Chapter 216: Chapter 216: Shattered Signals, Splintered Will
The sound is when the uplink split was not an explosion but a rupture—a howl of torn frequencies and burning circuits. The chain’s impact crushed the armored roof, spearing through the resonator pylons and splitting them like brittle wood. Sparks erupted in fountains out of blue and red, strobing across the battlefield in violent rhythm.
The soldiers’ comms shrieked with static. Orders devolved into chaos. Drones spun wildly, some crashing into each other mid-air, others spiraling into the ruins below. The disciplined in lattice of the strike force collapsed in seconds, its seamless coordination splintering into panicked shouting and scattered gunfire.
Lin should have felt relief. Should have felt triumph. The uplink’s destruction had ripped a hole wide enough for them to escape.
But instead, he felt the abyss surge.
The chains writhed higher, drunk on freedom, their jagged lengths splitting apart to form barbed shapes like jagged wings. They no longer struck in precision—they devoured. Soldiers were snatched screaming into the air, flung into walls with bone-shattering force. Others were dragged underground by coils drilling into the cracked concrete, their cries silenced in an instant.
"Lin!" Min-joon’s voice cracked raw, his hands still gripping Lin’s shoulders. "You have to stop this—look at me!"
But Lin couldn’t. His head was a furnace, his chest a battlefield. His vision flickered in bursts of light and blackness, the world is reduced to fragments. The chains were not following his thoughts. They weren’t following his desperation. They were listening to something else.
That voice again. Cold, immense. Each pulse of it drowned his own heartbeat:
Break them. Inherit.
"No!" Lin roared, slamming his fists against the tram wreckage. Blood spattered from his lips. His scream wasn’t defiance but desperation, a drowning man shouting into a storm.
Min-joon pulled him closer, pressing their foreheads together, trembling. "Stay with me. I don’t care if you’re breaking—I’ll hold you together, I swear. Just don’t let go!"
Keller vaulted from cover, firing into the panicked soldiers as if their chaos were opportunity. He dropped one, then another, his voice sharp over the gunfire: "Forget holding him together! We move while they’re scattered, or none of us make it out!"
"Shut up!" Min-joon snapped, not looking at him. His eyes stayed locked on Lin. "If he loses himself now, there is
no escape!"But Keller was already sprinting, using the craters left by the chains as cover. He didn’t wait. Survival had always been his only creed.
Hwan, pale and trembling, crouched beside Min-joon and Lin, voice shaking. "It’s not him anymore. Look at the chains—they’re hunting. They’re not defending, they’re feeding."
Lin’s chest heaved, his ribs screaming with every breath. He could feel it too. The abyss wasn’t satisfied with survival—it wanted annihilation. It wanted to consume the strike force not because they threatened him, but because they existed.
"Min-joon..." His voice was weak, torn apart by the resonance shaking through him. "If I—if I can’t stop it—"
"No." Min-joon’s grip tightened until his nails dug into Lin’s skin. His eyes were bloodshot, wild with fear. "Don’t you dare finish that sentence. You’re not giving up on me. Not now. Not ever."
The chains slammed again, splitting another transport in half. Fuel ignited in a plume of fire, washing the plaza in orange light. Shadows leapt high, stretching the writhing coils across broken walls like the silhouettes of demons.
The strike force had devolved completely. Some soldiers fired blindly, others dropped weapons and ran, only to be dragged back screaming. Drones without uplink control jittered and buzzed, their rotors whining as they crashed into buildings or spun out of control.
It should have been victory. Instead, it was slaughter.
And Lin could feel his mind slipping further. Each time a chain struck, he lost a little more ground inside himself. Each kill wasn’t his—it was the abyss’s. But it was his body that carried it out.
He was becoming a passenger in his own skin.
Min-joon must have seen it too—the way Lin’s eyes flickered, the way his voice thinned. Tears streaked his dirt-stained cheeks. "Listen to me. You’re still here. You’re not gone—you hear me? I don’t care what’s screaming in your head, you’re still Lin."
But that voice surged stronger, drowning everything else.
Inherit. The chains do not belong to you. You belong to them.
Lin screamed, clutching his head. Blood ran from his nose, his ears. The chains convulsed in a storm of violence, hammering every direction at once. Buildings collapsed under the assault. Soldiers vanished. Even Keller froze mid-sprint, staring in horrified awe at the sheer scope of it.
The plaza was no longer a battlefield. It was a grave.
Min-joon wrapped both arms around Lin, holding him as if physical closeness alone could anchor him. "Don’t let them take you. Don’t let it take you. If you go—I go too."
Lin’s trembling hand rose, bloody fingers brushing weakly against Min-joon’s face. His lips formed words barely audible over the chaos.
"I’m—slipping—"
"Then I’ll drag you back," Min-joon whispered fiercely, tears dripping onto Lin’s hand. "Even if it kills me."
For the briefest instant, something inside Lin faltered. The abyss’s roar thinned. The chains paused mid-lash, hovering in the firelit smoke.
A silence, fragile as glass, stretched across the plaza.
And then—
Another voice cut through the comm-static, colder, sharper, commanding authority the soldiers had lacked. A tone that froze the survivors in place.
"Stand down. All units, disengage."
The remaining soldiers halted, trembling, weapons half-raised. Even the drones, those still functional, ceased their erratic buzzing.
Through the haze of fire and dust, a new figure stepped into the ruined plaza.
Tall. Unarmored. Cloaked in abyssal resonance so dense that Lin’s chains recoiled instinctively, like beasts recognizing their master.
The soldiers lowered their weapons at once. The air grew heavier, denser, oppressive with command.
The figure’s eyes burned with the same cold light that lived inside the abyss itself.
And Lin knew, with sick certainty—
The abyss wasn’t just watching through him.
It was here.