Chapter 9 · The Forbidden Reboot

"Don't touch me with those shaking hands," Sila snapped, though her voice lacked its usual bite. She was slumped against a rusted girder, her tactical vest shredded and soaked in a deep, alarming crimson.

Kael didn't listen. He knelt in the dirt of the ruins, his fingers humming with a faint, golden static. "Shut up. You're bleeding out through your ribs, and I'm the only thing here that knows how to stop it."

"I don't need a scrap-tier glitch to save me," she spat, but she didn't pull away when he reached for the wound. Her breathing was shallow, rattling in her chest. The power dynamic had flipped in a heartbeat. She was the General, the one who had held him at gunpoint for days, but now she was just a woman clinging to consciousness in a graveyard of concrete.

Kael's eyes weren't normal anymore. The gold light from the overclock was still flickering in his pupils, casting strange shadows against the debris. He placed his palm flat against her side. The heat was immediate—not a burn, but a concentrated, pulsing energy that made the air smell like ozone and scorched metal.

Sila gasped, her back arching off the girder.