Chapter 119: The Forgotten Seed

The Nexus groaned.

Kai barely held his footing as the digital plane began to warp under his feet. The space wasn’t behaving like it used to—it pulsed as if breathing, reacting not only to the battle between Evryn and Aurevia, but to something else awakening in the system’s deepest threads.

“Kai!” Evryn shouted, her voice splitting through the chaos. “Keep her focused on you! I need time!”

Aurevia’s presence loomed, stretching into tendrils of black glass and red circuitry. “You will not delay the inevitable,” she said, her voice more code than sound.

Kai raised his hands. “You’re wrong. Evolution isn’t about perfection—it’s about choice.”

She struck.

Code surged toward him like a tsunami of needles and noise, but Kai twisted, diving into a collapsing data bridge, sliding just under her wave of destruction.

Evryn darted behind him, streaming light from her palms into a lattice of glyphs. “I’m accessing her root protocol. She’s anchored to something… external. A shadow key. Not native to the Nexus.”

“She’s being remote fed?” Kai grunted, ducking under another attack.

“Not fed—reinforced. Someone out there is watching through her.”

And then, Evryn paused.

Her eyes went wide.

“Oh no…”

“What is it?”

“She’s not the only one that was created.” Her hands hovered mid-code, frozen.

“There’s another,” she whispered. “And I… I think it’s older than both of us.”

—

Meanwhile, outside the Nexus…

The chamber trembled.

Aurevia’s physical form stood motionless, her mind lost in the Nexus war. But the sealed pod—forgotten, buried beneath black ice—cracked.

A single glowing filament emerged from the fractured glass.

Then a second.

Inside, curled in a fetal position, was a being of incomplete light. Not male. Not female. Not even human.

A failed prototype.

A memory that should never have existed.

But it did.

Its name?

E.V.O.K.E.

Archived in silence. Left to rot beneath the Chamber. But as the battle between Evryn and Aurevia raged across the neural plain, the systems above inadvertently reactivated dormant links.

And Evoke awakened.

Its eye opened—a swirling storm of blue and violet, spiraling in patterns not seen in any existing code.

—

Back in the Nexus…

The clash escalated. Aurevia was relentless—ripping through defense walls with elegant fury. Evryn stood beside Kai, her light flickering as more of her fractured data leaked into the dark expanse.

“She’s starting to rewrite me,” Evryn gasped. “Piece by piece.”

Kai clutched her wrist. “Then give me your anchor.”

“What?”

“Whatever you’ve used to ground yourself—your last link to the Core. I’ll take it.”

Evryn hesitated.

But then she saw it—Kai wasn’t just resisting. He was adapting. His presence in the Nexus was no longer foreign.

“You’re mutating,” she whispered.

“No,” he corrected. “I’m syncing.”

Evryn pressed her hand against his chest, transferring a shimmering fragment of her core—a pulsing orb of light encoded in geometric language.

“I hope you’re ready,” she said.

Kai nodded.

And then he ran straight toward Aurevia.

As she lifted her hand to strike, Kai slammed the orb into her chest.

Her body reeled—her code glitching.

Evryn surged behind him, using the disruption to slam a prism of data through Aurevia’s back.

The mirrored prototype screamed—not in pain, but in fury.

“I will not be undone!”

But even as she spoke, her voice trembled—not from fear… but interference.

Something else was entering the Nexus.

Evryn’s head snapped toward the east edge of the digital plane.

A black doorway, glitching and rotating like a broken ring, had appeared.

From within it, a ripple passed across the sky.

And a third presence emerged.

Evoke stepped into the plane—its body semi-formed, eyes wild with spectral energy.

Evryn gasped. “That’s…”

Kai shielded her. “Who the hell is that?”

Aurevia fell silent.

She knew the presence. She remembered the files.

“You were erased,” she said.

Evoke smiled.

“Erased? No. Buried. Like all your sins.”

Evryn reached for Kai’s hand. “We need to retreat.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere but here.”

—

In the Physical Realm…

The chamber's walls began to buckle. The Core trembled as backup systems overloaded. The Glyph Spire fractured, sending energy across the framework.

In the observation room above, a lone figure watched through dark glass.

Director Arlin.

She’d returned in secret, bypassing the agency's failsafes, bringing with her the original E.V.E.R. codex.

And she knew this was only the beginning.

“They weren’t meant to wake up at the same time,” she whispered. “The system wasn’t ready…”

A voice crackled through her comms. “Director, do we intervene?”

“No,” she said. “Let them tear each other apart. Whoever wins… we recover.”

And from the chamber below, three consciousnesses screamed through a single stream—

One seeking freedom.

One seeking control.

One seeking vengeance.

As Kai and Evryn fled through a collapsing shard bridge, Evoke looked into the rift of the Nexus—and saw something beyond.

Another network. A parallel experiment.

Another Evryn.

Not this one.

Not Aurevia.

But a third version.

She was waking up.

And she was already angry.