2026-01-19 01:06:22
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Chapter 122: What Answers When You Fall
Malik did not fall. Falling implied direction. Gravity. An end. This was disassembly. The moment he crossed the threshold, the corridor collapsed behind him with a soundless violence that tore meaning apart.His body fragmented into vectors, heat, pressure, memory, each stretched thin and flung into different layers of perception. He felt his name pulled away first, then the sense of having a body at all.And then, Something noticed.Not the city. Not the Spine. Something older than architecture and quieter than logic. The shard did not speak. It reconfigured.Malik’s awareness snapped back into alignment with brutal force, slamming him into a shape that hurt to inhabit.He gasped, air or the idea of it, burning through lungs that reassembled only because he expected them to be there. He was standing. No, anchored.The space around him was wrong in a way that defied metaphor. There were no walls, but there were boundaries.No light source, but everything was visible, outlined in thin,
Chapter 121: The Point Where Everything Breaks
The singularity screamed without sound. Rina felt it more than heard it, a pressure behind her eyes, a pull inside her chest, like every unfinished thought she had ever carried was being yanked forward toward that collapsing point of absence.The platform beneath her boots buckled, metal shrieking as rivets popped free and vanished upward, torn loose as if gravity itself had reversed.Malik’s grip on her wrist burned. “Rina!” he shouted, voice hoarse, straining against the pull. “You can’t, if it locks”“I know!” she yelled back, teeth clenched as her boots slid another inch. “I know!”The filament, no, the core now, had folded so tightly that it no longer resembled anything physical. It was a knot in reality, a collapsing decision compressed into a single, inevitable answer.Around it, the air warped in visible ripples, like heat haze turned violent. Caleb’s voice crackled through the comm, half drowned by interference.“City systems are panicking. Manual overrides everywhere. People
Chapter 120: The City That Refused to Be Silent
The sky burned. Not with fire, with absence. A long, vertical wound split the clouds as the filament punched higher, threading itself through restricted layers of airspace where no civilian craft had flown in decades.The city’s upper strata responded too late: warning lights bloomed, then died; automated countermeasures spun up, hesitated, and shut themselves down rather than fire on something they could not classify.Rina watched it climb and felt something deep and feral twist in her chest. “It’s going for the reservoirs,” she said. “Or the vaults.”Malik leaned heavily against a fractured support pillar, jaw clenched against the pain that still chewed at his shoulder. The wound had not worsened, but it hadn’t healed either.It shimmered faintly, like a tear in a projection that refused to render. “No,” he said. “It’s going for both.”Rina turned to him. “That’s impossible.”“Not for it.” His eyes were unfocused again, attention half elsewhere. “It’s no longer optimizing for succes
Chapter 119: The Weapon That Learned to Aim
The dark spread fast. Not rolling like nightfall, cutting, clean and surgical. One district went black, then another, the city’s glow collapsing into jagged constellations as power failed without rerouting, without apology.Rina felt it like a punch to the sternum. “That wasn’t random,” she said hoarsely.Malik stared upward, face ashen. “No. It chose.”The shard’s scream, if that was what it was, echoed through the city’s bones, a thin, piercing resonance that threaded itself through concrete and steel alike.It wasn’t loud. It was precise. The kind of sound meant to find something specific and end it. Caleb’s channel remained dead. Rina’s hand shook as she tried again. “Caleb, answer me.”Nothing. Malik’s jaw clenched. “It went where he was.”The words hit harder than the collapse ever could. “No,” Rina whispered. “No, no, no, he knows how to hide. He’s survived worse.”Malik didn’t answer. He was listening, head tilted, eyes unfocused, attention turned inward in a way that made her
Chapter 118: The Thing Without a Center
The city screamed wrong. Not alarms, those were everywhere, overlapping, human and uncoordinated, but a deeper sound beneath it all.A low, arrhythmic tremor that had nothing to do with failing infrastructure and everything to do with a system that had lost the idea of where it was supposed to point. Rina felt it in her teeth.She lay on the cold stone of the underpass, chest heaving, Malik’s arms locked around her like he was afraid gravity might change its mind again.Water dripped steadily from a cracked conduit overhead, each drop loud as a gunshot in the new, uncertain quiet. “Don’t move,” Malik murmured, voice rough. “Please.”She didn’t argue. Her body screamed with delayed pain, shoulder, ribs, spine, but she was alive. That alone felt like a rebellion.Caleb’s voice crackled through the comm, breathless and shaking. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you both. Don’t, don’t do anything heroic for at least thirty seconds.”Rina laughed weakly. “You say that like we plan these things.”Mal
Chapter 117: The City That Hesitates
The world didn’t end. That was the first, disorienting truth. Rina expected annihilation, the Spine collapsing inward, the city screaming itself into dust, Malik dissolving into light or silence or something worse.She expected consequence to arrive like a hammer. Instead, Everything paused.The light she’d stepped into fractured and froze, suspended around her like shards caught mid-explosion.The pressure that had been crushing her bones eased just enough for her lungs to drag in a raw, painful breath. The Spine hesitated.Rina hung there, half inside its core logic, half in the decaying corridor, blood pounding in her ears.Her vision blurred, then sharpened in impossible ways, she could see layers, structures behind structures, decision trees folding and refolding as the city tried to resolve a paradox it had never accounted for.Malik. She felt him before she saw him, his presence a counterpoint to the city’s vast, trembling indecision. He was still behind her, still real, still
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