The airships didn't descend.
They hovered like hungry vultures, their massive anti-gravity engines humming a low, dissonant chord that vibrated through the very marrow of my bones.
Twenty of them.
The flagships of the Black Archive, each one bristling with synthetic Shard-cannons and "Null-Field" generators. They didn't care about the sanctity of the Forbidden Zone anymore. They weren't here to study the ruins.
They were here to harvest.
"Akira," Haneul whispered, her hand trembling as she gripped the hilt of her blade. She was looking up at the lead ship—the *Argo*. "That's the Director's personal vessel."
I stood in the center of the ash, my obsidian hands still smoking from the singularity I had unleashed.
The "fullness" in my chest was gone.
Now, there was only a cold, calculating hunger.
*They bring... more cages...*
The Shard in my head was no longer a voice. It was a sensation. A cold tide of violet ink rising in the back of my mind.
"Lina, get Yuna to the ridge," I commanded. My voice sounded deeper, as if two people were speaking in unison. "Haneul, get ready."
"Ready for what?" Lina asked, her face pale as she dragged the unconscious Yuna toward the shelter of a collapsed obsidian pillar. "There are twenty of them, Akira! We're three people and a half-dead Vessel!"
"We're not three people," I said.
I looked at the white ash.
The "Echoes"—the hundreds of versions of me that I had supposedly destroyed—were still there. They hadn't vanished. They had simply dissolved into the ground.
I reached out with my obsidian hand and slammed it into the ash.
"Wake up," I whispered.
The ground didn't shake. It exhaled.
A wave of violet light rippled outward from my palm. The ash began to swirl, forming into shapes. Hundreds of them.
The Echoes rose again.
But they didn't look like me anymore.
They looked like shadows of the men they were meant to be. Knights of glass and smoke, their eyes glowing with a cold, pale violet fire.
The King had his army.
A spotlight from the *Argo* cut through the mist, pinning me in its glare.
"Akira Tsukishiro!"
The voice boomed from the ship's speakers. It wasn't Director Kwon. It was the Courier.
"You have exceeded your projected growth by 400%. The Director is... impressed. He has decided to skip the stabilization phase."
The bottom of the lead ship opened.
A massive, circular platform began to descend. On it stood a single figure, bound in glowing silver chains.
A woman.
She wore a blue dress, now tattered and grey. Her head was bowed, her long black hair obscuring her face.
My heart—the human part that was still hiding behind the obsidian—stopped.
"Mom?"
"Akira, don't look!" Haneul yelled, lunging toward me.
But I was already moving.
I sprinted across the ash, the Echoes running with me like a pack of silent wolves.
"Give her back!" I screamed.
The Courier's voice laughed, a dry, metallic sound.
"She is not a person, Akira. She is a 'Memory-Drive'. A prototype designed to keep you anchored. But the King no longer needs an anchor."
The Courier raised a hand.
A beam of green "Null-Energy" shot from the ship, hitting the woman on the platform.
She didn't scream.
She exploded.
But it wasn't blood that filled the air.
It was data.
Thousands of glowing blue ribbons of light erupted from her body, swirling in a violent vortex. Inside the ribbons, I saw images.
My mother baking bread.
My mother crying over my fever.
My mother being dragged away by the Church.
It was all being shredded.
"No... no, no, no!"
I reached the platform just as the blue ribbons began to turn black.
The "Mother" I had seen was a construct. A biological simulation built from my own stolen memories, designed to be destroyed at the exact moment I was most vulnerable.
The final "Breaking."
"The Heart must be empty to be filled by the God," the Courier shouted. "Witness the final truth, Akira! You have no past! You have no family! You are a Vessel of nothing!"
The black ribbons surged toward me, cold and sharp as razors.
They began to wrap around my throat, my arms, my chest. They weren't just attacking me; they were rewriting the Insight Shard. They were trying to erase the "Context" I had fought so hard to keep.
*Forget...* the ribbons whispered.
*Forget the name... Forget the smell... Forget the love...*
I fell to my knees, the obsidian on my skin cracking under the weight of the erasure.
Haneul was fighting her way toward me, her blade a blur of black fire, but the Archive airships opened fire with their secondary cannons. The ground around her erupted in fountains of white ash.
"Lina! The scrambler!" Haneul cried out.
Lina was frantically trying to recalibrate her device, but a blast from a nearby ship threw her backward.
I was alone.
The black ribbons were inside my head now.
I saw my mother's face in my mind.
It was blurring. The blue of her eyes was fading to grey. The warmth of her smile was turning into a jagged, digital glitch.
*Let go...* the voice of the Architect echoed in the void.
*Be light... Akira...*
"I... won't..."
I looked up at the *Argo*.
I saw the Courier standing at the edge of the platform, looking down at me with cold, silver eyes.
And beyond him, in the darkened bridge of the ship, I saw a silhouette.
Kwon.
He was watching. He was measuring the depth of my grief.
Something inside me snapped.
It wasn't the Shard.
It was the "Man."
If they wanted to erase my past, I would give them a future they couldn't survive.
