???
Adrian wakes to the uncomfortably familiar sensation of being buried alive. For a minute that stretches on far too long, memories flash through his mind.
“Help me,” Jasmine screams out, reaching for her lover’s hand. Adrian reaches back, and they clasp hands just as the rest of the building collapses on them.
The only part of her the search and rescue team finds is her hand, still cupped in Adrian’s.
“Help me!” a little boy begs, buried underneath the rubble. Adrian manipulates water, clearing away debris to pull the kid out, still nursing his own injuries. Two hours later, Adrian learns that the boy has survived and is recovering in the hospital. His father, who they find less than five feet under the child, succumbs to his wounds.
“Help me!” cry a thousand voices. Healers tend to the dying, ignoring those who are already dead but don’t know it yet. Adrian can do nothing but direct the flow of traffic through the overcrowded hospital. There are not enough healers. Never enough.
“There will be fewer when all is said and done,” a new voice says, high and feminine. Adrian never gets a look at her face.
He does, however, hear the click of the detonator.
“Help me,” Adrian echoes, his voice hollow. Nobody hears him.
He scrabbles for purchase, but there is none. He is sealed in a metal capsule, and it is full of him and fluid.
The Hydrokinetic, supposedly the master of this element, begins to drown.
“Help us,” the earnest blue-eyed girl says, the words unclear to his ears as the suffocating fluid fades away. “My name is Sierra.”
Adrian’s eyes do not work properly. They show him the scene, then a different world full of life he could never imagine. Then the bodies. Jasmine. The father. The patients.
“This is Jess,” the girl says. “Beaumont, Kenneth, Christopher, Rias—apologies. You must still be adjusting. Aunt Marie says the tests malfunctioned. You almost died.”
Blind rage suffuses him. A test. A test?
He summons the slowly-draining fluid from the capsule, and—
Adrian shakes himself out of the recollection by biting his tongue hard enough to taste metal. He knows how it ends. That one day—the worst day of his life, bar none—once controlled him. Now, it merely defines him. He will not allow it more.
He is sealed in a metal capsule, and it is full of him and fluid.
The Hydrokinetic, powers sealed by the backlash, begins to drown.
Not that he can. He knows that if whoever brought him here wanted him dead, he would already be dead. If they wanted him dead painfully, well, Adrian knows a dozen better ways to do it.
No, the fluid-filled tube that connects to his mouth, invading its way down his throat—that’s keeping him alive, no matter how close to death he feels. It’ll continue doing so until the fucks who captured him have a use for him.
Bitterly, he wonders why he’s even here. Why is it him that’s left? Jess was more powerful than him. Beaumont too. Both of them broke out of their tubes then, and given the amount Adrian advanced in the last year, they could break out of here now if they weren’t gone.
He bets that Sierra’s already out.
And here he is, useless once more. A level 8 Warrior with backlash that prevents him from accessing the only real power he has. A burden once more. He slowed Sierra down in the Crowned Islands. He couldn’t protect her in Ravendale, and he couldn’t help Evelyn. He’s nothing but baggage.
Adrian hangs his head and waits for death.
???
Sierra wakes up screaming.
She doesn’t stop for a long while.
Nobody is around to hear her.
When her throat is hoarse, she stands. “Is anyone there?”
The silence of the empty expanse around her coffin is answer enough.
Anomalous Fragment 004-WHITESTAR (alias 092-CALLEN)
The giant’s fist is effective beyond my wildest dreams. Rather than leave a dent in giant three like I hoped it would, it completely shatters the giant’s head, white gore exploding across a void-black body.
I worry that the giant will be able to function without the head, but that fear proves to be misplaced when giant three takes a single unsure step forward and begins to collapse. Both of its brothers are intelligent enough to get out of the way as it falls, avoiding a potentially fatal entanglement in its limbs, but I don’t.
Devour doesn’t work outside my body. The red and black magic fades the moment it gets more than a few inches from me, which is a shame. The addition of a range to the spell was one of my favorite aspects of it. While I’m not opposed to eating bodies, Devour as a ranged skill is significantly more convenient for collecting XP.
