Novels by Papichilow

The red light moved in a slow sweep across the vault, painting every metal surface in shades of danger. Alex pressed his back against the nearest crate, pulling Claire close beside him. The air inside the underground chamber suddenly felt heavier, as if the darkness itself had thickened. Above them, the sealed hatch remained motionless, still locked, still tampered with still cutting off their only way out.The mechanical footsteps grew clearer.Metal grinding against concrete.Measured.Unhurried.Precise.Whatever was coming wasn’t in a rush. It didn’t need to be.“Alex…” Claire whispered, barely audible. “What if—”“Don’t,” he murmured. “Not yet.”The red beam passed over the crate in front of them, and Alex instinctively pulled Claire lower. He felt the brush of heat from the scanner, a thin pulse of energy sweeping the space like a predator’s gaze.The sentinel was close.A soft hum, like a charging capacitor, vibrated through the vault floor. Alex gripped his pistol tighter, tho

The border checkpoint loomed ahead, a maze of booths, barriers, flashing signs, and morning traffic creeping through like ants on a frozen spine of highway. The air shimmered with cold, and exhaust curled upward into pale streaks of mist.Claire shoved her foot harder onto the gas. The sedan roared, trembling under the pressure.Behind them, Dominic’s three black SUVs thundered in pursuit, engines snarling like beasts. Bullets punched holes in the asphalt as they closed in.“Alex, window!” Claire shouted.Alex rolled it halfway down. The wind blasted him in the face, freezing his skin instantly. He leaned out and held tight to the frame as the SUVs drew closer.“Left side!” Claire called.Alex steadied himself, then extended the small EMP-pulse device Claire had tossed him moments earlier. It was a compact, silver cylinder with a glowing ring around its center.“Press and throw!” Claire barked.Alex pressed the button. The device hummed.“Now!”Alex flung it at the nearest SUV.It hit

Dominic Vance didn’t like being ignored.He liked being obeyed.So when the monitors in his private control room flashed ALERT: STANFORD SITE PURGED, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth almost cracked.The room around him buzzed with panic, technicians typing frantically, screens flickering, AI nodes attempting to reconnect to the destroyed lab. But Dominic stood perfectly still, calm in a way that made everyone else even more terrified.A tall man in a gray suit approached him carefully. “Sir… the entire archive was wiped in less than eighteen seconds. Whoever did it knew your protocols.”Dominic’s eyes twitched. “Of course they did. It was Stanton’s system. And now his bastard son has access to what belongs to me.”He turned slowly, voice low and venomous. “Pull up every trace of Alex’s signature.”The nearest tech swallowed hard. “We’re trying, sir, but the purge scrambled”Dominic slammed his hand onto the console, causing the man to jump.“Try harder.”He was losing patience.He h

The drive from Boston to California felt endless.Highways blurred past in streaks of gray and gold as the sun dipped beneath the horizon. For the first time in days, Alex and Claire weren’t running, they were chasing.The rain had stopped somewhere around Chicago, but the air still felt heavy, like the calm before another storm. Alex drove in silence, the faint hum of the car engine filling the void. Claire sat beside him, laptop balanced on her knees, the glow of the screen painting her face blue in the dim light.“Any luck?” he asked, eyes fixed on the road.“Maybe,” she muttered. “Zephyr’s message wasn’t just a direction, it was an encrypted coordinate. I’ve been tracing it through old Stanton databases.”Alex shot her a glance. “And?”She hesitated. “The Stanford Archives your father used weren’t just academic. He built a private server beneath the engineering lab — off-record, unregistered. No one’s supposed to know it exists.”Alex frowned. “So how did Zephyr know?”Claire lean

