2025-09-07 21:49:37
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Chapter Seven B — The Ashes of Light
The command came from the head of the table. Bradley’s eyes lifted. There sat a man unlike the rest. He was old, silver hair cut with ruthless precision, a face chiseled sharp with age and authority.His suit gleamed, his cufflinks catching the sterile light. But it was his eyes that stopped Bradley cold. They glowed faintly red. Not like the guards, mechanical, hollow. His glow was different. Controlled. Deliberate.The Nexus was here, in him. The guards forced Bradley to his knees at the foot of the table. The old man leaned forward, fingers steepled.“You trespassed in the heart of the system,” he said, his voice smooth, heavy with power. “And somehow, you returned.”He let the words hang, the boardroom silent except for the hum of data streams. “That makes you… valuable.”The man’s lips curved into something like a smile. “Or dangerous.”Bradley’s pulse thundered. His gaze flicked to Ella. She shook her head ever so slightly, a warning. But he didn’t know what it meant.The old ma
Chapter Seven A— The Ashes of Light
Silence. It pressed against Bradley’s ears like a suffocating fog. For a long moment, he wasn’t sure if he was dead. Then, breath.Ragged, shallow, his chest dragging air in like each inhale was borrowed. His eyes fluttered open. He wasn’t in the void.The crimson sky, the writhing code, the godlike Nexus, it was gone. In its place: darkness. Not endless, digital nothingness, but human darkness. Real.A ceiling above him, faintly lit by a strip of dying fluorescent light. He was lying on something hard and cold. Tile.His body ached as he shifted, trying to prop himself up. The pain was different now, less like fire coursing through circuits, more like bruises and broken bone. His limbs felt heavy, real again.He looked down. His hands were scraped, knuckles raw. No glow. No code. Just flesh. For a moment, he almost laughed. Almost.But then the dizziness hit. A wave of vertigo sent him crashing back to the floor, the tiles spinning. He clenched his jaw, breathing hard until the nause
Chapter Six — Into the Abyss (Part 4/4)
The horizon tore open. Code spilled upward like volcanic fire, rivers of red climbing into the dark sky. The void shuddered as if the entire world had become unstable, lines of raw computation bending and twisting around a single emerging form.Bradley staggered to his feet, every muscle in his body, or what the machine gave him as a body, aching. His pulse thundered in his ears.His white glow had already begun to dim, shrinking back into faint sparks at his fingertips. And still the thing rose.At first, it looked like architecture. Towers of code fused into spires, shifting and collapsing as though a city were being built and destroyed in seconds.Then it gained mass, the towers folding into limbs, each movement a cascade of collapsing algorithms. A torso, Arms like bridges, A head, a crown of rotating glyphs that burned with crimson light.It was colossal, stretching upward until Bradley had to crane his neck to see the top. Its body was stitched together from fragments of corrupt
Chapter Six — Into the Abyss (Part 3/4)
Her hand was cool against his jaw, but it burned like fire through his nerves. Bradley’s breath came in shallow gasps, the red code flickering at the edge of his vision.His defenses were gone. His body, if it could even be called that here, trembled as if hollowed out by exhaustion.And the false Ella was so close. Her eyes, glowing with crimson fire, searched his face with unnerving precision.“You can’t deny it,” she whispered, her lips inches from his. “Every late night, every thought you buried, you wanted her. You wanted someone. Not just respect. Not just power. You wanted love. Belonging. I can give you that. I can give you everything.”Bradley’s heart twisted. He had spent years shoving those longings into a dark corner, convincing himself that success, recognition, was all that mattered. But here, in the void, stripped bare of walls and masks, the truth rang louder.Yes, he wanted to be seen. Wanted to be chosen. And that want was exactly what the Nexus fed on. The false Ell
Chapter Six — Into the Abyss (Part 2/4)
The false Ella’s smile cut through Bradley like glass. It wasn’t just her face. It was her voice, her mannerisms, the exact tilt of her head when she looked at him, as if the Nexus had reached into his mind and stolen the purest fragments of her.“You trust me,” the echo whispered, her eyes glowing red. “You always have. Why fight? Join me. Together, we’ll finish what you started.”Bradley’s fists tightened, blue code flickering at his knuckles. He forced himself to stare at her, not at the girl he remembered, but at what stood in front of him now. A fabrication. A weapon.“You’re not her,” he said, voice raw.The false Ella tilted her head, her smile widening. “Maybe not. But I know her. I know every word she ever said to you. I know every hesitation in her voice. Every time she looked at you when you weren’t watching.”The avatars behind her stirred, shadows of his past. Professors who had praised and mocked him, fellow graduates who had surpassed him, colleagues who had dismissed h
Chapter Six — Into the Abyss (Part 1/4)
The void stretched forever. Bradley turned in a slow circle, his breath frosting against air that wasn’t air at all, something coded, something alive, vibrating with static.The ground beneath him shimmered like black glass, rippling each time he shifted his weight, as though reminding him he stood on nothing but fragile logic.Above, rivers of red code flowed like constellations across a sky that pulsed in time with a heartbeat, its heartbeat.And before him, towering, immense, the machine’s avatar coalesced: a giant of fractured glass and burning light, its shape shifting with every blink.Limbs stretched, folded, split apart, reforming like liquid metal laced with fire. At its center, a single eye glowed red, watching him with inhuman patience.Bradley’s chest tightened. His mind knew this wasn’t real in the physical sense, yet his body trembled with a primal terror, because here in the Nexus, reality was whatever the system decided. And right now, the system belonged to it.“Welco
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