But if my hypothesis is right, I don’t have a second to waste. I sprint along the falling body before it even hits the ground, careful not to slip and fall on its overly smooth body. It still keeps the steely skin upon its death, but there’s just enough give in the skin for me to stick knives into it and use them as handholds. It becomes less necessary as it falls, the blood splattering everywhere, and I slow myself to a stop with twin daggers before either of its brothers try to attack me.
And I return to the basest form of consumption. I eat the blood.
Devour still works at incredibly close ranges, and direct consumption works. I can’t identify the actual practical differences between types of magical pressure, not with my magic sense as vague and undeveloped as it is right now, but I can taste them.
This giant has demon blood in it, and I rejoice in the sensation of my soul slowly returning, the patches from my disallowed second use of a special skill slowly mending.
Except the process is going slower than it should. Sure, I’m not using Devour at its full Diamond power thanks to the still-active Silence, but it shouldn’t be moving this slow.
That’s when I realize that the other two giants are consuming the fallen one as well. They stand still, massive white circles appearing on each of them where their faces should be, and pieces of the dead giant tear off and flow into them. With each passing second, they get stronger.
I’m not stupid. I have no way to counteract them, so I slurp up one last bit of demon blood and run.
Even if I can’t get the full bevy of benefits from it, it’s enough to restore my soul after the latest round of abuse I’ve put it through. I advance to level 54 easily, granting me three additional free stat points as well as one to every attribute.
New levels aren’t granting me skills anymore. Is that because my level is so high now that my advancement is primarily focused on increasing my attributes?
The latter stages of any Category will see different forms of progression. Then, you will be preparing for your ascent to the next stage, whereas the first segment of the next Category’s advancement will be dedicated to delivering on the foundation you have created.
Another lecture. My soul’s repaired enough to give me flashbacks to lives I haven’t lived, which is promising.
The surviving two giants are growing larger and faster, which is not.
I’m forced to end my drain of the dead giant’s body early when one of the still-living ones pulses with power. My magic sense is strong enough to identify the sudden burst of energy focused in giant three’s face, and I dodge just in time, slapping two points into Body (Speed) as I do. Proportionally, it’s not a huge increase—59 to 61—but that extra edge enables me to barely clear the void-flecked beam of white energy that bursts from the giant’s blank face.
The last point goes into Magic (Power) as soon as I land.
99 ticks over to 100.
Objective: Paradigm Shift
You have raised an attribute above level 100. Do the same for the rest.
Attributes raised: [1/8]
All of my stats have ballooned before, but this is completely different. While every increase in an attribute has reflected itself in the state of my body, the increase from 99 to 100 is a threshold that I’ve just broken through, and I feel the innate magic within me start to compress into my core. A star forms within me, bursting with power and heat and blood and killing intent, and it burns.
Pain is no obstacle to me, but it hurts even through my Gold tier Pain Resistance. For a regular being, this would be the end of the fight.
Thankfully… well, you know the rest.
The star within me burns bright and hot, and my veins light on fire, my upgraded magic tracing new channels through my body.
It’s not an instantaneous process. I start sprinting away from the two remaining giants as my body reforges itself in a mixture of divine and demonic fire, dodging another void-tinted blast of white energy as I do. This one hits the ground, and the steel simply disappears. There’s no explosion, no dramatic noise. Just… nothing.
As the magic continues to reshape me, the heat spreads through my body, the proto-star forming within me spreading its influence to all of me. My heart pounds, the sounds of the room replaced by rushing blood. My magic needs an outlet. I’m full to bursting with it; any longer in this state and I’ll pop like an overinflated balloon.
I scream as I activate my Hemokinesis, and even that is infused with the power of my internal star.
And the Silence bends against my cry. It does not break, but blood explodes out through my pores, multiplying and hardening under my will. Up until now, the blood has acted as a third arm, ever so natural to control, but now it bucks like an unruly horse, trying to throw me off. My freshly-carved veins protest as I wrest the blood back into submission, and then I send a spear of it at the giant that’s closer to me.
