The battlefield was still.
Smoke curled from shattered stone and scorched steel. The air was thick with ionized particles and the static of malfunctioning energy signatures. Lin Chen stood motionless, his fists clenched so tightly that blood seeped through his knuckles. Beside him, the broken remains of a containment pillar sparked erratically—an eerie reminder of the ambush that had nearly cost him everything.
At the center of the ruin, lying in a pool of scattered memory modules and shattered sensor fragments, was Li Chu.
Unconscious. Pale. But breathing.
Barely.
His system interface flickered erratically in Lin Chen's peripheral vision. Damage reports. Integrity faults. Emotional calibration errors. But Lin Chen wasn't looking at it. He couldn't—not yet.
Because all he could see was her face.
The moment before she collapsed. The clarity in her eyes as she fought the control chip buried deep within her cerebrum. The way she smiled at him—not with fear, not with pain, but with fierce, sacrificial determination—as she chose to destroy her own abilities to stay herself.
He had seen courage before.
But not like this.
Not like her.
And now, something inside him had cracked.
Not the rage—that had already passed. Not grief, which now simmered low and quiet. But a resolve, cold and absolute, that seared through his chest with every breath.
Someone had to pay.
Someone would.
—
"System," he spoke aloud, voice like ice, "access all Erebus-level infrastructure logs. Cross-reference personnel rosters, project leads, and archived neural node mappings."
[Salvator System Alert: Query request breaches ethical containment protocols. Proceeding may induce irreversible hostility with all Erebus subdivisions.]
"Proceed."
[...Confirmed. Initiating shadow-level scan. Warning: Consequences will be global.]
Lines of red data crawled across his visual interface. Names. Faces. Places.
Then, a final designation blinked into focus:
PRIME NODE: Dr. Yi Ze (Project Codename: Creator Class Alpha)Current Status: Location Masked – Last Known Assignment: Genesis Core, Erebus Foundational Sector
Lin Chen's pupils contracted.
He remembered that name. One of the few signatures on his system initialization logs—buried so deeply that even Level S access had initially redacted it.
And then, another fragment emerged.
Relation: Supervising Lead for Subject Zero (Li Chu)Authorization: Total Emotional Core Access. Emergency Override: [ACTIVE, 72 hrs ago]
His hands trembled—not with fear, but with a fury too precise to explode.
"He did this to her," Lin Chen muttered. "He used her core… to stabilize me."
He stared down at Li Chu's unconscious form, her face serene despite the chaos around her. For a moment, the silence screamed louder than any explosion.
Then the system chimed.
[Mainline Directive Triggered: Salvator Host Emotional Threshold Exceeded. Initiating 'Judgment Protocol'.]
NEW MAIN QUEST UNLOCKED: 审判·创始者 (Judgment: The Originator)
Objective: Identify, locate, and dismantle all central command cores associated with Project Erebus. Target: Genesis Core Facility. Status: Active.Reward Phase I: Unlock Access to Level-2 Authority, Reconstruction Module: "World Reformat Engine"
He didn't blink.
Didn't flinch.
Just whispered:
"Then let's begin."
—
An hour later, Lin Chen stood alone on a ridge overlooking what was once a dormant Erebus relay station. Behind him, static storms curled across the skyline—remnants of the energy backlash from the earlier battle. His system pinged with urgent communications from various awakened factions—some begging for help, others offering sanctuary.
He ignored them all.
A single transmission flickered across his HUD. Encrypted. Masked frequency. But not unfamiliar.
[Unknown Sender: Y.Z.]"I warned them not to trigger her failsafe. But she was never just a weapon, was she? Neither are you."
Lin Chen's breath caught.
Dr. Yi Ze.
Still watching.
Still speaking in riddles.
"We don't create gods, Lin Chen. We design inevitabilities. What you choose next… defines whether you break this world, or reshape it."
The message terminated.
And Lin Chen felt the last shard of his hesitation dissolve.
There would be no reshaping. No mercy. No negotiation.
Only reckoning.
—
Back at the temporary medical shelter within Sector F13, two system-linked medics hovered anxiously over Li Chu. Her vitals were stable but flat. No abnormal spikes, no system flare-ups. But her neural map was oddly… clean.
Too clean.
As if the core of her system had been—wiped.
"Emotion chip... gone," one whispered. "Like it was never there."
But Lin Chen heard none of it.
He stood outside, watching the stars over the ravaged city. Watching, waiting—for the moment when the system would unlock the pathway to Erebus's heart.
And when it did, there would be no holding back.
No more calculations.
Only justice.
And vengeance.
For her.
For himself.
And for the countless others whose lives had been turned into pawns.
—