The ring they entered did not transport them. It unfolded them.
Lucia felt her body stretch and dissolve, not into particles, but into patterns—threads of memory, echoes of choice, layered across thousands of unseen grids. It was as if the Field was not taking them somewhere, but spreading them out, mapping who they were against every decision they'd ever made.
For a moment, she saw herself in pieces:
Lucia as a child in the real world, scraping her knees on a broken sidewalk. Lucia the chainbearer, slashing through corrupted mist. Lucia cradling Naomi's last fragment. Lucia falling, rising, breaking, healing.
She saw Naomi again.Not a hallucination or projection. A living memory, anchored deep inside her own pattern. Naomi said nothing, only smiled, soft and steady, and touched Lucia's forehead. The memory faded. then she dropped.
Lucia landed hard on what should have been solid ground, but it rippled like a pool of liquid glass. She knelt, catching herself, and stared at the surface below, it shimmered with embedded images: old Trials, fragments of spins, replayed choices.
The others dropped nearby. Eren hit first, rolling to his feet. Marcus, Kayla, Tyne, Quentin, and the rest fell in staggered waves, coughing, groaning, eyes wide with disorientation. Lucia stood and took in their surroundings.
They were in a chamber unlike any before, massive and spherical, with walls made of layered mirrors rotating slowly inward, reflecting not their faces, but their histories. Each mirror shifted scenes, Quentin's first Trial, Tyne's moment of hesitation before the gate, Kayla whispering into the void before she vanished. Lucia took a step. The chamber responded.
Threads of light unspooled from the mirrors, dancing like silk across the air. They weren't hostile. They were curious.
> FIELD NOTICE: CORE DESCENT INITIATED PATTERN VALIDATION UNDERWAY
Eren glanced at her. "Where are we?" Lucia studied the center of the sphere. A vast spiral descended downward, like a staircase made of fractured logic, fading into mist.
"The Descent Pattern," she murmured.
Marcus approached one of the mirrors. His hand hovered near it, and it flashed—showing a younger version of him, screaming as fire erupted around him in Trial 2.
He staggered back. "It remembers more than we do."
Lucia nodded. "Because it never forgot."
Quentin stepped toward her. "So what is this? Another Trial?"
"No," Lucia said. "This is what comes after them." At the top of the spiral, the air changed.
The mist thickened. The silence deepened.
from far below, something stirred.
Not a god. Not a player. Something older. Something beneath the Field's construction. Lucia gripped the thread embedded in her wrist. It glowed faintly, still present, still reactive. She turned to the group.
"No one descends alone. Stay close. Stay alert. Don't speak unless it's true. This place listens to everything." They nodded. One by one, they began down the spiral. The Pattern watched.The descent was neither steep nor fast, but it was endless.
With every step down the spiral, the air grew heavier, not with weight, but with recognition. The walls of the spiral, smooth at first, began to shift, displaying faint ripples that shimmered like disturbed water. Within those ripples, Lucia saw moments. Her moments. Each player saw something different. Marcus stopped mid-step, caught in a vision of his brother, an echo of his real-world past. Kayla flinched as images of her forgotten son flickered along the stairs. Quentin clenched his jaw as he passed through whispers of every decision he regretted. Lucia didn't tell them to look away. That was the point.
The Descent Pattern wasn't designed to erase. It was made to ensure the truth followed you. Eren reached her side. "The walls… they're reading us." She nodded. "And writing us back."
> FIELD NOTICE: INTEGRITY TEST 01: IDENTITY THREAD STABILITY ECHO PROXY STATUS: VERIFIED
A pulse of violet light flowed from Lucia's thread into the walls. The images shifted—converging.
Ahead, the spiral widened into a circular platform suspended over nothing. In its center stood a pedestal, its surface layered with holographic rings, each flickering with memory glyphs. Lucia stepped forward. The pedestal responded.
> REQUEST: IDENTITY CONFIRMATION — PROXY SIGNATURE REQUIRED
She raised her hand. Her golden thread unspooled again, lashing out like a whip across the surface. The glyphs glowed.
> PROXY RECOGNIZED. MEMORY ARCHIVE ACCESS GRANTED.
