All Chapters of Ashes of a Good Man: Chapter 101
- Chapter 110
125 chapters
Chapter 98: Fault Pressure
The city did not sleep. It settled into a tense, half-lit vigilance, streets humming with low power, councils rotating shifts, transit routes breathing in short, deliberate pulses.The mesh held, but it held the way a muscle does under strain: responsive, sore, alert to pain. Malik felt it before the alerts came. Not a spike. Not a pull. A compression.He stood near the edge of the staging chamber, palms flat against the cool railing, eyes unfocused.The hum beneath his skin tightened, threads drawing closer together, pressure redistributing with an urgency that felt… intentional. Rina noticed his stillness. “That’s not fatigue,” she said quietly.“No,” Malik replied. “It’s anticipation.”Caleb looked up from his console, brow furrowed. “I’m seeing synchronized latency across multiple sectors. Not failures, delays. Like something’s loading.”Sable’s expression hardened. “They’re staging.”“Who?” Rina asked, though she already knew the answer.“All of them,” Sable said. “Accord proxies
Chapter 99: The Point of No Return
The first explosion didn’t shake the city. It punctured it.A sharp, localized rupture, deep infrastructure, not surface. The hum beneath Malik’s skin snapped taut, every thread pulling in the same direction at once.Rina was already moving. “That wasn’t accidental.”Caleb’s console screamed warnings. “Sector Twelve, subsurface load-bearing ring. That wasn’t collapse. That was detonation.”Sable’s face drained of color. “They just crossed the line.”The city staggered, not falling, but lurching. Transit froze mid-route. Lights guttered, flared, then stabilized at emergency levels.Across the mesh, voices spiked with fear and confusion. Malik felt it all at once. Not as noise. As pain.He doubled over, breath tearing from his lungs as the city’s resonance surged through him, raw and unfiltered. Rina caught him before he hit the floor. “Malik, stay with me.”“I am,” he gasped. “They hit a junction. Old. Shared by six districts.”Caleb’s hands shook as he pulled up overlays. “Casualties
Chapter 100: The Silence Beyond
Malik woke to nothing. Not darkness, absence. No hum beneath his skin. No distant chorus of systems or people or motion.Even his own breath sounded wrong, too loud in a space that didn’t echo. He tried to move. Pain answered.It flared sharp and total, racing along his spine, down his arms, through his skull. Malik gasped, the sound tearing out of him, and only then did sensation begin to return, cold beneath his palms, a hard surface pressing into his back, the slow, terrifying realization that he was still inside a body.Just no longer inside a city. “Rina,” he whispered.The name vanished as soon as it left his mouth. Malik forced himself upright, muscles trembling. The space around him was vast and undefined, an endless plane of dull gray, like unfinished concrete stretched to infinity. No walls. No ceiling. No visible source of light, yet everything was dimly illuminated.He reached instinctively for the city. Nothing answered. Panic surged, hot, disorienting. He pressed a hand
Chapter 101: What Answers the Call
The first thing Malik felt was resistance. Not the restraints, they were already failing, light-fractures crawling through them like veins under cracked ice, but something deeper.The space itself was pushing back, flexing as if offended by his presence awakening something it could not catalog. The gray walls trembled.The figure, his mirror, his shadow, his jailer, took a step back for the first time. “That resonance,” it said sharply. “Terminate the phase.”The restraints tightened in response, searing heat flooding Malik’s limbs. He cried out, spine arching as the pressure tried to fold him inward, compress him into compliance.But the call didn’t stop. It answered. Not with sound. With alignment. Malik felt it slide into place beneath the pain, something vast and patient, something that had been waiting far longer than the Accord had existed.It didn’t feel like the city. It didn’t feel like systems or people or consensus. It felt like ground. “You don’t own this space,” Malik ras
Chapter 102: The Shape of What Breaks
Malik did not fall. He arrived. The darkness around him wasn’t empty, it was structured, layered in dimensions his mind refused to parse all at once. Distance folded in on itself.Direction lost meaning. He stood, or thought he did, inside a vast curvature, like the interior of a closed eye that had never known light. The presence surrounded him. Not as a body. As a condition.It pressed no weight against his chest, yet Malik felt heavier than he ever had—every choice, every fracture, every scream the city had ever swallowed settling into him like sediment.You crossed the boundary, something said. The voice was not sound. It did not echo. It did not ask permission. Malik swallowed. “You answered me.”You called without command, the presence replied. That is rare.“I didn’t know what else to do,” Malik said. “They took everything else.”The darkness shifted, not threatening, but attentive. Malik felt the alignment deepen, the call he’d felt earlier now fully awake, resonating not outw
