2024-06-01 04:02:19
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176 - Back In Country A
Adams woke to the sound of traffic.Traffic. Car horns blaring in uneven impatience. An engine coughing somewhere nearby. Voices arguing faintly in a language that felt suddenly, painfully familiar.He sucked in a sharp breath and immediately regretted it.Pain flared through his chest, real pain, raw and unfiltered. His ribs ached. His throat burned. His head throbbed with the dull insistence of a body that had limits again.He was lying on concrete.Rough and cold. Adams forced his eyes open. Grey sky and overcast. Smog hanging low in the air. A cracked sidewalk beside a half-finished building, rebar jutting out like exposed bone. Faded posters peeling from a wall across the street.Country A.His heart began to race.“No way!!!,” he whispered.He pushed himself up, slowly, clumsily, and nearly collapsed again when his legs shook beneath him.There was no strength to catch himself. No system adjusting balance. No invisible force compensating.Just him. Human!!!“Adams!!”Erica’s
175 - She Wished He Died: An End To All Madness X
The scream of the system was no longer contained.It tore through Kogi like a living thing, a soundless shriek that bent structures, twisted gravity, and peeled the sky apart layer by layer. The ground beneath them fractured into geometric plates, rising and falling as if the world itself was breathing its last, uneven breaths.Elizabeth staggered, not from weakness, but from feedback.The system resisted her.“No,” she said sharply, extending both hands. Symbols ignited in the air, vast arrays of code and alchemical constructs unfolding at once. “Stabilize. Anchor to Primary Subject.”The world lurched.Adams felt it then, the pull.Not temptation. Not persuasion.A hook.Something deep within him responded, an old reflex the system had etched into his bones long before he could speak. Power surged toward him, trying to re-seat itself, to crown him whether he consented or not.His knees buckled.Erica screamed his name as he collapsed forward, hands digging into the broken ground.
174 - Afraid IX
The presence announced itself without sound.No ripple. No flare of power. No distortion of space.It was simply there. Adams felt it before he saw it, an old gravity pulling at something buried deep in his chest, something that had once answered to hope. The system reacted late, hesitantly, as though unsure whether it was allowed to acknowledge what had entered its domain.Elizabeth stiffened.That alone told Adams everything.From the fractured air ahead of them, a figure emerged, not formed by light or summoned by code, but walking, as though he had always existed just beyond sight and had merely stepped forward.Lucas.Older than the man Adams remembered. Thinner. The arrogance he once wore so easily had eroded into something rawer, almost desperate. His hair was streaked with grey now, his eyes ringed with exhaustion that no power could erase.“Adams,” Lucas said, voice cracking.The sound of his name from that mouth hit harder than any blow Elizabeth had dealt.Erica inhaled sha
173 - Lucas's Arrival VIII
The world bent as if the weight of everything Elizabeth had hidden finally warped the very reality supporting it. The air itself felt stretched thin, trembling between what was true and what had been forced to appear true.The backlash of memories did not rush; it flooded, thick and choking.Erica was the first to fall.Her scream carved through the heavy air like a knife. Her knees slammed against the ground, her fingers digging into the soil as if she could anchor herself to something, anything, before the memories ripped her away again. Her breath came in violent bursts.“Stop, stop, please stop, ” she sobbed.But she wasn’t speaking to Elizabeth.She was speaking to the shadows slamming into her mind.White walls. Stainless steel floors. A thin blue light flickering above a surgical table. Someone holding her down, no, not someone. A machine. A metal restraint that tightened every time she tried to lift her head.Voices. Detached. Clinical.“She retains too much empathy.”“Does sh
173 - Must Choose Something
The memories did not arrive gently. They tore through the room like shrapnel.Aleric screamed first. He dropped to her knees, hands clawing at his temples as images slammed into his mind, white ceilings, blinding lights, voices layered over each other, arguing in tones stripped of empathy.Subject E-04 shows excessive emotional retention.Empathy remains high. Terminate iteration.“No, no, no, ” Aleric sobbed, rocking back and forth. “I was there. I was there before. I remember the glass… I remember begging.”Lorenzo staggered backward, colliding with Baxter as his own memories surfaced.Cold restraints. Numbers carved into steel. A voice, Elizabeth’s voice, younger but unmistakable.Obedience is not submission. Obedience is alignment.“I couldn’t do it,” Lorenzo whispered hoarsely. “You wanted me to follow without question. To stop thinking. I kept asking why.”Elizabeth inclined her head, acknowledging a correct answer.“And that,” she said calmly, “was your failure.”Baxter’s hands
172 - Failed Iterations VII
The silence after Adams’ refusal did not break.The air around them thickened, compressing until even breathing felt like resistance. Kogi’s sky, once vast and burning with artificial light, stuttered, as though reality itself had blinked and forgotten what it was supposed to be.Elizabeth stood very still.Her smile was gone.“So,” she said softly, “you choose extinction.”Adams did not answer. He could feel it now, something tightening inside his chest, not pain exactly, but pressure, like the system was pressing a thumb against his spine, waiting to see if he would bend.Elizabeth raised her hand.“Great! Be ready for whatever comes next for you. Don't say I didn't give you a choice.” Something invisible slammed into Adams and hurled him backward. He crashed into the fractured ground, pain detonating through his ribs.ADAMS!!The others shouted, Erica’s voice, Lorenzo’s, but the sound warped, stretched thin, as if reality could no longer agree on how sound should travel.Elizabeth
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