2024-12-30 15:35:20Kael stepped out of the taxi, immediately taking in the military vehicles and armed personnel surrounding the mansion. Before he could fully assess the situation, a familiar voice cut through the air.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Selena's sharp tone matched her frown as she strode toward him. Her eyes tracked the departing taxi, and something shifted in her expression. "A taxi... interesting," she muttered, more to herself than to him. "And here I thought... but no, Marcus's people only travel in those custom Rolls-Royces." "Is there a law against taking taxis now, Selene?" Kael asked mildly. "Don't play games with me. Why are you here? Following me again?" She crossed her arms, her military uniform crisp in the afternoon sun. "This isn't some casino where you can hide behind your cards when things get rough. We're about to take down Victor 'Crocodile' Nelson." Kael's eyebrows rose slightly at the name. "Nelson?" "Yes, Nelson. The most dangerous criminal in the city." She sneered. "But what would you know about real danger? You're just a—" "Commander!" A soldier came running up, his face flushed. "We've got a problem!" "What is it, Lieutenant?" "The manor's defenses... they're too heavy. Multiple armed guards at every entrance, reinforced gates, and what looks like a small private army inside. We can't find a safe entry point without risking massive casualties." Kael couldn't suppress a chuckle, drawing Selena's fierce glare. "Something funny about my men's lives being at risk?" she snapped. "Victor Nelson... the great 'Crocodile,'" Kael said, shaking his head. "If you only knew..." "Knew what? Please, enlighten us with your vast military expertise," Selena's voice dripped sarcasm. "Or better yet, just leave. Go back to your comfortable life and stay out of real people's business." "Real people's business?" Kael's voice remained calm, but something in his tone made the lieutenant take a step back. "In the quarry, we had prisoners who would eat your 'Crocodile' for breakfast." he said under his breath, but it was audible to the lieutenant. “What did you say?” Selene asked him. “Nothing, you can continue,” he chuckles. "Did I crack a joke that you are laughing? You are still same, nothing more than a clown who hides when it’s time to fight." Kael chuckled softly, the sound dark and mocking. "If only you knew," he murmured, barely loud enough for her to hear. Selena’s gaze sharpened, and she stepped forward, her hand instinctively reaching for the weapon at her side. "Get out of here, Kael," she barked. "Now. I’m not in the mood for your nonsense today. You’re not part of this operation. Leave before I arrest you." Kael straightened, raising an eyebrow. "Arrest me?" he asked, his voice tinged with amusement. "You don’t have the authority to arrest me, Selena. Besides, I’m not following you. I’m just here to take care of some business. And let’s be honest," he added, "I’m married." Selena blinked, caught off guard. "Married?" she repeated, her tone flat. "Are you trying to distract me with that? I don’t care." "Well, if you don't care, then maybe you’ll stop calling me a loser," Kael replied smoothly, crossing his arms. He wasn’t about to let her get under his skin any longer. Before she could respond, a soldier rushed up to her, his face grim. "Captain! We’ve encountered heavy resistance at Victor Nelson’s manor. It’s heavily fortified, and we can’t get past their defenses." Selena’s face darkened, her mind quickly processing the information. "Damn it," she muttered. She turned toward Kael, her patience already running thin. "This is serious, Kael. You can’t be here." Kael scoffed, his tone light. "Seriously? You think I’m concerned about a bunch of soldiers and their pathetic defenses?" His smile widened, but there was a dangerous edge to it. "You need to step up your game. Victor Nelson is nothing compared to what I’ve faced before. You’re wasting your time." Selena’s hands twitched, her temper rising as she gritted her teeth. "You don’t get it, do you? This is bigger than you. We’re going after a criminal empire, and you're just standing there like a fool." Kael shook his head slowly. "No, Selena," he said, his voice low. "You’re the fool if you think you can take him down without the right tools." Her eyes narrowed, her hands still clenched tightly at her sides. "You’re not welcome here, Kael. I’ll give you one last chance. Leave now. Or else I’ll arrest you myself."