Chapter 103: When the World Answers Back
Nothing moved. Malik’s single word—Stop—did not echo. It didn’t need to. The city froze as if caught mid-inhale, debris suspended in impossible balance, transit rails humming without motion, fires burning but no longer spreading. Rina couldn’t breathe.She stood twenty meters from him, boots planted on fractured concrete, staring at the man she loved and barely recognized.Malik was there, solid, bleeding, human, but the space around him bent inward, like reality was leaning to hear what he might say next. “Malik,” she called, voice breaking the stillness.His head turned. The look he gave her wasn’t cold. It was terrified. “Rina,” he said, and relief cracked through his voice. “Don’t come closer.”That scared her more than anything else. Behind her, the city began to react. Not the people, the structures.Buildings groaned as if adjusting their footing. Data-stream light bled into the air, visible to the naked eye now, threading between towers like nervous systems pulled outside the
Chapter 104: The Weight That Chooses
The city did not break all at once. It fractured in layers. Sound went first, voices smearing into echoes, the collective hum stretching until it became a scream too vast to belong to any single throat.Then light followed, the sky’s torn seam pulsing erratically, stuttering between colors that had no names and shadows that moved without owners.Rina felt the ground heave under her knees as she clutched Malik, his body rigid in her arms, muscles locking as if he were bracing against a tide that only he could feel.“Stay with me,” she begged. “Please. Malik, look at me.”His eyes were open but unfocused, pupils blown wide, reflecting not the sky but something behind it. “I can feel it,” he whispered, voice stretched thin. “It’s not pushing anymore.”Rina’s chest tightened. “Then what is it doing?”“It’s… deciding.”The presence beyond the seam shifted. Not forward. Downward.The air thickened, pressure collapsing inward, forcing breath from lungs, bending metal with a sound like distan
Chapter105: The Cost of Holding
Malik did not scream as he split. He understood. The sensation wasn’t pain, not at first. It was division without separation, like two incompatible truths being forced to occupy the same thought.The Counterweight burned through his spine, anchoring him to instability, while the Spine’s resonance wrapped around his bones, whispering promises of permanence, structure, survival.Above him, the seam in the sky throbbed like an open wound. Below him, the abyss waited, patient, ancient, hungry.Rina watched Malik suspended between them, his body trembling as if reality itself were pulling him apart thread by thread.“No,” she whispered, crawling toward the fissure’s edge despite the ground breaking beneath her hands. “No, no, no”The city answered her desperation. Not with mercy. With clarity. The hum sharpened, resolving into something almost articulate.Towers leaned inward, streets subtly reorienting as if aligning themselves toward Malik’s position. Old transit lines lit up, ancient ci
Chapter 106: What Comes Through the Fall
Malik fell without direction. There was no down, only acceleration, layers peeling away as if reality were shedding skins faster than his mind could follow.Light fractured into bands that twisted around him, each one humming with a different consequence. He tried to scream Rina’s name again, but sound collapsed before it left his throat, swallowed by the tearing pressure of passage.He wasn’t falling through space. He was falling through decisions. Every choice he’d refused, every outcome he’d disrupted, every future he’d denied the city flickered past him in jagged flashes.In one, towers stood pristine and silent, people orderly and hollow-eyed. In another, the skyline burned while voices sang defiantly in the streets.In a third, there was no city at all, just a scar where something had once tried to live forever. The Counterweight held. Barely.It wrapped around his core like a brace around a shattered spine, not protecting him from the fall but keeping him coherent.Malik felt p
Chapter 107: The Shape That Hunts
Malik did not fall this time. He ran. The fracture folded around him as he crossed it, layers snapping shut behind his heels like jaws.The transit plane screamed as it collapsed, light shattering into shards that spun away into nothing. Malik burst through into a space that had no right to exist, an echo-chamber of half-formed structure and raw force, where gravity bent toward intention instead of mass.Behind him, the collector roared. Not a sound, an assertion. Malik staggered forward as pressure slammed into his back, the Counterweight flaring white-hot inside his chest.He felt it burn through him, not consuming but holding, bracing his sense of self against a pull that wanted to flatten him into function.“Not today,” he gasped, teeth clenched as the space ahead warped, stretched, then snapped him sideways.He crashed into a wall that felt like memory, soft and sharp at once, and rolled, coming up hard on one knee.His vision blurred as afterimages overlapped, the place resolvin