Chapter 211: A Brittled Past
"They’re creatures that are very much alive... just infected to carry a hunger I never understood."
He paused, not from uncertainty, but from memory. His silver eyes tracked the curve of the black screen behind Elias, not looking at the present—remembering something buried far deeper.
"It isn’t decay," he went on. "It’s subtraction. The virus hollows things out. Leaves the surface. Deletes the context. All that remains is the instinct to consume. Not food. Not life. Just motion and replication."
The red veins along his arms lit brighter, glowing faintly beneath his pale skin.
"It would be catastrophic if one of us—one of the Twelve—were ever infected by it," he said, slower now.
"The results aren’t something I’ve ever wanted to see. So I’ve stayed away. All of us did."
He turned slightly, his eyes flicking toward the distant hallway they’d come from.
"I didn’t always fight the others," he admitted. "There was a time we built together. Shaped systems. Formed the scaffold of what the multiverse runs on now. But once they began stitching power from fragments of collapsing souls... once they used entire races as test beds for shard refinement..."
He stopped speaking.
He didn’t need to finish it.
Elias’s glow pulsed again, steadier than before. It didn’t brighten—but it stabilized. Even beneath the weight of Kikaru’s absence and Dot’s capture, the resolve in him had taken shape. He wasn’t floating anymore.