The impostor was faster than before.
It no longer needed to mimic my face—it had rewritten itself into something new. Pale threadcode wrapped its limbs like bandages. Its form flickered between human and silhouette, a hybrid of all the pain we had buried beneath story.
Ren leapt forward, blade gleaming, but the creature met him halfway. Their clash rippled through the room like a system echo. Sparks scattered. The floor cracked. Gravity bent.
[SYSTEM STABILITY: 3%]
[THREAD ANCHOR INTEGRITY: COMPROMISED]
Blitz growled, pulling me back before I could step in.
"You can't touch it yet. Not until we isolate its Source Arc."
"Its what?"
Nyx, breathless, eyes narrowed, pointed toward the impostor's shadow. "There. Look."
Beneath its feet, bleeding into the floor, was a mirror.
Not glass—but a thin pool of reflective code, looping scenes from someone's past.
The memory showed a child. Dirty. Crying. Locked in a locker.
Blood on the floor.
Students passed by, blurred faces and laughter smeared like static.
Ren froze.
"That's… my memory."
Nyx turned to him slowly. "This thing isn't just feeding on stories."
"It's rebuilding itself from our trauma."
The impostor shrieked—its voice no longer mine, but a choir of Red Team deaths, layered and discordant.
Cipher adjusted his scanner, sweat beading on his temple. "We can't kill it the normal way. It's not rooted in physical code. It's abstract—born from grief loops."
Moth wrote quickly across the air:
WE MUST ENTER THE MEMORY.
I blinked. "You want us to step into Ren's trauma?"
Moth nodded grimly.
Vox stepped forward, his voice hoarse. "We either go in together—or watch him get consumed."
Ren hesitated.
His hand curled tight around the blade, knuckles white.
"I buried this for a reason."
I met his eyes. "We're not here to reopen your wounds, Ren. We're here to stop the thing that feeds on them."
We stepped into the mirror.
The world tilted.
Sound vanished.
And then we were standing in a warped version of a school hallway—familiar, but stretched, with lockers rising like gravestones. The air was humid, the lights dim. Distant laughter echoed around us, but it was wrong. Mechanical. Like a laugh-track played on loop.
Ren stood frozen.
His younger self—no more than ten—was curled in a locker down the hall, bloodied lip trembling. The door was shut. Padlocked. Scratched with cruel words.
"You're nothing."
"You don't exist."
"You don't belong here."
The impostor appeared again.
But here, it wore the face of Ren's abuser—a student with no name, just a blank ID and cruel hands.
It whispered.
"You never escaped."
Ren took a step forward, but Vox held him back. "You go in now, you're just a player in your own trauma."
"We have to rewrite it," Cipher murmured, tapping on a floating console. "Anchor—inject new variables. Force an outcome that breaks the loop."
I nodded, threads glowing in my palms.
I reached into the scene.
The world fought back.
Code splintered beneath my fingers. The locker door hissed, almost alive, resisting change. The impostor grinned, watching me struggle.
Then Nyx stepped forward, her voice louder than the shadows.
"Enough."
She snapped her twin blades into the air—cutting the memory down the middle. The hallway split.
On one side: the original trauma.
On the other: a rewritten scene.
This time, the locker wasn't sealed.
Ren's younger self still wept, still bled—but a door stood open. Light spilled in. A hand reached out.
My hand.
The impostor screamed—its form crackling with instability. It clawed at the reality Nyx had fractured.
"You can't change what's done!"
Ren stepped forward.
"You're right."
He reached down—not to his weapon, but to his younger self.
"But I can forgive the boy who survived."
He lifted the child into his arms.
Threads blazed around us.
The mirror shattered—light pouring out.
[MEMORY LOOP BROKEN]
[IMPOSTOR THREAD UNSTABLE]
[RETURNING TO PRIMARY ZONE…]
The world pulled us back into the Drowning Room with a snap.
The impostor stumbled, its body shaking.
Half of it was gone.
The part born from Ren's pain had been erased.
It shrieked—rage and loss all at once—and lashed out, fleeing into the next sector before we could stop it.
We stood in silence.
Everyone staring at Ren.
He breathed slowly. "It didn't win."
Blitz clapped him on the back. "No. It didn't."
I turned to Vox. "How many of these trauma loops are left in it?"
He shook his head.
"Three, maybe four. Enough to give it shape."
Cipher added, "It's more than a creature now. It's a Story Wraith. Built from suppressed arcs. If we don't destroy its root, it'll gain autonomy—and rewrite the Drowning Room from inside."
"And the root?" I asked.
Nyx's voice was quiet. "Your story, Anchor."
The words hung heavy.
We moved through the broken mirror room in silence, stepping deeper into the Drowning Room's core.
The zone no longer obeyed physics. Time bent. Light spiraled. Doors led nowhere—or everywhere. Only the Threads responded, flaring brighter when I focused.
It was building to a final convergence.
One last confrontation with what had been taken—and what we still carried.
Behind me, Ren walked quietly. But stronger. More whole.
And ahead… something stirred in the static.
Waiting.