The world narrowed to the scream of the klaxon and the desperate hope in Valerius's eyes. The theoretical, the controlled experiments, the cold calculations—it all vanished, replaced by the raw, screaming need of the present. A Grave-Titan. The enclave's death knell.
"Can you do it?" Valerius repeated, his voice stripped bare.
Leo didn't answer with words. He simply turned and ran, pushing past the Captain, his body moving on an instinct that bypassed his terror. Valerius was right behind him, barking orders into his comms, clearing a path.
They burst out of the lab complex and into chaos. The sky above the main barrier wall was a swirling vortex of bruised purple and sickly green. A shape was forming within it, colossal, composed of shifting earth, twisted rebar, and the screaming, condensed faces of the dead. Its mere presence pressed down on the mind, a psychic weight that promised oblivion. The barrier generators were whining, their light flickering erratically.
They reached the command post at the wall's base. Kaelen and Rourke were there, their faces pale under the hellish light. The air crackled with discharged energy and sheer panic.
"The barrier won't hold!" an engineer screamed. "It's feeding on our defensive fire!"
Valerius grabbed Leo's arm, his grip like iron. "The wall, O'Connor! You have to hit it before it fully materializes! A full-powered dispersion! Now!"
Leo looked up at the monstrosity. It was a thousand times larger than the Mimics. To use the same power he'd used in Gamma-9 here would be like using a pebble to try and stop a tidal wave. The cost would be astronomical. It would be suicide.
But he saw the faces of the soldiers on the wall. He saw the civilians huddled in the streets behind them. He saw Kaelen, her jaw set, ready to fight a battle she couldn't win.
There was no choice.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the chaos. He had to go beyond anything he'd ever attempted. He couldn't just multiply a skill. He had to multiply the very act of sacrifice. He had to channel not just a psychic skill, but his own life force, his sanity, his entire being.
He focused on the core of his talent, on the engine of the Hundredfold Application itself. He didn't target a skill. He targeted his own existence.
[Action Recognized: Psychic Self-Annihilation - Lv. 0]
[Hundredfold Application Activated.]
The world did not simply go white. It unmade itself.
He was no longer Leo O'Connor, a man standing on a wall. He was a concept. A law of reality being rewritten. He felt every memory, every thought, every fear and hope, being copied, stretched, and amplified a hundred times. He saw a hundred different lives flash before his eyes—a hundred childhoods, a hundred failures, a hundred quiet moments of happiness—all of them burning up as fuel.
He wasn't creating a wave or a blade. He was becoming a singularity of negation.
A point of absolute silence bloomed in front of him. It was not black, not white, but the absence of both. It was a hole in the real. It shot upward, a silent, expanding sphere of nothingness.
It touched the base of the Grave-Titan.
There was no explosion. There was erasure.
The colossal form of the Manifestation simply ceased to be. The screaming faces smoothed into silent oblivion. The swirling vortex in the sky snapped shut like a healed wound. The oppressive psychic weight vanished, leaving a shocking, deafening void in its place.
The sphere of nothingness dissipated, its work done. The barrier wall was scarred, a perfect, smooth hemisphere carved from its top, but it held.
On the parapet, Leo stood frozen for a single, eternal second. He had done it.
Then the cost was collected.
He did not fall. He unraveled.
A scream was torn from his throat, a raw, silent sound that contained a hundred voices. Blood poured from his nose, his ears, his eyes. He felt the fractures in his mind, the ones he'd been nursing for weeks, rip wide open. The hundred different Leos from the mirror—the monster, the soldier, the corpse—all surged forward at once, clamoring for control of a psyche that was no longer whole.
He collapsed, his body seizing, his consciousness fragmenting into a kaleidoscope of broken selves.
Valerius was at his side in an instant, not with concern, but with a frantic, assessing gaze. "Medic! Now! Keep him alive!"
Kaelen reached them first, skidding to her knees. She saw the blood, the uncontrolled tremors, the utter vacancy in Leo's eyes, which now seemed to flicker with different emotions—terror, rage, serenity—in the space of a heartbeat.
"What did you do to him?" she whispered, horror-struck, looking up at Valerius.
Valerius ignored her, barking into his comm. "The Grave-Titan is neutralized. The asset is critically compromised. Prep the secure medical wing. Maximum containment. He is now our single most important and volatile resource."
The word "resource" echoed in the sudden quiet. The threat was gone. The enclave was saved.
But as the medics rushed forward and loaded Leo's broken, twitching form onto a stretcher, Kaelen understood the true cost. Leo O'Connor was gone. In his place was something else. A shattered god, a living weapon broken by its own firing. And Valerius, the man who had pulled the trigger, was already planning how to pick up the pieces and forge something new from the wreckage.
The victory was absolute. The price was a soul.