The silence that followed wasn’t peace. It was recoil.The chamber held its breath as the last echoes of power crawled back into the walls.
The girl lay motionless—limbs slack, eyes fluttering. Around her, the air shimmered with heat that had no fire.Not anymore.
The Last Light moved first.He didn’t check for wounds—only for breath.She had it. Barely.
He rose, blade still slick in his grip, and turned to the others.
They stared not at her—but at him.As if he was the one who cracked the world open.
“Move,” he said.
No one argued.
They passed the corpse of the failed Reign experiment without a word.Its frame twitched once, nerves misfiring post-mortem, as if still trying to
remember how to kill.No one dared look long.
The tunnel narrowed again—walls pressed tighter now, shaped by decades of flood and collapse.Each step echoed with the weight of the thing they
couldn’t name.Not the monster. Not the Reign.The girl.
She woke hours later, carried over the Last Light’s shoulder, her voice barely a whisper.“I dreamt in fire.”
He didn’t respond. He didn’t know how.
The descent grew crueler.
They passed a shattered stairwell, its stone steps cracked like broken teeth.The wounded were fewer now—one had slipped into silence hours before.
Another had simply fallen behind. No one called his name.
There was no strength left for grief.
The Hollow Guard girl walked under her own power again, fragile but upright.She spoke rarely. When she did, her voice was a ghost.The brand on her
throat pulsed—not just with heat, but with memory.
She gently brushed her fingers against the wall.Quickly she winced and recoiled.
“What did you see?” the Last Light asked.
She shook her head. “It wasn’t a memory of mine.”A short pause.“It was yours.”
The Last Light demanded they pick up the speed.
He hadn’t realized yet—only three remained.
They passed a stretch of tunnel where the walls changed. Subtle things. A handprint that hadn’t been there before. A glyph that pulsed once, then faded.
The water beneath their boots no longer rippled—just froze in place, mid-step, like time had forgotten it was meant to move.
One of them whispered, “We’ve been here before.”
The Last Light didn’t respond. Because he thought it too.
And for a flicker of a moment, he saw something impossible—himself, ahead in the dark, turning the corner, blade drawn, vanishing.
Just a glitch. Just a blink.
But it made him grip his weapon harder.
They moved faster—but the tunnel seemed to resist them. The air grew heavier, fouler. Shadows clung longer than they should have. Sounds echoed from
behind them—soft, distorted footsteps that didn’t match their pace.
Once, Echo stopped. Her voice was barely audible.
“There were five of us.”
The Last Light glanced over his shoulder.
“Where are the others?”
No one had enough energy to say.
She shook her head slowly. “No. I mean before. I remember four faces I’ve never seen.”
"We keep moving!" he demanded.
After some time they finally reached the old Reign substation—a corpse of industry buried in the dark. Its ribs hung twisted with exposed cabling, consoles
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long dead and fused with rust and bone-dust. The air reeked of battery acid and rot, thick with the stink of mold-slick metal and old blood burned dry on circuit boards.
But somewhere, barely, a twitch of dying current still whispered through the veins of wire—just enough to know the place wasn't fully dead. Not yet.
The Last Light checked the system core—dead. No signals. No escape routes. Just static and ruin.
The girl hovered near the edge of the room, staring at something only she could see.
"It’s close," she whispered. "Whatever it is... it’s waiting."
A tremor shuddered through the floor.
The survivors looked to the Last Light.
He listened.
Far off—metal against stone. Heavy. Rhythmic. Deliberate.
Not a patrol. Not a crawler.
Something worse.
The Last Light turned to the girl and handed her the core.
“If I fall—you carry it. You finish what he died for.”
She stared at him, voice unsteady. “Do you know what I am?”
He met her gaze. “I know what they tried to make you. That’s not the same thing.”
Then he turned to the others.“This is where we hold.”
They nodded. Not soldiers. Not heroes.Just the last sparks still standing in the dark.
The girl stepped forward.
Her voice didn’t tremble this time.
“I don’t know who I am.”
