The glitchbeast lunged.

  It skipped through the air like corrupted footage—frame-skipping, rewinding, stuttering between forms. A wolf. A void. A child in a blank mask.

  Then all three at once.

  Forge didn’t flinch.

  He swung the hammer mid-leap. The impact cracked the air like a dropped mainframe.

  CLANG.

  Sparks of memoryfire burst from the head of the hammer. They hit the grass—and the ground around him recompiled. Tree textures turned to ash. Roots flickered into loading geometry. Terrain couldn’t decide what to be.

  The glitchbeast landed behind him, skittered, and split.

  Three echoes.

  One turned wireframe.

  One wore AriaVII’s face.

  The last bled static.

  Forge moved through them like memory. The hammer sang.

  CRASH. One gone.

  SMASH. The wireframe burst.

  The third form screamed—and the sound wasn’t sound.

  “/rollback_event/initiate_forge.exe”

  “rejection loop_157a failstate”

  “mem_trace error: soul signature found...”

  It struck his side.

  Claws sliced across his ribs—and something deeper.

  A memory bled in.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  Not his.

  “Help me!”

  A boy in an alley.

  Her name was Mira.

  The hammer was still warm from her death.

  Forge staggered. Eyes wide.

  “Who was that?”

  The hammer vibrated in his grip. It pulsed like a heartbeat.

  The glitchbeast laughed in corrupted script:

  "//memory_swap: failed hero/initiate_forge.exe"

  Forge gritted his teeth. “You can glitch yourself all you want—”

  He raised the hammer. It pulsed brighter.

  “—but you can’t glitch what I remember.”

  The glitchbeast backed up. The world around it warped.

  Grass turned to fire.

  Sky turned to wire.

  The forest twisted into a battlefield of childhood, grief, and deletion.

  Even the beast stuttered.

  It knew it had triggered the wrong line of code.

  It moved to rewind. It tried to undo the strike that had already happened.

  Forge’s grip tightened.

  [Soul Echo Imprint Activated]

  [Override: “You can’t rewind memory that’s *true.”]

  He stepped forward. Hammer glowing.

  The beast phased again—wrongly, desperately—into ten models at once.

  The hammer swung without his command.

  It had chosen.

  BOOM.

  The hammer struck the beast’s core.

  Reality cracked.

  Color drained from the world. Sky went grayscale. The beast jittered in place, then screamed in twenty voices, including his own.

  [ENTITY ‘GLITCHBEAST’ – DELETION GRANTED]

  [Logged Memory Absorbed: Loop 212a]

  [Soulforged Weapon Evolved: Echoburn Catalyst]

  It collapsed.

  Not into blood. Not into loot.

  Into memory ash.

  As the wind took it, the trees rebooted.

  And AriaVII’s echo played one last time.

  She didn’t run. She didn’t scream.

  She looked at Forge.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Then silence.

  The hammer hummed.

  Not with power.

  With voice.

  “The soulforge remembers who they erased.”

  Above, a system log flickered across the sky:

  [Rollback Attempt: BLOCKED]

  [Anomaly ‘Forge’ recognized – Anchorpoint Logged]

  Forge breathed. Not out of need.

  Out of instinct.

  He wasn’t alone.

  The world felt him now.

  And from somewhere deep in the Subnet Wilds…

  A whisper stirred. Small. Lost. Scared.

  “Hello...? Is someone still awake…?”