Corrupted Bonds-Chapter 98: The Breaking Point

Silence fell.

Not the silence of peace. Not the hush of calm. But a ruptured, suffocating kind of silence. The kind that echoes in the ribcage and wraps itself around the spine.

Lucian's body hit the floor with a dull, final sound. His scythe shattered mid-air. Fragments of warped metal and energy hissed as they disintegrated into nothing—like memory being wiped from existence.

Rowan didn't move at first. Couldn't.

He stood there, mouth open, no sound escaping. Just a crackling breath and the wide, horrified stare of someone watching the impossible happen. His knees gave out. He dropped beside Lucian, shaking hands fumbling to press against the torn fabric of his coat, to check for breathing, pulse—anything.

Lucian's eyes were half-lidded. Violet glow dimming. Blood poured from his nose, his mouth. His fingers twitched once... and stilled.

"No—no, no, please—" Rowan's voice cracked like glass. He pressed his forehead to Lucian's, one hand cradling the back of his head like he could hold the pieces together through sheer force of will. His lips moved—but no more sound came out. Just breath. Just heartbreak.

All around them, the battlefield stood frozen. The others—Ari, Mira, Zora, Jasper, Quinn, Vespera, Sloane, and Ren—stood bloodied and broken, still locked in stances of defeat. Their reflections hovered near each of them, watching. Mocking.

The air was thick—wet with blood, tainted with burnt ozone and ash. The floor was cracked, blistered with heat fractures and dried pools of red. Walls flickered—reality unstable, texture shifting from stone to steel to impossible algorithmic pulses.

The reflections began to move again.

Ari's double leaned lazily against a column of fractured stone, twirling one of her bloodstained knives like she was bored. "Aw. You gonna cry for your boyfriend now?" she sneered, voice syrupy with venom.

Quinn's reflection stood behind him, arms crossed, face cold. Detached. Like watching Quinn suffer was a chore. "You always were better at feeling than fighting," it said. "Too bad you weren't good enough at either."

Mira's double crouched beside her real self, fingers stained with soot and blood. She tilted her head, gaze sharp. "Bet you regret trying to be strong now, don't you? Weakness always stinks like this."

Jasper's reflection paced in slow, deliberate circles, wind curling around his boots, dragging dust and hair across his face. "You barely know what your power can do," he hissed. "And still, you dared stand beside them."

Zora's reflection had his bow drawn. Arrow notched. But not aimed. Just waiting. Patient. "You're just a kid with pretty toys," he muttered. "I am gravity. You are falling."

Vespera's double stood with her back to her counterpart, arms loose at her sides, the silver chime spinning in perfect sync. "You wanted to heal this? You think empathy wins wars? Look what it's bought you."

Sloane's reflection strode in slow arcs, the terrain behind him rippling like a memory drowning in mud. "I told you," he whispered. "You build graves. I walk on them."

And Ren's reflection—still floating, still shining with time-laced brilliance—hovered just above his broken original. "The catalyst falls first," it said softly, more like a prophecy than a threat. "That's how the end begins."

The lights dimmed. The glyphs shifted. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com

And Rowan—still crouched over Lucian's motionless body—finally spoke. One word. Not loud. Not screaming. Just a broken breath: "...please."

The chamber didn't answer. But something had shifted. Something was coming.

The reflections hadn't finished. And the team hadn't fallen yet.

The reflections began to close in. Not with the precision of fighters. But with the predatory arrogance of victors.

Boots dragged across fractured ground. Blades glinted. Bows creaked. Their faces twisted with mockery, sharpened into grotesque masks of supremacy.

They weren't just going to win.

They were going to desecrate.

To erase.

To humiliate.

Every reflection moved in sync, steps measured like they'd rehearsed this finale a hundred times. Eyes gleaming. Smirks spreading. Weapons raised—not to wound, but to end.

And then— The lights froze.

The system itself seized.

A sharp thrummmmm tore through the air—metallic, ancient, undeniable. A voice. Not mechanical. Not programmed. But so vast it couldn't have come from the chamber.

It came from everywhere.

[SEQUENCE OVERRIDE.]

[INITIATING FAILSAFE.]

[WELCOME, SUBJECT: VAUGHN_00.]

