The end of the platform opened with a groan into the heart of the labyrinth, whose door was made of stone.

The room was spacious and round. Its walls were cut out of the same weeping, moss-covered stone with which its corridors were made, and projected into the impenetrable darkness.

It did not have a big throne, or a treasure hoard, or a big monster of flesh and blood. In the middle of it was the whirl of shadow and light, a mass of raw psychic energy, a vortex of anarchy and formlessness.

Screams, cries, and snivels were heard in the vortex garden, and they created a symphony of all the amplified fears of the entrapments.

Spectral faces in anguish and despair fluttered a moment in the vortex and were sucked back into the turmoil of the whirl.

Even the air was a weapon, full of the psychic residue of hundreds of terrified minds.

"What is that thing?" His knuckles were white as Alex sucked in the grip of his shield.

The new confidence which he had won on the Bridge of Burdens was already beginning to crack on its fringes in the presence of this all-absorbing despair.

Seraphina struck a note on her arrow, the eyes of her archer closed, and her voice was constrained with intensity.

It is not in a physical form. It's pure energy. And our assaults will sail straight through it.

Kaelen had not yet learned how to control his fear, and he involuntarily stepped back. His staff was flickering with poor light.

The despair coming out of the vortex was an attack on the soul of his sympathetic doctor.

I am afraid I am afraid that everybody will all die at once.

I was not unacquainted with this: the Echo Collector. It was the last boss in the game, a psychic construct that is meant to be overcome through a fight of wit.

But this… this was different. The one that appeared in front of us was bigger, more brutal, and did exude an evil too real to be part of a simulation.

The ghost in the machine, the unclean wound of the artifact of Derisu, had turned an already difficult boss into a bloodthirsty psychic predator.

I came forward, with Draken in my hand. Its coldness put me in the eye of the storm of feeling.

We do not engage in combat with the monster, I said, and my voice was ringing with an authority which startled even my own ears. It pierced their growing panic, and made them focus on me.

"We fight the fear. Kaelen, thou lightest our way to clear! Reprove not to hurt it, but only make us a refuge. A space it cannot touch!"

Kaelen blushed, and shook his head.He banged the end of his staff on the ground.

"Holy Ward! " he shouted, and a light of warm yellow warmth burst around us, and drove away the psychic gloom which had been pressing down upon us.

The vortex whispers grew softer, their venom soothed by the purity of the ward.

"Seraphina," I continued, pointing with my blade.

"Your arrows aren't for its core; they're for the echoes! See those threads of shadow connecting to the vortex? Those are the psychic links to the other students. Sever them!"

With her incisive eyes, she trailed me. She perceived them now--immeasurable, nearly imperceptible spider-webs of black nourishing the vortex, each throbbing with the horror of a student who is captured and held. Her expression hardened.

"Understood." She started to shoot, and her arrows were no longer directed towards the centre of the mass, but towards the edges, each shot a surgical, precise blow.

"Alex!" I turned to him last.

Thou hast not thy shield to defend: it is a symbol! It is the wall on which despair crashes. Hold it high! Let them see it! Let them feel your resolve!"

His eyes were open, and he stared at me, his shield in his hand and behind to me. He had a slugging fire in his eyes.

He was no longer Alex Vonstel, the persecuted peasant. He was the shield of Team 4.

With a roar of guttural defiance he banged his shield into the ground once more. The ward about us was vibrating to the beat, and was becoming brighter.

The Echo Collector screamed with a soundless wave of pure horror flashing over us. But this time, they were ready.

They had confronted their own demons and lived. They would now fight the demons they gathered together as not victims, but as defenders of their peers.

It is nourishing on their fear, I said, and my voice dropped to a low intensive growl, as I was about to act.

"So we will give it none… It will receive not a bit less than defiance."

Before I could attack, the familiar panel of the system came before my vision.

[New Emergency Operation Activated: Labyrinth of Echoes AI Core Purge]

[Details: A foreign, malicious code has infected the NOVA AI, amplifying psychic feedback to dangerous levels. The AI core is located within the central mass of the Echo Collector. A direct interface is required.]]

[Reward: 1x Skill Evolution Stone, +75,000 SP, Title: "Mindbreaker"]

[Failure Penalty: Permanent mental damage to all students in the simulation at the time also host integrity of the system will be lost.]

My blood ran cold. Permanent mental damage. This wasn't a game anymore.

The stakes were real. It was not only our exam performance that the ghost in the machine was threatening, but also the sanity of each and every student here. A straight interface implied that I needed to enter into that whirlwind of a nightmare.

"Cover me!" I shouted, and my voice made no reply.

Whatever be the case, stand the ground!

