All Chapters of System Within: Rise Of Frank Williams: Chapter 81
- Chapter 90
99 chapters
CHAPTER 81: AFTERSHOCKS OF THE ASCENDANT
The battle’s roar faded into a suffocating, broken silence. Dust drifted down like dying snowflakes. The ground still trembled under the echo of the last blast,white fire folding into red mist, the city groaning beneath the weight of what Frank and the hybrid had unleashed.Frank stood in the center of the ruined street, chest heaving, hybrid energy pulsing under his skin like a second heartbeat pushing too hard, too fast. “Elara ” he whispered, trying to steady his breathing. “Is it over?”“For now.”Her voice wavered,strong, but trembling at the edges. Flames still curled faintly around her arms, refusing to fully die down.Frank glanced around at the collapsed buildings, the smoldering cracks, the shattered stone.Everything looked wrong. Tilted. Warped. Burned.The hybrid pulsed inside him. More still threats still movement find them He flinched. “Stop,” he muttered. “What?”Elara stepped closer, alarm flickering in her eyes. “It’s talking again.”His voice dropped. “Louder. Cle
CHAPTER 82: THE SHATTERED SKY
The impact threw shockwaves through the ruined district. Windows burst. Dust plumed upward in spiraling columns. The sound didn’t echo, it cracked the air like something bigger than sound. Frank and the creature slammed into the far street, carving a trench through broken stone. Frank didn’t stop. Didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink. The hybrid had his body, his muscles, his rage. Frank felt it moving him,but he was still there, still conscious, still gripping the edges of control like a man clinging to a cliff. The creature struck first. Its arm elongated into a jagged blade of living shadow, slicing toward Frank’s throat.Frank caught the blade with his bare hand. His bare hand. It didn’t cut him. The hybrid’s laughter ricocheted inside his skull. “At last, equal footing”Frank snarled through gritted teeth. “Get. Out. Of my head.”The creature twisted, forcing Frank backward. White sparks scattered from his palms as their energies clashed. Elara’s voice echoed through the settling dus
CHAPTER 83: THE DESCENT
The tear in the sky widened. Not like a storm. Not like a portal. More like the heavens themselves were peeling back to reveal something that wasn’t supposed to exist. Wind whipped through the shattered streets. Dust spiraled upward instead of down,drawn toward the opening. Elara shielded her eyes. “Frank it’s pulling everything in.”“I know.”Frank stood in the center of the ruined road, fists clenched, white fire leaking from his knuckles. The hybrid inside him twisted restlessly, pacing like a caged beast. “Ascendant, Ascendant, Ascendant”Frank muttered under his breath. “Say something useful for once.”“Cannot. Insufficient classification. Entity exceeds all system parameters.”Frank’s jaw tightened. “You’re telling me even YOU don’t know what that is?”The hybrid hissed in something like fear. The hybrid. Afraid. Elara stepped beside him, still glowing faintly, one arm trembling with pain. “Frank… look at the creature.”The shadow-entity,the one that had tried to terminate him
CHAPTER 84: THE CHILD IN THE LIGHT
The world around Frank folded in half. Not metaphorically, physically. Buildings bent inward like paper pulled toward a flame. Streets rippled. The sky cracked into mirrored halves, each showing a different version of him. Elara’s scream stretched like an echo pulled through water. “Frank,FRANK! Stay with me!”He tried to answer. But he didn’t know which version of himself she could hear. Because he wasn’t standing in one place anymore. He was standing in two.One Frank stood with the hybrid, white fire coursing up his arms, strength radiating through every cell, a beast roaring inside his bones. The hybrid growled inside him: “Reject it. Reject the fragment. You KNOW what we are together.”The other Frank stood bathed in soft child-light, weightless, unburned, untouched by power, by terror, by war. A gentle, innocent version of himself reaching out with a small, glowing hand. The child-voice whispered: “Come back. Please, you don’t have to hurt anymore.”Frank felt his ribs crac
Chapter 85: SPLIT AT THE THROAT
The world didn’t explode. It buckled. Light collapsed inward like a lung punched empty. The suspended ash fell in a sudden, silent sheet. Roots of energy spider-webbed through the frozen air as her hand tightened around his throat, lifting him off the shattered ground.He didn’t choke. He didn’t struggle. He stared directly into her eyes,Elara’s eyes,and the thing behind them twitched. “Let go,” Frank rasped. Her fingers only tightened. “You accessed a forbidden state.”“Yeah,” he muttered, jaw locked. “And?”“You could unmake yourself.”“Good.”Her expression cracked,Elara’s panic flickering through the light like a scream behind glass. “Stop,don’t,”Her voice,the real her,broke through for a heartbeat. Frank’s grip shot upward, fingers locking around the creature’s wrist. “You hear that?” he growled. “She doesn’t want this.”“She is this!” the being snarled,her voice dropping into a deeper, layered distortion. “She chose power. She chose survival. And she chose,”“NO,” Frank sn
