Silence is not the absence of sound.
In the sub-tunnels of the Forbidden Zone, silence is a heavy, suffocating weight. It is the sound of dust settling on broken dreams and the rhythmic, terrifying thud of a heart that no longer belongs to a human.
I stared at Yuna.
The girl looked fragile, her white hair matted with silver blood and white ash. But her eyes—those silver, haunting eyes—held a truth that made the obsidian on my skin crawl.
"What did you just say?"
The words felt like stones in my mouth.
Behind me, I heard the sharp metallic click of a blade being unsheathed.
Haneul was standing, her black blade trembling in her hand. Her face was a mask of pale fury, her eyes wide with a mix of denial and soul-crushing terror.
"She's lying," Haneul whispered. Her voice was thin, brittle as glass. "Akira, she's traumatized. The resonance... it scrambled her head. She's my sister. I remember her. I remember the day she was born. I remember her first steps."
Yuna didn't look at Haneul. She kept her eyes fixed on me.
"You remember a movie, Haneul-unnie," Yuna said softly. Her voice carried a strange, melodic resonance, as if the Shard inside her was harmonizing with the truth. "A high-definition, neural-implanted sequence designed by Director Kwon. He didn't just give you a mission. He gave you a reason to never stop running."
I felt a surge of cold air in my lungs.
"Yuna," I stepped closer, my obsidian hand reaching out, then hesitating. I was a monster of glass and shadow; I didn't want to break her further. "Why would he do that? Why link me to you through her?"
"Context," Yuna whispered, leaning her head against the damp stone wall. "The Insight Shard—your Shard—needs a familiar anchor to stay stable. But the Archive couldn't find your real family. They were... 'purified' by the Church years ago."
She closed her eyes, and a flicker of violet light danced across her eyelids.
"So they took me. Another 'High-Potential' orphan. They rewrote my DNA to match yours. They rewrote Haneul's memories to make her my protector. They created a triangle of trauma, Akira. As long as Haneul fought for me, and you fought for Haneul, the Shard stayed fed. It stayed focused."
Haneul let out a strangled cry.
She swung her blade, not at us, but at a nearby rusted pipe. The steel snapped like a twig, sparks flying into the darkness.
"I am not a program!" she screamed.
She turned to me, tears finally breaking through her cold exterior, carving clean tracks through the grime on her face.
"Akira, tell her! Tell her about the locket! Tell her about the three years I spent searching for her in the Black Archive's labs!"
I looked at Haneul.
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to hold onto the only person who had stood by me in this nightmare. But the Insight Shard in my chest was humming a different tune. It recognized Yuna. Not as a sister I knew, but as a biological mirror.
Our pulses were in sync.
*Thump-thump.*
*Thump-thump.*
"Haneul..." I started, my voice failing.
"Don't," she hissed, pointing her blade at my chest. "Don't you dare look at me with pity. If my memories are a lie, then what am I? Just a weapon with a fake backstory? A tool that Kwon used to shepherd you to the Spire?"
"We are all tools until we choose not to be," a new voice echoed from the darkness of the tunnel.
I spun around, my obsidian wings flickering instinctively.
Lina was standing near the entrance of the sub-chamber, but she wasn't looking at us. She was looking at her terminal, which was glowing with an intense, pulsing red light.
"The Second Fracture," Lina whispered, her voice devoid of emotion. "It's not just a term, Akira. Look."
She turned the terminal toward us.
The screen showed a global resonance map. The three major zones—the Sanctified Territories, the Industrial Cities, and the Forbidden Zones—were bleeding.
Massive spikes of violet and gold energy were erupting all over the planet.
"The Spire's destruction didn't stop the resonance," Lina explained, her fingers shaking as she scrolled through the data. "It unleashed it. Without the Architect to hold the 'Will', the Shards are all waking up at once. Every Vessel, every failed experiment, every hidden relic... they're all connecting."
"The Hive Mind," Yuna said, her silver eyes glowing brighter.
She stood up, her movements graceful and terrifying.
"The Broken God is trying to put himself back together, Akira. But he's doing it through us. He's pulling every thread, every memory, every drop of blood. And he's starting with the anchors."
Suddenly, the ground beneath us groaned.
It wasn't an earthquake. It was a call.
From the darkness deeper in the tunnels, I heard a sound that made my obsidian skin vibrate.
*Clack. Clack. Clack.*
The sound of hundreds of glass feet walking on stone.
"The Echoes?" I asked, my hand forming a jagged blade of shadow.
"No," Yuna said, her voice turning cold. "The Shard Hunters. The ones Kaito spoke of. Version 5.0. The ones who don't have names to lose."
I looked at the darkness.
Six figures emerged from the gloom.
They were taller than Kaito, their bodies encased in silver-chrome armor that seemed to be fused with their flesh. They didn't carry guns. Their arms ended in long, serrated blades of synthetic violet glass.
They didn't have faces. Just a single, glowing red sensor in the middle of their helmets.
"Target: King Vessel," the lead Hunter said. The voice was a perfect, digital mimicry of my own.
"Priority: Extraction of the Heart. Elimination of secondary biological assets."
Haneul didn't hesitate.
She was a whirlwind of grief and fury. She lunged at the first Hunter, her black blade clashing against his glass arm. The impact created a shockwave that cracked the stone walls.
"Lina! Take Yuna and run!" I shouted.
I didn't wait for an answer.
I jumped into the fray.
My obsidian wings flared, cutting through the air like razors. I hit the second Hunter with the weight of a falling mountain. We crashed through a brick wall, tumbling into an old, flooded subway station.
