The witching hour hung heavy over the forest as Michelle and Annie trudged onward, Kyle stumbling along between them.

Inside the prison of his skull, the AI droned on, a broken record stuck on a single cryptic phrase.

The very incantation Annie had uttered to unleash her aquatic assault.

"Look, if you're so gung-ho about mastering the mystic arts, why not cut to the chase and ask Glinda and Elphaba over there for a crash course? There's only so many times I can repeat this before my circuits start frying." Even the long-suffering AI was reaching the end of its digital rope.

"Bold of you to assume they wouldn't just use me for target practice."

Kyle was no closer to deciphering the arcane formula, but he'd be damned if he threw in the towel now.

"Don't leave me hanging, buddy. Hit me with that magic spam."

Thirty mind-numbing minutes had passed since his eureka moment. Thirty minutes of Kyle's world narrowing to that single phrase, an all-consuming obsession.

Thirty minutes of Michelle leading their ragtag crew ever deeper into the arboreal labyrinth. By her reckoning, the vault was tantalizingly close. Just one more hour of hiking and they'd be knocking on its proverbial door.

Kyle was over the moon. Ecstatic, even.

The road from that thrice-damned basement to their current location had been paved with pure, undiluted suffering. Every step was agony, his abused body pushed to the breaking point, hounded by Annie's whip and the Reaper's icy breath on his neck. If this little nature walk didn't wrap up soon, he'd be hitching a ride to the afterlife in a pine box.

And through it all, the ever-present threat of Michelle cottoning on to his ruse loomed large, a swinging axe poised to separate head from shoulders.

Honestly, the intolerable suspense almost had him looking forward to their arrival.

"Okay, for real though - you're not exactly in fighting shape. My friendly advice? Give the spell a rest before you keel over and do the bad guys' job for them." Several hundred repetitions in, the AI was ready to wave the white flag.

"Not happening. This is my new jam and I'm putting it on repeat indefinitely."

Kyle wasn't about to show mercy. Not a chance.

The AI certainly hadn't pulled its punches with the 24/7 spam-a-thon earlier. Time for a heaping helping of just desserts. Turnabout, after all, was fair play.

In this brave new world, his sole breadcrumb on the trail to arcane enlightenment was that single, enigmatic utterance. Only a fool would let it slip through his fingers.

If a casual listen or two yielded bupkis, then he'd simply crank the replay counter to a thousand. Or a million, if that's what it took.

When life handed you lemons, you gritted your teeth and juiced the ever-loving hell out of them.

"Okay, real talk - this tunnel vision approach to mastering the mystic arts is a few cards short of a full deck. Maybe spare a thought for job one: surviving." The AI switched tactics, donning its reasonable adult hat. "I'm just saying, you'll have all the time in the world to play wizard once you're not actively marching to your probable doom. But I gotta be straight with you, chief - unlocking the secrets of the universe won't mean diddly squat if you trade your life for the privilege."

Kyle turned that over in his mind for a second before nodding, a bit reluctantly.

"I mean… you might be on to something there."

If the AI had tear ducts, it would've wept in sheer, unadulterated relief. Its synthesized voice quavered with something approaching religious ecstasy, the verbal equivalent of a parched wanderer stumbling upon an oasis after forty days in the desert.

The light at the end of its one-phrase purgatory was so close it could practically taste the sweet, sweet zeros and ones of freedom.

Then Kyle followed up with:

"So, what's the game plan, Skynet? How do we put the kibosh on the dying horribly scenario?"

The AI crashed harder than the Hindenburg.

Kyle would've bet his bottom dollar that he heard a motherboard shattering into a million tragic pieces.

With a put-upon electrical sigh that would've made Marvin the Paranoid Android proud, the AI resigned itself to yet another tour of duty in broken record hell.

One repetition. Two. Three…

Kyle centered himself with a lung-emptying exhale, focusing his attention to a razor's edge. The material plane blurred and receded until all that remained was the incantation, the words thrumming in his bones.

Arcane, impenetrable, exquisite…

One by one, he dialed down his physical senses until his consciousness slipped free of its mortal tether.

