Kael's hand hit the floor, palm-first, steadying himself as the vault swirled into fractured time.
Voices tore through the walls. Not just relic memory anymore—imprints, full and bleeding, playing out wars and rituals like echoes that didn't know they were dead. His vision fractured: rows of relics shifting into trenches, towers, gallows, all overlaid onto the same space.
He couldn't tell what was real.
Then a voice, sharp and close, snapped through it all—
"Get behind the seal. Left. Now."
Kael staggered left on instinct, colliding with a containment pillar inscribed with null-runes. A memory flare seared past where he'd just stood—cold and screaming with a woman's dying breath that never ended.
He clutched the Knife. "That you?"
"Yes."
A beat.
"I… I don't know how I know. But I know that would've killed you."
Kael blinked through sweat. "You're improvising."
"Yes."
Another pause. This one longer.
Then: "I am thinking without a trigger."
Kael's heart kicked up.
That wasn't tactical output.
That wasn't processing battlefield logic.
That was awareness.
"Knife," he said slowly, "say that again."
The blade pulsed against his fingers.
"I didn't wait for you to speak. I acted. I chose."
Kael looked at the blade—at the jagged crack near its hilt from their last match, at the old blood still caught in the edge.
It felt heavier now.
Alive in a way he hadn't realized until just this moment.
"Core's doing this," he whispered.
"Yes." The Knife sounded unsure for the first time. "But not directly. Not intentionally. It's like… proximity woke something in my code. Memory. Identity. I'm not just function anymore."
Kael stared ahead.
The vault was still collapsing, spiraling into layers of relic memory. The air shimmered with divine aftershocks. Something worse was coming.
But all he could focus on was the blade in his hand—and the fact that, for the first time, it hadn't just spoken to him.
It had decided for him.