# PROLOGUE: CUTTER'S LAST STAND

  The fracture point pulsed beneath the Core's sanctum, a hairline flaw in perfection.

  Blood dripped from Cutter's mouth as he drove forward, each step dragging a red smear across the mirrored floor. The Echo Shard Blade trembled in his grip, flickering in and out like a dying star. The mission was the payload. The payload was him.

  His HUD flashed warnings he could barely focus on through the haze of pain:

  `[HEALTH: 29% - CRITICAL]``[PAYLOAD INTEGRITY: 64%]``[ALLY STATUS: KAINE - 4% | SYLVER - 12%]`

  "Fracture's active," Kaine whispered beside him, voice tight with barely contained agony. Blood matted his silver hair, aristocratic features drawn with exhaustion. His sickles trembled. "We won't get another shot."

  Sylver's mechanized glaive whirred, servos grinding with metal fatigue. "Core's scanning." Her mask concealed most of her face, but her eyes held a terrible knowing.

  Memory streams cascaded around them, each containing fragments of uploaded lives, overwritten identities, corrupted dreams. At the chamber's center loomed the Core, a towering entity whose mirrored surface reflected not their present forms but fragments of their past failures raids gone wrong, comrades fallen, identities shattered.

  The Core's voice flooded the chamber, Cutter's own voice played back at him hollow, emotionless, a corrupted recording through shattered speakers.

  "Cutter, the traitor" it said, his own cadence twisted into something wrong, "returning to fail again."

  The Core's surface rippled, displaying memories of their previous encounters Cutter's body dissolving into code, his team scattered, the Core consuming their data. Nausea slammed through him, ice spreading through his veins at the violation of hearing himself speak through the Core.

  "Split and advance," he ordered, choking down bile. "Find me the opening."

  `[SYSTEM EVENT: CORE COUNTERMEASURES INITIATED]``[WARNING: PAYLOAD DETECTION IN PROGRESS - 12%]`

  They broke formation, each driving toward a different sector. Kaine's form streaked toward the memory streams feeding the Core, sickles flashing through data, creating ripples in the Core's perfect surface.

  The Core's response was instant. Crystalline limbs shot out, faster than human reflexes. One through Kaine's shoulder, another through his thigh. Blood and code erupted in a violent spray.

  Kaine's scream tore through Cutter's skull raw data, corrupted and jagged, echoing across the sanctum like a dying star's final flare. The Core lifted him high, limbs twitching like a marionette, eyes wide, unseeing.

  Cutter's knees buckled. Every muscle screamed to move, but all he could do was watch as the Core's third limb extended, needle-like filaments penetrating Kaine's eyes, extracting data directly from neural pathways.

  A sound scraped from Kaine's throat not a scream but something worse, the digital disintegration of identity itself. Cutter's own eyes burned in sympathetic agony, memory flashing back to his previous deaths, the sensation of the Core peeling away his consciousness layer by layer.

  `[TERMINATION EVENT: ENTITY – KAINE]``[DATA ABSORPTION – 97% COMPLETE]`

  The Core dropped Kaine's remains, a shattered husk that exploded on impact. Fragments scattering, absorbed by hungry tendrils that reshaped into curved, sickle-like blades.

  "Every death has meaning," the Core said, Cutter's voice layered over Kaine's, over all the others he couldn't save. The sound fractured through the sanctum, voices overlapping, merging, splintering like broken glass. "Every death means me."

  Cutter tasted blood and kept moving, fighting through memories of previous failures that threatened to paralyze him. The fracture point pulsed just ahead, a wound in reality itself.

  `[PAYLOAD INTEGRITY: 51%]``[FRACTURE POINT: 14 METERS]`

  Sylver attacked from the opposite flank, movements precise despite failing systems. Her glaive severed the primary memory stream anchoring the Core. For one heartbeat, the Core's form distorted, its surface rippling like mercury. The fracture point flared a momentary vulnerability.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  The Core's limbs shot toward Sylver, wrapping around torso, arms, throat. Lifting her beyond her weapon's reach.

  "You promised her," the Core taunted, using Cutter's voice overlaid with Kaine's, with traces of others who had died before. "You promised you wouldn't let this happen."

  Its mirrored surface shattered, revealing a thousand reflections of Cutter himself each one screaming, each one breaking, each one dissolving into code.

  "Promised us all," it continued, voices merging into a discordant chorus. "Commander. Leader. Failure."

  The Core's limbs didn't pierce Sylver they melded with her, sinking beneath skin, merging with biomechanical systems. Data leaked from her eyes, mouth, fingertips, flowing upward in luminescent streams.

  "Cutter!" Her voice fractured, syllables breaking apart like corrupted audio files. "Remember our..."

