The sky burned with divine light.
Three towering figures descended through the portal above Velmora, wrapped in living storm clouds and gold-laced armor. Each was faceless, featureless, inhuman. Their presence alone crushed the air, bent trees, cracked stone.
Celestial Sentinels.
Servants of the divine system.
Instruments of total balance.
They were not Reborn.
They were not alive.
They were enforcers—meant to erase anomalies like Riku.
"Get inside!" Valen screamed, dragging wounded Reborn to shelter. But Riku didn't move.
He stared up at the nearest Sentinel, the one marked with a sun-like crest etched across its chest. A voice boomed from it—not with malice, but terrifying finality.
"Origin-class anomaly identified."
"Probability breach: 91.6%."
"Correction initiated."
The Sentinel raised its hand.
A spike of radiant energy formed—pure law, burning like condensed sunlight.
Riku's Origin mark flared on its own.
Before he even thought, his body moved, reacting to the attack with a hybrid maneuver—half from Seraphim Path reflexes, half from Abyssal Phase Shift. Yet he hadn't selected either. His body just… adapted.
He dodged the beam and countered with a slash of raw kinetic force—a blade formed from violation of gravitational law.
The beam missed.
The Sentinel staggered.
"ERROR."
"Subject does not conform to encoded death-power cycle."
"Subject resists reset."
Two more Sentinels moved in, launching energy rings and spears of divine metal. The air warped. The very concept of "space" shivered around them.
Riku was forced to retreat.
The crystal fragment left behind by the masked soul in the last chapter pulsed within his hand. Then—it melted into light, absorbing into his mark.
"Function unlocked: Temporal Overwrite."
"One moment may now become infinite."
Riku exhaled. Time stopped.
For a second—no, for a hundred years in a single breath—Riku stood in the stillness, studying the paths of the Sentinels. Their code. Their construction. Their origin.
In the silence of stopped time, he heard a whisper—not his own.
"You are the beginning and the end. The Sealed Core waits."
Time resumed.
Riku vanished—reappearing directly above the first Sentinel.
His blade descended, coated in spiraling equations and golden runes.
SLASH.
The Sentinel screamed in static.
Its body split down the middle—not physically, but existentially. One half collapsed into dust. The other reverted into a glowing orb of compressed soul-data.
"One down," Riku muttered.
But the other two Sentinels responded.
They fused.
Not physically—but conceptually.
Their identities overlapped, creating a hybrid form. Massive wings burst out. Their new form hovered silently above the battlefield like a fallen god.
"Protocol elevation: Corelock Tier. Origin containment imminent."
A chain of logic formed in the sky—a prison written in law, attempting to wrap around Riku's soul directly.
Valen tried to intervene—but was knocked unconscious by a pulse of divine pressure.
Riku stood alone again.
And then—another presence surged in his chest.
"Break it."
Not his voice.
Not the masked soul.
Someone older. Someone deeper.
A voice from the Sealed Core itself.
He raised his hand.
His Origin mark spun so fast it formed a vortex in the air.
"You want to correct me?" Riku growled.
"I am the glitch you failed to delete."
And he stepped into the air, charging the fused Sentinel, as the sky above Velmora shattered into ten thousand fragments.
End of Chapter 11
Chapter 12(preview)
— Riku battles the Corelocked Sentinel and sees his first vision of the Sealed Core's inner sanctum?