Home / Urban / Shadows of the General / Chapter 116 — The Pulse Beneath the Ruins

Chapter 116 — The Pulse Beneath the Ruins

Author: Freezy-Grip

2025-11-13 19:25:15

Three days after the implosion, the Eye’s crater still glowed. Not with fire. Not even radiation. It was a deeper kind of light slow, rhythmic, pulsing faintly through the ash and fractured stone. It bled through the ground like veins beneath translucent skin.

Damon adjusted the filtration mask on his face as he descended the slope. His boots crunched against the crystallized dust so fine it clung to the soles like powdered glass. The air was dry, thin, metallic.

Behind him, a convoy of recovery drones followed in a staggered line, mechanical hums echoing in the silence. The once-bustling base around the Eye was now a wasteland of melted steel, warped towers, and hollow airships.

Everything that had been the Center of Human Ascension was gone. Except the pulse. It thudded softly beneath his feet, measured and slow, like the heartbeat of a sleeping giant.

“Commander, we’re picking something up again,” Mara’s voice came through the comms, distorted by the static that haunted this zone.

Continue to read this book for free

Scan the code to download the app

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

CHAPTER 145 — “THE THING THAT REMEMBERS ME”
Adrian didn’t see the creature at first. He felt it. A cold pressure slammed through the void, a pulse like a heartbeat that wasn’t his, rippling up the broken platform as if the entire plane inhaled at once.The fragments of obsidian light beneath him drifted upward, freezing midair like scattered shards of a mirror.He hovered for a breathless moment, suspended in nothing. Then the thing rose. A massive form dragged itself up from the abyss if “form” was even the right word. Its shape shifted constantly, contorting between something vaguely human and something that had never belonged on any world.Limbs stretched and shrank in the same second. A chest expanded as though inhaling, then collapsed inward like a dying star. And its face Adrian’s stomach dropped.It didn’t have a face. It had half a dozen impressions of one. Flickers. Echoes. Memories.His own. Every time it reformed, its features shifted closer to his mouth tightening like his did when he argued with Selene,eyes narrow
CHAPTER 144 — “THE VOID BETWEEN NAMES”
Darkness wasn’t the right word for where Adrian landed. Darkness implied emptiness, silence, absence. This place breathed.He lay on a surface that didn’t have texture, didn’t have weight, yet pressed against his ribs as though it were studying the shape of him. His pulse throbbed. Not just in his chest through the air, through the space itself, like the ground beneath him was syncing to the rhythm of his heartbeat.Adrian opened his eyes. The void lit up. Lines of light thin as veins, bright as lightning shot across an infinite black horizon, branching, splitting, reconnecting in impossible patterns. Each pulse mapped a heartbeat not his own. Someone else was here. Something else.He pushed himself to his knees. His hands left no imprint on the ground, but the surface rippled as if water tried to imitate solidity.“Selene?”His voice dissolved into static halfway through her name. The sound didn’t carry. It folded back into his throat, as though the space rejected it.No the space un
CHAPTER 143 — “FRACTURED GRAVITY”
Adrian opened his eyes to a world unmade. Not destroyed unmade. Broken into fragments of air and light, shards of stone floating in an endless, featureless void. Gravity no longer obeyed any rule he had ever known.Time felt sticky, elastic, as if it could snap back into itself at any moment, and Selene or the thing wearing her face was gone.One second she had been under his hand, a beacon of recognition amid chaos. The next, she had been ripped away by the descending shadow, the Eye or some fragment of it plunging into the void.His chest burned. Heart pounded. Breath came in short, jagged bursts. The air didn’t move around him, yet it pressed into his lungs like solid matter.“Selene!” he shouted, voice bouncing against nothing. His echo returned, warped, as if space itself had no meaning. “Hold on! I’m coming!”A flicker of light answered him. A shard of floating stone spun in the distance, catching the reflection of something her hair? A glint of her wrist? His stomach dropped. I
CHAPTER 142 — “THE VERTICAL FALL”
The fall was not a fall, Not at first. Adrian’s body plummeted, but space did not behave correctly around him. The wind didn’t roar past his ears, it pressed inward. The sky warped, folding like wet paper.The fractured tower above stretched into infinity, then snapped back into a shape that felt too small to contain what had happened.He held her hand Selene’s hand, or the shape of Selene’s hand with a grip so tight the bones of his forearm vibrated. Her fingers twined with his in a mirror-perfect reflection of every moment they’d reached for each other before. No glitching. No hesitation.But her eyes Her eyes tore him apart. They were wrong and right at the same time. One moment human, terrified, desperate. The next flickering with cavernous emptiness, a void that didn’t belong in anything wearing a face.“Adrian” Her voice broke in pieces, scattering across the collapsing sky. “Don’t don’t”The rest of the sentence fractured into static. A whirlpool of light opened beneath them, b
CHAPTER 141 B — “THE FACE THAT SHOULD NOT BE”
Adrian stumbled, catching himself on one knee. The figure stood motionless amid the chaos, the epicenter of the disturbance.He heard something under the shaking like a thousand overlapping whispers converging into one note. A resonance.The Eye,or something wearing the Eye like a mask.The captain shouted, “Adrian, we leave now!”But Adrian couldn’t move. Because the figure’s eyes those unstable, shimmering eyes had locked onto his again, and for half a breath, he saw something deep inside them. Not malice. Not manipulation. Something like confusion.Like someone trapped inside themselves, screaming beneath a surface that wouldn’t let them break through. And that more than anything made him hesitate.“Adrian,” she whispered, “help me.”His chest constricted painfully. That was Selene’s voice. That was her pleading tone. She had used it only once in their entire time together when she’d thought she was losing her humanity.He tried to stand. His legs trembled. “Don’t,” the captain bar
CHAPTER 141 — “THE FACE THAT SHOULD NOT BE”
The storm had no right to be silent. The sky above the shattered tower churned with spiraling ash and fractured lightning, yet not a single crack of thunder accompanied the violence overhead.Wind whipped around Adrian, tearing at his coat, carrying the taste of metal and burnt ozone but all noise seemed suspended, trapped behind the impossible presence standing at the broken lip of the tower. She looked down at him.Selene. Or something that had memorized her perfectly. The figure’s hair moved as hers used to, black strands lifted by currents that didn’t reach the ground.Her eyes glowed faintly not like the Eye, not like any human light, but an unstable mixture between warmth and cold, recognition and void.Her face held precisely the contour Adrian knew better than his own reflection, yet there was a stillness to her posture that Selene had never possessed. Selene had always been fluid, subtle, alive with micro expressions.This figure’s emotions came in too cleanly, each shift alm

You may also like

TRILLIONAIRE IN DISGUISE

The Rise of the Son-in-law After Divorce

RISE OF THE DISCARDED SON-IN-LAW

Billionaire in Disguise

Reborn son-in-law: I Died at your Hands Once

The Rejected Trillionaire Surgeon

THE REJECTED GENIUS

Here Comes the Lord

Latest Chapter

CHAPTER 145 — “THE THING THAT REMEMBERS ME”

CHAPTER 144 — “THE VOID BETWEEN NAMES”

CHAPTER 143 — “FRACTURED GRAVITY”

CHAPTER 142 — “THE VERTICAL FALL”

CHAPTER 141 B — “THE FACE THAT SHOULD NOT BE”

CHAPTER 141 — “THE FACE THAT SHOULD NOT BE”