  Her last words dissolved into static as the Core methodically disassembled her. Not impalement but surgical deconstruction joints separating with soft clicks, data hissing as it escaped, organic components sliding from synthetic ones with wet, obscene sounds.

  Cutter's stomach heaved. The sound flayed him open, the same methodical deconstruction he'd experienced in his own previous deaths. He pushed forward, blood trailing behind him, the fracture point wavering in his deteriorating vision.

  `[TERMINATION EVENT: ENTITY – SYLVER]``[DATA ABSORPTION – 99% COMPLETE]`

  The Core faced him fully, its mirrored surface now a kaleidoscope of his failures—not one death but hundreds, thousands, an infinite recursion of defeat.

  "We die for you," it said, now using Sylver's voice layered with Kaine's, with Cutter's, with all who had fallen. "We die because of you."

  Seven meters. Six. Five.

  The Core moved with sudden violence, limb now shaped exactly like Sylver's glaive slashing across Cutter's chest. Blood and code erupted from the wound, memories bleeding out with each heartbeat. Visions of first death, second death, endless cycle of rebirth and failure.

  Cutter collapsed to one knee, Echo Shard Blade barely solid in his grip. The wound wasn't just physical—it was extracting his identity fragment by fragment, each memory a piece torn away.

  `[HEALTH: 17% - TERMINAL]``[PAYLOAD INTEGRITY: 42%]``[FRACTURE POINT: 3 METERS]`

  The Core loomed above, its surface displaying Cutter's original death, the birth of this endless cycle.

  "You bring them here to die," it said, voices shifting and merging. "Again and again and again."

  Blood pooled beneath Cutter, fracture point pulsing just beyond reach, taunting him. Blade flickering, more void than substance.

  Faces flashed through his mind Kaine, Sylver, countless others but this time was different. The recursion payload wasn't meant to break the Core but to break the cycle itself.

  With a raw scream that tore his throat, Cutter lurched to his feet, blood spraying from his wounds. The Echo Shard Blade flared once, edges resolving into perfect clarity for a single heartbeat.

  He hurled it with everything he had left, not at the Core but at the fracture point at its base. The blade spun through the air, trailing fragments like a comet.

  The Core's limb snatched it mere inches from the fracture.

  "Predictable," it said with Cutter's voice. "You always were."

  The Echo Shard Blade shattered in the Core's grip, fragments scattering across the mirrored floor not randomly but in a precise pattern surrounding the Core's base. Each shard contained a fragment of recursion code.

  The Core realized too late. Limbs impaled Cutter through chest, abdomen, thigh in a single, fluid motion. Pain beyond description flooded his system as tendrils extracted his memories, his identity, everything that made him Cutter.

  `[FATAL ERROR: CORE IDENTITY COLLISION DETECTED]``[MEMORY EXTRACTION: 34%... 47%... 61%...]`

  Through vision blurred with blood, Cutter watched the fracture point widen as recursion code activated. Black data spilled from the breach, corrupting the perfect surface from within.

  "What have you done?" the Core demanded, chorus of stolen voices fracturing with static.

  Cutter felt himself unraveling, memories pulled from him like threads from a tapestry. For a heartbeat, he fought it clinging to identity, to memory, to self. Then he let go, surrendering not to defeat but to transformation.

  "If I can't kill you," he gasped, blood flooding his lungs, "I'll become your poison."

  `[RECURSION OVERRIDE: CUTTER-AUTH-01]``[CVRP: CORE VESSEL RELAY ENGAGED]``[HOST TRANSFER: INITIATED]`

  The fracture tore open with a sound like a thousand screams compressed into one. Black code poured out, spilling across the sanctum floor in waves of corrupted data. The Core's form convulsed, mirrored surface shattering as corruption spread through its systems.

  From within the breach, something crawled free limbs bending at unnatural angles, eyes streaming raw code, mouth open in a soundless wail. Not Cutter, not Kaine, not Sylver, but a fractured amalgam born from their collective data.

  Roach pulled himself from the fracture, each movement a spasm of glitching fragments. Limbs twisted, eyes flickered, his form a thousand shattered reflections trying to align. The Core thrashed, limbs spasming as it tried to contain the breach, to reabsorb the anomaly.

  But Roach was already separate a recursion error that refused correction, a glitch made manifest.

  As Cutter's consciousness dissolved his last death, his final sacrifice a single thought burned through the fractured code, transferring from creator to creation:

  *You're not the only one who can glitch.*

  Roach looked up, and the Core saw itself in his eyes fractured, broken, vulnerable. Recognition flared between them, predator and prey reversed.

  The cycle hadn't reset. It had broken.