"Nothing reveals a man's loneliness more than the presence of those who love him for a version of himself that no longer exists." – Old System
...
[Location: Stellarum - The Void Edge]
In the devastated halls of the Twin Towers, silence was not peaceful; it was heavy, like the air before a storm that never breaks. Luna walked through corridors where hanging gardens had once bloomed with crystal flowers. Now, only bare stone remained, gray and cold.
She stopped before a high arched window. It had once offered views of the Eternal Plains. Now, it looked out onto a shimmering, violet nothingness. The Void was eating the horizon, mile by silent mile.
"Your Majesty," said Lyralei, the ancient councilor, approaching with the fragility of dried parchment. "The reports from the Shadow-Blades have arrived."
Luna didn't turn. She watched a distant mountain range flicker and vanish, deleted from existence. "Tell me."
"He is more resistant than we expected," Lyralei said, her voice trembling. "Kael'thara delivered the seal. He transmitted the urgency. But instead of awakening his consciousness..."
"It made him double down," Luna finished, her knuckles white as she gripped the windowsill. "He is using our necessity as justification to drift even further from who he really is. He thinks efficiency is the answer to a question he hasn't bothered to understand."
"We should consider more... direct methods, Majesty."
Luna turned then, her silver eyes blazing with a terrifying light. "Direct methods? Kidnapping? Dragging him across dimensions in chains?"
"If necessary to save what remains—"
"No." The word cracked through the hall like a whip. "He is not a prisoner, Lyralei. He is the Bridge. If we force him, we break him. And a broken bridge carries no one."
"Then what do you propose? We are running out of time."
Luna closed her eyes. She reached out through the bond, feeling the cold, metallic hardness of Gabriel's current soul. He was walling himself off. If she couldn't reach his heart, she would have to threaten his reality.
"We escalate," Luna said, her voice turning to ice. "If subtle reminders don't work, we send reminders that cannot be ignored or rationalized away. Prepare the Reality Reapers."
Lyralei gasped. "The Reapers? Majesty, they are agents of chaos. Sending them to a stable dimension could cause—"
"Necessary collateral damage," Luna interrupted, though the words tasted like ash in her mouth. "He has isolated himself in a fortress of logic. So we will crack the fortress open. It is time to bring some of our chaos into his perfect little world."
...
[Location: Belém - Enactus Operations Center]
The Enactus room had transformed into something unrecognizable. The chaotic, colorful mess of creativity was gone. In its place was a sterile, white-walled command center.
Gabriel entered and headed straight to the central table. He didn't greet anyone. He didn't ask how their weekend was.
"Status report," he ordered.
"Excellent timing," Mikaela responded from her workstation, an approving smile touching her lips. "I just finished the psychographic analysis of the judge panel for Miami. We have their biases mapped."
The original Resilientes — Marina, Carlos, Leonardo — were gathered around a side table. They looked up as Gabriel approached, but there was hesitation in their movements. Fear.
"We need to finalize the narrative arc," Gabriel said, pulling up the presentation deck on the main screen. "Specifically, the Vila Esperança case study."
"We have the interview clips ready," Marina said, trying to maintain her composure. "Dona Maria talking about how the water changed her grandchildren's health. It's very moving."
"It's too long," Gabriel said, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. "And it's too emotional. It looks like charity, not innovation."
He tapped a few keys. The video of Dona Maria was sliced apart, reorganized into short, punchy soundbites interspersed with aggressive growth charts.
"We transform her narrative into a strategic asset," Gabriel explained coldly. "We don't tell her story. We use her data points to validate our scalability model."
The silence that followed was dense and uncomfortable.
Carlos, who had spent weeks living in Dona Maria's house, stood up. His hands were shaking. "Gabriel... isn't this wrong? She's a person. You're turning her into a statistic."
Gabriel turned to him slowly. His eyes were void of empathy. "I am turning her into a winning argument. Sentimentalism doesn't save lives, Carlos. Funding saves lives.
Scaling saves lives. Winning saves lives."
Mikaela nodded from the corner. "He's right. The judges want to see ROI, not tears."
"But we're losing the truth!" Carlos insisted, his voice rising.
"We are optimizing the truth," Gabriel countered, his voice hard. "Do you want to feel good about yourself, or do you want to secure the resources to help a thousand Dona Marias? Because you can't do both."
Carlos looked at Gabriel, searching for the friend he used to know. He didn't find him.
"I need some air," Carlos whispered. He walked out of the room.
Caio stood up to follow him, shooting Gabriel a look of pure disappointment. "You used to know the difference between people and numbers, Gab."
They left.
Gabriel watched the door close. He felt... nothing. No remorse. Just the clarity of a problem removed.
"Focus," he said to the remaining team members. "We have work to do."
...
[Location: UFPA Gymnasium - 02:00 AM]
At two in the morning, the campus was a ghost town. The gymnasium was empty, smelling of old sweat and rubber.
Gabriel stood before the heavy punching bag. He had been here for an hour.
Left. Right. Hook.
His mind was a cacophony he was trying to beat into silence.
Three hundred thousand lives lost. Punch.
