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Chapter Fifty-Four — Ghost in the Smoke
The world pressed in. The crimson strobe lights pulsed against the thick fog of gas and gunpowder, painting corpses in grotesque stop-motion snapshots. Ayla Trent’s ears still rang with the echo of gunfire, her throat raw from the acrid smoke.She pressed her back against the cold concrete wall, weapon raised in trembling hands, though there was nothing left to shoot. Except her own doubt.Raymond was gone, She’d freed him. Her hands had unclasped his shackles. Her decision, her mistake and now the host was loose in the labyrinth of this detention facility. Her pulse roared. Every second wasted meant another move in his game. And she was locked in a room full of bodies.Ayla forced herself to move, stepping over the sprawled forms of masked operators. The knife Raymond had left in one of their throats still quivered slightly, as if mocking her hesitation.She crouched by the steel door, fingers brushing the lock. Reinforced, Keycard only. The keypad blinked red, demanding credentials
Chapter Fifty-Three: The Eruption
The silence before the collapse felt wrong. Ayla Trent had trained herself to recognize patterns in code, in people, in the smallest fractures of behavior. And right now, the hum of the underground detention facility was too steady.The fluorescent lights didn’t flicker. The ventilation fans didn’t shift pitch. Even the guards’ movements outside Raymond’s steel-barred holding room had grown mechanical, rehearsed, stripped of the little imperfections of real life.Her instincts screamed: something was about to break. Raymond sat across from her at the bolted steel table, wrists cuffed, posture deceptively loose. He wasn’t tense the way she was. If anything, he looked amused.“You hear it too, don’t you?” he said softly, as if continuing a conversation they hadn’t started. His voice was silk over a razor. Ayla’s eyes narrowed. “Hear what?”Raymond tilted his head. “The absence. True silence isn’t natural here. Every system has noise. Every person leaves ripples. But this” he gestured la
Chapter Fifty-Two
The fall never ended. Ayla’s scream ripped from her throat, stolen almost instantly by the roaring wind. The world was a blur of firelight, crumbling stone, and twisting shadows.Her body whipped in the torrent, tumbling head over heels. She clawed at the air for something anything but there was nothing to hold, nothing to stop her descent. And then she saw him.Raymond, Falling just ahead, his limbs thrashing, his furnace-eye glowing faintly in the abyss. A beacon, a reminder that she wasn’t alone. “Ayla!” he shouted, his voice breaking through the maelstrom.She reached for him. The distance was impossible, their bodies spinning in different trajectories. But she stretched anyway, fingers straining, skin tearing against the rushing air. The abyss laughed, the sound reverberated through the endless shaft, cold and cruel.“YOU FALL TOGETHER. YOU BREAK TOGETHER.”The void thickened below them, a swirling pit of black flame and molten stone. Ayla’s chest tightened If they hit that, ther
Chapter Fifty-One
The words did not belong to Raymond. The sound that poured from his throat was deeper, more cavernous, like something echoing across the walls of a cathedral carved from bone.Ayla froze, her hands still on his face, as the abyssal voice rattled through her veins. “THE HEIR IS BROKEN, THE TITAN WALKS NOW.”She recoiled. “No,” she whispered. “That’s not you.”Raymond sat up with mechanical slowness, his limbs jerking like a marionette’s strings were being pulled by unseen hands. His head turned toward her, both eyes yawning pits of void, bottomless, hungry.For an instant she thought she saw fragments of his face creases of exhaustion, the faint scar at his jaw but then the abyss swallowed it whole, devouring the last traces of him.Ayla scrambled backward across the stone floor. Her palms slipped on the damp moss, Her chest heaved. She’d pulled him back, She’d fought the prison, She had saved him. And yet, he wasn’t Raymond anymore. He rose to his feet with a grace too alien to be hum
Chapter Fifty
The moment Raymond vanished into the titan’s maw, the world collapsed around Ayla. The horde shrieked louder than anything she’d ever heard, a sound so raw it made her vision blur.The ground buckled, veins rupturing, spurting black ichor that sprayed across her face and arms. The air itself thickened, choking her throat with every breath But none of that mattered. Raymond was gone.Her hands trembled as she stared at the space where he had been. Her palms still tingled, burned with the furnace-heat of his skin. She could still feel his weight pulling against her. And then nothing.Her knees hit the quaking ground. She screamed his name again, but the titan’s laughter swallowed it whole. It echoed inside her skull, low and booming, every syllable vibrating through her bones. “HE WAS ALWAYS MINE.”Ayla spat blood and bile, forcing herself to her feet. “You don’t own him!” she shouted, voice ragged. “He’s not yours!”The abyssal eyes tilted toward her, and she felt them pierce straight
Chapter Forty-Nine
The world had no shape. Ayla’s scream tore itself from her throat, but the sound was shredded into silence before it left her lips. She was falling not through air, not through water, but through something heavier, something viscous, something that clung to her skin and pulled at her bones.Her chest burned. She tried to inhale, but her lungs found nothing. No oxygen, no air at all Only void. Her vision fractured. For one blink she saw Raymond’s face above her, furnace-eye burning, hand locked around her wrist like an anchor.For the next blink, there was only blackness, pierced with streaks of red lightning. She clung harder, Her nails dug into his hand Don’t let go. The void tore sideways. She crashed against a surface that was not solid yet did not yield.It bent beneath her like taut fabric, then slingshotted her back into the endless fall. Her body twisted, convulsed. Somewhere inside the madness, her heart still hammered, refusing to stop. Raymond’s grip never loosened.The red
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