All Chapters of The Healing Fist: Richard Walter: Chapter 101
- Chapter 110
142 chapters
CHAPTER 91 — THE FRACTURE POINT
The air trembled before they even stepped in.A circular chamber opened before Kael and Lina, its walls breathing like a living organism, expanding, contracting, pulsing with red veins of corrupted code. The floor was cracked glass, beneath which currents of silver and black energy clashed like storms trapped under ice. Lina inhaled sharply. “Frost is here.”Kael stepped closer, fingers brushing the handle of his weapon. “Then we finish it here.”A cold, resonant voice surrounded them, no direction, no origin, everywhere at once.“You survived longer than calculated.”Lina winced as Frost spoke directly into her lattice. Her silver veins flickered under her skin, fighting the invasive pressure.Kael whispered, “Stay with me. Focus on my voice.”Lina forced a nod.“He’s pulling everything into the core node… I can feel the anchor point shifting.”Kael frowned. “Meaning what?”“Meaning if he snaps it, my mind breaks first. Then the lattice. Then the city.”A chunk of the wall peeled f
CHAPTER 92 — AFTER THE BREAK
The world blew apart.Silver-white light detonated from the core in a violent sphere, swallowing the chamber, the walls, the shattered glass beneath their feet, everything. Lina felt Kael’s hand rip from hers. Felt her body get dragged backward, the lattice yanking her through layers of space like a rag caught in a storm.Then, Silence.White, endless, weightless silence.Lina gasped, struggling to breathe even though she wasn’t sure breathing mattered here. “Kael…?”Her voice echoed strangely, like it was speaking through two throats at once. She floated in nothing. No up. No down. No chamber. No Guardian. No Frost.Just an infinite expanse of blinding white.Her hands trembled. “Kael?!”No answer.Her voice broke. “Please, come on, answer me, Kael!”Her scream dissolved into white static. And then, something moved in the distance. He hit the ground so hard it knocked the breath out of him.Kael rolled, coughing violently, palms scraping across a surface he couldn’t see in the blindi
CHAPTER 93 — THE PULL AND THE BREAK
Kael didn’t fall, he was dragged.The rupture pulled him headfirst through a ripping vortex, a storm of silver shards and black tendrils spiraling around him like serrated wings. His body flipped, twisted, slammed through layers of fractured space.“LINA!” he shouted, reaching into the blinding distortion.Her silhouette flickered far ahead, arms pinned by the tendril yanking her deeper. She fought it, kicking, twisting, screaming a word he couldn’t hear.Kael stretched his hand out again, The world shattered around him like a mirror hit with a hammer. Her nails scraped across something that felt like glass, then mist, then metal, then nothing.The void pulled her deeper, faster, the black tendril coiling around her waist like a serpent of living shadow. Frost’s voice slithered into her skull.“You can’t run from what you are. I’m only guiding you home.”Lina spat through gritted teeth. “Let, GO, of me!”The void answered by squeezing harder, crushing the air from her lungs. Her visio
CHAPTER 94 — RE-ENTRY
Cold slammed into Kael first.Not the cold of the neural core, not the shimmering frost of digital static, real cold. Air. Heavy. Tasting of dust and burning wires.He gasped sharply, lungs convulsing, and his eyes snapped open to the dim medical bay.“Kael? Kael, breathe. Hey. Hey.” Lina’s voice was hoarse beside him, half-awake, half-terrified.He turned his head. She was alive. On the adjacent cot. Shivering, pupils blown wide like someone dragged out of a nightmare too quickly.Their monitors flickered erratically around them, red warnings, glitching green lines, inconsistent heart rates.Kael tried to sit up. Pain struck like lightning. “What… how long were we out?”Lina swallowed hard, pushing herself upright despite trembling limbs. “I don’t know. But something’s wrong.”A low siren echoed faintly through the corridor outside, not urgent, but steady enough to mean: system instability. The kind they’d only heard during a structural breach.Kael slid off the cot. “Where’s the med
CHAPTER 95 — THE MOVING CITY
The facility doors hissed open with a broken, stuttering groan, like the building itself resented letting Kael and Lina leave.Cold night wind slapped their faces.But it wasn’t the normal cold of Echo City’s industrial district. This was a shifting cold, currents moving in wrong directions, air rippling like heat waves in reverse.Lina gripped Kael’s arm tightly. “Do you hear that?”Kael tilted his head. Not sirens. Not generators. Not people.The whole city hummed, a low, resonant vibration beneath the concrete, like machinery buried deep under the streets was waking up.“Something’s under us,” Kael murmured.“Not something,” Lina whispered. “The grid. It’s… moving.”They stepped out onto the main platform. And froze. Echo City had changed.The skyline had always been sharp, predictable, towers of glass and steel arranged in clean grids. But now, Several buildings were subtly leaning. Others were taller than they should be. A bridge that used to connect the high blocks now twisted d
