Chapter 58: The Mortal’s Gambit & The Papercut Prophet
Agony was a white-hot brand searing Nishanth’s side with every ragged breath. The dead coin in his hand felt like a tombstone. Across the transformed plaza, Zara was a statue of defiance and corruption, Stapler Prime’s targeting photoreceptor burning a hole in the air mere feet from her.
Tabitha’s roars had turned to furious, impotent thrashing beneath her paperclip prison. Lilith was a shadow against the lined-paper sky, her eyes wide with horror.
Mortal. Broke. Useless. The words hammered in his skull, echoes of Lilith’s pronouncement. But beneath the terror, beneath the crushing weight of his newfound fragility, a spark ignited. Not divinity.
Something older, messier, infinitely more human: spite. Mammon had broken him. Stapler Prime sought to erase him. They both saw him as obsolete, inefficient, clutter.
His gaze locked onto Stapler Prime’s central hinge – a complex junction of chromed plates near its ’waist,’ where the upper torso met the lower assembly. A vulnerability? Or just a hope born of desperation? It didn’t matter.
Nishanth pushed himself off the med-cot, the world tilting violently. Pain screamed through his ribs, a jagged counterpoint to the dry, mechanical clatter of the Bureau’s new master. He stumbled, catching himself on a folded-rubble filing cabinet, the sharp edge biting into his palm – another new, unwelcome sensation.
"You want efficiency?" Nishanth rasped, his voice raw but carrying across the unnaturally quiet battlefield. Stapler Prime’s photoreceptor flickered fractionally towards him, a dismissive acknowledgment of insignificant biomass.
Zara’s head twitched, a flicker of her own consciousness beneath Mammon’s smothering presence. "You think folding reality into a memo solves anything? Let me show you what real inefficiency looks like."
He forced his legs to move, each step an exercise in agony and willpower. He wasn’t charging; he was lurching, a broken puppet held together by sheer, bloody-minded obstinacy.
Stapler Prime’s arm remained trained on Zara, processing this minor distraction. Drones buzzed nearby, scanning, categorizing: Sentient Organism: Designation Nishanth (Former Divinity). Status: Critically Injured, Low Threat Potential.
Nishanth reached the base of the towering chrome entity. He looked up, dwarfed, insignificant. The cold weight of the inert copper coin was the only thing in his world. Last spark. Last gamble. Last everything. He drew back his arm, ignoring the shriek from his ribs, and with a guttural cry born of pain, fury, and utter human recklessness, he jammed the coin deep into the complex hinge mechanism of Stapler Prime.