The training timeline dissolved around them.
Jakarta vanished first, then Coalition headquarters, then everything familiar they had spent forty-eight timelines learning to call home. Reality shifted at its foundation. Everything they had known, everything they had fought and bled and died for, had been construct. Preparation. A testing ground built and rebuilt for one purpose: to see if any version of them could pass.
Actual reality materialized slowly, piece by piece, like a wound being uncovered.
What replaced the training timeline made everything before it look gentle by comparison. The final exam. The Sovereign. All of it paled against what was rising up around them now.
Reality itself was dying. Not as metaphor. Literally, visibly, undeniably. Space cracked open in long fault lines overhead. Time fractured at the edges of their vision, stuttering like a damaged reel. Existence itself was coming apart at the seams, and none of it looked like it planned on stopping.