To my surprise, it penetrates. My Hemokinesis acts far faster than it has before, sending the sharpened blood towards my opponenet at supersonic speeds, and it breaks the impossibly smooth void-black flesh.
My blood falls apart a moment later, too far from my body for me to keep control of it against Callen’s still-active Silence.
The giant is weakened, though. I have a chance of actually winning now that I have my magic back, and I prepare to face the two of them with twin Soulblades in hand.
I’m about to throw caution to the wind and dash in when the healthy giant blasts its brother in the back. Three void-empowered blasts of energy emerge—one from its face, two from its massive hands—and it eviscerates the other experiment in an instant.
It’s too far for me to Devour. Even with my speed, I can’t get there in time.
Because the one remaining giant is consuming it first. Unlike my skill, this one’s form of Devour is utterly black, tinged with white specks. Pieces of its brother’s body flow into it, and I watch as the giant grows larger, pulses with more magic.
A few weeks ago, I would’ve tried to fight this, no matter how outclassed I am. Sapphire would want me to fight this. Callen probably would too.
Fuck that. I want to test my upgraded power, but a fragment that’s actively falling apart is not the place to do it. During the course of our battle, the giants have already obliterated a solid fifth of the room, and it’s beginning to lose integrity. Cracks spread through the floor, widening with every reality-shaking step the ur-giant takes.
It’s still newborn, and it’s already managed this.
Why even bother with me?
Because it will be unstoppable.
Because nothing will be able to grow like Project 0.
The voice that my amalgam recall’s is Sapphire’s. My skin crawls.
The giant bellows, magic gathering across its entire body. The star-like flecks of white coagulate, forming radiant discs of energy on its body.
Thanks to the increase in Magic (Power), my resistances have been baked into my body, infusing every part of me.
And it enables me to see a skill that is so effective at Gold tier that it even managed to work its magic on its owner.
Well, either that, or I just forgot it was there. That would be… significantly more embarrassing. I can’t tell which it is, and I suppose it doesn’t matter.
Whatever the case, I can’t use it fast enough. As the giant prepares to annihilate me and half the lab behind me, I trigger my Antimemetic Cloak.
Even at Gold tier, this skill is finicky. While the rat-things under Novarath were able to use these with abandon, I have a lot of restrictions. The skill is expensive to use, so much so that I don’t think I can keep it up for more than ten minutes, even with my vastly enhanced mana pool, and almost any large action will break it. I can’t attack or use movement skills for fear of breaking the fragile effect.
But it works. It works better than I could’ve imagined. The giant’s faceless head turns, sweeping the room, and it pauses. The magic it’s gathered starts to die down immediately.
Instinct tells me to try to kill it. To put everything I have into one surprise attack and slaughter the one remaining obstacle in my path.
Logic tells me I can’t, and I trust that far more when I know who’s responsible for building my instincts. Silence still suppresses my skills, even if it can no longer cancel all of them out.
“I’ll be back for you,” I promise, carefully avoiding the cracks in reality as I make my way around the lab.
I grab my Soulshard Rifle, worried that the action will trigger the giant’s perception and break my cloak, but it goes off without a hitch.
Hurry. I don’t have enough magic to warrant even a second of wasted time, so I start looking around at the terminals. With my soul back to at least partial functionality, my amalgam is able to provide me enough information to make sense of most of the runes. It’s not perfect, but it’s more than enough to get a working idea of what I’m dealing with.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing conveniently labeled “Titan Ritual” or anything of the sort. I find multiple terminals that have runic descriptions of other fragments and/or spaces in reality that they can deposit me in, but none of them seem right.
I need to minimize the amount of time I spend fragment hopping. Theoretically, I could just jump to another fragment or facility and try again, but every second I spend here is a second that the ritual progresses.
It’s a second where Sierra could be dying.
I’ve worked my way through three-quarters of the intact terminals, barely avoiding a fall into the void when I trip over an invisible segment of something, when something catches my eye.
TRANSPORT CIRCLE: ________ HALCYON CONTAINMENT FRAGMENT — IMPRISONMENT AREA __________
Though I can’t read every rune, I can get the gist of it.
