The alarms didn't just ring; they shrieked in a dissonant, frantic frequency that made the glass walls of our suite vibrate.
On the monitor, the figure was a blur of violence.
She moved with a grace that wasn't human. It was kinetic poetry written in blood. Every time a Black Archive security team tried to corner her, she didn't just fight them—she unraveled them. She was using a Shard power I hadn't seen before: the ability to turn air into solid, jagged glass.
Haneul was frozen, her face pressed against the monitor.
"Yuna..." she whispered.
The name sounded like a prayer and a sob.
"She was supposed to be dead," Haneul said, her voice cracking. "Kwon told me the experiment failed. He told me her body rejected the Shard and turned to ash."
"He lied," I said.
I felt the Insight Shard in my chest throbbing. It wasn't hungry this time. It was angry. It felt a rival.
*The Mirror...*
The voice in my head was louder than the alarms.
*The one who reflects the King... but cannot hold the light.*
"We have to go," Lina said, grabbing her bag of tools. "The lockdown is active, but if that's Haneul's sister, she's headed straight for the central core. That's where the Project Eidolon labs are. That's where the exit is."
I looked at the door. It was three inches of reinforced titanium.
"Akira, the door is locked from the outside," Lina reminded me. "We need a—"
I didn't let her finish.
I walked to the door and placed my hand on the cold metal.
I didn't think about 'pushing'. I thought about 'erasing'.
The violet light surged from my palm. It didn't explode. It didn't melt the metal.
The titanium simply turned into fine, black sand. It poured onto the floor in a silent heap.
I looked at my hand. My fingers were starting to look like frosted glass.
"Come on," I said.
***
The hallways of the Black Archive were a slaughterhouse.
Bodies in matte-black armor were strewn across the white floors. They hadn't been shot or stabbed. They had been impaled by shards of translucent glass that sprouted from the walls, the ceiling, and even their own equipment.
The air was cold. Not industrial cold—supernatural cold.
Haneul was running ahead of us, her eyes wide, searching for the ghost of the sister she thought she had lost.
"Haneul, wait!" I called out.
She didn't stop.
We rounded a corner and came to a massive, circular atrium. In the center, a platform was suspended over a deep pit that seemed to go down forever.
Standing on that platform was a girl.
She looked barely sixteen. Her hair was stark white, blowing in a wind that didn't exist. She wore a simple white gown that was soaked in crimson. Her eyes... they weren't eyes anymore. They were two hollow craters filled with swirling violet smoke.
"Yuna?" Haneul stopped at the edge of the bridge.
The girl turned.
When she saw Haneul, the glass shards growing from the walls shattered simultaneously.
"Haneul... unnie?"
The voice was tiny. It sounded like a child lost in a dark forest.
"It's me, Yuna! I'm here!" Haneul took a step forward, her hand outstretched.
"Stay... back..." Yuna choked out.
Her body jerked. A jagged spire of glass erupted from her shoulder, tearing through her skin. She didn't even flinch.
"The Director... he's inside..." Yuna whispered. "He's in my head, Haneul. He's using the pulse... I can't... stop..."
Suddenly, a voice boomed from the speakers above.
"A touching reunion," Director Kwon's voice said. He sounded bored. "But premature. Vessel 02—The Queen—is currently undergoing a forced resonance synchronization."
"Kwon, let her go!" Haneul screamed at the ceiling.
"I can't, Miss Seo. She is the catalyst. To stabilize Akira, I need a counter-weight. The King needs a Queen to share the burden of the Broken God's memory. If I don't link them now, they will both burn out within the hour."
"I won't let you touch him!" Haneul shouted.
"You won't have a choice," Kwon said.
Below the platform, a series of massive brass rings began to spin. They were covered in ancient runes—the same ones I had seen in my vision of the Fracture.
A hum began to fill the room.
It was the same sound that had been in my head back in Sector 4. But it was a thousand times louder.
I felt my feet leave the ground.
*No...*
I fought it. I tried to anchor myself, but the rings were pulling the violet light out of my skin.
Across the atrium, Yuna began to scream.
Arcs of violet lightning jumped between us, bridging the gap.
Every time a bolt hit me, I saw a flash of her life.
I saw her in a laboratory. I saw Kwon smiling at her while he injected a Shard into her spine. I saw her crying for Haneul, calling for a sister who never came.
The pain was unbearable. It felt like our souls were being put into a blender.
"Akira! Resist it!" Lina was at a terminal, her fingers flying. "He's trying to merge your consciousnesses! If he succeeds, you'll both lose your individuality! You'll become a single, hive-mind entity!"
*Accept...*
The voice in my head was no longer just the Shard. It was Yuna's voice too.
*It's so lonely... Akira... help me... be with me...*
I looked at Yuna. Through the violet storm, I could see her reaching out.
She wasn't a monster. She was a victim.
But if I gave in, Haneul would lose her sister forever. And I would lose whatever was left of Akira Tsukishiro.
"I... can't..." I wheezed.
I looked down at the pit.
The map. The message from Elias.
**PROJECT EIDOLON.**
It was directly beneath us.
"Lina!" I shouted. "The bridge! Blow the support!"
"What? You'll fall!"
"Just do it!"
Lina didn't hesitate. She pulled a small explosive charge from her bag—the one she'd been saving for an emergency—and threw it at the base of the suspension bridge.
The explosion was deafening.
The bridge groaned and snapped.
