Rating: MA 15+
The laboratory beneath the Sea of Glass was a cathedral to forgotten science.
Machinery lined the walls—bio-mechanical hybrids that blurred the distinction between organism and apparatus. Tanks filled with luminescent fluid, still glowing after centuries. Workbenches holding instruments whose purposes Sabaku could only guess at. And everywhere, equations carved into stone, painted on walls, etched into metal—the First Scientist's attempt to compress the mathematics of consciousness into something human minds could grasp.
Nahara moved through the space with reverence, mechanical fingers tracing circuits that still hummed with residual power. "This is intact. Completely intact. Most pre-Collapse sites are ruins, salvage, fragments. But this..." She activated a display panel, and holographic text appeared—ancient language mixed with mathematical notation. "This is pristine. Like he left yesterday intending to return."
Sabaku stood at the chamber's center, holding the crystalline sphere. It pulsed urgently now, responding to proximity to its origin point. The sun-core in his heart answered with its own rhythm, and the two pulses began to synchronize—sphere and core becoming one unified heartbeat.
"The door," he said, pointing to the carved portal at the far end. "It's responding to this." He approached, and the equations on the door's surface began to glow, reacting to the sphere's presence.
But before he could touch it, a sound echoed from above. Deep. Resonant. The sound of something massive moving through the shattered Sea of Glass.
Nahara's head snapped up. "That's not wind."
The sound came again—closer now. A breathing rhythm, but wrong. Wet. Labored. As if lungs were struggling with function they'd forgotten.
"We need to open this door," Sabaku said, urgency rising. "Whatever's up there—"
"Is coming for us." Nahara readied her weapon, positioning herself between Sabaku and the opening they'd fallen through. "Work fast."
Sabaku pressed the crystalline sphere against the door's surface. The equations shifted, rearranging themselves, and he felt knowledge flooding through him—not his knowledge, not Aru's, but the First Scientist's, compressed into the sphere and now unpacking directly into his consciousness.
The sun-core is not weapon, the knowledge whispered. Not sacrifice. It is bridge. Communication device. But activation requires—
The ceiling exploded inward.
Something massive crashed through, landing in the chamber with force that cracked the stone floor. Water that had collected in the upper levels cascaded down, and through the deluge emerged the creature.
It had been human once. Traces remained—the basic architecture of a body, suggestions of limbs and torso and head. But twisted beyond recognition. Its flesh was gray-white, desiccated yet somehow living, stretched over a frame that had grown too large for skin meant to contain it. Multiple faces pressed against the surface—mouths opening and closing silently, eyes blinking asynchronously. And at its center, where a heart should be, a glowing wound that pulsed with stolen light.
The Heart Eater. Nahara had mentioned it only in passing, a legend among scavengers. A creature that consumed souls, adding their consciousness to its own, growing larger with each feeding.
But this wasn't random monster. Sabaku recognized something in the way it moved, the tilt of its malformed head. A gesture he'd seen before, in institutional hallways, in Tokyo rain.
"Mrs. Yamamoto," he whispered.
The creature's multiple mouths formed his name—not spoken, but shaped silently, dozens of lips moving in unison. And behind those mouths, other faces pressed forward. Children's faces. Kenji. Yuki. Haruto. All the orphanage dead, their consciousness somehow absorbed, merged into this nightmare amalgamation.
Nahara fired. Energy beams struck the creature's torso, burning through desiccated flesh. But the wounds closed immediately, other flesh flowing in to fill gaps, faces rearranging across the surface like images on disturbed water.
"Physical damage doesn't work!" Nahara backed toward Sabaku. "It regenerates too fast!"
The Heart Eater advanced, and when it moved, the faces screamed—silent screams, mouths open in agony but producing no sound. Just visible horror, suffering without voice.
"How did it get here?" Sabaku demanded, unable to look away from those familiar faces twisted into alien arrangement. "She died in Tokyo. They all died—"
"The sun-core's radiation," Nahara said, reading from one of the wall displays while maintaining defensive position. "It says here—experimental subjects exposed to core radiation sometimes experienced consciousness displacement. Souls pulled across space toward the core's location. Your core. You pulled them here."
The revelation hit like physical impact. Sabaku had killed them. Not directly—the gunmen had done that. But he'd pulled their dying consciousnesses across impossible distance, dragged them into this desert where Mrs. Yamamoto's soul had merged with something terrible, absorbed the children she'd failed to protect, and become this.
"I did this," he said numbly. "I made this."
"Focus!" Nahara grabbed his shoulder. "Guilt later, survival now!"
The Heart Eater lunged with speed that belied its size. Nahara shoved Sabaku aside, taking the impact herself. Mechanical limbs screeched as the creature's grip closed around her, multiple hands emerging from its mass to grab and pull and tear.
"Run!" she screamed as her armor began to crack. "Open the door! Find the answer!"
Sabaku ran—not away, but toward. Toward the door with its glowing equations. He pressed the crystalline sphere against its surface and pushed with everything—physical strength, mental will, and something else. The sun-core. He let it flow through him, channeling energy into the sphere, into the door.
The portal opened, swinging inward to reveal a smaller chamber beyond. And at its center, suspended in some kind of stasis field, a body.
The First Scientist. Preserved perfectly, face serene, hands folded. Around him, more equations floated—three-dimensional, rotating, showing calculations that would take lifetimes to decode.