The water was oily and cold, but I didn't feel it.
I felt only the hunger.
*Eat...*
*Consume the synthetic...*
The Shard in my head was roaring.
I grabbed the Hunter's helmet and squeezed. The silver chrome buckled, silver fluid leaking between my fingers.
The Hunter didn't scream.
He kicked me in the chest, a surge of Null-Energy blasting through my nervous system.
I fell back into the water, my vision swimming.
"Your resistance is calculated, Akira Tsukishiro," the Hunter said, standing over me. "Every move you make is already in our database. You are fighting yourself."
He raised his glass blade.
"And you have always been your own worst enemy."
I looked up at him.
In the reflection of his silver armor, I saw what I had become.
I wasn't a boy anymore.
I was a jagged, dark silhouette of a man, my eyes glowing with an ancient, tired light.
*Am I?* I thought.
*Is this the version of me they predicted?*
I thought of the memory of the honey bread.
I thought of the name Emiko.
I thought of the look on Haneul's face when she realized her life was a script.
A new kind of power surged through me.
It wasn't violet. It wasn't gold.
It was a dull, heavy grey.
The color of the ash. The color of the forgotten.
I grabbed the Hunter's glass blade with my bare hand.
I didn't break it.
I *absorbed* it.
The synthetic violet light was sucked into my obsidian skin, turning it a deep, matte black.
The Hunter's red sensor flickered. "Error. Resonance anomaly detected. Subject is... rewriting the Null-Field."
"You want to talk about calculations?" I whispered.
I stood up, the water around me beginning to boil.
"Calculate this."
I didn't punch him.
I simply stepped into his space.
The "Weight" I had felt at the Spire—the weight of the memories, the weight of the debt—I channeled all of it into a single point at the tip of my finger.
I touched his chest.
The Hunter didn't fly back.
He imploded.
His silver armor, his glass blades, his synthetic Shard—it all collapsed into a tiny, dense sphere of crushed metal and light.
I turned around.
The other five Hunters were closing in on Haneul. She was struggling, her movements slowing as the Null-Fields from the Hunters drained her energy.
"Haneul! Down!"
She didn't ask questions. She dropped to the floor.
I unleashed the grey wave.
It wasn't an explosion. It was a "Slow."
Everything in the room—the Hunters, the falling water, the dust in the air—stopped.
Except for me.
I moved through the frozen time like a ghost.
I walked to each Hunter and touched them.
One by one, they turned into spheres of scrap metal.
When the grey wave subsided, the subway station was silent once again.
I stood in the center of the wreckage, my breath coming in slow, heavy gasps.
Haneul stood up, her blade still drawn. She looked at the five metal spheres on the ground. Then she looked at me.
She didn't look grateful.
She looked horrified.
"What was that?" she asked, her voice trembling.
"I don't know," I said.
"You didn't use the Shard," she said, stepping back. "You used... something else. Something dead."
"It's the only thing Kwon didn't calculate," I said.
I looked at my hands. The matte black was fading, returning to the translucent obsidian.
"He knows how to control the light. He knows how to control the dark. But he doesn't know how to control the nothing."
Lina and Yuna emerged from the tunnel, their eyes wide.
"Akira," Lina whispered. "The terminal... it stopped."
"What stopped?"
"The Archive's pursuit. They've recalled all units."
I frowned. "Why? They had us cornered."
"Because they found something else," Yuna said.
She was looking at a flickering holographic screen on the subway wall. It was a news broadcast from the Industrial City-States.
The sky over the capital wasn't grey.
It was white.
A massive, golden gate was opening in the clouds.
"The Church," I breathed.
"The High Priestess isn't waiting for the King to return anymore," Yuna said, her silver eyes reflecting the golden light of the screen.
"She's bringing the God to the city."
The broadcast showed thousands of people falling to their knees as a giant, translucent figure began to manifest over the skyscrapers. It had a thousand wings and a single, weeping eye.
The Whole God.
Or at least, the version of him the Church had managed to stitch together.
"They're going to 'Purify' the entire city," Lina said, her voice full of dread. "Millions of people... they're going to be turned into glass."
I looked at Haneul.
She was still looking at me with those suspicious, broken eyes.
"We can't stay here," I said.
"And go where?" Haneul asked. "To the city? To die for a lie?"
"No," I said.
I walked over to her and held out my hand.
"We're going to the Archive's headquarters."
"Are you insane?"
"Kwon has the blueprints," I said. "He has the only thing that can kill that thing in the sky. And if Yuna is right, he has the truth about our families."
Haneul looked at my hand.
For a long moment, the only sound was the dripping of water in the subway station.
Then, she sheathed her blade.
She didn't take my hand.
"I'm going because I want to kill him," she said, walking past me toward the exit. "Not because I trust you."
"That's enough for now," I whispered.
As we climbed out of the tunnels and into the dying light of the Forbidden Zone, I felt a sharp pain in my chest.
*Thump.*
*Thump.*
The violet crown was pulsing again.
But this time, it was followed by a whisper.
A whisper that didn't come from the Shard.
It came from the sky.
*"Akira..."*
The voice was my mother's.
*"The bread is burning."*
I looked up at the golden God in the distance.
The Arch 1 was coming to its climax, but as the golden light touched the ash around us, I realized the lie was much deeper than I had thought.
Kwon didn't want a King.
He wanted a target.
And I had just painted one on my own soul.
"Let's move," I said.
"The God is waiting to be fed."