The Titan Who Asked Me to Kill God

Chapter 12

A blinding wave of searing plasma erupted from the enforcers' rifles, scorching the air inches above Cassian's shoulder as he threw his entire body forward into the roaring vortex of the Oakhaven anomaly.

"Warning! Reality-suppression field active!" Iris shrieked inside his skull, her digital voice warping into a painful screech of feedback as a wall of heavy, gray energy slammed down from the ceiling. "System power dropping at four hundred percent per second! Cassian, if your energy hits zero, your biological profile will be expunged from the mainframe!"

Cassian gritted his teeth, blood dripping from the graze wound on his shoulder as he fought against the invisible, crushing weight of the suppression tech. Every muscle fiber in his body felt like it was being systematically unzipped, his system interface flickering wildly between a brilliant crimson and a sickly, dying gray.

"I don't plan on sticking around to see the expiration date, Iris!" Cassian roared, kicking off a concrete slab that was dissolving into harmless pixels.

Behind him, three Directorate enforcers in immaculate black armor stepped cleanly through the spatial static, their movements mechanical and utterly devoid of hesitation. Commander Vane’s elite hounds had the scent, and they weren't going to let a minor reality collapse slow them down.

"Subject is attempting unauthorized spatial transit," the lead enforcer droned coldly, raising a heavy suppression carbine that hummed with a localized anti-anomaly frequency. "Open fire. Terminate the anomaly host."

A sustained burst of searing blue energy shredded the remaining floorboards beneath Cassian's boots, sending chunks of concrete plummeting into the bottomless void below. Cassian twisted mid-air, his right hand still locked onto the glowing control node of the perimeter. The crimson symbol on his palm flared with a desperate, frantic pulse, fighting back against the Directorate's tech just enough to rip a localized rift wide open.

"Not today," Cassian snarled, throwing his weight sideways as he grabbed a stray length of exposed rebar and hurled it directly into the enforcers' path.

The heavy iron bar caught the lead enforcer square in the chest visor, shorting out his tactical HUD with a brilliant cascade of sparks. But the other two didn't even flinch; they simply stepped over their comrade's staggering form, their rifles locking onto Cassian's chest with terrifying precision.

"Energy levels at three percent!" Iris warned, her voice dropping to a panicked whisper as the system interface flickered like a dying lightbulb. "Cassian, the suppression field is eating your core! You're about to be formatted!"

"Shut up and find me an exit!" Cassian yelled, his vision blurring at the edges as the gray void encroached closer.

He didn't wait for her to answer. Diving headfirst through a shattered glass partition, Cassian scrambled across a tilted maintenance deck where a heavily armored Directorate transport vehicle sat idling on its magnetic clamps, its engine glowing with a steady, lethal pulse of blue plasma.

"Target sighted!" an enforcer shouted from the balcony above, leveling a suppression rifle directly at the glass canopy of the transport. "Engage neutralization protocols!"

Cassian didn't hesitate. He slammed his glowing palm against the transport's exterior emergency override panel, ignoring the skin-singing jolt of electricity that surged up his arm. The system interface on his wrist sparked violently, parsing the Directorate's encryption code in a fraction of a second before the heavy steel doors hissed open.

"Get in! Now!" Iris yelled.

Cassian scrambled into the cockpit just as a volley of plasma bolts melted the rear quarter-panel of the transport into glowing slag. He threw himself into the pilot's seat, his boots slamming down on the manual ignition overrides while his right hand frantically ripped the primary data-cable out of the console and jammed it directly into his wrist port.

"Accessing Directorate clearance logs," Iris muttered, her tone shifting from panic to icy calculation as the transport's dashboard suddenly lit up with a blinding array of crimson and gold status lights. "Warning: This vehicle is slinked to the central harvesting grid. If you link your system to it, you're going to see what they're really doing with Oakhaven."

"Do it!" Cassian barked, yanking the steering yoke hard to the left as a plasma charge blew the transport's front stabilizer clean off.

The moment his nervous system bridged with the transport's mainframe, the physical world around him melted away, replaced by an overwhelming, deafening rush of raw, uncompressed data flooding directly into his cerebral cortex.

It wasn't just navigation telemetry or engine diagnostics. It was memories. Millions of them.

Flashes of familiar streets, laughing children, burning homes, and terrified faces raced across his mind's eye at lightspeed—not as random noise, but as structured, glowing packets of human essence being funneled through industrial-grade conduits straight toward the upper stratosphere.

"By the ancestors..." Cassian gasped, his hands trembling on the yoke as the horrifying truth locked into place. "They're not just erasing the world, Iris. They're harvesting the dead."

"The Unmaker's core," Iris confirmed, her voice trembling with genuine horror as the data packets mapped themselves out across Cassian's HUD. "Every timeline they delete, every soul they format out of existence—the Directorate isn't wasting a single drop of it. They're using the memories of the deceased as fuel to feed the Prime Weaver. The entire city... Oakhaven, the slums, everyone who ever lived and died here... they're batteries."

"Bastards," Cassian snarled, a cold, searing rage eclipsing the panic in his chest.

Down in the cargo bay of the transport, massive lead-lined storage crates began to hum, their digital manifests scrolling across the dash to reveal rows upon rows of compressed human consciousness, neatly labeled and ready for final combustion. The Directorate wasn't an army of preservation; they were butchers harvesting the soul-matter of a dying reality.

"Commanding officer Vane is locking onto our frequency!" Iris warned, her avatar flashing violently across his peripheral vision. "He's dispatching the entire strike fleet to block the perimeter exit!"

Cassian glanced up through the shattered windshield. Ahead of them, at the far end of the disintegrating highway, a massive, swirling spatial rift tore open the bruised purple sky, bleeding blinding white light across the ruined landscape. Guarding the rift were three Directorate gunships, their weapons charged and spinning up for a synchronized execution sweep.

"They want to format me?" Cassian muttered, a grim, reckless smile touching the corners of his mouth as he shoved the throttle all the way forward, pushing the stolen transport past its absolute structural limits. "Let's see how they like a system crash."

The transport shrieked in protest, its metal hull groaning as it accelerated to hypersonic speeds down the collapsing tarmac. The Directorate gunships fired in unison, sending a wall of white-hot plasma surging down the highway directly toward the cockpit.

Cassian didn't flinch. He didn't brake. With the crimson symbol on his palm blazing like a miniature sun, he gripped the steering yoke and drove the hijacked transport headfirst into the glowing spatial rift.