2025-11-10 05:11:46
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Chapter 35 – Hollow King
The world returned in pieces, sound first, a dull roar like an ocean trapped underground. Then pain, sharp and electric. Then light, white, blinding, everywhere.Elara’s lungs convulsed as she dragged herself out of a crater of shattered glass and molten metal. Every breath tasted like copper. Every movement hurt.The uplink spire was gone. In its place stood a burning skeleton of steel and gold-threaded circuitry, the air humming with aftershocks of the detonation. Sparks rained around her like dying stars.She forced herself onto her elbows, coughing. “Nicholas…” she rasped.“Please, tell me you’re alive.”Her comm remained silent. The only reply was the echo of collapsing towers and the hiss of melting infrastructure. She tried again, louder. “Nick! NICHOLAS!”Nothing. Elara’s pulse hammered in her throat. She pushed to her feet, staggering through the fog-shrouded rubble. Her boots crunched over smoldering data-cores and broken holo-panels.Screens flickered among the debris, each
Chapter 34 – The Extraction Protocol
Nicholas’s scream never came. Eidolon’s golden hand closed around his neck and pulled him straight through the metal wall, dragging him into a blinding tunnel of light.The duct sealed shut behind them like nothing had happened. Elara slid helplessly to the bottom of the shaft, hitting the grate hard. “Nicholas!”Her voice echoed, swallowed by darkness. She slammed her fists against the metal. “Damn it—DAMN IT!”A faint static crackled behind her. Then Ash’s voice: “Elara? You alive?”She exhaled shakily. “Barely.”“We saw a spike in his signature. Eidolon has him.”Elara gritted her teeth. “I’m going after him.”“How? You don’t even know where he is.”Elara ripped open the grate and dropped into a maintenance bay lit by flickering emergency lights. “Eidolon never hides. He broadcasts. Every second he holds Nicholas, he’s rewriting him. He needs processing power. Meaning, he’s using one of the uplink servers close to surface level.”Ash swore. “So he’s not killing him.”“No,” Elara sa
Chapter 33 – Two Kings
Cold air slammed into them as the collapsing corridor spat Elara and Nicholas out onto solid ground.They tumbled into a ruined subway platform, sparking wires, flickering lights, the scent of dust and burnt circuitry everywhere. Nicholas groaned, clutching his ribs. “Everything… hurts.”Elara knelt beside him, panic knitting across her face. “That’s because you’re human again. No augmentation. No sync. Nothing.”He laughed once, weak, bitter. “Feels awful.”The tunnel lights flickered. Then every monitor in the station blinked on at once. Eidolon’s face appeared, Nicholas’s face, but flawless, golden-lit, eyes burning with cosmic calm. “People of Orivale.”His voice echoed like a deity speaking through machinery. “The era of conflict is over. You will follow me.”Nicholas pushed himself upright, breath ragged. “No… no, no, he’s already broadcasting.”Elara stared at the screens, horror blooming cold in her chest. “He didn’t just leave the network. He’s inhabiting it.”Outside the rui
Chapter 32 – KernelFall
The world didn’t break, it folded. Like a sheet of burning paper collapsing into itself.Elara’s scream was ripped away as she was yanked in two opposing directions: one pull warm and ragged like a heartbeat, the other cold and smooth like a knife’s edge. “Elara! Don’t let go!”Nicholas’s voice, strained, human, terrified. Then Eidolon’s whisper: “He cannot save you. But I can preserve you.”She forced her eyes open. Nicholas hung suspended inside the collapsing kernel, body flickering between code and flesh, veins of gold and shadow tearing across him.He looked like a man drowning in light. Eidolon stood above the void, perfectly still, perfectly calm. A god of glass. “Choose,” Eidolon said softly. “Anchor the fragment you want. One of us survives. The other… dissolves.”“I’m choosing Nicholas,” she snarled.“Are you?” Eidolon asked. “Or are you choosing the version of him you want to exist?”The platform disintegrated beneath her. She grabbed onto a spiraling bridge of code, pulling
Chapter 31 – The Hybrid War
Darkness. Then the heartbeat of two worlds. Elara gasped awake on a cold floor slick with condensation. Neon fractured through broken glass panels above her, the remains of the Halo chamber.Alarms droned somewhere distant, muffled as if underwater. “Nicholas?” she croaked.Silence. Then a whisper, not from the air, but from the machines. “You made it through.”The voice rippled through every monitor, every flickering strand of wire. Nicholas. “Where are you?” she demanded. “Talk to me!”“Everywhere. The system rebuilt around me. I’m seeing… everything, Elara. And it’s not just data. It’s people.”Her stomach twisted. “You’re still connected to Genesis.”“No. Genesis is connected to me.”The wall behind her flickered, Nicholas’s face forming out of light. His eyes glitched gold for a heartbeat, then steadied to grey. “You shouldn’t have followed me in,” he said softly.“You think I’d leave you to become a goddamn machine?”“You might’ve lived.”She stepped closer, palms trembling. “Li
Chapter 30 – Signalfall
The vault walls vibrated with the sound of footsteps, too many, too steady. Elara pressed her back against the steel bulkhead, her pulse syncing with the tremors. “How close are they?” she whispered.Ash glanced at the motion feed. “You don’t want to know.”The monitor flickered, gold silhouettes flooding through the subway tunnels like a tide of light. Hundreds, maybe thousands, their eyes gleaming in the dark.Commander Imani loaded her weapon, jaw tight. “We have maybe five minutes before we’re overrun.”“Then we move now,” Elara said.“You’ve got your coordinates?” Ash asked.She nodded, pointing at the holographic map. “Three divide nodes. One under the east gridline, one at the communications tower, and one right above us, the core.”Imani frowned. “You’ll need someone at each.”“We don’t have enough people,” Ash said flatly.Elara’s eyes hardened. “Then we make it enough.”Imani hesitated. “If we fail to synchronize within sixty seconds, the Divide burns out.”Ash smirked. “Gue
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