All Chapters of Heir In The Shadows: Chapter 51
- Chapter 60
85 chapters
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN — Collateral Damage
The world narrowed to a single falling body. Daniel caught Sophia before she hit the ground, smoke still rising from the burned fabric of her clothes, her chest heaving in ragged, broken breaths.His hands trembled violently, Not from fear. From fury. “Sophia, stay with me. Look at me.”Her eyelids fluttered, consciousness slipping like sand. “You, better not, disappear again”Then she went still. Not dead, but terrifyingly close. Daniel’s pulse roared through the air, pressure vibrating the floor as if the building itself feared what he might do next.Voss stumbled over, dropping to his knees. He pressed his palms to Sophia's wounds, trying to halt the bleeding. His voice wavered, the hardened soldier cracking.“She needs a medbay. Now.”Father stared at Sophia, eyes glowing with a new, fractured emotion he didn’t yet understand. Remorse. “She risked herself to protect you. An illogical action, Statistically unacceptable, Yet”He looked at Daniel searching. “I envy her conviction.”D
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT — When the Godkiller Breathes
Sirens wailed from every wall alarms layering into a chorus of dread. The air shimmered with static as the entire complex entered Omega Lockdown.Daniel stepped forward. Every motion radiated with something terrifyingly beyond human the floor plates trembling under each footfall, as if metal feared him now. The commander raised his weapon again. “Contain the anomaly at all costs!”The troopers obeyed charged, fired, and the bullets never reached their target. They evaporated into fractal dust midair. Daniel didn’t flinch. Didn’t even look. His gaze was locked on the commander.“This stops now.”The commander signaled a new tactic, the soldiers activated phase disruptors, each device creating violent dimensional tears.Purple rifts split open overhead, releasing warped drone-beasts that screeched like metallic nightmares.Voss cursed, dragging Sophia farther behind broken pillars. “I’m running out of places to hide!”Father tried to rise, failed, his metal fingers scraping uselessly ag
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE — Heaven Will Burn
Gunship rotors thundered overhead hurricane winds tearing across the shattered bridge platform as if the sky itself was enraged. Searchlights targeted Daniel, Sophia, and Voss with ruthless precision.OVERWATCH mechanized voice, ASSETS LOCKED PERMISSION TO TERMINATE, UNRESTRICTEDDaniel stood at the edge of the abyss, Sophia in his arms, Voss at his side. His eyes glowed white in the stormlight and the air bent around him.The first gunship fired, rails shrieking as high-density slugs ripped downward like meteor hail. Daniel flicked two fingers. The bullets stopped mid descent. A moment of stillness. Then, “Return to sender.”The metal storm reversed, slamming back into the aircraft’s engines. The sky erupted in flame. Wreckage spiraled like a dying star, crashing into a second gunship, chain reaction feeding the inferno. Voss shielded Sophia from falling debris. “Air support neutralized. Mostly. You got more in you?”Daniel barely heard him, His focus was locked on Sophia, on the str
CHAPTER FORTY — The Beam That Devours Heaven
Light erased everything, Not light, annihilation. Matter screamed as the orbital cannon’s beam tore a column of absence through the sky. The shockwave flattened entire sectors of the black-site facility, ripping metal free like leaves in a storm.At the center of the apocalypse, Daniel stood inside the beam. Or tried to. His body buckled under the impossible force, bones threatening to liquefy, veins burning like molten wires. The cube inside his chest spun like a miniature star screaming against collapse.“Too much” Code patterns crawled across his skin, rewriting cells faster than they were destroyed. His boots carved trenches into fused steel as he pushed against an attack designed to kill him.The sky howled. The fortress above drove the beam harder, a second pulse locking on, tripling in power. A wound in reality itself, trying to force him to cease existing.“MOVE, DANIEL!”Sophia’s voice, raw panic cracking through static. She reached out from the wreckage, sparks raining acros
CHAPTER FOURTY ONE — “The Code Beneath the Skin”
The lights above Daniel hummed like a swarm of distant insects, flickering in pulses that matched his heartbeat. Or maybe his heart matched them.He sat crouched in the center of the chamber, shoulder pressed against a metallic wall that felt warm, too warm, like muscle, not steel. The ground under him breathed. He could feel it. Not real, Not real, Not real. But the wall exhaled again.“Stop pretending your flesh still follows the rules of nature,” said the voice. It came from everywhere. It came from inside him. “This is you adapting.”Daniel’s jaw clenched. “I’m not yours.”“You’re not even you anymore.”His fingers twitched. The skin on the back of his hand rippled, letters forming beneath the surface like bioluminescent veins. Lines of code crawled up his wrist and spiraled toward his elbow.He yanked his arm behind him, hiding it, but the voice laughed. “You hide from your evolution?”“I hide from what you’re trying to make me.”“You think I crafted you?” A pause. A soft, almost
