The hesitation didn’t last.The chamber’s glow steadied again, regaining its rhythm, as though her defiance had been nothing more than a brief interruption. The lines pulsed, precise and unyielding, wrapping her in a net she could neither escape nor fully touch.Lina pressed her palms flat against the trembling floor, forcing herself to breathe slowly. One inhale. One exhale. Her body ached from the effort, but she couldn’t afford to let panic claim her again. If the chamber fed on her weakness, then she had to starve it.You’re not the prisoner. You’re the core.Ward’s voice — her cursed voice — echoed like a brand in Lina’s mind. She wanted to tear the words out, shred them into nothing, but they clung too tightly, replaying themselves until they sounded less like advice and more like inevitability.The glow crawled higher up the walls, narrowing inward. Every pulse carried weight, pressing against her lungs until her breaths felt too shallow.SYNCHRONIZATION: 23%The text burned ac

The glow no longer pulsed in rhythm—it screamed. The chamber’s light fractured into jagged shards, each flash stabbing into Lina’s vision until her eyes watered and her skull pounded with every beat.She staggered forward on shaking legs, but there was nowhere to go. The walls bent inward, narrowing the chamber, pressing closer until it felt like she was suffocating inside a shrinking lung.The numbers across the surface flared.SYNCHRONIZATION: 82% — CRITICAL.Her heart seized. The sync was climbing too fast.Her body convulsed as the chamber pulled harder. Every breath came ragged, her chest heaving as though her lungs were no longer hers. Her muscles trembled without command, her arms jerking like a puppet’s.Her scream tore loose before she could stop it.The walls caught it, amplified it, hurled it back in layers of voices—her own, multiplied, fractured. They folded her pain into the rhythm, embedding it deeper into the sync.You are ours. You are ours. You are ours.The chamber

The chamber had grown impossibly bright, though not light in any ordinary sense. It was as if every pulse of her heart was mirrored in the walls, each beat echoed back at her tenfold. Lina pressed her hands to the floor, trembling, trying to anchor herself to something solid, something real. But the surface beneath her felt as fluid as the air itself, vibrating with a pulse that was both hers and not hers. The lines of code along the walls had become rivers of light, twisting and writhing toward her with purpose, like they knew her movements before she made them. Her chest heaved. Each breath drew in both panic and awe; she could feel the synchronization climbing with every second. 97… 98… her head spun. “You’re close,” Ward’s voice whispered from somewhere behind her—though she wasn’t actually there. The words were fragments in her mind, layered like a signal within the noise. Lina shook her head, but even her denial fed the chamber. No. She wasn’t theirs. She wouldn’t be swallo

He cursed under his breath. He had never felt so powerless. Not against the Syndicate. Not against the full weight of their influence. Never. But here, staring at the blinking synchronization counter, he felt the true gravity of helplessness. 94… 95…Kael’s fingers hovered over the interface. He could execute his latest code attempt, the one he had been refining for weeks, but every instinct warned him it was incomplete. If he misaligned even a single parameter, he could accelerate her dissipation rather than prevent it. He could not fail. He could not.He leaned back, closing his eyes, letting his mind expand beyond the console, beyond the numbers. He imagined the chamber itself, imagined the patterns of light and code, and focused on Lina’s presence within it. She was tethered to him by something more than the interface—her essence, her being, responded to him. Every choice he made, every micro-adjustment of his algorithm, reverberated through that tether.And yet… he still lacked t

Kael had known from the instant he touched the forbidden thread of code that there would be no return. The Chamber was not a door to be forced open; it was a living system, a construct designed to devour intrusions. Yet he had forced himself inside anyway, because the thought of Lina dissolving into that machine while he stood outside powerless was worse than any trap.The first sensation was pain.Not the clean stab of a blade, nor the sharp throb of bruises. This was pain like his body had been rewritten into a frequency that did not belong. His chest burned with static, every nerve screaming as though flayed. He staggered in a place that had no ground, his breath ripping through him, his mind fighting to anchor itself against a storm of alien pulses.The Chamber.It surged all around him—light and hum, an infinite pulse of design woven tighter than anything human hands could have imagined. At its center, like a beacon, Lina glowed, threads of code wrapping her form in relentless wa