The platform tilted sharply.
The resonance link broke.
I fell.
I saw Haneul's terrified face as I plummeted into the darkness. I saw Yuna reaching out as the glass spires around her began to crumble.
And then, I hit the water.
It wasn't water. It was a thick, viscous fluid that smelled of chemicals and old blood.
I sank deep into the dark.
*Empty...*
The voice was fading.
*So... very... empty...*
I closed my eyes, letting the darkness take me.
***
I woke up on a cold stone floor.
The air was silent. No alarms. No screaming.
The only sound was the steady *drip... drip... drip...* of water somewhere in the distance.
I sat up, my head spinning. My chest felt like it had been hollowed out with a hot spoon.
The violet light under my skin was dim, flickering like a dying candle.
"You're late, Akira."
The voice was calm. It was the same voice I had heard in my vision.
The voice of the man who broke the God.
I looked up.
A man was sitting at a wooden desk in the middle of a room filled with books. Real books. Paper and leather. He was wearing a simple grey sweater and reading a thick volume by the light of a single candle.
He looked... normal.
Too normal.
"Elias?" I whispered.
The man closed the book and looked at me. His eyes weren't gold. They weren't violet. They were a deep, weary brown.
"Some call me that," he said. "Others call me the Architect. The Church calls me the Great Heretic. But you... you can call me Elias."
He stood up and walked toward me. He didn't have the predatory grace of Haneul or the cold ambition of Kwon. He walked with the heavy tread of a man who had carried the world on his shoulders for far too long.
"Where am I?" I asked, struggling to stand.
"The basement of the Archive," Elias said. "Project Eidolon. Director Kwon thinks he's building a God here. He doesn't realize he's just building a tomb."
He gestured to the shadows behind him.
I looked, and my heart—or the space where it used to be—froze.
Hundreds of glass tubes lined the walls.
Inside each tube was a body.
They weren't dead. They were suspended in that same violet fluid.
"Who are they?"
"The failures," Elias said softly. "The ones whose names were eaten. The ones whose lives were consumed to create the Apex Core you have inside you."
He stopped in front of me.
"Kwon gave you a tracker, Akira. He's currently pinpointing your location. He'll be here in ten minutes."
"Then we have to go!" I said, reaching for his arm.
Elias didn't move.
"There is nowhere to go, Akira. The world is a broken machine. You can't run from the pieces."
He looked into my eyes, and for a moment, I saw it.
The Fracture.
I saw the moment he broke the God.
It wasn't an act of rebellion. It was an act of mercy.
The God was suffering. It was too big for existence. It was tearing reality apart just by being.
"Why did the Shard choose me?" I asked.
"It didn't," Elias said. "You chose it. When you broke that cylinder in the warehouse, you didn't do it out of fear. You did it because you wanted to prove you had a choice."
He reached out and placed a hand on my chest.
His touch was warm.
"The Insight Shard is the memory of the God's heart," Elias whispered. "It's the part that loved humanity. That's why it's eating you, Akira. It's trying to find a way to love again through your eyes. But it doesn't know how to do that without destroying the vessel."
"Can you fix it?"
Elias smiled sadly.
"I can give you a choice. One final choice."
He walked back to his desk and picked up a small, iron key.
"You can stay here. Let Kwon take you. He will merge you with the girl. You will become a stable God. You will bring peace to the Divide. But you will no longer be Akira. You will be a beautiful, hollow statue."
"And the other choice?"
Elias pointed to a heavy wooden door at the back of the room.
"Beyond that door is the Forbidden Zone. Not the slums. The true Zone. The place where the God's remains are still screaming. If you go there, the Insight Shard will lead you to the 'Grave'. You can find the pieces to kill the God once and for all."
"But I'll die," I said.
"Yes," Elias said. "But you will die as a man. Not as a vessel."
Suddenly, the ceiling above us shook.
Explosions.
Kwon's forces were breaking through.
"Decide, Akira," Elias said, his voice fading as the room began to fill with smoke.
I looked at the tubes of failed Vessels. I thought of Yuna, crying in her glass prison. I thought of Haneul, losing her memories bit by bit.
I took the key.
"I'm not a God," I said.
I walked toward the wooden door.
But as I reached for the handle, a hand grabbed my shoulder.
I spun around.
It wasn't Elias.
It was Haneul. She was covered in blood, her eyes wild.
"Akira! Don't listen to him!" she screamed.
She pointed her blade at Elias, who was still sitting calmly at his desk.
"That's not Elias Vorn!" she yelled.
I looked at the man in the grey sweater.
He didn't change. He didn't move.
"Then who is he?" I asked.
Haneul's voice trembled with a terror I had never heard before.
"He's the Shard," she whispered. "The Insight Shard has manifested. You're not talking to a man, Akira. You're talking to your own hallucination."
I looked back at the desk.
The books were gone. The candle was gone.
Elias was gone.
There was only a pile of dust and a single, violet eye floating in the air, watching me.
The voice in my head laughed.
*We are... so close... Akira.*
The wooden door at the back of the room began to bleed.
"Run," the voice whispered.
But I didn't know who was telling me to run anymore.
The Shard... or what was left of me?
The room exploded.
White robes flooded the chamber.
The High Priestess had arrived.
And she wasn't looking at me.
She was looking at the floating violet eye.
"Father?" she whispered, falling to her knees.
The eye blinked.
And the world turned to glass.