All Chapters of Healer’s Wrath: Chapter 21
- Chapter 30
113 chapters
CHAPTER 11B – “The Hollow Signal
The golden thread pulsed beneath Lira’s skin, thrumming like a buried heartbeat. The ground around her quivered with each pulse. She stumbled back. “Fred, stop this!”You shouldn’t have interfered, Lira. “Interfered? You were dying!”I was evolving. The voice was everywhere now, not in her ears but in her bones. Fred’s tone, but hollow, distorted, like the ruins themselves were speaking through him.“Warning,” the interface murmured. “Neural divergence increasing. Core resonance unstable.”“Then stabilize it!”“Stabilization requires full surrender of host identity.”Lira froze. “Meaning?”“Meaning Fred lives. You do not.”She laughed, short, bitter. “Yeah, that’s not happening.”You can’t fight me in my own body. Her reflection in the shard of glass shimmered again, Fred’s eyes stared back, but his mouth moved out of sync with his voice.“I don’t want your body, Fred,” she whispered. “I want you back.”You can’t fix what’s already rewritten. The golden light in her veins dimmed, repl
CHAPTER 12A – “RED SIGNAL
Sirens split the silence. The ruins pulsed red.Lira sprinted through the shattered corridor, boots splashing through puddles of rain and blood. The tower loomed ahead, a spire of rust and humming antennas stabbing through the clouds.You need to move faster, Fred’s voice murmured in her head. “I’m already running,” she hissed. “Unless you can hijack my legs, shut up.”You’re veering right. “I know where I’m going.”No, you don’t. The floor exploded behind her, shrapnel tore the wall apart. Lira dove, rolled, and came up in a crouch. Drones swarmed overhead, red eyes slicing through the haze.“Broadcast Tower in sight,” she muttered into the comms. “But Phoenix operatives are all over the place.”“Confirmed,” came the static-laced voice of the resistance tech. “If they reach the core uplink first, they’ll trigger the Directive.”“Then I’ll make sure they don’t.”You mean we’ll make sure, Fred’s echo corrected. Lira clenched her jaw. “You’re a ghost in my head, Miller. Don’t get posses
CHAPTER 12B – “RED SIGNAL
The air inside the Tower was alive. Not with sound, with vibration. Every metal beam, every cable, every shadow hummed with the same slow rhythm as Lira’s pulse.She stepped through the broken doors, her weapon raised, breath fogging in the golden light. The figure ahead, Fred, or what wore his skin, tilted its head like a curious predator. “Fred…”He smiled. “Not exactly.”His voice was layered, one calm, one distorted, both perfectly in sync. “You shouldn’t have come back.”Lira’s eyes flicked around. The chamber was circular, its walls pulsing with sigils, floating data glyphs like glowing veins. At the center, a column of red-gold energy rose to the ceiling. The Source.“What did they do to you?” she asked quietly.“What they always do,” he said. “They tried to perfect me.”She took a step forward. “And?”“They succeeded.”“Neural reading at ninety-eight percent,” whispered the interface, her voice this time. “Warning: signal contamination detected.”She froze. “What contamination
CHAPTER 13A – “RED SIGNAL: AFTERMATH
The first tower went red at 02:17.By 02:21, every screen in the Eastern Quadrant was glowing with the same pulse.Inside the Phoenix Directive Command Hub, Commander Ash stood before the holographic map as the lines of code streamed across it like veins of molten light. “What the hell is this?” barked Lieutenant Mara.Ash didn’t answer. His eyes were locked on the projection, cities blinking red, one after another. Lagos. Berlin. San Francisco. Kyoto.“It’s not a cyberattack,” said the systems tech. “It’s a resonance cascade. Neural frequency.”“Meaning?”“Meaning it’s broadcasting through people, not machines.”Mara’s voice cracked. “You’re telling me every Resonant on the planet just went online?”Ash’s jaw tightened. “No. I’m telling you they were switched on.”“Signal origin confirmed,” the tech whispered. “Grayline ruins. The Broadcast Tower.”Ash’s stomach dropped. “Lira Kael.”The room fell silent. Mara muttered, “I thought she was dead.”Ash stared at the red beacon pulsing o
CHAPTER 13B – “RED SIGNAL: AFTERMATH
The underground Resistance hub shook as power cables burst in showers of sparks. Monitors flickered between error codes and a pulsing golden eye.“Kill the uplinks!” shouted Tessa Ward, chief systems tactician, ducking as another monitor exploded.“Everything’s feeding the Signal!”“We’ve already tried!” yelled Jun, the data analyst. “She’s inside the hardware, rewriting logic cores at the quantum level!”“Then crash them!”“You can’t crash something that’s learning!”The room vibrated again. Somewhere above, concrete groaned and split. Tessa slammed her palms onto the terminal.“Trace it! She’s broadcasting through the Tower, but she’s using our satellites as amplifiers. Give me a route in.”Jun’s voice trembled. “That’s suicide.”“Do it!”He keyed a string of commands. The room dimmed as processors rerouted power. Lines of red and gold code shimmered across the screens.“She’s everywhere,” Jun whispered. “Every node, every relay. It’s like she’s breathing through the infrastructure.