I reached out and grabbed the black ribbons with my bare obsidian hands.
The "Erasure" didn't work.
I didn't forget.
I *stored*.
I took the pain of the dying memory and compressed it. I took the grief, the anger, and the betrayal, and I shoved it into the violet crown around my heart.
The violet light didn't just glow.
It turned black.
A pulse of absolute darkness erupted from me, a wave of "Anti-God" energy that turned the white ash into a field of dead, cold stone.
The black ribbons shattered.
The Echoes—my army—didn't evaporate. They merged.
The hundreds of shadow-figures flowed toward me, sinking into my skin, increasing my mass, my weight, my gravity.
I stood up.
I was no longer nineteen. I was an ancient, jagged thing of obsidian and void.
"Courier," I said.
My voice didn't just shake the air. It shook the *Argo*.
The massive airship tilted, its anti-gravity engines screaming as they struggled to maintain a lock on a reality that was rapidly dissolving around me.
"You want the King?"
I raised my hand.
The singularity returned, but it wasn't a small ball of light.
It was a wing.
A massive, jagged wing of black-violet glass erupted from my right shoulder, stretching a hundred feet into the air.
"Then come and take him."
I jumped.
I didn't need the ground. I didn't need the wind.
I moved through the space between the seconds.
I appeared on the deck of the *Argo* before the Courier could even raise his weapon.
I grabbed him by the throat.
His silver teeth rattled as I lifted him off the deck.
"The Director... he... he anticipated this..." the Courier choked out, his silver eyes spinning frantically. "You're... you're triggering the... Second Fracture..."
"Tell the Director," I whispered, my obsidian fingers sinking into the metal of his suit.
"The Debt is no longer for the Shards."
I looked into the bridge, directly at the silhouette of Kwon.
"The Debt is for the Bread."
I crushed the Courier's throat.
I didn't wait for him to die. I threw his body into the engine intake of the *Argo*.
The ship groaned. An explosion of silver and violet fire rocked the deck.
"Akira! The ships are charging their main cannons!" Haneul's voice came from far below.
I looked down.
The nineteen other airships were turning their massive barrels toward the *Argo*.
Kwon wasn't trying to save his flagship.
He was using it as a trap.
He was going to sacrifice the *Argo*, the Courier, and hundreds of his own men just to bury me under a mountain of Null-Energy.
"Target acquired," a mechanical voice echoed from the surrounding ships. "Firing in three... two..."
I looked at Haneul and Lina. They were still on the ground, trapped in the crossfire.
If I stayed here, they died.
If I ran, I lost the *Argo*.
*Eat...*
The Shard whispered. It was terrified now.
*Eat the ship... use the mass...*
"No," I said.
I looked at the violet crown.
"We're not eating."
I plunged my hands into the deck of the ship.
"We're *falling*."
I didn't release energy. I increased my density.
I made myself so heavy that the anti-gravity engines of the *Argo* simply snapped.
The massive airship, three hundred meters of steel and Shard-tech, began to fall.
It didn't fall like a plane.
It fell like a hammer.
It slammed into the Forbidden Zone, the impact creating a shockwave that leveled the ruins for miles. A cloud of white ash and silver smoke rose into the sky, obscuring the sun.
The nineteen other ships fired their cannons into the smoke.
The ground turned into a lake of molten glass.
Silence followed.
The airships hovered for a long time, their sensors scanning the inferno below.
"Target neutralized?" a pilot asked over the comms.
"Resonance at zero," a technician replied. "The Vessel has been vaporized."
On the bridge of the remaining flagship, Director Kwon stood alone.
He looked at the flaming wreckage of the *Argo*.
He pulled a small, wooden coin from his pocket—a childhood toy he had kept for forty years.
He dropped it onto the floor.
"He's not dead," Kwon said.
He turned away from the window.
"He's just finally gone underground."
***
Deep beneath the molten glass, in the cold, dark sub-tunnels of the Forbidden Zone.
I opened my eyes.
I was covered in soot, my clothes gone, my skin a patchwork of human flesh and obsidian glass.
Haneul and Lina were there. I had managed to pull them into a "Void-Pocket" at the last millisecond. They were unconscious, but alive.
Beside them lay Yuna.
She was looking at me.
Her eyes weren't violet. They weren't brown.
They were silver.
"Akira?" she whispered.
"I'm here," I said. My voice was a rasp.
She reached out and touched my obsidian hand.
"The woman in the blue dress..." Yuna said, her voice trembling. "She wasn't a memory, Akira."
I froze.
"What do you mean?"
"The Archive... they didn't build her from your head," Yuna said.
She looked at the ceiling, her silver eyes reflecting a truth I wasn't ready to hear.
"They built her from *mine*."
I felt the world tilt again.
"Why your memories, Yuna?"
"Because," the girl whispered, a single silver tear rolling down her cheek.
"I'm not Haneul's sister, Akira."
She looked me in the eye.
"I'm yours."
Outside, in the dark, something began to howl.
The Second Fracture had begun.
And the King was no longer alone in his bloodline.