But Sabaku didn't need to decode them. The knowledge was already flowing from the sphere, unpacking in his consciousness. He understood now what the First Scientist had discovered, what the sun-core's true purpose was.
Behind him, Nahara's screams cut off abruptly.
Sabaku turned to see the Heart Eater holding her broken body, multiple faces pressing against her, trying to absorb, to add her consciousness to its collection. But her mechanical augmentation was interfering—circuits and biology incompatible, causing the creature pain.
It dropped her and focused on Sabaku. All its faces turned toward him simultaneously, expressions mixing hunger and recognition and something that might have been love, twisted beyond sanity.
Sabaku, the faces mouthed. Come. Join. Together. Family. Forever.
Mrs. Yamamoto's voice, fractured across dozens of mouths.
The Heart Eater advanced, and Sabaku felt the pull—the creature's gravity, drawing consciousness toward it. He felt the orphanage children's awareness inside the thing, screaming for release or reunion or both.
He could surrender. Let himself be absorbed. Join them in their nightmare communion. Become part of the amalgamated soul, never alone again.
The thought was seductive in its horror.
But the knowledge from the sphere pulsed urgently: The sun-core can unmake what it makes. Can separate what radiation has merged. But requires precision. Requires choice. Requires killing.
"I'm sorry," Sabaku whispered.
He let the sun-core activate fully. Energy flooded through him—solar power channeled through biological architecture, his body becoming conduit. His hands glowed, bright enough to hurt, bright enough to see bones beneath skin.
The Heart Eater lunged.
Sabaku met it. Thrust his glowing hands into the creature's central wound, into the space where the stolen light pulsed. And he released everything—focused the sun-core's energy not to destroy but to separate, to unmake the forced fusion.
The creature shrieked—actually shrieked, sound finally emerging from all those mouths simultaneously. Faces began pulling apart, consciousness separating, souls that had been forcibly merged now given permission to individuate.
Mrs. Yamamoto's face emerged clearest—aging rapidly from the middle-aged person Sabaku remembered to something ancient, desiccated, as if all the years she'd been sustained by stolen life suddenly caught up. Her eyes met his, and for a moment, they were human again. Aware. Apologetic.
"I couldn't save them," she said with a voice like wind through graves. "The gunners came and I couldn't save any of them. So when the desert called, when your light pulled us across, I gathered them. Kept them together. Made us family in death since I failed them in life."
"This isn't family," Sabaku said, tears streaming down his face. "This is prison."
"I know." Mrs. Yamamoto's form began dissolving, consciousness finally releasing its grip on stolen flesh. "But I didn't know how else to love them."
The children's faces surfaced one by one—Kenji, Yuki, Haruto, all the others. They looked at Sabaku with expressions beyond forgiveness, beyond accusation. Just tired. So impossibly tired.
"Can we rest now?" Haruto's voice asked from the dissolving mass. "Can we finally rest?"
"Yes," Sabaku whispered. "Yes. I'm so sorry. You can rest."
He pushed harder, channeling more energy, feeling the sun-core burning through him like fire through paper. The Heart Eater came apart—not violently, but gently, like snow melting in spring. Each face fading, each consciousness released into whatever came after.
Mrs. Yamamoto was last. She held form for one more moment, looking at Sabaku with something like pride.
"You got your desert," she said. "I hope it's kinder than what we built."
Then she was gone. They were all gone. The Heart Eater's mass collapsed into ash that dissolved even as it fell, leaving nothing but scorched stone and the lingering echo of screams finally silenced.
Sabaku fell to his knees, hands still glowing, still burning. The sun-core's energy receded slowly, reluctantly, leaving him trembling and hollow.
Nahara crawled toward him, armor shattered, mechanical limbs sparking but functional. "You did it," she rasped. "You saved them."
"I killed them," Sabaku corrected. "Again. I killed them again."
"You freed them." Nahara's hand—flesh, not mechanical—touched his shoulder. "There's a difference."
But Sabaku wasn't sure he believed that. He looked at his hands, seeing Mrs. Yamamoto's final dissolution replaying in his mind. Seeing the children's faces fading. Seeing the blood—metaphorical now, but no less real—coating his palms.
"This blood isn't theirs anymore," he whispered, voice breaking. "It's mine. All of it. Every death. Every ending. Mine."
Nahara didn't contradict him. Didn't offer comfort. Just sat beside him in the devastated laboratory, two broken children surrounded by the machinery of transcendence, holding vigil for the newly dead.
Above, through the shattered ceiling, the moon rose. Pale and distant and offering no judgment. Just witness. Just light on devastation.
Sabaku sat beneath it for hours, holding his trembling hands, watching the glow fade from his palms as the sun-core's energy settled back into dormancy. Around him, the laboratory hummed its eternal equations, promising answers he wasn't sure he wanted anymore.
The First Scientist's preserved body watched from its chamber, face serene with knowledge that had cost him everything.
And Sabaku understood, finally, what the old world had discovered: that consciousness could be transformed, souls could be separated, death could be unmade and remade.
But understanding wasn't wisdom.
Power wasn't mercy. And sometimes the only kindness was to stop trying to fix what couldn't be fixed. To let the dead rest instead of dragging them into new horrors. He'd learned what the sun-core could do. Now he had to decide if he'd ever use it again. The moon watched. The desert waited. And five days remained until Tefra came to collect her prophecy.
TO BE CONTINUED…