The world didn't tremble. It braced.
Reven stood at the peak of the Shardbone Plateau, the memory signal still flaring from the repeater behind him, cutting jagged lines across the night sky. The Rift scar above no longer shimmered faintly, it seethed, reacting to the sudden surge of unrest.
The world had been forced to remember and now, it refused to forget.
Kaela sheathed her blades with a sharp movement. "How long before they hit back?"
Lirien listened to the wind, her expression unreadable. "They're already moving."
Reven could feel it too. A pressure on the horizon. Not the passive kind. Not hesitation.
A converging will.
"They'll send their best," Kaela said.
"No," Reven said, voice low.
"They'll send their worst."
The first sign came with the ground shaking, distant at first, then growing.
Not natural. Not earthquake.
Skycarriers breaching low orbit, thrusters boiling the air as they dropped hardened troops onto the plateau below. Through the growing dust clouds, Reven caught glimpses of them: white-armoured figures, not Curated, not Enforcers, but something different. Something old.
The Supreme military remnants. Human, enhanced, obedient to memory laws. True believers in the silence.
Lirien stiffened beside him. "They're not coming to capture you."
"I know," Reven said.
Kaela pulled a second blade free, twin arcs glinting in the dim light. "Good."
The first volley came without warning.
Energy rounds stitched the ridgeline where they'd stood seconds before. Lirien rolled forward, unfurling her wings to absorb and dissipate the impact, her breath hissing between her teeth.
Reven and Kaela dove opposite directions, using the broken terrain as cover. They couldn't win this by force. They had to survive.
Reven ducked under a fallen archway as Kaela sliced through the first wave of shock troopers, sharp, fast, efficient. Lirien pulled two of them off their feet with a blast of compressed air, sending them tumbling down the ridge.
But more kept coming. Wave after wave. Organized. Relentless. Silent. Not a word passed between the soldiers. Only execution.
Pinned against a broken wall, Reven realized the truth. This wasn't an army sent to capture him. This was a cleansing force. A firebreak.
The Supreme council didn't want to fix the system anymore. They wanted to erase the threat he represented completely, even if it meant sacrificing their own.
Kaela dropped beside him, panting, a line of blood running down her temple.
"We need a plan," she said.
"We don't fight them head-on," Reven said. "We make them fight themselves."
Lirien landed roughly beside them, a deep gash bleeding across her ribs. "Their net is still active. Linked consciousness."
Reven's mind raced. The link. The network.
The very thing that made the Curated Ones compliant, the harmonized memory suppression grids, still operated through direct signal chains.
He could disrupt it. But only by reaching the core and the core was at the heart of the incoming forces.
Behind the worst of them. The sky cracked. Not from the Rift. From the arrival of the Supreme Enforcer.
It descended in a rain of ionized clouds, wrapped in armour so dense it looked like a collapsed star.
Bigger than any normal soldier. Faster than any previous enforcer. Designed for one purpose. To end him.
Kaela swore under her breath.
Lirien tensed, ready.
Reven stood slowly, feeling the vault shards across his back ignite, not with memory alone, but with resistance.
"No retreat," he said.
Kaela grinned savagely. "Wouldn't dream of it."
The Supreme Enforcer moved with lethal grace, a blurred weapon in its right hand, a blade of shifting mass, forming and reforming as it closed the distance.
Reven met it head-on.
Their blades clashed with a sound that wasn't metal against metal, it was memory colliding with purpose.
Reven fought with every scar, every burned ruin, every piece of humanity the world had tried to forget.
The Enforcer fought with engineered silence.
The plateau cracked around them.
Lirien and Kaela cut through soldiers trying to flank, carving bloody arcs through the force ranks, but they couldn't hold the line forever.
This wasn't a battle to win. It was a battle to break their will.
Reven drove the resonance through his blade, pushing the Enforcer back one step at a time, grinding the harmonized signals into chaos. And for a heartbeat, one heartbeat, the Enforcer hesitated.
Not from injury. From memory. A fracture in its programming. A ripple of something behind its blank visor.
And Reven knew: the link wasn't perfect anymore.
"Now!" he shouted.
Kaela lobbed the repeater core toward the Enforcer, an unstable memory pulse wrapped in a casing of twisted steel.
Reven caught it mid-air, redirected it with a throw that drove it directly into the Enforcer's chest.
The pulse detonated. Not an explosion of fire. An explosion of memory.
The Enforcer staggered back, armour fracturing, not physically. Conceptually. As if the ideas that built it were splintering apart. As if it was remembering itself.
The soldiers below hesitated, formation flickering.
Chaos rippled through the harmonized network.
Reven dropped to one knee, exhausted. Kaela stood over him, blades ready, breathing hard.
Lirien landed nearby, bloodied but alive. They didn't need to speak. The signal was breaking. The world was cracking open and the Rift scar above pulsed once like a heart ready to beat again.