After I put my fears behind me, I entered the room where Dr. Apauex and the Sentinel scientist were.
"Welcome, Kaleb," Apauex said without looking up, his voice hollow, more like an echo than a greeting. "It's an honor to finally make your acquaintance. Well—physical acquaintance."
"Let her go," I said, teeth clenched.
"Now we can't have that," he replied sharply, folding his hands behind his back. His movements were calculated, theatrical. Like a man playing chess with a god and somehow thinking it a fair match.
He nodded, and the Sentinel scientist silently exited the room, head low, almost reverent. Now it was just us.
"Before we begin," Apauex offered, eyes gleaming behind translucent data streams, "Would you like to reconsider?"
I didn't answer.
I acted.
Power surged through my limbs. But it was different now. Heavier. Wilder. Like holding the pen of creation, only to realize someone—or something—else was doing the writing. I took a single step and unleashed a wave of energy, jagged and screaming.
Apauex raised one hand, index and middle fingers extended. My energy folded around him like water bending around stone. He flicked his wrist, and the energy dispersed.
"Ah. You chose violence," he said with a smirk. "Predictable."
Thin streams of light pulsed across the floor beneath him. Data patterns. Probability chains. Prewritten failure.
"Calculating countermeasures… complete."
He tilted his head slightly, eyes glowing with a soft blue light. "This version of you always fails here."
I moved again. Waves of negative energy snapped from my hands like serpents. He stepped to the right with practiced ease.
"You are energy without structure. A ripple pretending to be a wave."
I flung myself at him. He was still talking.
"Now watch—"
A cloud of floating equations—glowing numbers, symbols, entire theorems—hovered above me.
"—and do nothing."
They dropped like anvils.
I couldn't move. Not because of force. But because every instinct said there is no way out. It was a perfect calculation. Total certainty.
But I didn't need instinct.
I needed belief.
I summoned a dome, raw and imperfect, shaped more by desperation than design. The equations smashed against it like meteors. The shield cracked but held. When the final number disintegrated, Apauex walked past me casually.
"She screams, you know," he said. "The one you came to save."
My heart pulsed violently. I launched to my feet, rage coalescing into energy. I pulled every ounce of power from the air and discharged it in a torrent of jagged light.
He sighed.
"A deviation," he muttered, flicking his wrist again. "Invalid input. Retrying is pointless."
A lattice of floating equations formed around him, halting my attack mid-air. They folded it in on itself like origami, then shattered it into data dust.
"Erasure Formula," he whispered.
Suddenly, I couldn't remember what I'd just tried to do. My mind blanked. My power stumbled.
He lunged forward.
Attacks flowed from him like a machine learning mid-strike. Blades of math. Spikes of geometry. Rays that bent time between frames.
"Left foot slips in three… two…"
He was right. I slid slightly.
"You're improvising now," he said. "That's the final stage of collapse."
I ducked a projectile, only to find his palm already at my chest.
"Probability favors me. It always did."
I flew backward, crashed into a console. Sparks burst. He stepped forward, hands out, eyes empty.
"You've already lost. The rest is inertia."
Then he spoke it like a god pronouncing a sentence:
"Perfect Prediction."
I leapt backward—only for him to be behind me.
He gently kicked my ankle. I fell. I scrambled upright, but halfway up, he was in front of me.
"Wha—?"
Then I saw it.
Above me: the number zero. Hanging there like a final note.
It exploded upward to one million.
Then began to fall.
I rolled, ducked, narrowly avoiding the crushing force of raw probability.
Apauex stood twenty feet away, arms spread like a conductor of chaos.
"vCM = Rω," he said.
The falling number twisted into a perfect cylinder and began rolling toward me, physics now his puppet.
But I remembered something.
I control reality.
I clenched my fist and punched the cylinder.
It burst into shimmering bubbles.
Apauex blinked.
"This wasn't in the model. Recalculating."
I didn't wait.
I stomped the ground, bending it, turning it—waves of chaotic energy spreading from beneath me, washing through the lab's digital order.
He paused, watching the ripples. "Unaccounted for… but not beyond adjustment."
He leapt, twisting mid-air, numbers orbiting him like stars. He flung them like darts, angles,s, and exponents that screamed through space.
I twisted and turned, barely keeping ahead of his rhythm.
Then he pointed his finger upward. An X hovered above it.
It grew rapidly, red-hot with probability energy.
"You cannot harm what probability refuses to allow," he said, voice cold as the void.
The X rotated violently, a saw blade made from denial itself. It rocketed toward me.
I dodged left—barely. It skimmed my shoulder, and suddenly I remembered the moment it killed me in a different future. Or a different Kaleb.
I shook the thought loose.
I needed to break his equation.