CHAPTER 86: THE BREACH IN HER NAME
The world split. Not shattered, Frank stumbled backward as the air tore open between him and the being,between him and Elara. Light bent, shadows twisted, and a sound like a thousand glass lungs inhaling at once punched outward. He couldn’t breathe. He pushed forward anyway. “Elara!” he shouted. Her voice,thin, trembling,reached back through the breach. “Don’t,Frank don’t,don’t come near it,”“I’m right here!”The light-being jerked violently, half her face melting into Elara’s proper features, the other half splitting into cracked glass geometry, like two realities trying to occupy the same skin. “STOP!”she screamed, Not-Elara’s voice, layered and broken. “You’ll push her through the breach, she’s not contained, she’ll detonate,”Frank slammed his arm into the rift anyway, wincing as his skin blistered instantly under the pressure. “She’s coming out whether you want her to or not!”“NO!”The creature lunged, grabbing his wrist, claws of light burning into his flesh. “You don’t ge
CHAPTER 87: AFTERMATH AND FISSURES
The air smelled of ash and ozone. Concrete lay twisted like paper, shattered streets glittering under the fractured sun. The city,what remained,trembled, silent but for the faint hum of residual power lingering like static in every wall and broken beam.Frank stumbled over the rubble, every step jarring. His lungs burned, his muscles screamed, but he didn’t slow. Elara’s hand still clutched his, golden light flickering faintly around her fingers. She seemed smaller now, human again,or as human as one could be after what had passed,but her eyes held a wild, unsettled glimmer, like a storm had settled just beneath the surface. “Frank,” she whispered, voice unsteady. “Where, where do we go from here?”He looked at her, expression taut. Blood and soot smeared his face, but the resolve in his eyes was clear. “We keep moving. Forward.”“Forward?” Her tone cracked.“After all this?”He nodded once. The city groaned beneath the weight of silence. “I don’t know what’s left.”“Then we find
CHAPTER 88: INSIDE THE WHITE
There was no impact. No pain. No sound. Just white. Frank opened his eyes,or thought he did. It was impossible to tell. The world around him wasn’t light. It was the absence of everything except the glow. A flat horizon of nothing, stretching forever. Then, A voice. Soft. Flickering. Familiar. “Frank”His stomach dropped. “Elara!”His shout echoed in the void, warping, bending, as if swallowed by distance that didn’t exist. Her voice answered from everywhere and nowhere. “I, I can’t see you.”Frank started moving,running, though the ground didn’t feel like ground at all. Each step landed with no sound, no weight, no direction. He could be sprinting in circles. He could be going nowhere at all. “Elara! Keep talking!”His pulse hammered. “I’ll find you!”“Frank, wait,something else is in here”Her voice trembled. He froze. Something shifted in the white. A ripple. A shadow inside the light. Impossible, yet there. Frank’s jaw clenched. “Come out!” he barked at the ripple. “If you wan
CHAPTER 89: THE ORIGINAL
Dark. But not empty. Frank slammed into something solid and cold,stone? Metal? It didn’t matter. The impact knocked the breath from him, and he staggered upright as his vision adjusted. A corridor materialized around him,long, industrial, lined with flickering lights that buzzed like dying insects. The air smelled of disinfectant and fear. He knew this place. He shouldn’t. But he did. “Laurel Labs?” Frank whispered. His voice echoed down the corridor. A memory he didn’t have shaped itself around him,white walls, observation windows, containment doors with red hazard seals. Footsteps. Screams muffled behind thick glass.“No way,” he muttered. “This isn’t real,”“REAL ENOUGH.”The voice shook the hall. Frank turned. The masked being,the Original Hybrid,filled the corridor’s far end. Tall, skeletal but powerful, with joints that bent slightly wrong and veins of white light crawling under its dark skin. Its mask shifted every few seconds,blank, then smiling, then cracked, then screa
CHAPTER 90 : THE DOOR OF BRIGHT SILENCE
Frank stepped toward the door of white light, chest still heaving from the last fight. The corridor behind him pulsed once,like it was breathing,and then went still.The door didn’t glow steadily. It throbbed. Like a heart. Frank wiped dust and blood from his brow. “Alright,” he muttered. “What’s behind you? Another version of me? Something worse?”The door answered by shifting,its surface rippling like liquid light. Frank tried the handle. There was none. He touched the surface, and his fingers sank straight through. He jerked back. “What the,?”A faint voice murmured from the other side. “ come in ”Frank stiffened. “Elara?”The voice didn’t respond. He inhaled sharply, rolled his shoulders, and stepped forward. The white light swallowed him whole. It was silent. Too silent. Frank blinked. A flat, endless plain. White ground. White sky. No horizon. No shadows. It felt like standing inside someone’s memory of a world,not the world itself. Frank muttered, “Great. A blank loading