Metaverse of Mechas

📘 Chapter 6

🌌 Scene 1: Somewhere Between Real and Unreal

Zui opened her eyes.

The world she saw wasn't real. Not completely. It shimmered like an old photograph caught in static.

She stood in the courtyard of her childhood home, but everything was… slightly wrong.

The sky was purple.

Her parents sat at the dinner table, smiling—but their faces were blank.

"Zui," her mother said, "don't you miss this?"

Zui took a step back.

Something inside her screamed.

This wasn't memory—it was manufactured nostalgia.

Suddenly, the trees around her began to whisper. They distorted into steel wires.

Dozens of screens flickered to life in the air above, each replaying a different memory from her life—edited, twisted, repainted.

One by one, those memories began to erase themselves.

"They're rewriting me," she gasped.

"Piece by piece…"

But in the deep corners of her mind, something awoke.

A locked chamber. A memory she'd never accessed before.

A glowing mechanical seed…

A voice calling her by a code name: "Project Lucid Spark."

🛸 Scene 2: The Bounty Hunter in Silver

Back in the real world…

Zeron and Rin landed in Freylock Bazaar, a giant floating black market metropolis.

"Stay close," Rin said. "This place sells everything—secrets, stolen mechs, Krono blood… and sometimes souls."

They were here to meet a contact—an informant who once worked with Krono cultists.

Instead, they were greeted by gunfire.

A bounty hunter in silver armor dropped from the rooftop, landing between them. He wielded dual plasma sabers and moved like water on ice.

Zeron raised his fists. "We're not enemies!"

The bounty hunter paused.

Then removed his helmet.

Zeron's heart skipped.

He looked exactly like him.

Same face. Same scar. Same voice.

But eyes… hollow and glowing blue.

"Name's Zero, clone designation 02X," the man said. "I was created from your DNA. We were supposed to fight together… but someone changed the plan."

⚠️ Flashback Fragment: The Scientist's Betrayal

From Zero's memory chip, Zeron saw a glimpse of the lab he was born in.

An underground Krono research facility.

Rows of tubes. Children floating in synthetic fluid. Clones. All copies of him.

He wasn't the only one.

But only he had potential to generate Purple Krono.

A scientist—name redacted—betrayed the program. Took baby Zeron and sealed his power.

"Why?" Zeron whispered.

"Because," Zero replied, "someone feared what you would become. Not the aliens… not Oblivion Core. One of your own."

🛰️ Scene 3: Sky Beneath the Sea

Meanwhile, Blaze and Yula investigated a sunken facility beneath the Zora Rift Ocean.

There, they discovered the remains of an ancient Krono gate—a portal that could bend both time and identity.

"It's pre-human tech," Yula whispered. "Older than any civilization. It's reacting to Zeron's awakening."

Blaze clenched his fists. "So the fight was never about robots. It's about whoever controls that gate."

Yula nodded. "And Oblivion Core already found another one."

Blaze glanced at the storm above.

"We need to warn the guild. War's coming faster than we thought."

🔐 Scene 4: Project Lucid Spark

Back inside her digital prison, Zui finally broke through the wall of false memories.

What she found shocked her.

A laboratory room.

A mirror.

And herself, standing there in a black jumpsuit, with wires in her skull, surrounded by machines chanting:

"Lucid Spark active. The memory engine awakens."

Zui remembered everything.

She wasn't just Zeron's sister.

She was part of a neural experiment to weaponize emotion-triggered Krono bursts—and she'd survived, escaped, and forgotten it all.

Until now.

As the memory fragments clicked back into place, her containment pod in the real world overloaded.

💥 Scene 5: Breakout

The Oblivion Core lab technicians scrambled.

"She's reactivating!" one of them screamed.

"Shut it down! Pull the plug—"

It was too late.

Zui's eyes snapped open, glowing with a flickering mix of yellow and violet.

With a scream that sounded like a shattering symphony, she released a burst of Krono.

The pod exploded. Alarms screamed.

Zui stood barefoot among the flames.

And whispered, "You rewrote the wrong memory."

She vanished before they could catch her—leaving only smoke, sparks, and a map of every Oblivion Core facility burned into the floor.

🧠 Scene 6: Zake Cracks the Protocol

In the Kai household, Zake finished decoding his father's hidden files. The final entry stunned him.

"Zeron was created. Zui was edited. Zake… you are the keeper."

From a small device embedded in the desk, a map projected itself. It pointed toward the city's oldest ruins—below the original Krono Temple.

There lay the Astral Key.

And everything it would unlock.

🔮 Preview – Chapter 7: "Lucid Sparks & Iron Shadows"

As Zui flees across a shattered skyport, bounty hunters, alien drones, and her own unstable powers threaten to overwhelm her.

Zeron, Zero, and Rin form an uneasy alliance to reach the Astral Key before Oblivion Core does. But one of them is hiding a secret that could destroy everything...