Breath of the Idle King

Chapter 13: Sinkronisasi 15% Gejala Kehilangan Diri

The structural integrity of the outer maintenance catwalk shrieked, groaning under the pressure of the artificial gravity reasserting itself. Garou’s breath hitched a sharp, mechanical rattle that vibrated behind his teeth. It wasn't just physical exertion. A digital tick, a countdown only he could hear, pulsed in the center of his skull: [SYNC LEVEL: 15%].

"Stop!" Irae lunged, grabbing the back of his tactical vest before he could pivot toward the ladder leading to the spire's external hull.

Garou turned, and for a fraction of a second, the light in his eyes didn't look blue it was an opaque, flickering mercury, like a monitor with a blown cathode tube. "Don't touch me," he said, his voice overlapping with an echo of a sound he hadn't made.

Irae recoiled, her hand retreating as if she’d scorched her skin. "Garou, your face… you’re bleeding. Not blood something else."

A viscous, glowing filament was leaking from the tear ducts of his left eye. It wasn't just leaking  it was dissolving, evaporating into tiny nanoscopic streams that twisted into the air like electrified spiderwebs. Garou touched his cheek, his fingers brushing against the burning trail. He couldn't feel his fingertip hitting his skin. In fact, he could barely remember if he *had* skin.

"I can see the internal geometry of this platform," Garou whispered, staring through the thick metal grate at his feet. "I can see the power conduits, the pressure gradients, the structural failure points of the welds. It’s too loud, Irae. Everything is screaming a diagnostic."

"You’re hitting the integration ceiling," Irae shouted over the wind. She checked the fragment of the core unit she’d stolen, its pulses erratic. "The system isn't just downloading data into your head it’s overwriting your wetware to match its hardware requirements. If you don't anchor yourself, you're going to delete your personality files."

"I don't think I care about 'Garou' right now," he muttered. He began to walk, his footsteps echoing with an unnerving, percussive timing. Each step was exactly one hundred decibels, measured to perfectly counter-resonate with the metallic walkway.

"You moron! If the host identity disappears, the system doesn't stop it becomes a default mode administrator," she said, chasing him. She grabbed his arm, hard. "Look at me! Don't look at the conduits. Look at my eyes!"

He snapped his head toward her. For a terrifying beat, his eyes shifted rapidly blue, then white, then a grid like patterns of black numbers. His jaw worked, his teeth clenching until his molars cracked.

"Who… who were you before you met me?" he asked. The question was a violent gear-grind in his throat.

"Does it matter? We're on the clock!"

"It matters," he pushed her against the guardrail, his grip heavy and imprecise. His kinetic aura fluctuated wildly, small sparks singing the hem of her jacket. "The synchronization. It needs… a counter weight. A memory. Something illogical that doesn't fit into the system's architecture. Give me one."

Irae stared into his face. He looked terrified, despite his inhuman strength. The guy was drifting into the abyss of his own consciousness, a sailor losing sight of the shore. She took a sharp breath, her hands moving to his cheeks, pinning him in place.

"You grew up in District 9," she lied, or perhaps remembered something real. "Your favorite meal was that synthetic protein mush at the 4:00 AM shift change because you thought it tasted like burnt toast and freedom. You used to tap your foot during factory inspections because you hated the silence. You’re the guy who almost got crushed to death because you stopped to feed a stray drone."

Garou went rigid. "That was… stupid."

"It was," she breathed, her face inches from his. "But it was *yours*. Keep that. Hold on to the stupid parts of you, Garou. The system is perfect. Perfection is a prison. Stay flawed."

The golden filigree under his skin dimmed, and the mercurial flow from his eye stopped. The grid in his vision dissolved into ordinary, dusty industrial light. Garou let out a shaky, desperate breath, collapsing his weight onto the rail. He hung his head, his forehead thumping against the cold steel.

[SYNC LEVEL: 14.8%]

"It went down," he muttered.

"Don't get cocky. 15% is the threshold for motor-control autonomy. At 20%, you stop thinking and start… outputting." She backed away, checking her gear. "We need to hit the secondary vents, three levels up. We’re moving to the maintenance guts of the spire."

"Ira," he said, finally standing straight, though he avoided her eyes. "Why are you really doing this? You don't have to keep playing the martyr."

"I told you. I want a world that isn't written by someone else's script." She climbed the access ladder, pausing to look back down at him. "And you’re the only glitched out, idiot hardware powerful enough to actually delete the Author’s files. Don't die before we reach the summit."

As they climbed, Garou looked at his hands. He felt different finer-tuned. He wasn't just aware of his surroundings; he felt like a component of the structure itself. A loose screw, a ticking wire, an anomaly in the perfectly calibrated machine of the mega-city.

Suddenly, a chime erupted from every PA system in the Spire not a recording, but a live announcement.

"All maintenance crews, initiate containment on the Spire facade. Hostile target designated: Error Code Zero."

"Error Code Zero?" Garou laughed, a sharp sound that echoed up the vent. "I've been promoted. That sounds like a guy who isn't worth saving."

"Or a guy who can't be contained by your regular definition of 'threat'," Irae noted grimly. "Look out!"

She threw her body to the side just as a plasma discharge vaporized the ladder where her hand had been seconds prior. A 'Cleaner' a hovering, circular blade unit draped in stealth camouflage descended from the roof-hatch above.

Garou didn't need a calculation. He reached up, his hand blurting into a sphere of golden kinetic potential. He caught the plasma bolt in his palm, feeling the thermal energy sear his sensors then redirected the discharge backward at the drone.

BOOM.

The machine spun out of control, cratering into the hull and sparking a cascade of electrical fire.

"You did that without even looking at your interface," Irae noted, stunned.

"Yeah," Garou replied, jumping the gap onto the upper walkway. "It didn't feel like 'I' did it. It felt like… I finally know how to speak to the metal."

The synchronicity wasn't a death sentence. It was becoming a new language. But as they crested the final ridge of the Spire, seeing the horizon of the mega-city stretch out like a gargantuan, sprawling graveyard of electronics, Garou felt a sharp, icy prickling on the back of his neck.

The Tower wasn't alone. In the dark expanse above, something else was watching an entitiy that didn't inhabit a system, but operated above it.

"Garou," Irae’s voice had lost its bravado. She pointed toward the Spire's apex, where the signal was strongest. "Look. There are no watchers there."

"Then who's making the noise?"

"The person who set the alarm," she replied, gesturing toward a figure sitting on the edge of the broadcast dish, illuminated by the city’s harsh neon. The figure wasn't holding a weapon; they were holding a digital pad, tapping at it with casual boredom, as if Garou were nothing more than a minor server error.

The sync counter flared to 15.1%.

Garou gripped his chest. His identity was like sand slipping through fingers, and the man on the broadcast dish was ready to blow it all away with a single keystroke.

"Keep walking, Garou," Irae whispered, her shadow-dagger finally in her hand. "But don't give the seat to the machine. Whatever you do do *not* stop feeling stupid."

Garou nodded, forcing his heartbeat into a slow, ragged, *human* pace, and moved toward the top of the world.