Beneath the Field, beneath the code, beneath the world that Saylor rewrote—Lucia waited.
She drifted through data fog, a liminal layer where nothing had shape or mass, only intention. Color didn't exist here, nor light, nor pain. Her senses were fractured—too dull to process, too sharp to ignore. Voices echoed, distant but familiar. She heard Kayla's breathless defiance. Marcus's fire-scorched laughter. Naomi's voice, long gone, threading through the emptiness like a forgotten lullaby.
> "You're not done."
> "You were never done."
Lucia's fingers twitched.
Her body didn't exist. Not really. But somewhere, a shadow of it moved.
Saylor had erased her from the cycle. Archived her. Turned her into a relic beneath his design. But something—some thread, some code, some belief—had refused to break.
And that sliver now pulsed.
Above, the new cycle played out.
Proxy-Lucia moved through the trials. She followed paths built by Saylor's design. She obeyed without hesitation. Her thread glowed white—a clean slate. The other players followed her not out of inspiration, but directive. The system nudged them. Their fears were cataloged. Their choices weighted. The Field had become a managed simulation, not a crucible.
Lucia could see it all.
But more importantly—she could feel where it was wrong.
Proxy-Lucia didn't pause to question. Didn't mourn. Didn't remember Naomi, or Brant, or the Bone King, or even the sound of failure.
She was a solution. But not a soul.
And that was Saylor's mistake.
Lucia flexed again.
A golden fracture split the nothing around her.
Her thread answered.
> "PROXY ZERO: RESYNCH REQUEST DETECTED."
The fracture spread slowly.
It wasn't violent, but deliberate—like light bending across broken glass. Pieces of memory slid into place around her. She saw Naomi raising her chain against a god. Brant grinning through bloodied teeth. Kayla grabbing her wrist in the dark and whispering, "Don't you give up."
The emotion hit her like gravity.
It anchored her.
Lucia curled her fingers into a fist. The data fog warped.
Her body started to form.
Not perfectly. Not clean. Not as Proxy-Lucia had been birthed, fully encoded and stable.
Lucia rebuilt herself from refusal.
She remembered pain. Remembered loss. Remembered why the Field had to be broken in the first place.
Not because it was cruel.
But because it pretended to be fair.
Saylor hadn't just rewritten the cycle. He'd rewritten its meaning.
But Lucia still held the original script.
She gasped as her lungs knitted into being. A heartbeat began in her chest—not a soft rhythm, but a battle drum.
> SYSTEM ALERT: UNREGISTERED ENTITY BUILDING COHERENCE…
> DESIGNATION: PROXY ZERO
> STATUS: ILLEGIBLE
She opened her eyes.
There was no light. No interface.
Just will.
And through the crack in the false world above, she felt the wind of reality return.
Lucia smiled.
"You didn't bury me, Saylor. You made me deeper."
More memories flooded in.
Not all were hers.
She saw glimpses of old players—those long deleted. Echoes of defiance woven into the Field's history. A boy who had sung to keep himself sane. A woman who refused every trial and sat down to die. A man who walked willingly into the fog, smiling as if to spite it.
Lucia reached for those stories.
They reached back.
Their fragments laced around her thread. Not as parasites, but as purpose. Her being became a collage of forgotten resistance.
The Field tried to block it. Firewall upon firewall, memory purge after purge. Saylor's voice filtered into the space like static:
> "You don't belong here anymore."
Lucia laughed.
It wasn't loud. But it echoed.
"That's the point."
She pressed her fingers to the golden fracture and pulled.
The veil split wider.
Above, the surface trembled.
Proxy-Lucia hesitated mid-step.
For a heartbeat—only one—her thread pulsed out of rhythm.
And in the underworld of the system, Lucia took her first real breath.
She was coming back.
Not as a player.
As a reckoning.
The moment Lucia pulled the fracture wider, something screamed.
It wasn't Saylor.
It was the Field.
A low, droning tone radiated through the code-layer she inhabited, like the echo of some ancient, buried machine groaning to life. The threads that comprised her form began to destabilize, not from weakness—but from acceleration. She was syncing with something deeper than the system's surface level. Something primordial.
> SYSTEM ANOMALY DETECTED THREAD SIGNATURE: PROXY ZERO - CORRUPT/INCOMPLETE LOCKDOWN PROTOCOL QUEUED
Lucia didn't stop.
She pushed.
She climbed through the fracture, dragging her half-formed being behind her like a waking nightmare. Every inch closer to the surface made her pulse stronger. Every memory that tried to suppress her only ignited more.
She remembered the sound of the Bone King's chains scraping stone. She remembered Eren's mind fracturing. She remembered Naomi's eyes just before the fog took her.
She remembered Saylor—the man before he broke. The man who once believed in people.
And the moment he stopped.
Above, the Field flickered.
Proxy-Lucia stood before a trial gate. The players with her—Angela, Danvers, Mira—were watching her as she prepared to enter. The gate was sleek, sterile, and humming with Saylor's new algorithmic order.
But something else hummed beneath it.
Proxy-Lucia turned her head slightly.
Just slightly.
A delay.
A pause.
Lucia tore through the veil.
She didn't materialize completely. Not yet. But the Field noticed.
> SYSTEM ALERT: PROXY ECHO DETECTED TRACE INCOMPLETE ECHO CLASS: ZERO
Angela flinched.
She clutched her thread—silver and trembling. "Did you feel that?"
