Time became a fractured, broken thing.
The spear of pure, white light, a weapon of absolute order and deletion, shot across the basin. Its target was clear. Elara and Miyuri, the two most critical and vulnerable members of our party, were directly in its path. They were defenseless, their focus entirely on the beacon that represented our only hope.
I was too far away. Erina was still recovering, pushing herself to her feet. We were helpless spectators to the final, inevitable conclusion.
Then, a flicker of shadow.
It wasn't a leap of heroism. It wasn't a desperate, shouting dive. It was a movement of impossible speed and precision, the kind of movement only a master scout could make. Silas, who had been on the far flank, exploded into motion. In the space between one heartbeat and the next, he had crossed the entire basin, a dark blur of motion against the grey landscape.
He didn't try to block it. He didn't try to deflect it. He simply… intercepted it. He placed his own body directly in the path of the oncoming annihilation, his arms spread wide, his back to the two women he was now shielding. It was a final, silent, tactical decision. The last duty of a protector.
There was no deafening explosion. No clang of armor. There was only a soft, hissing sound and a blinding flash of white light.
The spear struck Silas square in the chest.
But it didn't pierce him in the way a normal weapon would. It didn't send him flying. The light simply… consumed him. For a fraction of a second, his entire body was a silhouette against the impossibly bright energy. And then the light was gone, and so was a part of him.
A perfect, circular hole, as wide as my head, now existed where his chest had been. There was no blood, no gore. The edges of the wound were cauterized with a faint, shimmering light. It was a clean, perfect deletion. It had simply erased him from existence.
He stood there for a long, silent moment, a statue with a gaping hole of nothingness punched through its center. His face, which I could just barely see, held a look of faint, final surprise. Then, without a sound, without a last word or a dying groan, he crumpled. He fell to the obsidian ground, a discarded puppet whose strings had been irrevocably cut.
The world went silent.
"Silas!"
Erina's voice was a raw, broken scream of pure denial. Miyuri, her task forgotten, had scrambled backward, her hands covering her mouth, her eyes wide with uncomprehending horror. Elara stood frozen, her violet eyes fixed on Silas's still form, her face a pale, shattered mask.
But I… I felt nothing. My mind simply refused to process the data. It was impossible. This wasn't real. It couldn't be. Summons… summons could be re-summoned, right? That's how it worked in the games. It was just data. He would respawn. There would be a timer, a mana cost, and the Builder would bring him back.
But this wasn't a game.
The cold, hard reality crashed down on me, shattering my denial into a million tiny, razor-sharp pieces. I remembered the cynical smirk he'd given me when I got my Gold card. I remembered his terrible, unsolicited opinions in the wasteland. I remembered him acknowledging my presence at the dinner table. He wasn't just a summon, a collection of code. He was Silas. He was my teammate. He was my friend.
And that thing, that silent, silver knight… it had just murdered him.
A cold, black fire ignited in the pit of my stomach. It wasn't the hot, explosive anger I had felt during my trial. This was a deeper, more profound rage. A hatred so pure and absolute it felt like it was freezing me from the inside out. I looked at the Fallen Founder. It stood there, its featureless faceplate turned toward us, its silent vigil unbroken. A hero? A protector of order? No. That wasn't a hero. It was a monster wearing a hero's skin. An unthinking, unfeeling program that had just deleted my friend for the crime of protecting his own.
My body was screaming in protest. My mana was gone. My muscles ached. I was an empty shell. But the cold fire in my soul didn't care.
With a trembling hand, I reached into my pouch. My fingers closed around the smooth, spherical shape of the Lineage Orb. It felt warm, a familiar, pulsing heat against my cold skin.
"You," I whispered, my voice a low, guttural rasp that didn't sound like my own. I wasn't speaking to the Founder. I was speaking to the orb in my hand.
I staggered to my feet, my gaze locked on the silver knight. I held the orb up, the faint, ominous glow illuminating my face.
"You're one of them, aren't you?" I snarled at the orb. "The echo of a Founder. The last remnant of a hero who fell."
The orb pulsed, a steady, rhythmic beat against my palm, like a dormant heart.
"He was our friend," I choked out, the rage and grief warring within me. "And that thing… that thing killed him. It calls itself a protector of order, a hero. Is that what you were? Is this what you become?"
My grip on the orb tightened until my knuckles were white.
"If you are what they say you are," I roared, my voice breaking, "the last echo of a Founder's will… then listen to me! He was one of us! He died protecting us! And I am too weak to avenge him!"
The cold fire in my gut surged, and I poured all of it, all my rage, all my grief, all my desperate, helpless fury, into the orb.
"I don't want your power to test it. I don't want it to learn from it. I want it all! Now! Give me your strength! Give me your rage! Give me everything you were, so I can destroy everything that thing is!"
My plea was a prayer, a demand, a desperate bargain with a dead hero's soul.
And for the first time, the orb answered.
It wasn't a pulse. It was an explosion. An agonizing fire erupted in my hand, racing up my arm and flooding my entire body. It was a pain so immense, so overwhelming, that it brought me to my knees. The orb's light turned from a soft glow to a blinding, furious red. It was dissolving, melting into my very being.
I screamed, a raw, inhuman sound of pure agony. Black, jagged lines, like corrupted data-veins, spread out from my hand, crawling up my neck and across my face. My vision was awash with a torrent of chaotic information—fragmented memories of ancient battles, the phantom pain of a death I had never experienced, and a bottomless well of old, forgotten rage.
The power was terrifying. It was tearing me apart, rewriting my very code from the inside out. But in the heart of that pain, there was strength. A vast, primal, and unbelievably powerful strength.
I pushed myself back to my feet, my body trembling, not from weakness, but from the sheer, unrestrained power that was now thrumming through my veins. The air around me crackled with black and red energy.
I looked at the Fallen Founder. It had turned its full attention back to me, its silver form now seeming less like a god and more like a target.
The scream that tore from my throat was not entirely my own. It was the howl of a fallen hero, a grieving friend, and a glitched player who had just been pushed far, far beyond his limits. And it was a promise of the vengeance that was about to come.