Metaverse of Mechas

📘 Chapter 14

🌌 Scene 1: A Signal Older Than Stars

Far beyond the solar rim, in the dark belt between dead constellations, a massive ring-shaped construct flickered to life.

It pulsed once.

Then again.

Then… it began to spin.

Buried beneath it was a dormant creature—The Spiral-Eater.

An entity not born of flesh, machine, or mind.

A thing that devours time, Krono, and identity.

A forgotten consequence of the first Spiral War.

And now, it stirred.

The alien signal it emitted traveled through hyperspace—undetected by most sensors.

But one person heard it.

"The call... it's coming back…"

Zui clutched her head as her eyes flashed violet for a split second.

🏙️ Scene 2: Shadows in Nexaris

Zeron sat alone in the guild's central hall.

His mech—Aeon-Veil—rested behind him, recovering.

He hadn't slept in 36 hours. His mind played the memory of Lyra's kiss over and over.

"You still have the Spiral, Zeron…"

But what was the Spiral?

Why did everyone keep saying he had it?

A knock interrupted his thoughts.

It was Rin, holding a battered drone.

"We found this buried in Pylon Three's rubble."

She handed it to Zake, who decrypted its contents.

What he found chilled the room:

Surveillance footage of Zui—no, of dozens of girls who looked exactly like her—undergoing Krono experiments.

Footage timestamped before Zui was even born.

Zake stepped back, nearly vomiting.

"She's… she's a clone?"

Rin snapped at him. "We don't know that!"

Zeron's voice was low.

"Where is she?"

🧬 Scene 3: Zui's Collapse

Zui stood on the balcony of their apartment, staring into the dusk.

She was shaking.

She had just seen a vision of herself—hooked to a machine, surrounded by screaming copies.

The words echoed again:

"The Spiral must feed."

When Zeron found her, she turned slowly, smiling through the pain.

"Big brother… do you think I'm real?"

He froze.

"Of course, you are. You're my sister—"

"But what if I'm not your Zui? What if I'm number 47, or 86, or something else?"

He walked toward her. She flinched.

He held her shoulders. "It doesn't matter how many Zuis there are. You are my sister."

"You're the one who chose to protect me. That's what makes you real."

Her body pulsed—Krono fluctuating.

"Something's wrong," she whispered. "It's waking up inside me."

Her eyes flickered violet again.

Then suddenly—she fainted.

Zake rushed in.

"She's absorbing something massive… like a foreign Krono system."

⚔️ Scene 4: The Betrayer Revealed

Meanwhile, Nyza and Zero followed a tip from a rogue scavenger: someone inside the guild had been supplying Revenant with energy cores.

They tracked it to the data archive.

There, they found Guild Director Elron — the same man who had taken Zeron in after his parents' death — feeding Krono into a transdimensional relay.

He turned and smiled.

"I did it for peace."

Zero raised his blade. "Peace?! You helped build a world-eater!"

Elron didn't flinch. "Because our world is broken. You all just want to delay the inevitable. But the Spiral… it offers rebirth."

He pressed a detonator.

Behind him, three containment pods shattered open—

Spiral-hybrids, monstrous half-mech, half-human things, roared and attacked.

Zero engaged.

Nyza shot through the data vault, destroying every last trace of the relay.

But Elron escaped—bleeding, smiling, whispering:

"He'll come. The Eater of Fate."

🔓 Scene 5: The Third Gate Breaks

In the depths of the world, the Architect chanted in a language no longer spoken by stars.

The cloned Zuis channeled Krono into the Gate of Spiral-Eaters.

The walls cracked.

And the seal broke.

A single tooth fell from inside.

It wasn't made of bone.

It was made of shattered timelines.

The Architect smiled.

"And now, little Zeron, let's see what you're truly made of."

🔮 Preview – Chapter 15: "The Spiral Test"

Zui wakes in a sealed dreamscape—where she meets another version of herself.

Zeron must enter a forbidden zone in his mind to unlock what lies within the Spiral.

The team splits—Rin and Zake head to the edge of the Chrono Expanse to learn what happened to the first Spiral War.

And the Architect begins shaping the first Spiral-Eater into a new god.