The rig let him go like a breath held too long.

  Bennett jolted forward with a shuddered gasp, air slamming into his lungs, cold and chemical-stale. His chest rose and fell too fast, heartbeat thudding loud in his ears. For a moment, he couldn’t feel his hands. His body remained locked in that muscle tension of digital adrenaline, wired with the echo of motion he hadn’t made.

  The world was dark and colorless. The HUD was gone.

  No golden light. No whispering vault stone. No scent of charred air or mana-threaded circuitry.

  Just the real.

  Just… Bennett.

  His eyes blinked against the glare of overhead fluorescents, stark and uncaring. The ceiling was off-white and pockmarked, grid panels uneven in their mounts. A vent clicked nearby, recycling chill air through dust-heavy filters. The lab smelled like cold plastics, lukewarm coffee left too long on a burner, and faint electrical stress — ozone and copper threading the air.

  4:32 AM, read the desk clock beside the sensory cradle.

  The world felt wrong. Slow. Too quiet in the wrong ways. His body remembered what it had just done — falling into combat with a version of himself made from everything he feared he could’ve become. Throwing that final fragment, watching it land, watching that version of Prolix fracture like brittle glass caught in an off-note.

  His hands shook.

  Not much.

  Just enough.

  He exhaled, dragging his hands down his face and through his sweat-damp hair, fingertips tingling. The residual harmonics hadn’t faded yet — not from his nerves. Not from his bones.

  That would take hours.

  Bennett rose unsteadily from the cradle, bare feet pressing to cold tile. He reached for his coat with slow fingers, sliding into it like a ritual — a return to the flesh-and-blood mask. He didn’t bother tying the boots he stepped into. The weight of them grounded him.

  Outside the rig’s pod, the room felt cavernous. Dimly lit banks of hardware lined the walls, silent now but thrumming with afterlife. Status lights blinked green and amber across screens. A few cables still glowed, coiling like veins across the floor.

  Across the room, the only other lit space was the corner office — its door cracked, the interior painted in the soft blue light of monitors cycling admin feeds.

  Dave.

  Of course Dave hadn’t gone home.

  Bennett made his way toward the office slowly, the echo of each footstep a reminder that this wasn’t Ludere. No caltrops underfoot. No trap triggers or AI pathing. Just bureaucracy, and coffee, and the weight of unfinished code.

  He nudged the door open with two fingers.

  Dave sat like a man welded into the core of the machine — hunched forward in his tattered hoodie, elbows braced on the desk as he flipped through raw encounter logs and memory layer traces. His monitors displayed debug layers of Ludere’s backend — one showed a real-time resonance model of the Obsidian Harmonic Vault. Another still-frame of ProlixalParagon, blade in hand, locked in that impossible final lunge against his perfect doppelg?nger.

  The glow from the monitors etched the fatigue into the hollows of Dave’s face.

  “You took your time,” Dave said without turning.

  “I stayed,” Bennett rasped, his voice rough from disuse. “It was worth it.”

  He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and pulled free a slim data drive. He placed it gently on the desk beside Dave’s keyboard — like a ritual offering.

  [Session Upload Queued – Dev_User: BNT_031 | Player Tag: ProlixalParagon]

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Class Line: Umbral Synthete – Solo Vault Entry Logged

  Data Condition: Fragment Acquired – Sixth Node Secured – Memory Construct Encounter Verified

  Additional Tag: Optional Boss Triggered – Memory Thread Match Complete

  Dave’s fingers twitched once on the keyboard. Then he looked at Bennett properly.

  “You alright?”

  “No,” Bennett said, honestly. “But he is.”

  Dave studied him for a long moment. “You triggered the mirror path.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Vaults don’t care what you mean to do,” Dave muttered. “They care who you are when they see you coming.”

  Bennett nodded once. The silence stretched. Then—

  “It built a version of me. Not Prolix-as-player. Not even Prolix-as-canon. Me. The lines it said… I don’t remember typing those. I don’t remember thinking them.”

  “It’s the old harmonic capture system,” Dave said, rubbing his eyes. “Seeded during closed alpha testing when player profiles weren’t bound yet. You didn’t trigger code. You triggered a shadow in the lattice.”

  A beat.

  “It sang with you, didn’t it? At the end.”

  Bennett hesitated.

  Then nodded.

  “There was another voice. Not mine. Not the construct’s. Something beneath it. It didn’t say anything… but it was there.”

  Dave’s mouth twitched at the corner. Not a smile. A grimace. “The Sixth always sings. That Vault was supposed to be deprecated before launch. There are still artifact variables in there. It remembers things we buried.”

  “I don’t think it’s done remembering,” Bennett murmured.