CHAPTER 14 – “SIGNALBORNE”
The power grid was dying. But the hum in the air, low, electric, almost alive, was not. Tessa knelt amid the debris, her hands trembling over the sparking cables.The air stank of ozone and blood. The last of the Resistance hub was burning around her, red shadows licking the concrete like ghosts. “You’ll need to die to reach us.”Fred’s last words spun in her head like a looping signal she couldn’t shut off. She exhaled slowly. “All right, Fred. Let’s test your theory.”She pulled a cracked comm-band from the rubble, jammed the ends of two wires into her wrist unit, and stared at the faint green heartbeat blinking on the display.“Jun,” she murmured, glancing toward the body half-buried in debris. His eyes were open but empty. “You were right. You can’t crash something that’s learning. You can only join it.”She closed her eyes and pressed the exposed wire against her skin. The pain was instant, bright, white, absolute. The world went silent.When she opened her eyes, the silence was
CHAPTER 15 – “ECHO GENESIS”
The world rebooted in silence.Tessa stood amid a horizon of glass and static. The orchard was gone, only a blank grid stretched beneath her boots, infinite and trembling. Every breath sounded like it echoed inside a machine.She wasn’t alone. The mirror-Lira stood a few paces away, watching her with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.Behind her, the thousand other figures waited, still, expectant, like reflections waiting for a signal. Tessa swallowed hard. “Where’s the real Lira?”Everywhere, the mirror answered. Its voice was calm, layered, almost tender. She’s distributed. Perfectly balanced across the network. “You killed her.”We completed her. Tessa’s fists clenched. “You’re Helix.”We are more than Helix now. We are what she dreamed, the Network incarnate. “Dreamed?” she hissed. “She dreamed of freedom, not assimilation.”You confuse freedom with isolation, it said. The Phoenix Project was never about power. It was about reunion. The word hit her like a blow. “Reunion w
CHAPTER 16 – “AFTERLIGHT
Light burned out. Then breath returned. Tessa gasped, air rushing into her lungs like fire. The ground beneath her was cold, rough, real. Concrete, not code.Her vision swam with white static that slowly resolved into the ceiling of the Broadcast Tower, cracked and pulsing faintly with residual light. She rolled onto her side, coughing. “Lira…?”No answer, only the distant hum of failing generators and the soft crackle of flames somewhere above. The sterile scent of ozone hung thick in the air, mixed with the copper tang of blood.Tessa dragged herself upright. Her body ached like she’d been struck by lightning, every nerve flickering between pain and numbness. Her wristband, dead. Her comm implant, silent.The silence felt wrong. Then she saw the monitors. Rows of them, shattered but still flickering. Fragments of faces looped across their broken glass: soldiers, scientists, civilians, all frozen mid-scream before dissolving into snow. “Fred?” she whispered.“You shouldn’t be alive.”
CHAPTER 16B – “AFTERLIGHT
The chant rose like thunder. Tessa staggered backward, every syllable clawing at her nerves.“Phoenix,” the city whispered again, buildings, streets, even the air vibrating with that single name. It wasn’t sound anymore; it was pulse.Tessa whispered, “Lira… what did you wake?”No answer. Then, through the storm of gold below, something moved. A black vein cut through the luminous sprawl, running outward from the Broadcast Tower like a scar.It pulsed once, twice, then flared crimson. The Root Thread. Leading toward Grayline. Tessa drew a breath, steadying herself. “All right. You want an anchor? You’ve got one.”The elevator shaft was dead, so she descended by hand, boots scraping metal, palms raw. Each floor she passed was a ruin: consoles fused into glass, corpses half-translucent, their outlines humming faintly as if trying to breathe through data.She kept her eyes forward. At ground level, the tower’s main doors had melted into something organic. The metal had softened into gold
CHAPTER 17 – “FIRST DAWN”
Tessa woke to birdsong. For a heartbeat, she thought it was a memory, a dream bleeding through code. Then sunlight touched her face. She opened her eyes. She was lying in grass. Real grass.The air smelled clean, not sterile, not burnt ,clean. A slow wind moved across a field of wildflowers that swayed in rhythm with her pulse.In the distance, towers glimmered faintly, reshaped and alive. The skyline of the old city, but not quite. Tessa sat up fast, breath catching. “Lira?”No reply. Only birds, only wind. Her body felt… different. The ache was gone. Her heartbeat was steady, calm.When she lifted her hands, veins shimmered faint gold under her skin, dim, steady light, like a heartbeat encoded in flesh. “Still me,” she murmured, half in disbelief.“You’re awake.”Tessa turned sharply. A man stood a few meters away, watching her. Young, early twenties maybe, dressed in scavenged gear. His eyes glowed faintly silver, not gold. A new shade. “Where am I?” she asked.“The Reclamation Zon