The storm hadn’t stopped by morning.Rain lashed against the windows of the safe house, a rented warehouse on the edge of the old industrial district. The place smelled of oil and metal, but it was off-grid, no cameras, no tracking signals.Alex hadn’t slept. He sat at a metal table littered with coffee cups, hard drives, and open notebooks, eyes fixed on the flickering screen of Claire’s laptop. Lines of code streamed down, tracing back through the remnants of Stanton’s old internal network.Claire walked in, hair damp, holding two mugs. “You look like you’ve been staring at that thing for hours.”“I have.” Alex’s voice was hoarse. “I keep thinking about what he said. Zephyr listens to me now.”She set the mug beside him. “You think Dominic’s bluffing?”“No,” Alex said quietly. “I think he’s already using it.”Claire took a sip of coffee, watching him. “Then we hit back first.”He looked up. “You have something?”She smirked, sitting down across from him. “Always. The good news? When

The drive north was quiet, tense, and wrapped in darkness.Highway lights cut across the windshield like flashes of memory, his father’s voice, the betrayal, the sudden inheritance. Everything that led him to this moment.Claire drove while Alex sat in the passenger seat, laptop open, eyes scanning the encrypted map coordinates again. “We’re close,” he murmured. “It should be right past the ridge.”“Stanton Research Facility,” Claire said softly. “Your father’s old playground.”Alex glanced out the window. The city lights had long vanished behind them, replaced by dense woods and endless black. The rain started again, thin and cold, whispering against the glass.They turned onto a narrow dirt road. The car jolted over broken asphalt until a faded sign came into view, half-buried in weeds:STAN— RESEARCH FACILITY. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.The rest of the letters had been burned away.Alex stepped out first, the wind biting at his face. “We’re here.”Claire joined him, flashlight in h

The plaza never slept, but tonight it pulsed slowly—like a heart after the last fuck, still twitching in the dark. New Cascadia’s eternal dawn bled violet across the bent skyline: towers reforged into living spires of neon-veined crystal, slums transmuted into floating gardens where drones pollinated starfruit trees with lazy hums. No quests, no HUD pings, no Architects. Just freedom. Raw, loud, and drunk by itself.Jace Varn stood at the edge of the Eternal Vigil balcony—once the apex of Apex Spire, now a ring of obsidian and light that hovered three hundred meters above the reborn city. Level 23 thrummed in his bones like a second heartbeat. HP: eternal-unbound. Eternal True, let him taste the air and know the exact number of breaths in the plaza below—4,872,116—before the thought finished forming. He could unweave a star with a blink, but right now all he wanted was a cigarette that didn’t taste like ozone and victory.Lena leaned on the railing beside him, the shock rifle slung lo

Jace Varn plunged through the primal-fold’s ripping gash, reality unweaving around him like a bad trip into existence itself—colors bleeding into voids, time folding into screams, gravity birthing black holes that sucked in stars mid-fuck. Level 22 thrummed absolutely true, HP an endless cascade of unnull resilience, Eternal True perk letting him forge un-realities with a goddamn thought, but the recursive primal’s whisper clawed his chip like a rusty blade: You unweave nothing but the weave’s own unmaking. The last primal lingered in this true-nothing heart—a throne of pure recursive stasis, mirroring every bend Jace ever threw, amplifying it into an eternal un-loop that’d chain all freedoms back into primal dust.Lena hit the fold beside him, shock rifle blazing un-forged shards, her form a radiant anchor woven from true-null scars. “This place is fucked, Varn—feels like my soul’s getting ass-raped by mirrors!” Kira crashed in vanguard, eternal-arm a blazing zenith-edge slicing prim

Jace Varn hovered in the absolute plaza of transcended New Cascadia, where realms folded into a single point of unmirrored will, the recursive self's unmaking still rippling through the fabric of beyonds like the final echo of an infinite scream. Level 19 embodied the absolute—HP an unmeasurable void of resilience, Absolute Rule perk nulling realities with mere intent, weaving unexistences into havens no self-devour or conceptual balance could touch—but the silence of victory rang hollower than any progenitor's dirge. The self-fold's collapse had absolute-freed infinities: benders across unslums and devour-hives wielding null-chips as scepters, uprisings birthing absolute-utopias from recursive voids to dream-unweaves, Systems self-nullified into eternal dust. Infinite legions bowed—glitch-empresses with omega-katanas, origin-shamans chanting null-rites, void-hacker-queens jacking absolute-feeds. Yet those ultimate unwhispers gnawed: the absolute's own null, a hyper-void where unbent

