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CHAPTER 132 — A CITY WITHOUT LINA
The fracture came without warning.One moment, Kael felt Lina’s presence like a steady current in his chest, warm, grounding, real. The next, it was gone. Not severed violently, not ripped away, just… missing, like a word erased from a sentence that still pretended to make sense.Kael staggered.“No,” he said aloud, the sound swallowed by the city. “No, Lina?”The street beneath his feet was whole. Too whole. Buildings stood upright, unbroken, their windows glowing with orderly light. Traffic moved smoothly. People walked, laughed, argued, lived. Echo City looked… normal.Wrongly normal.Kael’s breathing quickened. “Lina,” he said again, louder. “Answer me.”Nothing.The Architect’s hum, always present, always whispering at the edge of perception, was muted, like sound underwater. The Heartfold’s pulse was gone. In its place was a low, dissonant vibration that crawled along Kael’s spine.The Core. It hadn’t attacked him directly. It had done something worse. It had removed her. Not fr
CHAPTER 131 — THE PARADOX SPEAKS
The woman was standing in the middle of the street, flickering.Not vanishing, flickering. One moment she was young, early twenties, eyes wide and frightened. The next, older, shoulders bent under decades of regret. Then younger again, a child clutching a broken toy that hadn’t existed in this district an hour ago.Kael stopped short. “Lina… tell me you’re seeing this too.”“I am,” Lina said quietly. “And it’s worse than I thought.”The street around them shuddered, buildings vibrating like they were unsure which version of themselves to remain. Neon signs buzzed, letters rearranging mid-glow. Pedestrians froze in place, their outlines smearing slightly, as if time itself had lost focus.The woman turned her head toward them. Her eyes locked onto Lina. “You’re late,” the woman said.Kael stiffened. “She knows us.”Lina swallowed. “No. She knows me.”The woman stepped forward, and her foot landed twice. Two sounds. Two impacts, slightly out of sync.“I was supposed to be saved,” the wo
CHAPTER 130 — THE LIVING PARADOX
The city did not break this time. It stuttered.Echo City inhaled, and forgot how to exhale. Neon lights froze mid-flicker. Rain hung in the air like a held breath. Kael felt it before he saw it: a pressure behind the eyes, a sensation like standing too close to something that did not agree with reality.Lina staggered beside him, one hand braced against a concrete wall that shimmered like heat-distorted glass.“Kael,” she said quietly. “Something’s wrong. This isn’t spatial. It’s not temporal either.”Kael swallowed. A man stood across the street, frozen mid-step. His face flickered, not glitching, not duplicating, but revising. Older. Younger. Scarred. Unscarred. Each version existed for a fraction of a second before collapsing into the next.The man turned his head. Looked directly at Kael. And reality bent.Kael gasped as the street buckled inward, like the world was trying to fold around the man’s gaze. Lina shoved him backward just as the pavement cracked into a spiral.“That’s
CHAPTER 129 — THE PRESENT HUNTS BACK
The district didn’t appear all at once. It arrived in revisions.Kael noticed it first, not with his eyes, but with his balance. The street beneath his boots shifted, not sideways or vertically, but temporally. One second the pavement was cracked concrete; the next, polished steel; then broken again, older than before.He stumbled. “Lina,” he said sharply. “The ground”“I know,” Lina replied, breath tight. “It’s rewriting itself around us.”They stood at the edge of what had once been District Nine. Now it was something else entirely, a stretch of city that folded forward and backward through moments like breathing lungs. Buildings flickered between states: unfinished frames, pristine towers, collapsed ruins, then back again.A bus passed them. Then passed again. Then shattered mid-motion, its fragments rewinding back into a solid vehicle before exploding forward into rust.Kael swallowed. “That district isn’t unstable.”“No,” Lina said quietly. “It’s predatory.”The Architect’s ancho
CHAPTER 128 — TEMPORAL PREDATORS
Echo City no longer moved like a city.It lurched, staggered between seconds, inhaled moments and exhaled silence. After Kael and Lina’s impossible choice, after entire districts were severed from real-time causality, the city existed in layers of almost. Streets repeated half-actions. Traffic lights blinked between colors that no longer had names. People froze mid-step, then jerked forward, then froze again.And something else moved between those pauses. Lina felt it before she saw it.“Kael…” Her voice was tight. “Do you feel that pull?”Kael nodded, jaw clenched. “Like gravity… but sideways. Like time’s being hunted.”The Architect’s anchor pulsed weakly beneath their feet, struggling to compensate for the damage. The districts they had chosen to save stabilized unevenly. The ones they let go were gone, not destroyed, but unmoored, drifting in a temporal dark.And from that dark, they came. A ripple slid across the air, distorting the skyline. The distortion sharpened, condensed, u
CHAPTER 127 — THE COST OF TIME
The city didn’t shatter this time. It paused.Kael felt it first, not as motion, but as absence. The wind stopped mid-breath. Neon signs froze halfway through flickers. A car hung suspended inches above the street, its headlights locked in an eternal glare. Even the low hum of Echo City’s systems vanished, swallowed by a silence so complete it pressed against his ears.“Lina…” Kael said slowly. “Tell me you feel that too.”“I do,” Lina replied, voice unnervingly calm. Her eyes glowed faintly, scanning the streets below. “The Core didn’t attack the city. It… stepped outside time.”A ripple passed through the skyline. Then another. Entire districts, blocks at a time, slipped. Not collapsing. Not dissolving. Simply disconnecting. Streets faded into pale outlines, buildings turning translucent, as if they were memories rather than matter.Kael’s throat tightened. “Those districts, are they gone?”“Not gone,” Lina said. “Severed. The Core has cut them from real-time causality. They’re trap
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