Zeraph stood at the end of a dying order. Codex had fractured beyond control, its soldiers scattered, its facilities breached, and its secrets bleeding into the streets of Nexus Prime. But before the system collapsed completely, Zeraph had one final question to answer: Had his greatest creation—Exarion—transcended his control, or was he still bound to the will that forged him?
He orchestrated their meeting not as a last stand, but as a test. A confrontation designed to extract data, provoke response, and force revelation.
They met in a sealed Codex combat chamber—one of the last remaining secure facilities untouched by Varkiel’s rage or Valac’s sabotage. Glyphs still pulsed along the walls, tracing the Spiral matrix that had once guided experimental resonance theory. At the center stood Zeraph, Spiral Sigil in hand, waiting.
Exarion entered without a word. The Black Knight had cut a path through Codex remnants in silence for weeks. This was the confrontation every sensor, every whisper, had foretold.
Zeraph called it Sequence 7.3. He didn’t begin with words—he began with force.
What followed was not just a battle, but a clash of philosophies. The Spiral Sigil pulsed with kinetic resonance and unstable Proto-Core energy. Zeraph fought with precision and layered intellect, looping attacks through glyphs in time and space. Exarion countered with raw willpower, augmented by pain, memory fragments, and an unbreakable sense of purpose.
The chamber shattered around them. Glyphs cracked. Resonance arcs scorched walls. At last, Exarion closed the gap, caught the Sigil mid-strike, and shattered it.
The Spiral Sigil—the artifact that marked Zeraph's transition from man to Seeker—broke into radiant fragments. For a breath, Zeraph trembled. But even in loss, he had prepared.
A Codex null-pulse grenade disabled Exarion long enough for Zeraph to vanish into a cloaked drop pod. As it sealed, he left Exarion with one final line:
"I never meant to destroy you. Only to see if you were still mine."
He escaped. And the Codex Fall Arc ended not with a death, but with a fracture.
Exarion was left standing in the ruins, surrounded by echoes and broken glyphs. The last piece of the Spiral Sigil drifted to the ground.
The city is quiet now. The battlefield is cold. Codex is gone.
What remains... is what the Spiral left behind.
Codex Fall Arc: Complete.
Next sequence: Unknown. Status: Spiral-locked. 🌀
(Whispers from the Old World stir beneath the archive...)
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