The chamber didn't respond.

It submitted.

Light fractured—froze—then inverted, the glyphs overhead pulsing not with illumination, but command.

Reality itself convulsed, a breathless pause stretching between pulses of a power too old to have a name.

The air cracked.

Not from pressure. From history recoiling.

The chamber convulsed. The glyphs overhead flickered like dying stars.

Reflections reeled back as if hit by a wave of vertigo—not from power, but from something older.

Dominance.

A tear split across the far end of the chamber—silent and radiant, like the skin of space peeling back to reveal bone.

From the heart of the light—he came.

Vaughn_00.

He did not walk. He did not descend. He manifested.

A silhouette at first—cloaked in starlight-stitched black, threaded with the shimmer of timelines undone—platinum veins pulsing like starpaths. His feet never touched the floor. The air shuddered beneath him, resonance bending as if recognizing a rightful master.

His eyes were not violet. Not white. They held all colors, and none—like looking into the unmade edge of time itself. They were the color of recursion itself—a prism collapsed into singularity.

[SEQUENCE OVERRIDE CONFIRMED.]

[ALL THREADS DEFERRED TO SUBJECT: VAUGHN_00.]

[AUTHORITY: ABSOLUTE.]

The system didn't just speak. It yielded.

Vaughn_00 hovered forward, the air behind him repairing itself with each step—as though time remembered how it was supposed to be when he passed.

The air fractured like glass underfoot. A soundless shockwave blew through the chamber. Reflections froze mid-step, mid-mockery, their gazes jolting upward in instinctual dread.

One of the reflections—Ari's double—stepped back, blade twitching. "You... you're not supposed to be here."

Whatever unity they shared fractured. Their smirks faltered. Their stances buckled—not in fear, but in recognition.

He was not one of them.

He was what came before them.

He was calm.

And they were not.

Cracks spiraled across the walls, not from damage—but resonance recoil. The chamber couldn't contain him. It didn't try.

A tremor rolled beneath the reflections' boots.

His voice was quiet. Composed.

"I was here before there was a 'supposed to.'"

"You are errors. I am the original equation."

Then—

He raised one hand.

And reality obeyed.

The reflections gasped—flinching back as if gravity turned upside-down. One spoke, trembling through their bravado:

"You... You're not part of this cycle."

"I am the cycle," Vaughn_00 said calmly. "And you are just its stain."

His voice was low. Calm. Not threatening. Not cold. Just... absolute.

The Lucian reflection snarled, scythe raised, resonance thrumming. "We were born from you. From your failures."

A slow tilt of Vaughn_00's head.

Not in anger.

In pity.

Vaughn_00 stepped forward. And with it, the chamber healed behind his feet—stone re-knitting, blood vanishing into light.

"No," he said. "You were born when I started letting go."

"But I've held on long enough to end it now."

He lifted his hand. The space between fingers split—each fracture a mirrored shatter of time, each shard a weapon of his will.

He moved.

And the battlefield detonated.

—

Ari reflection snarled, teeth bared in a blood-stained grin. "You think this ends with one ghost in a fancy robe?"

Her daggers snapped upward—crossed before her chest like a predator ready to strike. Blood dripped from their tips, sizzled against the resonance-rippled floor.

Vaughn_00 turned toward her.

Calm.

Unmoved.

His voice didn't rise. It sank.

"You were never ghosts. Just shadows. And now—no light remains to cast you."

The Ari reflection screamed, lunging—blades spinning in a vicious spiral.

She moved like a storm—twisting mid-air, momentum perfect, knees bending into a full flip to land behind him—

And he didn't even look.

He flicked two fingers behind his back.

The air behind him ruptured—time folding into itself like a sinkhole of glass and heat.

Ari's reflection was caught mid-lunge.

She twisted—stabbed her blades downward, trying to anchor herself into the breaking plane, boots skidding, boots dragging, screaming.

"No—NO, I'm not done!"

The ground beneath her gave out.

Her form crumpled inward—imploding, bones distorting, light tearing through her like knives of memory unspooling. Her scream cut off with a sharp snap as her body folded into itself—

—a perfect spiral of annihilation.

Gone.

Not even ash left.

Just a faint echo of a scream that never quite finished.