An imprisonment facility. Sierra and Adrian were sent to one the last time we ran into people that were sent by my creators. Would they do the same thing twice?
Yes, I decide. They would. Callen didn’t want them dead. He wanted to test me.
His words float back through my mind as I read the instructions on how to use the ritual circle.
Allow me to demonstrate why bonds hurt you.
If I enter this fragment, I’ll lose time. I might entirely fail to stop the new Titan from being created, if that’s even possible. I’ll lose the chance to kill the giant here. I’ll lose the chance to Devour the newest Titan before it can even be born. I’ll lose the chance to advance.
Every fiber of my body should be protesting for me to leave them behind. I should be happy to lose my allies, ready to take down the world myself if need be.
But that’s EV3, the demonic being that was birthed into a world of blood and broken glass.
I am EV3, but I have moved past that form in every way that matters.
And I do have the urge to just move on, to leave Sierra and Adrian and Zil behind and strike out on my own. On many levels, I do want to abandon my bonds. I want to advance, to leave the people I’ve befriended—and, in one case, more than that—to focus on myself and myself only.
That instinct, however, is not me. That primal desire is something that was instilled in me by scientists in lab coats that wanted a perfect little weapon.
Well, that backfired, didn’t it? Vindictive anger fuels me at the thought of every last one of them looking at me and thinking that I’m defective.
I can’t accurately describe the sensation that’s coursing through my body right now because nobody ever taught me what it is. None of the people who created me taught me how to be a person. I did that, copying mannerisms and bodies and stealing from the amalgam until I pass as human.
And Sierra taught me what it truly means to have allies. She’s the first human being I ever saw as something more than a bag of flesh that can give me XP.
She deserves to be more than an afterthought in my story.
“I am Evelyn Carnelian,” I whisper, knowing nobody will hear me. “I decide what I am.”
I cast one last regretful look at the now-immobile giant and push my mana into the ritual.
I’m coming for you, Sierra.
???
Adrian wakes to the uncomfortably familiar sensation of being buried alive. For a minute that stretches on far too long, memories flash through his mind.
“Help me,” Jasmine screams out, reaching for her lover’s hand. Adrian reaches back, and they clasp hands just as the rest of the building collapses on them.
The only part of her the search and rescue team finds is her hand, still cupped in Adrian’s.
“Help me!” a little boy begs, buried underneath the rubble. Adrian manipulates water, clearing away debris to pull the kid out, still nursing his own injuries. Two hours later, Adrian learns that the boy has survived and is recovering in the hospital. His father, who they find less than five feet under the child, succumbs to his wounds.
“Help me!” cry a thousand voices. Healers tend to the dying, ignoring those who are already dead but don’t know it yet. Adrian can do nothing but direct the flow of traffic through the overcrowded hospital. There are not enough healers. Never enough.
“There will be fewer when all is said and done,” a new voice says, high and feminine. Adrian never gets a look at her face.
He does, however, hear the click of the detonator.
“Help me,” Adrian echoes, his voice hollow. Nobody hears him.
He scrabbles for purchase, but there is none. He is sealed in a metal capsule, and it is full of him and fluid.
The Hydrokinetic, supposedly the master of this element, begins to drown.
“Help us,” the earnest blue-eyed girl says, the words unclear to his ears as the suffocating fluid fades away. “My name is Sierra.”
Adrian’s eyes do not work properly. They show him the scene, then a different world full of life he could never imagine. Then the bodies. Jasmine. The father. The patients.
“This is Jess,” the girl says. “Beaumont, Kenneth, Christopher, Rias—apologies. You must still be adjusting. Aunt Marie says the tests malfunctioned. You almost died.”
Blind rage suffuses him. A test. A test?
He summons the slowly-draining fluid from the capsule, and—
Adrian shakes himself out of the recollection by biting his tongue hard enough to taste metal. He knows how it ends. That one day—the worst day of his life, bar none—once controlled him. Now, it merely defines him. He will not allow it more.