  Dave stood and turned to his monitor, dragging open another terminal window — code unfolding in cascading vertical threads. Fragment references. God vector anomalies. A flare in the Dedisco packet line.

  “PillowHorror’s sector pinged minutes after you logged out,” Dave said. “Tlekaneth’s leyline is running hot. The Emprince’s agents are moving inland, and the Hollow Rot’s spreading through the abandoned stormwall map. Something’s happening, Bennett. Something...”

  He trailed off.

  Bennett pulled in one long, grounding breath.

  And then, because he had to — because the session was logged, and the report was submitted, and his limbs ached with the aftershock of surviving himself — he simply said:

  “I’m clocking out.”

  Dave blinked. Then nodded once, sliding a thermal mug across the desk toward him.

  “Go. Before Ludere finds another door to open in your spine.”

  —

  The walk down the hall was quiet.

  No NPC footsteps. No golden HUD.

  Just bare hallway and fluorescents that flickered in tired pulses above a world not quite ready to wake.

  Bennett passed the vending machines humming softly, the elevators still dark, and keyed out at the security pad beside the side door.

  [Employee Exit Logged – 4:47 AM]

  Outside, the air was wet and raw. Mist curled low over the cracked pavement. Streetlamps glowed dimly in the gloom, blurred by fog.

  He tugged his hood up.

  Not to hide.

  Just to keep the silence in.

  Somewhere behind him, data was being sorted. Replays queued. Vault echoes dissected. PillowHorror’s name probably already tagged six times over in the internal chat.

  But for now…

  Bennett walked alone.

  And somewhere deep in the marrow of his soul, he still heard the Vault singing.

  Not in words.

  In possibility.

  The city hadn't quite started breathing yet.

  Dawn hadn't cracked the horizon, only softened it — a pale bruising at the edges of the sky, like light considering arrival. The mist clung low and heavy as Bennett slid into the driver's seat of his car, each motion stiff with disuse. The door closed with a soft mechanical chunk, isolating him in silence.

  He didn’t turn on the radio.

  Just sat there for a moment, key hovering in the ignition, watching his hands on the steering wheel. Still trembling, faintly. The way they'd curled in-game — gripping a dagger, a trap, a final shard. The memory of frictionless tension hadn't left his knuckles.

  He started the car.

  The engine turned over with a reluctant growl. Headlights cut twin tunnels in the fog as he pulled away from the lot and onto the side street, tires whispering against damp asphalt.

  The roads were mostly empty. A few delivery vans. A single cyclist huddled in high-vis gear. Headlights gleamed off fog-wet curbs. Bennett drove on autopilot — not the car’s, his own. Hands steering from habit. Eyes half-lidded. Body a distant second to a mind still reverberating with vault echoes and blade-threads of harmonic combat.

  By the time he reached his neighborhood, the streetlamps had begun to flicker off.

  His house stood silent and still, a single porch light left on like a votive. He parked at the curb instead of the driveway, slumped against the wheel for a moment longer, then forced himself upright. He grabbed his satchel but left the data drive in the glove compartment. He wouldn’t need it. Not right now.

  The front door creaked softly. Inside, the air was warmer — lived-in. The heater had kicked on while he was gone, and the scent of cinnamon cereal lingered faintly in the kitchen.

  But the house was empty.

  Coats gone from the rack. Shoes scattered but missing pairs. A lunchbox still drying upside down in the rack near the sink.

  His partner’s morning note was scrawled in purple ink on the counter:

  Left early for the field trip. Don’t forget to eat. Proud of you. – J.

  (Kids took the good cereal. Sorry.)

  Bennett read it twice, the words slightly fuzzed around the edges. He set his satchel down beside the coffee maker. Thought about breakfast. A shower.

  Then shook his head.

  He made it as far as the stairs.

  Up. Down the hall. Past the open bedroom door where one of the kids had left a game controller face-down on a pillow. Past the shared bathroom where the mirror still fogged in ghost-smudges.

  Into his room.

  The bed wasn’t made. He didn’t care. The sheets were rumpled, the blanket half-pushed aside. He sat on the edge and unlaced his boots. Dropped them one at a time with soft thumps against the carpet. Jacket followed. Shirt.

  He didn’t bother with the rest.

  He crawled beneath the blanket fully clothed, body curling tight against the mattress, the tension in his limbs finally breaking into stillness. His muscles ached with the wrong kinds of motion — the kind the real world wasn’t designed to contain. His chest rose. Fell.

  And somewhere, deep in the part of him that still heard ProlixalParagon’s heartbeat syncing with something older than memory, Bennett thought:

  I survived it.

  Sleep hit him like a blackout.

  No dreams.

  Just the weightless, empty hush of a world paused.

  Waiting.