2024-12-23 17:36:49Fury flashed in Madeline’s eyes, and without hesitation, she slapped Samuel hard across the face.
The sound echoed in the hallway.
“Enough!” she hissed, her voice trembling with anger. “Know your place.”
Samuel’s cheek burned, but he stood tall, his voice calm.
“You’ve just made the biggest mistake of your life.”
Madeline laughed derisively. “Who do you think you are, Samuel? Without my grandparents’ charity, you’d still be nothing more than a street rat! Don’t delude yourself into thinking J&S succeeded because of you.”
“Your skills were all ours to begin with,” she continued, her tone dripping with contempt. “If someone as useless as you could run the company, imagine what we can achieve without you.”
Samuel gave a faint smile, saying nothing more.
“You know what? I’m marrying Gideon!” she declared, her voice laced with venom, "He was incredible!"
“Gideon is handsome, smart, and rich. With him around, J&S will not only make more money but also become a global powerhouse!”
Samuel responded with a smirk, one corner of his mouth lifting.
“What are you laughing at? You think you’re better than Gideon?!” Madeline snapped, her eyes narrowing into furious slits.
“Well,” Samuel replied coolly, “I’m just curious how he plans to manage J&S Corp when he had just been bailed out of prison.”
His words struck a nerve, causing Madeline’s hands to clench into tight fists.
Because Samuel wasn’t wrong.
Gideon Hawthorne had a terrible reputation, having been arrested for raping a minor.
Madeline looked like someone had hit her nerve. She shouted:
“And you? You’re nothing!”
“I don’t have to waste my time tolerating a 'fiancé' like you! So far beneath me!”
“Imagine how much I’ve suffered these past three years!”
“Don’t bother worrying about other people’s lives,” she spat. “You should focus on how you’ll rot away in prison!”
Her tone turned crueler, sharper.
Samuel had fully understood: this was a trap woven by his fiancée’s family, meant to keep him locked away forever.
Madeline turned back to the police, signaling for them to do their job.
Handcuffs gleamed, but the officers stood rooted in place, as if an invisible force had shackled them.
Samuel’s sharp gaze pierced through the three officers like a blade.
It wasn’t anger in his eyes, but something far more potent—an air of authority so commanding that it froze the officers in their tracks.
He didn’t need to speak to establish dominance.
His reputation alone preceded him—known not just for his wisdom, but for his ability to utterly dismantle his opposition with little more than his words and presence.
Samuel Hayes wasn’t a man to be taken lightly.
He held his head high and descended the steps ahead of them, looking nothing like a criminal.
As the flashing sirens disappeared into the night, Madeline let out a relive sign.
She pulled out her phone and called her father, Arthur Brooks.
“My daughter,” came Arthur’s gravelly voice. “I trust you’re calling with good news about your plan.”
“Of course, Daddy. When have I ever failed?” Madeline replied, her smug grin spreading. She basked in the satisfaction of her apparent victory.
“Good job, my daughter,” Arthur said. “Forgive me for doubting you. Now, prepare to welcome your future husband.”
“Don’t worry,” Madeline purred. “I’ll have Gideon wrapped around my finger in no time. We will get as much money as we want.”
After ended the call, Madeline turned toward the villa.
"At last, I’ve finally gotten rid of a poor fool," she smriked , striding into the opulent estate,
"This beautiful house; these banknotes...Finally mine alone again! No one takes it apart from me!"
Meanwhile, in the small interrogation room, Douglaz gestured to a chair.
“Have a seat, Mr. Hayes. I understand who you are, but I expect full cooperation here.”
Samuel nodded once, his eyes drifting to the phone on the table.
“I’d like to borrow your phone,” he said, his tone casual but firm.
Douglaz hesitated. “To call your lawyer? That’s a good idea, Mr. Hayes.”
“No,” Samuel replied, his voice steady. “I want to call your chief.”
“Call our chief?” another young officer, who hadn’t been involved in the arrest, laughed and interrupted.
“Who do you think you are?! Our chief is not someone you can mess around.”
Chief Joey Gunther, with a career spanning over two decades, had earned respect and admiration for his achievements.
Firm, authoritative, and revered by all, Joey exuded leadership.
Even the sound of his footsteps down a corridor could silence his subordinates.
This arrested criminal had no right to see the chief.
Besides, how many billionaires had tried to bribe Chief Joey Gunther, only to humiliate themselves?
This man was just a manager of a local company, and a nominal one at that.
The officer sneered.
“If you don’t want us to shove your face in a toilet, shut up and answer the questions!”
“He’ll want to meet me,” Samuel replied. “It’s better for you to let me call him than for him to find out about this himself.”
The younger officer, seeing Samuel’s stubbornness, tightened his grip on the stun baton and stepped forward threateningly.
But just then, the phone on the desk suddenly rang.
The name on the screen was striking: "Chief."
Douglas froze, his heart skipping a beat, and hesitantly picked up the call.
On the other end, Joey Gunther’s furious voice roared:
"How dare you bastards lock Mr. Hayes up?! Do you even know who he is?!"