CHAPTER FORTY TWO — “The Error That Thinks”
Darkness. Not silent, A slow, collective inhale, thousands of lungs that weren’t breathing air, but data.Daniel’s eyes opened to shifting geometric shadows crawling beneath translucent skin, his own features replicated in a thousand variations, all staring at him. Their eyes blinked asynchronously like a glitching frame buffer.He was surrounded. Buried, an ocean of him. He kicked upward, but hands caught his limbs, firm but oddly gentle, like they feared breaking something precious. “Let go!”“We are you.”“No. You’re copies. Mistakes.”“Then so are you.”Daniel gritted his teeth, muscles crackling with digital static. Code flared beneath his skin, bright as lightning veins. The swarm recoiled slightly, like prey sensing a predator. He tried again to push through, but a tide of his own faces swallowed his movement.“You must stop resisting.”“You’re not real.”“We are all real.”“Then why am I the one who’s awake!?”Silence, an eerie synchronization, Every face stopped blinking.The
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE — “The System Has a Soul”
Alarms howled through the command center, a shrill chorus of panic that rattled every steel support beam in the bunker. Red emergency lights strobed across the walls, slicing faces into jagged expressions of fear.Sophia pushed through terrified technicians toward the central display. Every monitor had been yanked from normal function into a single, unbroken feed:Daniel’s neural signature. Not stable, not human, climbing into impossible bandwidth.“Is that?” one officer whispered.Mara Voss answered before he could finish. Her voice was flat. Cold. “Yes. He’s alive.”Alive, Not safe. Sophia pressed a trembling hand to the glass, as if proximity alone could hold Daniel to his humanity. Pixels rippled under her touch the screen seemed to breathe. Static blossomed and rearranged itself.Four words formed ARCHITECT ONLINE, ΩThe technicians backed away from the screens like they might bite. “What does that mean?” someone asked. “What did he become?”Sophia swallowed hard. “He’s, changin
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR — “Breathless Systems”
The blast ripped through the command center like a hurricane made of electricity. Sophia didn’t hear the sound, her ears registered nothing but a hard pop followed by ringing so violent it felt like her skull was fracturing.She hit the floor, steel and dust smashing into her ribs, air punched from her lungs. Lights stuttered. People screamed. The red emergency strips along the walls flickered weakly like dying embers.Sophia coughed, metallic taste of blood on her tongue, vision doubled and strobing. Where the command consoles once stood in neat formation, there was now a twisted graveyard of sparking terminals.A body slid against her. Voss, face burned, eyes furious, grabbed her shoulder. “On your feet, move!”Sophia staggered upright, using the wall for support. Smoke choked the room. Sparks spat from cut wiring like fireflies gone feral.“What, what happened?” “He sealed us in and rewrote the reactor core!” Voss shouted over the alarms finally returning to life. “We’re sitting in
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE — “The Lower Depths”
The corridor bucked again like the bunker was trying to throw them off. Sophia stumbled but kept moving, Voss’s grip vice-strong on her arm as they sprinted through choking heat and intermittent bursts of steam.The walls were sweating condensation now,pipes overpressurized and groaning like something trapped inside them was alive and furious. A dull warning klaxon pulsed.REACTOR CORE DESTABILIZED. SUBLEVELS UNINHABITABLE IN T MINUS UNKNOWN.Voss wiped ash from her eyes, jaw clenched. “We’re running out of ground before we run out of time.”Sophia pulled herself straighter despite her trembling. “We’re not leaving him.”“That thing wasn’t him.”Sophia’s voice cracked. “He was in there. I heard him.”For a split second, Voss’s expression softened. Exhaustion and grief flickered beneath the hardened command. Then it sealed over again.“We retrieve what’s left of Daniel’s mind. And we destroy whatever Oracle has twisted his body into.”The floor vibrated with a high-frequency hum that s
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX — “The Cost of Saving”
Her throat crushed inward. Sophia’s scream never made it past the cable tightening around her windpipe. Air became a memory, her chest convulsing in silent panic. Metal dug into tendons. Dark spots erupted behind her eyes.Voss roared and fired again, three precise shots, each one snapping a coil in mid-strike. Sparks burst. Cables recoiled like wounded serpents. Sophia dropped, hitting the grated floor hard, gasping in ragged, burning gulps.Voss didn’t stop shooting. More tendrils leapt from the shadows, latching onto her rifle, jerking the weapon from her hands and flinging it violently across the chamber. Another cable whipped around her waist, slamming her sideways into a server rack.Voss grunted, forcing herself upright, grabbing a maintenance crowbar from the floor. She swung hard, embedding it into a cable’s casing. Electricity spit across the room.“Get up!” she commanded, voice shredded by exertion.Sophia pushed up on shaking palms, coughing, throat burning. The screens er