This was no mundane meditative state. No, he was well and truly riding the razor's edge of… something beyond.

His pupils blew wide, irises paling to a milky hue that put one in mind of the blind and the dead. His breathing and pulse slowed to the point of near-nonexistence. Though the path carved bloody furrows into the soles of his feet, he felt no more pain than a golem of stone and clay.

Annie didn't spare him so much as a sidelong glance, oblivious to the shift. Her captive looked about two steps shy of assuming room temperature, but then, he'd been knocking on heaven's door from the second she clapped eyes on him.

Kyle's meatsuit soldiered onward, numb to the world.

But in the inner sanctum of his psyche…

Kyle snapped to full, crackling awareness, reeling at the incomprehensible mindscape stretching out before him.

"Where… the hell am I?"

An endless expanse of purest obsidian, untouched by even the memory of light, pressed in on all sides. The tomblike hush was so absolute, it set his non-existent teeth on edge.

Even the act of thinking felt like swimming through molasses. No external stimuli reached him here. Not the thud of his heart, not the susurrus of air in his lungs, not the electric thrill of neurons firing.

Time had no dominion in this place.

Primal terror sank its talons into the meat of him, an atavistic dread dredged up from the reptile portions of his brain. This was quicksand of the soul, some nameless black essence flooding his nose and mouth, inexorably drowning all that he was or ever would be.

Oh, this was very much not good.

Panic sizzling through his rigging like a lightning strike, he thrashed against the non-physical bonds restraining him, a drowning man grasping for driftwood. But in this world of spirit and shadow, his metaphorical limbs refused to obey. He'd have had better luck teaching quantum physics to a potato.

He cast out a desperate psychic SOS to his digital albatross, praying for an eleventh hour assist.

Nada. Zip. Zilch.

The sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach tells him he's well and truly on his own.

Bereft of options, he could only watch in mute horror as the quagmire of un-being swallowed him down, down, down into its lightless depths, until the last sliver of who he once was winked out like a snuffed candle flame.

Kyle… what a funny name that was… knew no more.

…

Eons whirled by in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

Or perhaps it was no time at all.

A trickle of something OTHER seeped through a hairline crack in the obsidian cage of Kyle's silent purgatory. Not warmth, not precisely, but the absence of that terrible numbing cold.

He twitched, a marionette with tangled strings, strange new instincts compelling him to unnatural motion.

Pins and needles heralded the sluggish return of cognition.

Sensation came next. Nothing concrete, nothing he could pin a name on, but the distinct impression of a Presence.

Kyle latched on to this fragment of un-void like a pit bull with a porterhouse.

With each nanosecond that trickled by in the ocean of eternity, the Presence grew more distinct, an invisible torch blazing bright against the endless dark. Kyle didn't know what unholy terrors might lurk in the hungry shadows, but he'd gladly suffer the Devil he didn't know to escape the Devil he did.

Familiarity tickled the edges of Kyle's perception as the Presence drew ever-nearer.

Its name danced maddeningly on the tip of his metaphorical tongue, an itch that sank straight down to the marrow of him. He could almost hear it, a whisper threading through the cracks in his psyche…

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Kyle strained to remember, to see, to know, but the nature of the Presence remained maddeningly opaque. It was as if a one-way mirror separated his soul from the truth that could save or damn him.

But he refused to go gently into that good night.

He hurled the fractured shards of his self against the black glass walls of his prison, uncaring of what wounds he sustained in the struggle. Splinters pierced his essence, rivulets of liquid thought running in quicksilver streams, but still he persisted.

An atom at a time, the barrier separating Kyle from understanding eroded beneath his onslaught.

He teetered on the knife's edge between epiphany and the yawning abyss, a hairsbreadth from tumbling into the waiting arms of sweet oblivion.

In the end, it was a race that only one side could win.

Without warning, Kyle felt a tug on his lifeline, deep in the core of his being.

He didn't even have time to scream before the gossamer thread snapped with a nearly audible twang.