—

Quinn's Reflection staggered upright, blood dripping down his chin, one arm limp at his side. His other hand shook as he raised a flickering resonance shield, the shimmer fracturing under strain. His expression contorted—desperate, defiant, but still laced with contempt.

"You'll need more than nostalgia to fix this," he hissed, voice cracking like glass under pressure.

Vaughn_00 tilted his head, expression unreadable. He stepped forward slowly, the world folding with each footfall—space softening beneath him like reality dared not resist.

"I'm not here to fix you," Vaughn_00 said gently, his voice like a hymn lost in time. "I'm here to end what never should've existed."

He walked straight through the resonance field.

No crack. No resistance.

The shield unwove around him like it had been waiting for his arrival.

Quinn's reflection didn't have time to move.

Vaughn_00 placed a hand flat over the center of his chest.

And pulsed.

A wave of pure, undiluted emotion—raw, ancient, devastating—exploded outward.

Not anger. Not vengeance. But grief weaponized.

Every tether the reflection had forged—every false bond, every mimicry of Quinn's empathy—shattered.

He screamed.

Not from pain.

From being seen.

From being felt.

The reflection's chest fractured from the inside, cracks of glowing resonance spreading across his ribs like spiderwebs spun in reverse.

His eyes widened, voice cracking—

"W-wait—"

Too late.

He burst apart—shards of emotional residue spiraling outward in a silent implosion. Not even a body left behind. Only the echo of someone who never truly lived.

Gone.

—

Mira's Reflection rose from the smoke with predatory grace, boots crunching over fractured glass and blood-slick stone. Her sniper glinted on her back, but her hands were already primed with fire—flames licking her fingertips, eager to consume.

"You think you're divine?" she spat, a smirk curling at the corner of her mouth. "Let's test if gods burn."

She snapped her fingers.

A pyro-burst ignited the air—raging outward in a violent wall of flame, curling like a serpent, the heat warping even the light.

Vaughn_00 didn't move.

The fire reached him—touched his cloak—

And died.

Snuffed out like a candle kissed by a hurricane.

He looked at her, eyes like collapsing stars. Timeless. Pitying.

"You were built from fury," he said softly. "But fury without truth... is just noise."

She roared, switching rounds—lightning ammo.

Sniper in hand, she twisted her body with balletic precision, firing a barrage of charged shots so fast the air screamed. The thunder-crack of each blast echoed like cannon fire, splintering the ceiling, shattering pillars.

Each round curved like guided vengeance—straight toward his skull.

Vaughn_00 raised one hand.

Time slowed.

The bullets hung in the air like silver stars.

He plucked one gently between his fingers.

Snapped it.

The sound was deafening.

Everything detonated.

The slowed rounds reversed, hurling back toward her at terminal speed—tenfold.

She fired again—desperate—ducked, rolled, twisted to avoid—

But Vaughn_00 was already there.

In front of her.

He touched the muzzle of her sniper rifle. And it melted in her grip—metal liquefying, warping around her arms, fusing like a coffin made of her own weapon.

She screamed—tried to unleash an incendiary backup charge—

He flicked two fingers.

Her own fire turned on her.

A cyclone of elemental backlash erupted—flames and lightning both—spiraling around her like a tomb.

She was caught in the center.

Burning. Cracking. Screaming as her body was consumed by her own perfection turned poison.

Vaughn_00 watched.

Not cruelly.

Not triumphantly.

Just... sad.

"She always wanted control," he murmured. "But she never understood balance."

And in the cyclone's core—she shattered.

A final burst of scorched ash spiraled upward—then was gone, carried on a breeze that no longer existed.

Gone.

—

Zora's Reflection didn't retreat.

He stood in the center of the crumbling chamber with a cruel elegance—twin curved swords humming with gravitational pulses, his bow strung across his back like a second spine. His coat fluttered from the residual pressure—artificial gravity bending the air around him.

He sneered.

"Gravity bends to me," he said, voice like a blade sliding across stone. "Even gods fall."

Vaughn_00 stopped.

Tilted his head.

"Then fall with grace."

The reflection roared—slamming one of his blades into the ground.

The chamber twisted.

Stone warped upward in jagged towers. Arrows of pure pressure fired from mid-air, slicing toward Vaughn_00 with terrifying force—each one engineered to implode bones from the inside.

