Chapter 202: Crushing Weight
Her head throbbed, a dull ache that pulsed in time with the shard pieces, as if the fragments were trying to speak, to tell her something she couldn’t yet hear.
An instinct older than training warned her that the message would demand payment, and her body was already overdrawn.
Around her, A Block lay in a row of medical beds—Faye, Tidwell, Paul, Wes, Junjio—their faces pale, eyes closed, chests rising and falling in shallow rhythm, the faint glow of their Ikonas hovering above them, trembling with residual energy.
Each glow wavered when hers flared, sympathetic yet unable to bridge the gulf between sleep and waking.
The ward was silent save for the hum of machinery and the faint drip of fluid from an IV line, a stillness that pressed against her ears, amplifying the ache in her chest.
Somewhere deeper in the facility, a distant klaxon chirped once—just once—then cut off, as if the building itself had second‑guessed the alarm.Her fingers tightened around the shard pieces, nails scraping against their jagged edges, the twin fragments grinding together with a faint, electric hiss that traveled up her wrists. Memories of Elias surged—his dry laugh during dawn drills, the crooked grin whenever she bungled a system prompt, the resigned warmth in his final words: There’s very few people I’d trust with her. You’re one of them.
Pressure built behind her eyes, heat blooming until vision blurred, and with it came the image of his fading form in the liminal realm—muscle turning translucent, blood at the corner of his mouth turning black as it dried.
She’d failed him—failed to stop the reckless burst of self‑sacrifice, failed to save him from dissolving into that cold light—and the realization lodged like a stone under her sternum, heavy and immovable.
Each heartbeat felt delayed, as though her body waited for permission to continue without him; the ward’s overhead LEDs dimmed in and out with her pulse, casting shifting shadows that made it look as if empty chairs beside each bed were quietly filling with ghosts.