describe the source of reverence he felt when looking up. That was all he could rember though. The circumstance in which he ca up with the word was lost to him.
"Well, whatever. Who cares," he thought out loud. The most important thing was that he now had a befitting word he could use to refer to the source of that reverent feeling. He kept walking toward the floating shard-like fragnt in the center. His gatekey to Origin.
"—st!" A distant voice cut through his happy thoughts, making him pause in his steps.
"Host is in critical danger! Consciousness is collapsing. Neural entropy is rising beyond recoverable limits. Brain activity shows catastrophic loss of self-awareness. Unknown dream-state construct is inducing irreversible cognitive shutdown. If you do not wake up now, continuity of self will be lost! Wherever you are, disengage imdiately!"
"Wake up, Host!"
"Host is in critical danger! Consciousness is collapsing—" the voice repeated the warning over and over with urgency.
"Danger?! What could be dangerous about this?!" he fired back, intent on disregarding the warning.
"Host?!" the voice called out in response to Zephyr’s remark.
"Host, wherever you are, you need to find a way out of there! Your continued stay in that dream-state threatens to erode your very existence."
"So what?!" Zephyr replied. "What’s so wrong with that anyway? I am where I’m supposed to be! Who the hell are you to tell what to do?!"
The voice paused for a beat before replying. "I am Aegis Nexus 09. Your personalized Artificial General Intelligence."
There it was. That feeling again. Zephyr shook his head as Aegis fired on— from Zephyr’s response, it had concluded that he had already lost parts of himself, forgetting who he was. Therefore, it disregarded all protocols and delved into the sea of Zephyr’s mories stored in his brain, from his cerebral cortex to his hippocampus. Decoding electrical impulses and firing them off as vital snippets to jar him awake.
Zephyr held his head, falling to his knees as he scread in discomfort. He felt like he was being tainted. Parts of him that weren’t supposed to be in here, weren’t qualified to be in here, flooded right back in. The distant feeling of self getting pieced together slowly, becoming more solid.
Aegis kept sending streams of thoughts from wherever it was. mories of Zephyr’s father’s face that had beco vague to him over the years, small details, like the first ti his rune inscription was acknowledged by Old Bjorn back at the forge. Zephyr could rember every single thing clearly, from the sll of the brew Bjorn was drinking from his flask that day, to the tiny flint on his weathered apron. Eventually, he didn’t even need Aegis to jog his mories, everything started falling into place naturally. He slowly ca to himself, becoming aware of his surroundings, and he realized that all the while, he hadn’t even been really screaming... at least not with his mouth.
All his thoughts were being broadcast out loud. He had no voice in the literal sense here.
His rapid breathing slowly evened out as he cald, stabilizing himself.
"Host is stabilizing. Consciousness integrity returning to nominal range. Neural entropy falling to safe levels. Core identity signals are re-synchronizing. Brain activity indicates restoration of self-awareness and volitional control. No hostile constructs detected. Dream-state no longer seems to be posing any clear threat. Continuity of self is secure... Welco back, Host," Aegis reported.
A small sigh of relief escaped Zephyr’s lips as he opened his eyes slowly. "Thank you, Aegis..."
"Always at your service, Host."
He sat up, grimly considering what would have happened if Aegis had not snapped him out of his dream-like state. He shuddered at the thought, snapping himself back to the present.
He took in his surroundings again for the second ti, but this ti with a new eye.
He imdiately noticed sothing terrible.
Based on what he was seeing so far, he could already infer where he was presently. He was sohow... inside his Mana core? And while that made absolutely no sense, he had no ti to ponder on it as it was the least of his concerns.
He could physically see the invading chill that had made him lose consciousness. The whole place was starting to take on a pale gray shade. From the cold, clear ground, to the network of glyph lines extending all the way to the shard-like fragnt— or what he now considered to be his Mana node if his assumptions were correct.
His single mana node was locked in a losing battle of attrition with the virus-like substance. It had enveloped all glyph lines coming from the ground up to his Mana node, starting to infect even the shard-like fragnt slowly from the bottom.
If this went on, the end goal would seem to be what was above... Origin. Zephyr wanted to look up at it, but a lingering sense of reverence prevented him from committing the blasphemous act. He wasn’t worthy.
Instead, he needed to focus on what he could do. Regardless of the absurdity of his presence here, this was his Mana core. And it was being invaded before his very eyes.
Like hell he was going to let that happen!
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