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Chapter 255
The tear widened.Not like paper. Not like sky.It screamed open, as if reality itself had reached its breaking point and could no longer hold its seams together. The margins howled with it—bleeding chronology, bleeding memory.And from that wound came everything the world had once forgotten.Whole timelines—long buried, discarded, pruned from the Tree of Plot—came crashing through like collapsing wavefronts. The bleeding margins quaked, and Subtext warped like a glitching dream.One by one, the alternate realities fell into the world like glass shattering in reverse.A kingdom appeared on a hill that hadn’t existed a second before.An entire species blinked into life—then burned into ash.A river rewound into a volcano, erupting upward from the soil like it was angry to have ever cooled.A child, playing with chalk on a cobblestone path, blinked—then became an old man, screaming, weeping, grasping at memories of parents who had never existed.“This is wrong!” Selene cried. “It’s rewr
Chapter 254
It stood between realities like an ink blot defying grammar.The figure—Draft Zero—wasn’t a man, or a monster.It was the part of a story you were never meant to see.The discarded voice.The original fracture.The wrong sentence, left unspoken for so long it became its own echo.Kael felt its presence like a splinter in his thoughts. Something ancient and misremembered, a half-erased whisper at the foundation of his being.“Who are you?” he asked.But even as the words left his lips, part of him knew.The figure straightened, parchment skin fluttering in nonexistent wind. It had no eyes, no face—only a blankness wrapped in folds of obsolete narrative.“I am what came before, Kael,” it whispered. “Before the first story. Before the first quill. Before the Library carved truth into shelves.”Its voice didn’t travel through sound—it pressed directly into the mind, like a childhood memory reemerging with the wrong details. It turned toward the others—Selene, Pamela, Elias, Riva—and with
Chapter 253
The door opened like a wound.It didn’t swing outward or inward—it simply peeled, like memory detaching from bone, like a truth slowly being admitted. As it parted, light spilled from within—not radiant, but revealing, the kind of light that doesn’t illuminate the world so much as strip it down to the shape of its making.Pamela was the first to move.Despite the warnings in her bones, despite the twitching of glyphs along the corridor walls as if trying to signal “do not enter,” she crossed the threshold with the cautious resolve of a historian walking into a page that should never have existed.Beyond the door was no room, no chamber, no vault.It was a loop.A recursive sphere of memory, repeating endlessly in all directions like an echo locked in glass. In the center of it—curled, flickering, radiant and trembling—was Kael, or rather, the moment Kael first knew himself.⸻It was not a moment of joy. Not triumph. Not even clarity.It was terror.There, at the primal origin of his s
Chapter 252
It began with glyphs.Symbols not etched, but remembered—carved not into stone or bark, but into the soft pliable clay of the world’s forgotten thoughts. They pulsed in the margins like veins beneath a translucent skin, glowing faintly with an inner phosphorescence, casting long shadows that shouldn’t have been possible in a world that had no consistent light source anymore.Elias crouched low near the base of a hill where language itself seemed to weep. His fingers traced the symbols reverently, his brow damp with sweat. He wasn’t deciphering language so much as listening to the sediment of meaning. This wasn’t text—it was subtext. A code carved into silence. A whisper woven beneath the page.“They’re instructions,” he murmured finally, eyes widening. “Or… a confession.”Selene knelt beside him, her own breath shallow. “What do they say?”Elias blinked slowly, as if the words ached to be spoken aloud.“The fusion didn’t end the recursion. It started a descent. There’s another layer…
Chapter 251
The margins bled. They always had—but now the bleeding was slow, syrupy, unnervingly rhythmic. As though the world had found a heartbeat again, and that heartbeat pulsed through torn sentences and decaying metaphors. The stitched edges of reality no longer held neatly; instead, they frayed like threads at the cuff of a forgotten draft. The world wasn’t dying. It was… reconsidering itself.And in the center of that strange, shifting non-place walked Kael.Not the god. Not the mortal. Not the child nor the memory. But the fusion.Gold and grey spiraled in his irises like opposing galaxies caught in collision. His skin shimmered like something written and erased and rewritten. Where he walked, words bent around him—trees leaned to avoid narrative alignment, clouds hovered low as if eavesdropping on a story they couldn’t quite grasp.And he was silent.Not just silent in sound, but in presence. Where Kael walked, conversation fled. Wind forgot to howl. Footsteps muffled themselves. Selene
Chapter 250
The sky was ink.No longer a canvas or a dome, no longer even a concept of weather—the sky above the burning margins bled words. Letters tumbled like ash, catching fire midair, sentences dissolving before they were read. Somewhere, a clock tower chimed without gears. Somewhere else, an ocean recited poetry backwards into salt.In the center of this madness stood Selene, surrounded by the fraying edges of the world. The ritual circle had been drawn in molten ink, each glyph traced from memory, not instruction. The old magic—if it could even be called that—was never meant to fuse two selves from separate narrative threads. But then again, the world was never meant to survive Kael’s story.Selene’s hands were burned black with metaphor.In one, she held the broken quill—Kael’s, the one that ended the war, the one that sealed the Library. It still trembled with the memory of finality.In the other, she held the bleeding pen—Kael-0’s, or perhaps a relic from the first word ever written in
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