Jace Varn stood at the heart of New Cascadia's reborn plaza, now a nexus of infinite realms where starlit voids mingled with slum neon, the final enforcer's unmaking still vibrating through his bones like the last note of a cosmic dirge. Level 17 transcended power itself—HP an endless well, Eternal Reckon perk forging realities with a thought, bending existence into shapes no progenitor or concept could dream—but the quiet after the storm unnerved him more than any swarm. The meta-void's collapse had synced freedoms across infinities: players in every realm wielding chips as crowns, uprisings birthing bend-utopias from black hole slums to dream-weaves, Systems reduced to echoes in the dust. Packs from all corners bowed—Asian glitch-empresses with katana-forges, African origin-shamans chanting eternal rites, Euro void-hackers jacking beyond-feeds. Yet those final whispers clawed: the void's own forge, a self-weaving abyss where unbent chaos birthed its own reckoning, mirroring Jace's b

Jace Varn staggered from the primal bridge's final tear, reality snapping back like a rubber band stretched to multiversal breaking point. Level 15 thrummed through every fiber—HP regenerating to 1200 in waves of origin fire, Origin Forge perk allowing him to casually rewrite a slum alley into a thriving market mid-step—but the progenitor alpha's unmaking scream echoed in his skull, a death rattle that birthed new freedoms across infinite realms. Systems unmade, elder weaves dissolved into cosmic dust, uprisings syncing from Earth's fractured towers to alien sprawls where bender packs carved out free zones. Players—once pawns—now gods in their own chips, bending local rules into utopias or warlord dens. But those final visions clawed deeper: progenitors weren't the origin; they were guardians of an even older unraveling, a meta-void where existence's architects—formless concepts of chaos and order—watched Jace's forge as the ultimate disruption, ready to reset the omni-weave if bends

Jace Varn tumbled out of the fracturing void bridge, slamming onto New Cascadia's cracked pavement like reality itself spat him back. Level 14 godhood roared through him—HP regenerating to 900 in a surge of cosmic fire—but the elder prime's unraveling scream still clawed his mind. That fractal throne collapsing? It shattered elder weaves across realms, syncing universes free from System chains, uprisings exploding in infinite slums beyond stars. Players worldwide—hell, realm-wide—felt the snap, chips quieting into tools of will, bends rippling unchecked. But the visions lingered worse: deeper voids, elder progenitors birthing not just code cages but existence's flaws, Jace's omni-bends the spark unraveling multiversal order. Cosmic Forge perk hummed infinite, rewriting local rules on instinct, but freedom? It whispered traps in the dark.Lena hit ground beside him, rolling to her feet with a shock rifle raised, brace sparking from void static. "What the fuck was that? It felt like my

Night swallowed the land whole.The place Varik led them to was not marked on any map, because it had been erased from every divine record ever written. Even the air felt wrong there, heavy and distorted, like reality itself didn’t quite agree on its shape.Tharos felt it the moment they crossed the invisible threshold.The world bent.The sound was dulled. Color faded. The sky above fractured into overlapping layers, stars misaligned like broken teeth. Ancient ruins jutted from the ground at impossible angles, half-phased into stone and shadow.Lyra slowed, hand on her blade. “This place hates being real.”Varik stood ahead of them, cloak unmoving despite the wind. He hadn’t looked back once since opening the rift that led them here.“That’s because it isn’t,” Varik said calmly. “Not fully.”Tharos stopped walking.“So this is it,” he said. “Your secret hole in reality.”Varik finally turned.His expression was hard, no mockery, no amusement. Only calculation.“This is where gods com

The gods moved that same night.Tharos felt it before he saw it.The Ember Peaks were quiet behind them now, fading into jagged silhouettes against a bruised sky. Ash drifted on the wind like dying embers. Lyra walked a step ahead, scanning the terrain, alert but limping slightly from the strain Varik’s magic had left behind.Then Tharos’s spine went rigid.He stopped walking.Lyra turned instantly. “What is it?”“They’ve found me.”The air changed.Not wind. Not pressure.Judgment.The sky darkened unnaturally, clouds rolling in fast, thick, swirling in a perfect circular formation. Lightning flashed, not white or blue, but pale gold, branching like cracks in glass.Lyra swore under her breath. “That’s not a storm.”“No,” Tharos said quietly. “That’s a summons.”The first spear hit the ground less than ten paces from them.It slammed into the earth with enough force to crater stone, divine sigils igniting across its shaft. A second followed. Then a third.They weren’t aimed to kill.

