All Chapters of The General's Return: Chapter 251
- Chapter 253
253 chapters
Chapter Two Hundred and Forty-One — The Moment That Resists
The corridor snapped shut. Not around Fowler through him. Selene felt the wrench instantly, a violent tug that didn’t pull at his body but at the idea of him.The space where he stood distorted, edges sharpening as causality tightened like a vice. “Fowler!” She lunged, fingers brushing his wrist and the contact hurt.Not pain. Feedback. A sharp, electric recoil that burned up her arm and into her skull. She cried out, stumbling back as the universe rejected the touch. Fowler gasped, teeth clenched. “It’s isolating me.”The precision-lines surged brighter, converging into a narrow channel that wrapped around his outline. Inside it, the air stilled, motion flattening into inevitability.The presence had changed tactics. No persuasion. No integration. Extraction. Selene forced herself upright, ignoring the ringing in her ears. “You can’t take him without collapsing the bloom!”The darkness did not answer. Instead, the substrate shifted, layers compressing as if bracing for impact. The bl
Chapter Two Hundred and Forty-Two — The Choice the World Refused
The presence surged, no longer subtle, its intent blazing clear. Singular anomaly must be resolved. The bloom flared one last time, light tearing free in a blinding arc that wrapped around both of them.Selene felt herself pulled forward into him. Reality folded. The substrate cracked. And the universe was forced to choose which one of them it could afford to lose.The universe chose wrong. Or maybe it chose the only thing it couldn’t predict. Selene didn’t fall into Fowler. She overlapped him.For an instant that contained too much time, their outlines blurred bone and light, memory and intention sliding across one another like misaligned transparencies.Selene felt his heartbeat inside her ribs. Fowler felt her breath where his lungs should have been. They screamed not in pain, but in protest as causality buckled under the contradiction.The precision-corridor shattered. Not exploded. Failed. Lines of inevitability snapped like brittle wire, recoiling into the dark.The presence rec
Chapter Two Hundred and Forty-Three — What Breaks First
The impact was silent. Not quiet absent. As if sound itself had been stripped from the moment to keep it from tearing apart.Fowler felt Selene leave him. Not her body her presence. The overlap collapsed with a violent recoil, space snapping back into alignment like an overstretched tendon released too fast.He screamed her name. The force hit. It didn’t feel like pain. It felt like being unwritten mid-thought.Light tore through him, not burning but erasing peeling away layers of cause and effect, stripping him down to the raw insistence that he had been. The warmth in his chest flared once, defiant, then fractured.He hit something solid. Hard. The world came back in pieces. Cold ground. Gravity. Air slammed into his lungs like an accusation. He rolled onto his side, coughing, fingers clawing at dirt that smelled real iron, dust, rain.Rain. He sucked in a breath and opened his eyes. Gray sky. Low, heavy clouds bleeding water in sheets. Ruined concrete rising around him in jagged si