He is sealed in a metal capsule, and it is full of him and fluid.
The Hydrokinetic, powers sealed by the backlash, begins to drown.
Not that he can. He knows that if whoever brought him here wanted him dead, he would already be dead. If they wanted him dead painfully, well, Adrian knows a dozen better ways to do it.
No, the fluid-filled tube that connects to his mouth, invading its way down his throat—that’s keeping him alive, no matter how close to death he feels. It’ll continue doing so until the fucks who captured him have a use for him.
Bitterly, he wonders why he’s even here. Why is it him that’s left? Jess was more powerful than him. Beaumont too. Both of them broke out of their tubes then, and given the amount Adrian advanced in the last year, they could break out of here now if they weren’t gone.
He bets that Sierra’s already out.
And here he is, useless once more. A level 8 Warrior with backlash that prevents him from accessing the only real power he has. A burden once more. He slowed Sierra down in the Crowned Islands. He couldn’t protect her in Ravendale, and he couldn’t help Evelyn. He’s nothing but baggage.
Adrian hangs his head and waits for death.
???
Sierra wakes up screaming.
She doesn’t stop for a long while.
Nobody is around to hear her.
When her throat is hoarse, she stands. “Is anyone there?”
The silence of the empty expanse around her coffin is answer enough.
Anomalous Fragment 004-WHITESTAR (alias 092-CALLEN)
The giant’s fist is effective beyond my wildest dreams. Rather than leave a dent in giant three like I hoped it would, it completely shatters the giant’s head, white gore exploding across a void-black body.
I worry that the giant will be able to function without the head, but that fear proves to be misplaced when giant three takes a single unsure step forward and begins to collapse. Both of its brothers are intelligent enough to get out of the way as it falls, avoiding a potentially fatal entanglement in its limbs, but I don’t.
Devour doesn’t work outside my body. The red and black magic fades the moment it gets more than a few inches from me, which is a shame. The addition of a range to the spell was one of my favorite aspects of it. While I’m not opposed to eating bodies, Devour as a ranged skill is significantly more convenient for collecting XP.
But if my hypothesis is right, I don’t have a second to waste. I sprint along the falling body before it even hits the ground, careful not to slip and fall on its overly smooth body. It still keeps the steely skin upon its death, but there’s just enough give in the skin for me to stick knives into it and use them as handholds. It becomes less necessary as it falls, the blood splattering everywhere, and I slow myself to a stop with twin daggers before either of its brothers try to attack me.
And I return to the basest form of consumption. I eat the blood.
Devour still works at incredibly close ranges, and direct consumption works. I can’t identify the actual practical differences between types of magical pressure, not with my magic sense as vague and undeveloped as it is right now, but I can taste them.
This giant has demon blood in it, and I rejoice in the sensation of my soul slowly returning, the patches from my disallowed second use of a special skill slowly mending.
Except the process is going slower than it should. Sure, I’m not using Devour at its full Diamond power thanks to the still-active Silence, but it shouldn’t be moving this slow.
That’s when I realize that the other two giants are consuming the fallen one as well. They stand still, massive white circles appearing on each of them where their faces should be, and pieces of the dead giant tear off and flow into them. With each passing second, they get stronger.
I’m not stupid. I have no way to counteract them, so I slurp up one last bit of demon blood and run.
Even if I can’t get the full bevy of benefits from it, it’s enough to restore my soul after the latest round of abuse I’ve put it through. I advance to level 54 easily, granting me three additional free stat points as well as one to every attribute.
New levels aren’t granting me skills anymore. Is that because my level is so high now that my advancement is primarily focused on increasing my attributes?
The latter stages of any Category will see different forms of progression. Then, you will be preparing for your ascent to the next stage, whereas the first segment of the next Category’s advancement will be dedicated to delivering on the foundation you have created.
Another lecture. My soul’s repaired enough to give me flashbacks to lives I haven’t lived, which is promising.
The surviving two giants are growing larger and faster, which is not.