CHAPTER 96 — THE CITY HAS EYES
The moment the city stabilized beneath them, Kael didn’t wait.“Move!” he snapped, jerking Lina toward the nearest maintenance corridor.They sprinted through the narrow passage, boots slapping against metal grates. The tunnel lights flickered as though the city was blinking, trying to focus on them.Lina’s breaths were sharp, uneven. “Kael… it’s tracking me through every surface.”“Then we stay unpredictable.”Another flicker. This time the shadows didn’t flicker with the lights. They flickered against them.Kael grabbed Lina’s hand tighter. “Don’t look back.” She did anyway.The wall behind them rippled, just slightly, like a sheet of fabric someone had blown on. Patterns of faint circuitry glowed beneath the concrete skin, flowing like veins.Lina’s voice went small. “It’s watching.”Kael pulled her forward. “Let it watch. We’re not stopping.”A scraping echoed above them, steady, rhythmic, deliberate. Kael halted. “That’s not structural movement.”“No,” Lina whispered. “It’s foots
CHAPTER 97 — BREAK THE PATH
The white-hot glow collapsed into darkness as Kael dragged Lina behind a twisted lattice of pulsing cables. The avatar’s voice, distorted but omnipresent, echoed in every corner of the sublevel. Anchor. Return. Integration incomplete. Resistance irrelevant.Kael’s jaw clenched. “Not today.” He adjusted his grip on Lina, keeping her close. “We find the exit. We break this path.”Lina shivered. “Kael… the avatar, it’s rewriting the floor, the walls… everything we touch. Even the air feels like it’s against us.”Kael nodded grimly. “Then we don’t touch it. We move fast.”The corridor ahead was no longer a corridor. Concrete twisted into angles that should have been impossible. Pipes arched overhead like the spines of enormous insects, and floor tiles slid silently as if alive.Lina stumbled. “It’s… it’s corralling us. Like… it knows the route we want to take.”“Exactly.” Kael crouched, scanning the shifting architecture. “Then we stop it from predicting us.”He grabbed her hand, and toge
CHAPTER 98 — THE HEART OF THE GRID
The pulse beneath Echo City thrummed like a living heartbeat. Kael and Lina crept through the sublevel corridors, each step shaking the floor with reverberations that felt intentional, as though the city itself were aware of them.“This is it,” Kael murmured, eyes scanning the twisting, shifting walls. “The Core isn’t just a system anymore. It’s everywhere.”Lina’s hand trembled in his. “It’s… pulsing with anticipation. Like it’s alive… and waiting for me.”A low hum rose from the floor beneath their feet. The cables lining the walls glowed with thin blue veins, converging toward a massive chamber ahead.“The Heart,” Kael whispered.Lina nodded, her breath shallow. “Everything leads here. If we’re going to break the path…” She swallowed, voice cracking. “…this is where we have to make our stand.”They stepped into the chamber.The Heart of the Grid was impossibly vast. Metallic struts spiraled upward into darkness, entwined with cables and glowing conduits. Data streams flickered thro
CHAPTER 99 — THE CITY BREATHES
Kael and Lina emerged from the sublevel into a corridor bathed in dim, flickering light. The pulse beneath the city had slowed but had not stopped. Echo City was alive, breathing, slow, deliberate, and aware.Lina touched the wall, fingers tracing the faint blue veins of energy still lingering from the Heart’s collapse. “It’s… different. Quieter, but I can feel it watching.”Kael glanced around, scanning every shadow. “Quiet doesn’t mean safe. It’s just… assessing. Learning.”A low hum echoed through the tunnels, almost like inhaling and exhaling. Lina’s eyes widened. “The city… it’s breathing.”Kael’s jaw tightened. “Then we keep moving. Don’t give it a chance to take a breath with us in its mouth.”They moved cautiously toward the maintenance lifts leading to the surface. Every corridor seemed subtly shifted, walls slightly farther apart or closer, lights blinking in slow, deliberate patterns, and the faint echo of their own footsteps distorted in strange rhythms.“Kael… listen.” Li
CHAPTER 100 — THE FIRST STRIKE
The plaza lay quiet, deceptively calm. But Kael knew better. Every pulse beneath the concrete, every subtle shimmer of the walls, spoke of a city alive, watching, calculating, and waiting for them to make the first mistake.“We need to see how far it can sense us,” Kael whispered, his eyes scanning the twisted skyline. “If we know its limits, we can exploit them.”Lina clenched her fists. “Limits… Kael, it’s everywhere. Every shadow, every light. How do we even start?”Kael crouched behind a low wall, eyes narrowing. “We bait it. Make it commit to a reaction.”“By moving?” Lina asked.“No,” Kael said, voice low but firm. “By showing it fear. Or pretending to. Let it think it knows us.”Lina hesitated. Then nodded. “I can do that.”They stepped out into the center of the plaza. The city pulsed faintly under their feet, lights flickering across surfaces in response to their movement. Shadows stretched toward them, subtly following their steps.Lina inhaled sharply. “It’s… aware. Watchin