QUESTCHAIN: Reality Reloaded

The city hadn't changed.

Same neon smear of vendor stalls. Same rhythm of quests scrolling over glass billboards. Same filtered daylight stretching through the holo-rigs overhead. But for Kael, it all felt… thinner.

Reality shimmered like a badly rendered background. No one else seemed to notice. They laughed. Leveled up. Chased dailies.

No one else had seen the tower.

He stood on the edge of a plaza, his HUD feeding him surface-level bounties—fetch quests, tag hunts, upgrade triggers—but none of it landed. The world felt like a loading screen he'd forgotten how to exit.

Dex emerged from a side street, hood up, lenses dark. He was moving slower than usual, more deliberate. His movements no longer looked like a player—more like a trace-ghost trying to pass as one.

"Any signs?" Dex asked, keeping his voice low.

Kael shook his head. "No. Oracle's gone quiet. The shard's dark. But I keep seeing... echoes. Like memory leaks."

They both watched a girl skate by on chrome blades. Her skin flickered for half a second—then returned. Most wouldn't have seen it. But they saw everything now.

Dex checked a script loop on his device. "We're still threaded. Passive sync is holding. That means Oracle's still watching."

Kael's jaw clenched. "Then why let us go?"

Dex didn't answer.

---

That night, back in Kael's stackspace, they ran diagnostics. Surface data only. Every time Dex tried to run deeper code pulls, something countered.

"Blocker script," Dex muttered. "Adaptive. Rewrites faster than I can parse it."

"Oracle?"

Dex shrugged. "Or something protecting its trail."

The shard sat on Kael's desk, inert. No pulse. Just a dull shard of code-glass now. But it hadn't cooled. It was still warm to the touch, like it remembered being alive.

"Any word from Sera?" Kael asked.

Dex looked up. "Gone. Not even trace-ghosts left in her last known shard. She's in blackout mode."

"Think she's trying to protect us?"

"Or she's trying to finish something she started years ago."

---

The next day, they walked the city again—blending in, pretending the world made sense.

But they were different now. Not marked like players. Marked like variables—inserted into an equation they hadn't written.

In a back alley near the old net-arch district, a strange symbol pulsed across a closed server door. Just for a moment. A sigil: broken chain, surrounded by a ring of eyes.

Kael stopped cold. "You see that?"

Dex nodded slowly. "Relic. They're watching now too."

Kael's breath caught. "They know we accessed a shard."

"Worse," Dex said. "They think we belong to it."

---

That night, Kael couldn't sleep.

Dreams came fast. Fractured. The tower again—closer now. No longer distant. Its base was covered in roots that weren't roots, like data structures made of bone and memory. It was growing.

He saw players kneeling. Reconstructed from glitch-fragments. The mirrored-eyed versions of himself stared up at him again.

But this time, one stood up.

This time, one reached out.

---

Kael woke drenched in sweat.

Dex was already at the console.

"They're back," Dex said without turning.

"Who?"

Dex pointed to the screen.

A dev ping. Encrypted.

RELIC_TEAM://TRACE_ACTIVE

They had been found.

Kael's throat went dry. "They're making a move?"

"Not yet," Dex said, his voice tight. "But they want us to know we're being tracked."

Kael sat down beside him. "Then we need to move before they do."

Dex turned to him, eyes calm but lit with that same quiet fire from the Crypt.

"Then let's find the Coreworld."