I’m forced to end my drain of the dead giant’s body early when one of the still-living ones pulses with power. My magic sense is strong enough to identify the sudden burst of energy focused in giant three’s face, and I dodge just in time, slapping two points into Body (Speed) as I do. Proportionally, it’s not a huge increase—59 to 61—but that extra edge enables me to barely clear the void-flecked beam of white energy that bursts from the giant’s blank face.
The last point goes into Magic (Power) as soon as I land.
99 ticks over to 100.
Objective: Paradigm Shift
You have raised an attribute above level 100. Do the same for the rest.
Attributes raised: [1/8]
All of my stats have ballooned before, but this is completely different. While every increase in an attribute has reflected itself in the state of my body, the increase from 99 to 100 is a threshold that I’ve just broken through, and I feel the innate magic within me start to compress into my core. A star forms within me, bursting with power and heat and blood and killing intent, and it burns.
Pain is no obstacle to me, but it hurts even through my Gold tier Pain Resistance. For a regular being, this would be the end of the fight.
Thankfully… well, you know the rest.
The star within me burns bright and hot, and my veins light on fire, my upgraded magic tracing new channels through my body.
It’s not an instantaneous process. I start sprinting away from the two remaining giants as my body reforges itself in a mixture of divine and demonic fire, dodging another void-tinted blast of white energy as I do. This one hits the ground, and the steel simply disappears. There’s no explosion, no dramatic noise. Just… nothing.
As the magic continues to reshape me, the heat spreads through my body, the proto-star forming within me spreading its influence to all of me. My heart pounds, the sounds of the room replaced by rushing blood. My magic needs an outlet. I’m full to bursting with it; any longer in this state and I’ll pop like an overinflated balloon.
I scream as I activate my Hemokinesis, and even that is infused with the power of my internal star.
And the Silence bends against my cry. It does not break, but blood explodes out through my pores, multiplying and hardening under my will. Up until now, the blood has acted as a third arm, ever so natural to control, but now it bucks like an unruly horse, trying to throw me off. My freshly-carved veins protest as I wrest the blood back into submission, and then I send a spear of it at the giant that’s closer to me.
To my surprise, it penetrates. My Hemokinesis acts far faster than it has before, sending the sharpened blood towards my opponenet at supersonic speeds, and it breaks the impossibly smooth void-black flesh.
My blood falls apart a moment later, too far from my body for me to keep control of it against Callen’s still-active Silence.
The giant is weakened, though. I have a chance of actually winning now that I have my magic back, and I prepare to face the two of them with twin Soulblades in hand.
I’m about to throw caution to the wind and dash in when the healthy giant blasts its brother in the back. Three void-empowered blasts of energy emerge—one from its face, two from its massive hands—and it eviscerates the other experiment in an instant.
It’s too far for me to Devour. Even with my speed, I can’t get there in time.
Because the one remaining giant is consuming it first. Unlike my skill, this one’s form of Devour is utterly black, tinged with white specks. Pieces of its brother’s body flow into it, and I watch as the giant grows larger, pulses with more magic.
A few weeks ago, I would’ve tried to fight this, no matter how outclassed I am. Sapphire would want me to fight this. Callen probably would too.
Fuck that. I want to test my upgraded power, but a fragment that’s actively falling apart is not the place to do it. During the course of our battle, the giants have already obliterated a solid fifth of the room, and it’s beginning to lose integrity. Cracks spread through the floor, widening with every reality-shaking step the ur-giant takes.
It’s still newborn, and it’s already managed this.
Why even bother with me?
Because it will be unstoppable.
Because nothing will be able to grow like Project 0.
The voice that my amalgam recall’s is Sapphire’s. My skin crawls.
The giant bellows, magic gathering across its entire body. The star-like flecks of white coagulate, forming radiant discs of energy on its body.
Thanks to the increase in Magic (Power), my resistances have been baked into my body, infusing every part of me.
And it enables me to see a skill that is so effective at Gold tier that it even managed to work its magic on its owner.
Well, either that, or I just forgot it was there. That would be… significantly more embarrassing. I can’t tell which it is, and I suppose it doesn’t matter.
