All Chapters of His Dark Reign: Chapter 181
- Chapter 190
206 chapters
172. When the ground forgets it's weight
The church did not invite them in.It yielded.The doors, heavy with age and soaked in old prayers, swung outward with a sound like a long-held breath finally released. The hinges did not creak. They sighed. Air spilled from within—not cold, not warm, but wrong in a way Adam felt immediately in his bones. It carried the scent of dust, iron, and something unfinished, like stone cut and abandoned before it learned its purpose.The pressure that had been spreading laterally across the city gathered itself in response, coiling tighter, more deliberate now. It no longer brushed against Adam’s awareness like a curious touch. It pressed.Lilith’s hand tightened on Adam’s arm. She didn’t look at the church at first. She watched him—the way his shoulders drew back slightly, the way his spine straightened as if responding to an invisible alignment. The world around them seemed to adjust in quiet increments, pavement sinking a fraction of an inch, shadows leaning inward.“Don’t,” she said under
173. The shape of a refusal
The silence did not last.It fractured slowly, the way ice does when pressure keeps building beneath it—no single sound announcing the break, just a creeping awareness that the stillness had become unstable. Somewhere far off, a car alarm began to wail, cut short almost immediately as if embarrassed by its own panic. The air resumed movement in hesitant currents, brushing against skin and stone like it was relearning how to flow.Adam lay half-curled against Lilith, his weight heavier than it should have been, as though gravity had briefly reconsidered him and decided not to let go just yet. Her arms were locked around his shoulders, one hand pressed flat against his chest, counting his breaths without realizing she was doing it.One. Two. Three.He was breathing.That alone felt like a victory carved out of something hostile.“Adam,” she whispered, her voice barely more than vibration against his collarbone. “Don’t move yet.”He didn’t answer immediately. His thoughts were scattered,
174. Cartography of the unpermitted
The city did not sleep that night.Lights stayed on in apartments where no one remembered turning them on. Screens flickered with static that resolved into nothing recognizable before snapping back to normal. Dogs refused to settle. Infants cried without waking. Even the streetlights hummed differently, their glow slightly too pale, as though filtered through an atmosphere that was still deciding what rules applied.Adam felt all of it.Not as pain. Not even as noise.As orientation.He stood on the rooftop of a low-rise building a few blocks from the church, the concrete cool beneath his boots. From here, the city stretched outward in layers—streets, buildings, bridges—ordinary geometry overlaid with something else entirely. Lines he could not see with his eyes traced themselves through his awareness, intersecting, branching, looping back. Thin places. Stress points. Regions where reality had been folded too many times and never fully flattened again.Lilith stood beside him, arms fo
175. The variable that refused silence
The city exhaled, and the sound was wrong.It wasn’t wind. It wasn’t traffic. It was the collective release of pressure from systems that had just barely avoided collapse—electrical grids stabilizing, gravity reasserting its claim, time snapping back into a tolerable rhythm. Windows stopped rattling. Car alarms cut off mid-scream. Somewhere, a person woke from a dream already fading, heart racing for reasons they would never remember.Adam felt the aftershock like a bruise forming under the skin of reality.He lowered his hand from the air slowly, fingers trembling. The instinct to hold the world together had become reflexive, automatic—and that terrified him more than the watchers ever could. Power earned too easily was power that came with hidden terms.Lilith watched him closely, her expression carved from restraint. She had learned when to intervene and when to let him surface on his own. This moment, she sensed, required patience.Kaleb broke the silence first. “So,” he said, for
176. Containment protocols
The city did not return to sleep.It pretended to—lights dimming, streets thinning, windows darkening one by one—but beneath the surface, everything remained alert, like a body lying still while the heart refused to slow. Adam felt it as a low vibration under his ribs, a persistent hum that refused to fade. The containment had begun, not as a cage, but as a question the universe kept asking itself: What do we do with you?They left the rooftop in silence.Not because there was nothing to say, but because every word felt too loud, too capable of tipping something delicate into catastrophe. Lilith walked a step ahead, her shoulders squared, eyes scanning reflections in glass and metal as if expecting the city itself to blink at her. Kaleb trailed behind, hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets, trying—and failing—to look like a normal teenager heading home after a long night. Malrick’s presence thinned, retreating inward, though Adam could still feel him coiled tightly, watchful.When
