CHAPTER 99 – Gu Yanzhou at the Edge of Death
While the three champions fought,Chaos, Light, and Heroism clashing against cold Order,Gu Yanzhou struggled just to stay conscious.
The Root Protagonist's initial pressure, though blocked by Xiao Xi, had weakened his structural integrity to the breaking point.
His body flickered uncontrollably, like a bad connection.
His legs faded completely, reduced to a ghost-like outline.
His arms blurred in and out of existence, the sound of static and deletion becoming a deafening roar in his ears.
Every second was an agonizing decision to exist.
Parts of him vanished, and only the intense, persistent pull of Xiao Xi's Chaos threads kept him from being sucked into the void.
It felt like a lifeline, thin and strained, holding him over a bottomless abyss.
He could barely lift his head to follow the dizzying fight.
"Xiao… Xi…" he rasped, his voice barely a whisper of code.
He watched her fight,
Wild, brilliant, terrifying, beautiful.
She was everything he love, strength, passion, and fierce, protective defiance.
He wanted to stand at her side.
Wanted to protect her.
Wanted to be the shield she didn't need but deserved.
But his body crumpled each time he tried to move, the digital snow of deletion pouring from his core.
His voice cracked, choked by code failure.
"I… can't stay like this… I'm dissolving."
He felt the cold, empty void tugging at him, a massive, irresistible gravitational pull.
Dragging him.
Pulling him away from her, from existence.
He whispered her name again, the desperation of a final, breaking heart.
"Xiao Xi… I'm sorry… I can't,
But her voice, laced with the immense power of the Root, rang through the roaring chaos of the battlefield, a command that tore through the void itself:
"Yanzhou!"
She risked a second of distraction, turning her head just slightly.
Chaos blazed around her, but her eyes were full of a fierce, desperate love that saw only him.
"DON'T LET GO.
FIGHT THE CODE.
COME BACK TO ME!"
Her command tore through the static and the pain.
It wasn't just a plea; it was a cosmic directive.
His fading heart,the heart she had created by giving him a real narrative,beat once,
twice,
harder.
He clenched his hands, forcing the dissolving pixels back together through sheer, raw, emotional will.
His love was a refusal to fade.
"I… won't… leave you.
I refuse to be deleted."
The Root Protagonist, momentarily deflecting a joint strike from Shen and Ling, observed Gu with mild, clinical interest.
"His emotional resonance is unusually strong.
An error in the coding of his initial attachment."
Xiao Xi snarled, her voice a low, dangerous rumble:
"He doesn't belong to you! He belongs to me!"
Her chaos surged so violently that the air itself distorted, the entire frozen scene beginning to tremble under the force of her rage.
Gu's breath caught, a shuddering gasp of life and pain.
"…I love her," he whispered, the declaration a vow of existence.
"That's why I won't fade.
My purpose is her."
And the world seemed to hear him, the violet threads around his body solidifying, fighting the deletion with the strength of a narrative truth.
He was alive, because he was loved.