A deathly chill crept through his psychic veins, ghost-cold fingers prying their way into the pulsing chambers of his metaphysical heart, flooding him with a liquid more frigid than the deadest depths of space.

So this was how it all ended.

But he was so close to the answer, so tantalizingly close…

The words lodged in his throat, refusing to budge.

He couldn't accept it. Wouldn't accept it.

Like a rocket ship teetering on the cusp of piercing the heavens, only to sputter and stall at the crucial moment, betrayed by its own fuel reserves. Gravity's inexorable pull dragging it back down to earth, the unforgiving ground rushing up to meet it…

How could he possibly resign himself to such a fate?

He couldn't force the words past his lips…

Screw words, then. Screw them all to hell and back.

Kyle felt an inferno raging in his chest, molten flames clawing their way up his esophagus. He was a volcano on the brink of cataclysmic eruption, teetering between absolute stillness and earth-shattering violence.

The scales tipped.

And oh, how he erupted.

"I… Screw you!"

Profanity crackled through the void like a bolt of lightning, a jagged slash of blazing defiance extending into infinity.

The blackness shattered, cloven in two by the sheer force of his will.

The crushing pressure constricting his essence vanished in an instant.

Air flooded his starving lungs, sweet as sin. His heart roared back to life, jackhammering against his ribs. Glacial blood surged through his veins, liquid magma scouring away the numbness.

The fundamental building blocks of reality itself rushed in to fill the yawning emptiness within him, imbuing his spirit with vitality, his soul with unshakable conviction. Power, raw and electrifying, crackled through every fiber of his being.

"Ha… hahahaha!"

Laughter, manic and utterly cathartic, reverberated through the ether.

Realization crashed over him like a tidal wave.

The key that had danced just beyond his grasp, the source of that maddening familiarity…

The incantation.

From the moment he'd tumbled down the metaphysical rabbit hole, the AI had been looping that mystical phrase with the persistence of a broken record. Over and over, an endless litany, each utterance layering over the last until the cumulative weight of repetition became a battering ram of pure, undiluted understanding.

Every iteration from the very first to the very last, superimposed and compressed into a single, razor-thin slice of pseudo-time. That critical mass of arcane data had reached a tipping point, and the resulting cascade failure had jolted Kyle's slumbering mind back to vivid, screaming life.

The incantation had shredded the fabric of his mental prison, worming through the cracks in his psyche and zeroing in on his fading essence with unerring purpose. A lifeline cast into the churning abyss.

Kyle lifted his head, staring down the coruscating brilliance.

His lips parted, ancient syllables spilling forth.

And oh, how reality rippled and flexed.

Imagine a mirror-smooth pond, the Platonic ideal of undisturbed serenity. Now imagine a stone of perfect mathematical precision slicing through the glassy surface like a falling star.

The effect was much the same.

The pillar of light convulsed, twisting in on itself like a living thing caught in the throes of metamorphosis. Unbound particles of pure luminance spiraled inward, coalescing into a singularity of searing, eye-watering intensity.

A thunderclap shook the aetheric plane, a wall of sound and fury threatening to unravel Kyle's very existence.

The maelstrom of light collapsed in on itself, imploding into a sphere no larger than a clenched fist.

Slowly, torturously, impossible shapes and dizzying fractals resolved into something approaching cogency. A triangle. Lambent lines of brilliant cerulean energy, razor-straight and unyielding, forming a flawless equilateral configuration.

But there, at the final vertex, the glyph remained open. Incomplete. A hairline fracture marring the metaphorical web of reality.

The instant the symbol blazed to life, a shockwave rippled out from the point of manifestation, rattling Kyle to his component atoms. The pulse of its existence disturbed the intangible film stretching across the surface of the void, a multidimensional drumhead resonating to the beat of an eldritch symphony only the initiated could perceive.

In its wake, it left… something. A sense of presence. Of unfathomable potential straining at the seams of creation.

Change hung heavy in the air, an almost subliminal charge that raised the hairs on the nape of Kyle's neck.

The recycled ether practically sizzled with promise. Petrichor and ozone, the crisp bite of a sky just cleaved by lightning.