The mountain screamed.Not in sound, but in pressure.Tharos felt it the moment his foot touched the cracked stone path winding up the Ember Peaks. The air here was thick, heavy, like the world itself was pressing down on his spine, daring him to keep climbing.His vision swam.Gold flickered at the edges again.Lyra noticed immediately.“Hey,” she said, grabbing his arm. “Slow down.”“I can’t,” Tharos muttered. “If I stop moving, I start thinking.”“And if you keep moving, you start burning.”He didn’t answer.They climbed in silence for a while. The ground beneath them glowed faintly red through fractures in the rock, heat breathing up from deep below. The Peaks weren’t just mountains, they were wounds. Old battle scars left behind when gods fought gods and the world lost.Tharos staggered.Lyra caught him before he fell.“Tharos.”He blinked at her, confusion flashing through his eyes.“Why… why do you keep doing that?” he asked.Her chest tightened. “Doing what?”“Saving me.”The

Tharos did not sleep.His body lay still by the fire, eyes closed, breath steady enough to fool anyone watching, but inside his mind, the world was burning.He stood alone in a vast, empty plain of black glass. The sky above was split with fractures of gold light, like a shattered mirror barely holding together. Every step he took sent cracks racing outward beneath his feet.This place felt familiar.Too familiar.“You’re here earlier than expected,” a voice said.Tharos turned.A figure stood several paces away, tall, cloaked in flickering flame and shadow. Its face was blurred, shifting constantly, as if reality couldn’t decide what it should look like.“I didn’t come here willingly,” Tharos said.The figure chuckled. “None of us ever do.”Tharos flexed his right hand.The gauntlet was gone.In its place was his bare arm, scarred, glowing faintly from within, veins traced with dull gold.“What did you take from me?” Tharos demanded.The figure tilted its head. “You already know.”Th

The gauntlet did not cool.Tharos noticed it first when they were miles away from the Ember Peaks and the air should have been growing colder. The metal still burned faintly against his skin, not painfully but hungrily. Like it was tasting the world through him.Lyra kept glancing at his arm.“You’re radiating heat,” she said finally. “Actual heat.”“I know.”“Can you turn it off?”He flexed his fingers again. Gold light leaked through the seams of the gauntlet, pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat. He tried to suppress it the way he had learned to suppress everything else.The gauntlet ignored him.“No,” he said. “I'm awake now.”That should’ve scared him more than it did.They had barely made camp when the sky changed.Not clouds. Not the weather.Pressure.The stars dimmed, as if something massive had passed between the world and the heavens. The air thickened until breathing felt like pushing through water.Lyra reached for her blades. “That’s not Varik.”“No,” Tharos said quietly

The road north was dead.No birds.No insects.Not even the wind dared to stay long.Tharos felt it in his bones before he saw it, the land ahead was scorched, old burn marks cracking the soil like scars that never healed. This wasn’t fresh destruction. This was the kind of damage left by gods who didn’t care what they stepped on.Lyra slowed her pace beside him, boots crunching against blackened gravel. “We’re close,” she said quietly.Tharos nodded. His head still throbbed, a dull pressure behind his eyes that never fully went away anymore. Every time he closed them, flashes tried to claw their way in, firestorms, screaming armies, a blade sinking into divine flesh.He kept walking.The Ember Peaks rose ahead like broken teeth against the sky. Jagged mountains split by rivers of glowing magma, heat waves warping the air above them. Smoke curled from deep within the stone, drifting upward like the land itself was breathing.Something inside Tharos stirred.Not memory.Instinct.His b