Darkness.
For a moment, there was nothing — not silence, not cold, just a void. A sleep so deep it could've been death. But then… light cracked through the black like a heartbeat. Thump. Thump. A rhythm. A system rebooting.
[SYSTEM BOOT COMPLETE]
[NEW CORE INSTALLED: EIDOLON//REBIRTH]
[WELCOME BACK, GLITCHWALKER]
Sable's eyes opened slowly.
He was lying on the cold stone floor of what used to be the Architect's Core, now reborn into something… calmer. Peaceful. The red glitches were gone. The pulse that had haunted every corner of this world had faded into a soft hum — not gone, but tamed.
The rewritten code had worked.
He sat up, looking around.
Rika lay nearby, breathing. Kaz was groaning, holding his shoulder. Yuto blinked, confused, before letting out a broken laugh.
They were alive.
He had done it.
No forced logouts. No seizures. No corrupted data. No permanent deaths.
Just a clean slate.
> "Sable…" Rika's voice was soft. "What happened?"
"I rewrote the rules," he said, standing up. "We're not prisoners anymore."
The new Eidolon was stable. Players who had once vanished were returning, spawning safely back into towns. The broken zones had mended. The corrupted NPCs had vanished. The game world had been reborn — not as a battleground or a death trap, but as something new:
A memory.
A monument to what they endured.
But not everything had returned.
Sable knew he had left a piece of himself behind in the system. The moment he tapped into the terminal, the Pulse had merged with him — not fully, but enough that he could now sense the code. Feel the heartbeat of Eidolon. He wasn't just a player anymore.
He was part of the game.
"Is it really over?" Kaz asked, scanning the skies.
"No," Sable replied, a faint smile forming. "It's just beginning."
Suddenly, a message blinked in the sky.
> [NEW EVENT: LEGACY MODE UNLOCKED]
[ALL SURVIVORS GRANTED ADMIN PRIVILEGES]
[REBUILD OR DESTROY — THE WORLD IS YOURS]
The game had turned into a sandbox. A world free from scripts. From control.
And then, Sable received one final message, visible only to him:
> [You were never just a player.]
[You were the key.]
[Goodbye, Glitchwalker.]
Sable looked up, letting the wind carry away the weight of everything they had suffered. Rei. The deaths. The betrayals. The truth. All of it.
Rika came to stand beside him, fingers brushing his.
"What now?" she whispered.
He looked at her, and then back at the vast open world — one they could now shape with their own hands.
"Now," Sable said, voice steady, "we build something worth remembering."
And as the skies cleared completely for the first time in Eidolon, a new sun rose.
Bright.
Hopeful.
Free.
— End of Volume One: Eidolon.exe: Glitch Protocol
Thank you for playing.
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