The Last Light gave a single nod.
“Then let’s find out.”
They had come here to make their last stand. And yet—at the far end of the substation, maybe an old evac shaft, half-collapsed and waterlogged—they finally
glimpsed escape.
Relief flickered.
Then, it manifested.
Not burst in. Manifested.
A thing with no face, only a smeared shimmer where one should be. Its form didn’t move; reality around it bent. Glitched. Stone pixelated. Sound looped.
A survivor turned to run—and his body split mid-motion, not torn—rewritten. Unraveled like corrupted code.
The monster didn't attack.It corrupted memory.
The deaths were fast. Wrong. Like physics gave up.Like the world couldn’t remember how they were supposed to die.
The third survivor panicked. He bolted toward the illusion of escape.
Reality unspooled him mid-motion—gone before the scream left his lungs.
The other survivor didn’t just run—he screamed and turned, fists swinging at nothing. There was no weapon in his grip, only desperation. He stumbled backward, his
foot catching on warped flooring. For a breath, he hovered mid-fall—suspended like corrupted data—then he folded inward, spine and sinew collapsing like fragmented code.
He died not with a scream, but with a silence that erased him.
Echo didn’t move. The world bent, and still she stood—as if she’d been waiting for this exact ending.
The Last Light rushed to engage—but the blade passed through too many versions of the creature at once. No impact. No anchor. Like trying to strike a thought.
Only Echo remained, unmoving. And in that impossible presence, her body began to flicker—not like it was dying, but like it was aligning.
Not with the creature but with the memory of it.
Her skin shimmered. Her brand pulsed. Around her, fragments of false timelines bled through—faces, names, scenes that never happened, yet felt real.
The monster leaned closer.
Then it struck.
Not with force, but with collapse. The world cracked sideways. Time hiccupped. The Last Light raised his blade—and was already too late.
A blow like a corrupted memory slammed into him, not breaking bones but unraveling coherence. His mind skipped. His body hit the wall. Blood ran cold and thick,
armor cracked down the middle.
He staggered up again—just long enough to meet the second hit.
This one was real.
It tore him off the floor and hurled him into the wreckage of the substation. Metal buckled. Cables snapped. He lay there, broken, the world smeared and flickering
around the edges.
The creature advanced, its form still unstable, its presence rewriting reality around every step.
Echo screamed.
It wasn't fear. It was ignition.
Her brand erupted in white fire—no heat, just memory. The rot of the past, the weight of forgotten names, all rising like ash.
A ring of fractured timelines spun outward from her—visions and echoes that didn’t belong here. The chamber filled with the pressure of unreal history.
And then the surge hit.
A burst of raw, absolute memory. Not recalled. Not learned. Created.
It threw the Last Light like a ragdoll across the room.
The creature reeled, its scream bent backward, like a glitch choking on its own code. It wasn’t just injured.
It was overwritten.
Echo stood at the center of it all, burning with every life that never was.
She collapsed again. The light in her brand sputtered, then dimmed. Her body folded slowly to the ground, smoke rising from her skin like memory still burning off.
The Last Light groaned. Broken. Bleeding. Every motion was fire beneath his ribs. But he dragged himself across the rubble, inch by inch, toward the crater she left behind.
He reached her. Collapsed beside her.
Her eyes fluttered open just once.
And then, in a voice scorched raw by power too ancient to hold:
“They broke me. In death, find me. Together, we burn the world.”
Then silence.
The Last Light froze.
That oath—those exact words—cut deeper than any wound. His breath caught, his blood colder than the stone beneath them.
He looked down at her face, at the flickering brand still dim on her skin.
"How do you know that?" he rasped. Not a question. A demand pulled from the grave.
But Echo was already gone again.
Unconscious. Still.
He stayed there, broken and breathless, watching the faint rise and fall of her chest. The oath still echoed in his skull. Not just remembered— Returned.
And beneath the blood and cracked bone, something deep inside him flickered.
Not pain. Not fear.
Something older.
Something waking.
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