Caio's disappointed face. Punch.
Luna's fading memory. Punch.
The rhythm accelerated. He wasn't using technique anymore. He was using rage.
Why do they make me do this? he thought, the anger boiling over. Why do I have to be the monster so they can be the saints?
It was during a particularly violent uppercut that it happened.
He didn't just hit the bag. He pushed reality.
The eighty-kilogram bag didn't just swing. It flew. It tore free from the heavy chains, defied gravity, and launched across the room like a cannonball. It slammed into the far concrete wall with a sound like a gunshot, bursting open and spilling sand onto the floor.
Gabriel stood panting, his chest heaving. He looked at his hands.
They were trembling. A familiar tingling sensation buzzed in his fingertips — the same feeling that preceded his "exceptional intuition." But this wasn't intuition. This was raw, kinetic dominance.
He unwrapped his bandages. Where his knuckles had split from the impact, the blood welling up wasn't entirely red.
It was threaded with silver.
Luminous, metallic streaks pulsed within the crimson, glowing faintly in the dim light of the gym.
What is happening to me?
The power wasn't just flowing through him anymore. It was rewriting his biology. It was consuming the human parts to make room for the conduit.
Transformation is the price of transcendence, the cold voice in his head whispered.
Gabriel wiped the silver blood on his sweatpants. He didn't call a doctor. He didn't call a friend. He simply walked out into the night, leaving the broken bag where it lay.
...
[Location: Ver-o-Peso Market - 07:00 AM]
The next morning, Gabriel walked through the Ver-o-Peso market. He needed the noise. He needed the chaos of the waking city to drown out the silence in his own head.
The humid air carried familiar scents — açaí, river fish, fried manioc, mud. But to Gabriel, they felt distant. Like memories from a movie he had watched years ago.
He was examining a fruit display, staring at a pile of cupuaçu, when the world tilted.
It wasn't a dizzy spell. It was a distortion in the air pressure. A drop in temperature that made the sweat on his neck turn to ice.
People continued their lives around him, shouting, bargaining, laughing. They didn't see it.
But Gabriel saw.
A figure stood near a fish stall, ten meters away. It wore a cloak made of shifting smoke that rippled against winds that didn't exist in this dimension. Its face was a void.
[System Alert: Extra-Dimensional Entity Detected.]
[Class: Reality Reaper.]
[Mission: Provocation.]
The Reaper turned its hooded head toward Gabriel. It didn't speak, but a voice echoed directly in Gabriel's skull, sounding like tearing metal.
"Remember."
The creature raised a hand — a skeletal limb formed of obsidian shadows — and touched the main wooden support beam of the market stall roof.
Gabriel watched, horrified, as the solid wood began to rot in fast-forward. The beam turned gray, then black, then dust. The heavy tiled roof groaned, sagging dangerously. Directly underneath it, an elderly vendor was counting change for three children in school uniforms.
It was a test. A cruel, calculated test. The Reaper wanted him to act. It wanted him to reveal himself.
The roof cracked.
The choice lasted less than a heartbeat. Protect his cover, or protect the innocents?
Efficiency, his mind screamed. Saving them is the only acceptable outcome.
Gabriel extended his right hand. He didn't think of the warm Light of the past. He reached for the cold, absolute authority of the Void. He didn't want to heal the wood; he wanted to freeze the laws of physics.
[System Skill: Stasis Lock.]
He pushed his will into the rotting wood.
STOP.
The collapse froze instantly. The dust hung suspended in mid-air. The wood solidified, turning a dark, unnatural gray, hard as diamond. The roof held, suspended by invisible pillars of force.
The crisis was averted. But the price was immediate.
A spike of excruciating pain exploded behind Gabriel's left eye. The streetlights along the market perimeter flickered and burst, showering sparks. The asphalt beneath his feet cracked in a perfect spiderweb pattern, radiating outward from his stance.
Gabriel gasped, tasting copper and ozone. He raised a hand to his nose.
Blood. Thick, heavy, silver blood dripped onto his white shirt.
Across the street, the Reaper seemed to smile — a jagged tear in reality — and then dissolved into mist.
Gabriel fell to one knee, frantically wiping the silver blood away with his sleeve. He looked around wildly. Had anyone seen?
The vendor was looking up at her roof, confused, muttering about a miracle. The children were laughing at the sparks from the streetlights.
But they weren't the only ones watching.
On the rooftop of a colonial building across the square, the morning sun glinted off a lens.
Gabriel focused his enhanced vision, zooming in.
Binoculars. A figure in a dark suit.
Professor Henrique.
Henrique lowered the binoculars. He didn't look scared. He looked validated. He looked like a scientist who had just confirmed a dangerous hypothesis. He pulled out his phone and dialed a number.
Gabriel stumbled to his feet, the silver blood staining his shirt, the headache blinding him.
Paranoia had become reality. They had seen the monster. Now, they would try to cage it.
He needed to leave. He needed to get to Miami before they could stop him. And anyone who stood in his way — Reaper or Professor — would have to be removed.
[System Notification: Corruption Level 15%.]
[Status: Hunted.]