Chapter 34 · God-Sized Shards

"Get out of my head!"

Kael screamed the words, but they didn't sound like his. They sounded like a thousand voices overlapping, a jagged chorus of every person he’d stolen a skill from, every ghost he’d dragged back from the reset. He slammed his back against the white, featureless wall of the void, his fingernails digging into the non-existent plaster.

"You're shaking," Vera said. She didn't move toward him. She stood five feet away, her boots clicking softly on the void's floor. She looked at him not with pity, but with a cold, clinical curiosity—like a scientist watching a lab rat have a seizure. "Is it the power, or are you finally realizing you're just a collection of stolen parts?"

"Shut up," Kael spat. He tried to stand, but his left arm jerked violently, lifting itself without his permission. It wasn't a tremor. It was a gesture—a precise, arrogant flick of the wrist that belonged to the High Executioner he’d killed in loop forty-two. "I'm not... I'm still me."

"Are you?" Vera stepped closer. The air between them grew heavy, thick with the static of the glitching reality.