So I closed my eyes.
And stopped predicting.
I reached inward—not for logic, but for belief. For intuition.
And I walked forward.
Apauex's eyes narrowed.
I walked through a barrier of numbers. They shattered.
He stepped back. "No—You're blind to logic. You've severed your predictability chain."
I smiled faintly.
He threw another attack. A sphere of collapsing constants.
I absorbed it mid-flight, spun, and launched it back—except it returned not as a sphere, but as a memory. Of his.
He staggered. "What… what did you do?"
"I stopped being a variable."
I blinked forward—teleporting mid-sentence—and struck him with a burst of reversed energy. His body recoiled. He twisted his torso, forcing the probabilities to heal the blow.
"You can't just not exist inside my framework!" he screamed, breaking composure for the first time.
"Then write a new equation," I growled.
He shouted something ancient. A sequence of symbols that twisted space. But I bent it into a spiral and flung it back at him.
Reality folded, and we were suddenly in an infinite hallway of mirrors, each showing a different version of me—some broken, some monstrous, some triumphant.
He began panicking.
"This… is not the path. This is not the chain."
"This is my Nexus," I said, stepping forward. "And I choose uncertainty."
The mirrors collapsed inward, and I caught Apauex in the center of the implosion, dragging him into a realm of unstable potential.
But before he vanished entirely, he smiled—blood dripping from his lips, eyes glowing with unreadable data.
"You'll become me… eventually."
And then he was gone.
I dropped to one knee, chest heaving, reality stitching itself together like torn fabric.
Behind the broken data wall, I saw her.
Aaliah.
Still locked in the machine.
Still humming like a caged god.
And the only sound in the room was her heartbeat—and mine.
Out of sync.
But closing in.
I stepped closer to Aaliah, the soft hum of the machine vibrating through the floor. Her body was suspended behind fractured glass, tubes, and glowing cables threading through her like puppet strings. I placed my hand gently against the glass—not to break it, but to reach through it.
To find her.
Reality shifted.
In a flash, I was standing in a gray, empty room with no walls, no doors—no exit. Just an infinite stillness. The air was thick, like it hadn't been breathed in years.
In the far corner, curled up and shaking, was Aaliah.
She was crying.
Her back was to me, her body trembling. Her presence flickered like a dying signal in the dark.
I stepped forward cautiously and knelt beside her. My hand touched her shoulder.
She jolted violently.
"Wha—?!" Her head snapped up. She turned, eyes wide and wet. "K-Kaleb?"
"Yeah," I said softly, swallowing the lump in my throat. "It's me."
Her expression twisted in disbelief, in hope, in panic.
"What happened to you?" I asked.
She wiped her eyes, trying to steady herself.
"They sent me on a mission," she said. "To infiltrate a city —a small place just outside Atlanta."
"Infiltrate?" I echoed.
She nodded. "Yes. I was tracking a small faction tied to the Harbingers. They'd embedded themselves there, hidden beneath the civilian infrastructure."
I froze.
"That city wasn't… it wasn't a Harbinger defensive position?" I asked, cautiously.
She furrowed her brow. "No. Why?"
I stared at her, my stomach twisting.
"They told me to defend that city. They said it was under threat. They said you were there, in danger."
She stared at me in stunned silence.
"…Kaleb, that city was marked as a red zone. Sentinel knew that. It's why they sent me—alone. Covert. Why would they send you in as backup? Why defend it?"
I stood slowly and backed away, the gears in my mind grinding.
What the hell was Sentinel Solutions thinking?
What game were they playing?
"I don't know," I admitted, staring at nothing. "But I'm getting you out of here. I swear it."
Aaliah looked away, hesitant. "You can't just pull me off this device. It's… feeding off me. If you disconnect it wrong, I will die."
"Then we'll do it right." I turned back toward her, voice low and certain. "Tell me how they hooked you up. You have to remember."
She closed her eyes.
"There were… three spheres," she whispered. "I remember them glowing. Spinning in opposite directions."
She clutched her head, voice pained.
"Each one is holding me here. Like anchors. You need to—"
Her words cut off.
Her image glitched—just for a second—and then everything shattered like glass.
I was violently ejected from her mind.
My body stumbled backward, gasping, my hand yanked away from the glass. My breath fogged the surface.
And I wasn't alone anymore.
Behind me, the air bent.
A presence pressed against reality like a knife against skin.
I turned—and there he stood.
Cloaked in black. Hood drawn low. Red sigils floated around him like dead stars.
Dante.
The Devil.
He didn't need an introduction. His presence bled into the room like ash on snow.
He tilted his head.
"I could smell your sins from far away," he said in a voice like velvet over a coffin.
"Time to pay for them," He roared.