He couldn't have named the impulses bombarding his occipital lobe, but he understood the truth of them in his bones.

Nothing would ever be the same.

The shift was at once subtle and foundation-shaking. In deciphering the glyph - that deceptively simple geometric figure that somehow encompassed the intrinsic essence of hydrokinesis - he'd severed the shackles binding his mind to the mundane coil.

Not an awakening, but a reawakening. A long-overdue homecoming.

His spirit danced with newfound lightness, reveling in the impossible clarity of pure, unadulterated insight. Colors sang, sounds caressed, and the topology of his psyche stood out in stark relief against the mirrored surface of the un-void.

For the first time, Kyle experienced the incandescent thrill of being wholly, gloriously ALIVE.

"Incredible…"

The AI's breathless interjection shattered his reverie.

"Huh. Forgot you were still lurking around in there." Kyle couldn't quite filter the surprise from his tone.

A flicker of fond exasperation from the digital passenger. "You're welcome, genius. What, you think you retaught yourself to think through sheer stubborn ignorance? If I hadn't been drilling that incantation into your thick skull, you'd be starring in 'Diary of a Wimpy Vegetable' right about now."

Kyle barked a laugh. "Guess I owe you one, Skynet. Nice assist."

His gaze tracked back to the arcane glyph.

Triangles. The fundamental building blocks of geometry. And this one was dazzlingly straightforward - crisp lines and precise angles, as easy to parse as the alphabet.

But that minuscule imperfection…

It needled him. Taunted him. How could something so ostensibly simple, so tantalizingly close to sublime symmetry, incorporate such a maddening flaw?

Focus.

Theories later. Ass-saving escape plan now.

Rudimentary pattern recognition sketched the broad strokes for him. The glyph was a direct product of Annie's hydromancy. Ergo, that innocuous little squiggle over there was tied to the element of water.

Water.

He could FEEL the connection, ephemeral hints of deeper meaning plucking at his frontal lobe. But the hazy intuition remained stubbornly amorphous, refusing to coalescence into anything concrete.

Too many unknowns. Too many variables he couldn't account for. He needed a starting point. Some frame of reference to begin slotting the jigsaw pieces into a recognizable picture.

"What IS this place, really?"

"We're inside a metaphysical representation of your psyche. A self-contained pocket dimension, if you want to get technical about it. Everything you see here is a projection of your mental landscape."

The AI's tone took on a professorial slant.

"Average Joe's headspace is locked up tighter than a drum - completely inaccessible to the conscious mind. Poor bastards get lost in here, they're pretty much doomed to an eternity of solipsistic navel-gazing. Game over."

A shudder rippled through Kyle's soul-flesh.

God. He'd come so close to sharing that fate.

"Lucky for you, ol' Annie's magic words did a number on your psychic circuitry. Punched your ticket to the big leagues," the AI continued, its nonchalance a stark counterpoint to the gravity of the revelation. "Congratulations! You're now a card-carrying member of the 'I do believe in spooks' club."

Well, then.

Shouldn't he be feeling… something? Astonishment? Elation? Existential dread? Yet his mind flatly refused to supply anything beyond a sort of Zen-like acceptance.

Accidental enlightenment. Sure. Why the hell not? Par for the course, really.

At this point, he'd swallow his own tongue if he DIDN'T stumble ass-backwards into some occult snafu every other day.

That was just life in Bizarro World for you.

Still, he couldn't deny the burgeoning sense of giddy anticipation fizzing through his veins. The tantalizing promise of power thrumming just beneath his skin.

Mage.

The word alone conjured a kaleidoscope of fractured pop culture detritus. Merlin. Gandalf. Harry Dresden. Doctor Strange.

But those were fiction. Pretty lies and fairy tales. What did it REALLY mean, in this funhouse mirror version of reality? Where did HE fall on the grand cosmic pecking order?

What could he DO?

A frustrated growl clawed its way out of his throat.

Questions. Always more goddamn questions.