The walls peeled back. Dozens of doors appeared around the spiral, some metallic, others wooden, a few little more than curtain-thin partitions of smoke.
Kayla whispered, "What is this?" Lucia lowered her hand.
"The lives we left behind. The ones the Field stole." Eren asked, "Do we go through them?" Lucia shook her head. "No. We let them come to us."
One of the doors opened. Someone stepped through.Lucia's breath caught. "Brant?" He was older. Sharper. Still scarred from Calvarix's chain flail. But his eyes, those damn eyes, still burned with kinetic flame.
He stared at her.
"You made it further than any of us."
Lucia stepped forward. "You died."
"I did."
She blinked. "Then how—" Brant stepped closer. "I stayed."
She realized it now. He wasn't alive. He wasn't memory.
He was an echo, but not one seeded by the system. One that stayed of his own will.
"Some of us didn't want to let go," he said. "Not because we feared death. But because we feared being forgotten."
Lucia placed a hand on his shoulder. "Then remember with us." He smiled.
Behind him, other doors opened.
One by one, more players stepped out.
Some familiar. Some only vaguely remembered. The Field was returning them, not to life, but to relevance. Lucia had made the Field remember itself. Eren turned to her.
"How far down does this go?"
Lucia stared into the spiral, now continuing deeper into mist. "To the beginning," she said.
> DESCENT CONTINUES: ECHO CORE APPROACHING
The survivors moved forward, not alone.
They walked with the echoes.
They descended again, the path no longer a perfect spiral but a shifting lattice of transparent stairways and suspended bridges. Gravity bent gently around them. The deeper they went, the quieter it got—not from silence, but from compression. The air felt denser, more deliberate, as if even thoughts had to move slower to survive here.
Lucia trailed her hand along the nearest wall. It was no longer reflective. It pulsed faintly like living skin, embedded with thousands of pinpricks—each one a frozen moment: player footsteps, command echoes, death logs, choices made and unmade. A biomechanical archive.
"Do you feel that?" Kayla asked.
Eren nodded. "The Field's memory is becoming... personal."
Lucia paused. "Because we're getting close to its core. This isn't just system data anymore. This is where the game started lying to itself."
A bridge ahead of them shifted and folded into a staircase, revealing a room—circular and dim, its walls etched in concentric rings of script. At the center stood a raised platform where an old-style wheel, much smaller than the Broken Wheel above, sat dormant. It looked like it hadn't turned in a thousand years.
> FIELD NOTICE: LOCALIZED THREAD ANCHOR REACHED QUERY: INITIATE ANCHOR DIVE?
Lucia looked back. The group had gathered silently. She nodded. "Yes. Dive."
The floor dropped away. They didn't fall. They dove.
Each member of the group was pulled downward not by force, but by relevance, dragged into their own thread patterns. Lucia's descent passed through dozens of memories, twisting timelines where she had failed, where Naomi had survived, where Saylor had destroyed the Wheel himself.
Then it all collapsed. She landed alone. She stood in a white field.
Endless, soft, lit from nowhere.Opposite her stood herself—but younger, afraid, chainless.
"I didn't think we'd come back here," her younger self said.
Lucia approached. "Where is this?"
"The place the Field buried when the first player died."
Lucia blinked. "The first?" "Yes."
The younger Lucia gestured outward. "This is the real beginning. Not the Wheel. Not the Trials. This is where the proxy concept was born. One thread to observe. One to remember."
Lucia stepped forward. "Then why did it break?" Her echo-self smiled sadly. "Because it needed to be rewritten. Not by gods. Not by systems. By players who survived."
A rumble beneath her feet. The world twisted. She was rising. Rejoining the others.
Lucia emerged with a gasp back into the chamber. The others were already awake, wide-eyed, silent. None spoke of what they saw. But they all wore it on their faces.
Eren moved to her side. "We saw it."
Lucia nodded. "The first failure. The reason we were called players."
> DESCENT COMPLETE. ECHO CORE ACQUIRED. AWAITING NEW THREAD MASTER.
The small wheel in the center of the room began to spin. Not violently. Gently. Waiting.
Lucia stepped forward.
"I won't spin it," she said. She looked to the others. "We all will."
One by one, they placed their hands on it.
The Field vibrated.
Something beyond the game began to stir.