God-Level Reset: System of the Forgotten King

Chapter 52: Crownfire Protocol



Bullets screamed through the air. Marei ducked behind a steel column as kinetic blasts shattered ancient consoles, sending sparks raining down. Kade moved instinctively, shielding her flank with a barrier field that pulsed with Catalyst-blue energy.

The Rell assassins weren't standard operatives. They moved with unnatural synchronization—like puppets controlled by a shared intelligence.

Kade flung a shard—one of the upgraded ones Marei had coded with spike logic.

Impact.

One assassin's armor glitched, the mask dissolving in static—revealing a face.

Kade froze.

"Juno?"

It was his squadmate. One who had died years ago. Or so he'd believed.

Her eyes were glossed over with a neural haze. No recognition. No emotion. Only mission.

"Reset anomaly detected. Eliminating Candidate: Kade Fallon."

She raised her blade.

Marei shouted, "They're Rell Sleeper Units! Thought-dead soldiers reprogrammed with false memories. That's what the family does—they recycle people!"

Kade's rage ignited.

He met Juno's charge head-on, activating a buried function in the Catalyst. His palm glowed, and memory-construct armor formed around him, pieced from every battle he remembered surviving.

He wasn't just fighting back. He was rewriting the battlefield.

Each blow he struck rewrote the very ground they stood on—turning the old vault into an echo chamber of his victories. Juno stumbled, her programming wavering.

That's when he saw it—beneath her left eye: a faint glyph. A memory seal.

Kade stabbed his hand into the seal.

A burst of data exploded.

Suddenly, he saw her memories—fractured, buried, controlled. She'd been reset seven times. Each time killed and brought back as a tool of the Rell bloodline.

"Juno," he whispered, "remember who you were."

She hesitated.

But the second assassin didn't.

A blade pierced Kade's side. Hot. Deep.

He collapsed, coughing blood.

Marei screamed his name—but her voice seemed far away.

Darkness pulled at him.

Until a voice—familiar and feminine—spoke directly into his mind.

"You've bled for the truth. Let me give you mine."

It was her.

Evira. The Architect.

And in that instant, Kade's surroundings shifted.

He was no longer in the vault. He stood in a memory—a living one.

A city on fire. Children running. Soldiers bearing the Rell insignia executing scientists. And there… at the center of it all… Major Rell himself, younger, cold, calm, giving the order to burn Project Catalyst to the ground.

Evira stood across from him, holding a data shard.

"You'll doom the world with your resets. The Catalyst was meant to preserve humanity's mind, not fracture it."

"No," Rell said, "it was always about control."

Kade fell to his knees, breath catching. He understood now.

Rell's bloodline had orchestrated the resets to weed out threats. The system wasn't just a system—it was a filter. And Kade… was never supposed to survive.

Back in reality, his eyes snapped open. Catalyst energy surged like a tidal wave.

He stood.

"Protocol Crownfire," he said aloud.

Marei looked up. "What the hell is that?"

Kade's voice was different. Fused with Evira's code.

"It's the Architect's purge. A full memory reset—on our terms."

He raised his hand—and the vault exploded in a corona of blue fire, rewriting the air, the walls, the assassins, everything.

And when the light faded… only he and Marei remained.

The others were gone. Dissolved.

But not erased.

"No more hiding," Kade whispered. "We burn their system from the inside out."

Marei looked at him, stunned. "What did she give you?"

Kade's eyes gleamed with both pain and clarity.

"A map to the original Seed."

"The what?"

"The first memory. The one that started the Catalyst. The one even Rell couldn't find."


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