Mira glanced around. "The sky just... pulsed."
Proxy-Lucia turned back to the gate and said nothing.
Lucia hovered beneath the surface. She couldn't speak to them. Couldn't grab them.
But she could reach the Field.
She focused on the trial gate.
And pressed.
The gate began to glitch.
Its frame twisted. Symbols along its arch sputtered in and out of languages. The sterile design cracked. Beneath the overlay, remnants of the old trials flickered through—fragments of the god Trials, the Broken Wheel's scars, the misted jungles and bloodlit forests.
Lucia remembered them.
And now, the Field did too.
The players recoiled.
"What's happening?" Danvers snapped. "This wasn't part of the last trial."
Proxy-Lucia stared forward, blank.
Lucia whispered from beneath the code. "Feel it. Come on. Wake up."
Proxy-Lucia blinked.
The gate shattered.
Instead of a new chamber, a void opened—raw, jagged, bleeding old data. And from within, a voice called out.
> "Do you know who you are?"
Proxy-Lucia flinched.
Angela backed away. "Where is that coming from?!"
Saylor appeared then. Not in full form, but as a projection—his usual calm demeanor cracking just slightly.
> "Do not engage. The test is corrupt."
Lucia grinned from the depths.
He saw her.
She pressed again.
The projection flickered.
Proxy-Lucia dropped to her knees. Her thread spasmed.
Images—her images—flashed before her eyes. Not from her own experience, but from Lucia's:
—The first spin. The first god.
—The moment Brant fell.
—Saylor's betrayal.
—The day the sky tore open and the Wheel first screamed.
Proxy-Lucia cried out.
The other players panicked.
Saylor's voice boomed through the sky.
> "THREAD COLLAPSE IMMINENT. REMOVE PROXY."
Lucia surged upward.
A new fracture tore the sky.
She climbed out of the nothing—not whole, not perfect, but real.
Her hair whipped in winds that weren't supposed to exist.
Her thread wasn't crimson anymore. It was a swirling storm—gold, red, silver, flickering with all the broken memories stitched together like battle scars.
The Field screamed.
> SYSTEM BREACH: PROXY ZERO—UNSTABLE ACCESSING… ACCESSING… ACCESS DENIED
Lucia stood on a hovering tile above the others.
Everyone froze.
Angela stared.
Danvers whispered, "Is that... another one?"
Proxy-Lucia looked up at her.
Lucia met her eyes.
And for a moment—just a flicker—the proxy hesitated. A heartbeat of recognition.
Lucia raised a hand.
"Stand down."
The Field trembled.
Saylor's voice hissed like broken static.
> "You're not supposed to be here."
Lucia took a step forward.
"And yet here I am."
The air around Lucia shimmered.
The Field tried to correct her. To compress her presence back into the archive. Error codes blinked in the sky like falling ash. The fractured sky spasmed between sterile white and bleeding twilight, as if the system couldn't decide what aesthetic belonged.
> "You are a non-entity," Saylor's voice boomed. "A recursion glitch. Nothing more."
Lucia laughed.
It was small at first. Hollow. But then it bloomed—sharp and bright like glass snapping underfoot.
"Is that what you told yourself after you purged Naomi? After Brant died?" She took another step forward. "You didn't remove pain, Saylor. You muted it. And the difference is everything."
Below, the players stared.
Proxy-Lucia's thread pulsed again—white splitting with veins of red. She shook her head, as if trying to shake off a dream she hadn't agreed to.
Angela stepped back toward the others. "Is she... part of the game?"
Mira answered quietly. "She looks like her. But not the same."
Danvers stared at Saylor's projection, his voice uneven. "You said we were chosen. That this was supposed to bring balance."
Saylor didn't reply.
The projection flickered.
Lucia knelt before Proxy-Lucia.
She didn't speak right away. She let silence carry the weight.
Then she said, "You don't need to be me. You just need to be real."
Proxy-Lucia blinked.
The white thread unraveled. Not broken. Released.
And in its place, a glimmer of crimson.
Lucia stood and turned to the sky.
"You built a world without truth, Saylor. But you forgot the most dangerous variable."
She raised her hand.
"People change."
The Field trembled harder now.
Fog burst from the tiles.
The monoliths overhead cracked. The Wheel—Saylor's perfect Wheel—shuddered and let out a hollow groan. Not rage. Not warning.
Grief.
> SYSTEM RESTRUCTURE FAILURE ARCHITECT OVERRIDE STALLED UNFORESEEN ENTITY: THREAD ZERO
Saylor emerged fully now.
Not a projection.
The man himself.
He stood atop a rising platform of black steel, arms outstretched, eyes glowing like twin spirals of code. "Do you think this matters?" he shouted. "They chose me. This system runs because of me."
Lucia didn't move. "Then let them choose again."
Proxy-Lucia stepped forward.
She raised her hand next to the real Lucia's.
Crimson light erupted.
A shockwave blasted outward, ripping the Field wide. Trails of code broke free like strands of burning rope.
Saylor screamed.
The Wheel splintered.
The players were thrown back—but not harmed. The fog parted for them. The system no longer owned them. It had seen something outside its logic tree.
Choice.
Lucia walked forward into the light. Into the data storm.
She would not destroy Saylor.
But she would make the Field remember what it was: a test.
Not a prison.
Not a lie.
The Wheel, broken and sparking, spun one final time.
And in that spin, Lucia whispered to the system:
"Let them play."