177. When decisions grow teeth
Morning arrived without permission. It didn’t creep in gently or stretch the shadows thin. It arrived abruptly, as if the world had woken up mid-sentence and decided to keep talking anyway. The sky was a dull, colorless gray, not the clean promise of dawn but the exhausted afterimage of a night that had gone on too long. Adam had not slept. He sat at the edge of the narrow bed, elbows on his knees, hands clasped so tightly his knuckles ached. The room around him felt smaller than it had the day before, the walls subtly closer, the ceiling pressing down with quiet insistence. Even the air carried weight. It moved reluctantly, as though each breath had to negotiate its passage into his lungs. Malrick was silent. That, more than anything, unsettled him. Usually, Malrick filled the quiet—sometimes with warnings, sometimes with mockery, sometimes with cold, surgical observations that left no room for denial. Now there was only the faint impression of coiled presence, like a bla
178. The shape of retaliation
The school did not close.That fact alone told Adam everything he needed to know.If a student collapsing mid-hallway had been a purely human incident, the administration would have reacted with the usual panic—dismissals, assemblies, murmured reassurances that everything was under control. Instead, classes resumed after a brief, carefully managed delay. Teachers spoke in calm, measured tones. The announcement over the intercom was bland, rehearsed, stripped of emotion.Medical episode. Situation handled. Please return to class.Containment disguised as routine.Adam felt it immediately: the net had not loosened. It had adapted.He sat in his seat, back straight, hands folded on the desk, eyes forward. To anyone watching, he looked composed—perhaps a little pale, perhaps a little distant. Inside, every nerve was alert. The hum beneath his ribs had deepened, no longer a vibration but a steady pressure, like a second pulse beating out of sync with his heart.Malrick was no longer silent
179. The cost of being seen
The alarms did not stop.They layered over one another—fire, intrusion, system failure—until the sound became less a warning and more a declaration. The school was no longer pretending. Whatever protocols existed for normal emergencies had been abandoned, overwritten by something blunt and desperate.Adam stood at the center of the cafeteria as if the chaos bent around him.Students had scattered to the edges of the room, pressed against walls, crouched beneath overturned tables, hands over their heads. Teachers shouted instructions that no one followed. Smoke curled lazily from shattered light fixtures, the smell of ozone sharp in the air. Somewhere, glass continued to fall in irregular tinkling sounds, like an afterthought.The pressure remained.It did not attack again immediately. Instead, it observed.Adam felt it clearly now—no longer diffuse, no longer hidden behind probability and anchors. It was focused, intent sharpened by irritation. The net had torn, but the thing behind i
180. Aftershocks don't ask permission
The authorities arrived too late to understand anything.They flooded the building in fluorescent vests and practiced urgency, radios crackling with codes that assumed the crisis had a name. Firefighters checked for structural damage that didn’t exist in any conventional sense. Paramedics attended to students in shock, their questions gentle and repetitive, designed to keep people tethered to the present.Adam watched it all from the hallway, seated on the floor with his back against the lockers, a thermal blanket draped around his shoulders like an accusation. Lilith stood nearby, arms crossed, eyes never leaving him for long. Kaleb paced in short, agitated lines, running his hands through his hair and stopping every few steps to glance at the ceiling as if expecting it to ripple again.The school had been partially evacuated, but not closed.Containment again.The net was quieter now—less pressure, more presence. Adam could feel it in the way people avoided the hallway he occupied,
181. The city learns his name
Night did not fall naturally.It arrived in layers—too fast, too dense—like the city had been draped in shadow rather than eased into it. Streetlights flickered on in uneven rhythms, some buzzing louder than they should, others dimming as if unsure they were meant to exist. Traffic slowed without reason. People checked their phones more often, frowning at nothing, feeling watched without knowing why.Adam felt all of it.Every step away from the school stretched an invisible thread behind him, vibrating with delayed consequence. The aftershock he’d sensed hadn’t stopped—it had spread. The city was adjusting around him, reorganizing itself the way matter does after a fracture.They moved through back streets and half-lit alleys, Lilith leading with quiet certainty, Kaleb glancing over his shoulder every few seconds. Adam walked in the middle, Malrick’s presence coiled tight inside him, alert in a way that bordered on predatory.The net is no longer passive, Malrick said. You have cross