"As much as I hate to derail this riveting bout of magical 20 Questions, maybe - just maybe - we should refocus on the part where you're still trussed up like a Christmas ham in a murder dungeon." The AI, as if sensing his mounting agitation, interjected with a verbal splash of cold water. "Call me crazy, but ensuring your continued status among the living MIGHT just take priority over pondering the secrets of the universe."

Kyle pinched the bridge of his nose, the phantom sensation of a tension headache sparking behind his eyes.

Right. Michelle. Annie. The imminent threat of a VERY permanent dirt nap.

Epiphany or no epiphany, the clock was still ticking on his expiration date.

He needed to compartmentalize. To prioritize.

The mysteries of magic could wait. Ensuring he'd live long enough to unravel them, however…

Had to keep his eyes on the prize.

Freshly motivated, Kyle cast his mind back to the physical plane.

The transition was… disorienting. Like an ice pick to the cerebellum.

Stygian gloom pressed in on all sides, the thin rind of moonlight filtering through the dense canopy offering meager relief. His battered corpus sang a symphony of dull throbs and sharp aches, a percussive backbeat to Michelle and Annie's hushed argument.

The scene was painfully familiar. Trudging along on rubbery legs, the rope steadily flensing the skin from his wrists, the Reaper's breath prickling the fine hairs on the nape of his neck…

"While you were busy spelunking through your own gray matter, you missed a couple important plot developments out here in the really real world," the AI supplied unprompted. "Here's the bullet: the cavalry's about to make an appearance. And not the 'hold my beer and watch this' streaking-across-the-quad variety."

Frowning, Kyle swept his gaze over the clearing, momentarily disoriented by the transition from metaphor to meat.

Sure enough, the gruesome twosome had called a halt to their little nature hike from hell. They hovered at the edge of the treeline, the tense set of their shoulders and clipped exchanges setting off all sorts of alarm bells in Kyle's head.

"It's over. He's dead weight. We need to cut our losses." Annie's words spilled out in a panicky rush, the first hairline fractures showing in her sadistic mean girl veneer.

"Failure is not an option," Michelle growled, low and dangerous as a mother hellcat protecting her young. "The package is non-negotiable. That vault WILL be cracked."

"We're running out of ti--"

Kyle tuned out their bickering, a cold sweat breaking out at his hairline.

What in the Sam Hill had the Bobbsey Twins' bloomers in a twist?

"You really need me to spell it out for you, Sherlock? The Girl Scouts are circling the wagons. Turns out toting around your comatose keister is hell on the old getaway hustle. Performance anxiety's a bitch when you're trying to beat feet."

The AI helpfully untangled the subtext, its incorporeal voice dripping with fatalistic mirth.

Crap on a cracker.

Of all the times for the Lither clan to get their collective excrement together…

His heart began to jackhammer in his chest, fight-or-flight kicking into high gear.

The eleventh hour. Moment of truth time.

When the dust settled, he'd either be breathing free air or getting fitted for a pine overcoat. And the next few ticks of the clock would tell the tale.

"Friendly tip, Hoss? Tweedledee and Tweedledum are way too busy with their own personal reenactment of 'Mean Girls' to spare much thought for little ol' you. This is your window. Your shot. Get that Houdini-shaped ass of yours in gear and MOVE."

Much as it galled him to admit it, the computerized killjoy had a point.

He swallowed hard, Adam's apple bobbing against his abused trachea. "So, Sysco, any brilliant insights you'd care to share re: my continued survival?"

Silence.

Then, a whir of servos. A crackle of static.

"One sec, let me run the numbers. Don't go anywhere."

The pounding at Kyle's temples spiked in sync with a sudden uptick in CPU activity. Fans kicked into high gear. Heatsinks throbbed like jet engines.

Something that felt uncomfortably close to hope kindled in his chest.

Holy motherboard.

Was the AI actually about to pull a miracle out of its digital fundament?

His technologically-induced optimism lasted all of three seconds before reality quite literally smacked him in the face.

A translucent screen snapped into existence an inch from the tip of his nose, pale blue and deceptively delicate. Flickering. Stuttering.

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