I drew a deep breath before I could ask why, and, in my turn, I turned on the Swift Step of Siekie Ryoku, and threw myself into the midst of the vortex.

________________________________________

[VR Hall – Viewing Gallery]

In the gallery, the instructors watched the main screen, which cycled through the battles of the top teams. Leon's flawless advance, Eric's destructive rampage—it was all textbook prodigy behavior.

"Team 1 continues to advance with remarkable efficiency," Professor Evelyn Whitehound commented, her tone professionally detached, though a flicker of pride touched her lips as she watched Leon's team.

Alastor Greythorn grunted, his arms crossed over his massive chest.

"Efficiency is for parades. Eric William in Team 2 is showing real combat instinct, even if he is a reckless fool. He's breaking the labyrinth, not solving it. There's a lesson in that."

But on a smaller, secondary screen off to the side, the feed for Team 4 was showing something else entirely.

It showed a desperate, chaotic defense against a swirling vortex of shadow that didn't match any of the listed boss encounters for the trial.

"What is Team 4 doing?" a junior instructor murmured, frowning. "Their opponent isn't a Golem."

Evelyn's gaze shifted to the smaller screen. Her brow furrowed. The psychic energy readings displayed next to the feed were flashing red, indicating stress levels far beyond acceptable parameters.

"Their opponent has mutated. And… what is Wilson doing?"

On the screen, they watched as Michael charged headfirst into the swirling mass of shadows. His form was instantly swallowed.

"Is he insane?!" the junior instructor gasped.

"That's suicide!"

Alastor leaned forward, his casual demeanor gone, his eyes narrowed with a sudden, sharp intensity.

"No," he growled, his voice a low rumble.

"That's a plan." He had seen that look in Michael's eyes before—the cold, calculating calm of a gambler betting everything on a single, impossible roll of the dice.

__________________________________

[Team 1: The Lionheart Phalanx]

Leon's team stood before the final door. They were bruised, their mana reserves were running low, but their formation was unbroken.

"The mental pressure is increasing," Selena noted, her hand pressed to her temple.

"It feels… different. More desperate."

Leon nodded, his hand resting on his sword's hilt. He too felt it—a gnawing anxiety that had nothing to do with the dungeon's illusions. It felt like the collective terror of a hundred drowning souls.

He had fought through his own echoes—illusions of his father's disappointment, of his sister Emily's overwhelming shadow—but this was different.

This was a raw, unfiltered despair that seemed to bleed from the very walls of the labyrinth.

"Whatever is in that final chamber, it's affecting the entire simulation," he said grimly. "Let's end this quickly."

Chris slammed his shield into the ground, a gesture of grim readiness.

"Ready when you are."

With a shared nod, Leon pushed open the final door, prepared to face the Golem guardian.

Instead, he was met with the sight of a swirling vortex of screaming faces, a monster of pure fear.

__________________________

[Inside the Vortex – Michael's POV]

The world outside vanished. I was adrift in a sea of pure, weaponized emotion. Screams, sobs, and hateful whispers assaulted me from all sides.

Faces of my classmates flashed before me, their eyes wide with terror, their worst fears playing out in an endless, repeating loop. I saw Leon being consumed by shadows bearing his sister's face.

I saw Aiden trapped in a cage, his lightning sputtering out as his feral strength was stripped away.

This wasn't an illusion. This was a live feed of their breaking minds.

And at the center of it all, I saw him. A shadowy, glitching figure sat on a throne of corrupted data, laughing.

It was a phantom, a psychic echo left behind by the man himself, but its consciousness was very much alive in the machine.

"Who are you...to destroy my plan," the shadow of Derisu Vengraud hissed, its voice a chorus of distorted code and demonic whispers.

"You were not supposed to be here. You were not part of the equation."

Tendrils of corrupted data shot out, wrapping around my limbs, trying to digitize my consciousness, to trap me within the AI's nightmare.

My own fears began to surface—the memory of my lonely death as Samar, the suffocating feeling of being a nameless face in a crowd, the terror of my new life being just another game I was doomed to lose.

'No,' I thought, gritting my teeth as I channeled the aura from Draken. The divine weapon, even in its virtual form, responded. Its cold, draconic will was an anchor of absolute reality in this sea of illusion.

"I am Michael Wilson....Future strongest person in the word" I roared, not with my voice, but with my will. My aura flared, a blade of silver-blue light that cut through the data tendrils.

The shadow of Derisu recoiled, its form glitching violently. "What are you?!"

"I'm the bug you didn't account for," I snarled, raising my blade. The System's interface overlaid my vision, lines of code now visible to me within this psychic space.

I saw the corrupted file—the heart of the ghost in the machine.

This wasn't a sword fight. It was an exorcism. And I was about to perform a system purge the hard way.

(To be Continued)

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