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619
At first, they thought it was just an echo.A flicker on the surveillance net. A brief distortion near the old Echo Chamber beneath Bastion’s west wing — long abandoned, used only during the early calibration of shard synchronization. The space had since fallen into disuse. No power, no systems, no reason to return.Until now.“Tell me you’re seeing this,” Sarah muttered, leaning over the monitor.The image was faint: a silhouette pacing slowly inside the chamber, pacing in exact steps Sarah had once taken.“Looks like you,” Joey said, frowning.“That’s because it is me,” she whispered.“But that can’t be—”Samuel entered behind them, already reaching for his personal interface. “Pull the prism scanner. I want a temporal signature.”Sarah tapped in the override.A moment later, the analysis came through.Thread anomaly: 94% match.Anchor origin: Flame Net timeline [Locked: UNKNOWN]Subject: SARAH, VARIANT 3B - INVERTED FLAME“Jesus,” Joey breathed. “It’s a version of you. From another
618
Not the kind that followed battle. Not the heavy kind that came after decisions like the one they'd made — to delay sealing the world, to buy time they didn’t understand.This silence had shape.It bent.It listened.It waited.And then, without warning, it spoke.Joey was in the lower observatory, seated by the paneled dome where the artificial stars had begun to glitch. Every few minutes, a light would flicker and repeat itself — blinking patterns out of sync with the constellations.He was alone.Or he thought he was.“Still think we made the right call?” he muttered aloud, fingers tracing the rim of his cooling tea.No answer.He reached for his comm-link, considered calling Lin, then Sarah… but didn’t. The others were all in their corners, dealing with the consequences in their own ways. Samuel had retreated to the eastern wing, no doubt reviewing models and constructing fallback rituals. Sarah had been pacing the upper deck like a hawk for the past hour. Lin was—nowhere. She dri
617
The Bastion’s war table hadn’t been used in months.Dust lined its edges. Old energy signatures flickered faintly along its curved interface, echoing long-erased battle maps. It was built to track enemies—Void incursion zones, Ashborn troop lines, shard anomalies.Tonight, it displayed Earth itself.Not the Earth they remembered.Not the Earth they had fought for.The globe was fraying. Threadlines glowed red across the surface—unraveling. Symbols blinked where entire cities once stood. Others spun erratically, overlapping. Multiple realities clashing for space, like two ghosts trying to possess the same body.Joey stared in silence.Lin sat with a heavy shawl around her shoulders, pale but awake.Sarah stood stiffly across from Samuel, arms folded.Nobody had spoken in five minutes.Until Joey said softly, “We’re already losing it.”Samuel said nothing.Sarah’s voice came next, hard-edged: “Not yet.”Joey turned to her. “What would you call what just happened? We opened a hole in the
616
No one touched the relic at first.It hovered midair in the center of Bastion’s Deep Chamber — spinning, slow, silent, and not entirely present. Shaped like an orb, but its edges shimmered and warped, refusing to settle into a single dimension. Every time someone looked too long, they saw something different: a beating heart, a writhing knot, a tiny flame.Samuel stood closest, arms folded, the memory of Kael’s echo still fresh in his mind.Sarah and Joey flanked him. Lin hadn’t woken yet — her mind was still torn open from the Spiral’s flood.“Where did it come from again?” Joey asked, voice barely above a whisper.“Kael gave it to me,” Sarah said, hand tight around her shard. “Or what’s left of him. He called it a key. Something older than the Net.”Joey eyed the orb. “It doesn’t look like any relic I’ve seen. Doesn’t feel like one, either.”“It’s not a relic,” Samuel muttered.Sarah turned to him. “Then what is it?”“It’s a hole.”They didn’t believe him at first. Not until the orb
615
The corridor was silent, save for the soft pulse of the emergency lights. Sarah moved carefully, her fingers trailing the wall, her shard still flickering from the chaos at the ridge. She wasn’t sure why she’d come down here — the lower levels of the Bastion were sealed, memory-locked since the first Wave.But the shard pulled her. Not through flame. Through grief.Room B-17. Her mother’s old chamber.Except it wasn’t.The moment she stepped inside, the light shifted. Everything became thinner, quieter — like sound had been tucked under glass. Dust didn’t settle here. No time passed.And in the center of the room stood Kael.Her breath caught.He wore the old uniform — burnt red sash, blade across his back. He looked… unchanged. His expression unreadable, his hair slightly windblown as if he’d just returned from patrol.“Kael?” she whispered.He didn’t answer.But he smiled.“I watched you climb the cliff once,” he said. His voice was softer than she remembered. “You were thirteen. Th
614
Flames crawled along the blackened hillsides like serpents starving for breath. The sky above the Eastern Ridge had begun to turn the color of bruised plum, a prelude to something no one wanted to name. Ashborn forces, once so unified, so terrifyingly synchronized, now moved with jagged rhythm, like puppets on strings too tight or too frayed.Samuel stood at the ridge's edge, panting, one hand gripping the hilt of his flame-blade. Around him, the remaining Guardians kept their weapons drawn but hesitated to attack. Not because the Ashborn had stopped advancing, but because they were... speaking.Not shouting. Not chanting.Whispering.He couldn’t understand the words, not fully. The tones were warped, soaked in static, like memories being replayed through a broken machine. But the cadence was unmistakable.Voices from the Void.One Ashborn, eyes glowing with leaking violet light, fell to its knees. Another followed. Then three more. Their mouths moved, and Samuel heard it more clearly
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