Whatever the case, I can’t use it fast enough. As the giant prepares to annihilate me and half the lab behind me, I trigger my Antimemetic Cloak.
Even at Gold tier, this skill is finicky. While the rat-things under Novarath were able to use these with abandon, I have a lot of restrictions. The skill is expensive to use, so much so that I don’t think I can keep it up for more than ten minutes, even with my vastly enhanced mana pool, and almost any large action will break it. I can’t attack or use movement skills for fear of breaking the fragile effect.
But it works. It works better than I could’ve imagined. The giant’s faceless head turns, sweeping the room, and it pauses. The magic it’s gathered starts to die down immediately.
Instinct tells me to try to kill it. To put everything I have into one surprise attack and slaughter the one remaining obstacle in my path.
Logic tells me I can’t, and I trust that far more when I know who’s responsible for building my instincts. Silence still suppresses my skills, even if it can no longer cancel all of them out.
“I’ll be back for you,” I promise, carefully avoiding the cracks in reality as I make my way around the lab.
I grab my Soulshard Rifle, worried that the action will trigger the giant’s perception and break my cloak, but it goes off without a hitch.
Hurry. I don’t have enough magic to warrant even a second of wasted time, so I start looking around at the terminals. With my soul back to at least partial functionality, my amalgam is able to provide me enough information to make sense of most of the runes. It’s not perfect, but it’s more than enough to get a working idea of what I’m dealing with.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing conveniently labeled “Titan Ritual” or anything of the sort. I find multiple terminals that have runic descriptions of other fragments and/or spaces in reality that they can deposit me in, but none of them seem right.
I need to minimize the amount of time I spend fragment hopping. Theoretically, I could just jump to another fragment or facility and try again, but every second I spend here is a second that the ritual progresses.
It’s a second where Sierra could be dying.
I’ve worked my way through three-quarters of the intact terminals, barely avoiding a fall into the void when I trip over an invisible segment of something, when something catches my eye.
TRANSPORT CIRCLE: ________ HALCYON CONTAINMENT FRAGMENT — IMPRISONMENT AREA __________
Though I can’t read every rune, I can get the gist of it.
An imprisonment facility. Sierra and Adrian were sent to one the last time we ran into people that were sent by my creators. Would they do the same thing twice?
Yes, I decide. They would. Callen didn’t want them dead. He wanted to test me.
His words float back through my mind as I read the instructions on how to use the ritual circle.
Allow me to demonstrate why bonds hurt you.
If I enter this fragment, I’ll lose time. I might entirely fail to stop the new Titan from being created, if that’s even possible. I’ll lose the chance to kill the giant here. I’ll lose the chance to Devour the newest Titan before it can even be born. I’ll lose the chance to advance.
Every fiber of my body should be protesting for me to leave them behind. I should be happy to lose my allies, ready to take down the world myself if need be.
But that’s EV3, the demonic being that was birthed into a world of blood and broken glass.
I am EV3, but I have moved past that form in every way that matters.
And I do have the urge to just move on, to leave Sierra and Adrian and Zil behind and strike out on my own. On many levels, I do want to abandon my bonds. I want to advance, to leave the people I’ve befriended—and, in one case, more than that—to focus on myself and myself only.
That instinct, however, is not me. That primal desire is something that was instilled in me by scientists in lab coats that wanted a perfect little weapon.
Well, that backfired, didn’t it? Vindictive anger fuels me at the thought of every last one of them looking at me and thinking that I’m defective.
I can’t accurately describe the sensation that’s coursing through my body right now because nobody ever taught me what it is. None of the people who created me taught me how to be a person. I did that, copying mannerisms and bodies and stealing from the amalgam until I pass as human.
And Sierra taught me what it truly means to have allies. She’s the first human being I ever saw as something more than a bag of flesh that can give me XP.
She deserves to be more than an afterthought in my story.
“I am Evelyn Carnelian,” I whisper, knowing nobody will hear me. “I decide what I am.”
I cast one last regretful look at the now-immobile giant and push my mana into the ritual.
I’m coming for you, Sierra.