He didn't move.

Not until the last second.

Then—a blink. A blur.

And Vaughn_00 stepped sideways through space itself.

The gravity spikes shattered around him like glass meeting still water.

Zora's reflection cursed, drawing both blades and rushing forward. He swung in a crescent arc, each cut accelerating unnaturally as gravity bent to boost their momentum.

The strikes could cleave titanium.

But Vaughn_00 lifted his hand.

Time slowed.

No—weight slowed.

Zora's reflection's limbs stuttered mid-swing, his body beginning to sink into the floor.

Panic bloomed in his eyes.

"What—what are you—"

"You command force," Vaughn_00 said softly.

"But you never carried its weight."

He closed his fist.

The gravity turned inward.

Zora's reflection screamed as his own gravitational field collapsed into him. His arms snapped downward, legs splintering under impossible pressure.

Stone cracked in a perfect circle around his feet.

Then his body compressed.

Not crushed. Compacted.

His bones snapped inwards, blood turning to a mist of pressurized red, limbs folding unnaturally into a singularity of himself.

A black hole of failure.

For one breath, there was silence—

—then a sharp implosion.

Gone.

Nothing left but a crater the shape of despair.

Vaughn_00 lowered his hand slowly.

The chamber echoed with the residual hum of distorted mass. Even the light bent for a moment, as if mourning the consequence of arrogance.

—

Sloane's Reflection stood high on a jagged spire of stone he'd raised beneath his boots, like a monument to himself. Mist coiled around his frame, thick and unnatural, shifting with every breath like it obeyed him.

He looked down on Vaughn_00 with a sneer carved from granite.

"Ground shakes when I speak," he said, voice low and crawling. "You may wear his face, but you don't carry the world like I do."

Beneath his feet, vines erupted—snapping across the battlefield like snakes of stone and root. The air choked with spore-dust and pollen so sharp it stung the lungs.

The earth buckled, rising and falling in waves.

Vaughn_00 raised his eyes.

"You never carried the world," he said softly. "You scarred it."

The terrain reflection snarled, hurling compressed boulders forward, each one engraved with sigils that glowed like magma. Vaughn_00 walked through them, each stone pausing mid-air, then disintegrating into powder.

He stopped just before the spire's base.

Lifted a hand.

The earth whimpered.

Roots blackened.

The vines snapped, curling in on themselves like dying things.

Sloane's Reflection stumbled.

"What did you—"

"You shaped the land with fear," Vaughn_00 murmured.

"Let me show you what love does to stone."

The ground inverted beneath the reflection. His mighty spire withered—rock turning to sand, sand to ash.

Sloane's reflection fell—hard—landing with a crunch that echoed like splintered ribs across the chamber.

Before he could rise, Vaughn_00 stepped forward—pressed his palm to the earth.

A ripple rushed outward. From the floor sprang crimson bloomscars—flowers forged of memory, blooming and bursting simultaneously, each one singing a different resonance note.

The terrain answered Vaughn_00—not with obedience, but reverence.

Roots of shimmering light curled around the reflection's limbs.

He writhed, gasping as bark twisted around his throat, his arms, his spine.

He tried to speak. Couldn't.

"The land never belonged to you," Vaughn_00 said gently.

"You were only ever a guest."

Then he clenched his fist.

The roots dragged the reflection down.

Into the floor.

Into himself.

The stone swallowed his scream. His body contorted—crushed into the raw strata beneath the battlefield until nothing remained but the shape of a grave.

Gone.

—

Vespera's Reflection stood in stillness.

Chime pendant floating, not swinging—caught in an unnatural stillness.

Her eyes glowed silver, lips parted in a faint smile that held no warmth—only the brittle perfection of someone pretending to feel.

She tilted her head.

"Do you know what I am?" she asked, voice soft as breath in a mausoleum. "I'm what's left when empathy dies. I'm the whisper in the mind that says: let go."

The resonance around her shimmered—waves of empathic static expanding like a net. Her charm spun faster, pulling invisible threads of memory from the air—threads of fear, guilt, regret. The battlefield grew heavy, pressed down by emotions not their own.

The others staggered. Rowan gasped.

Even Vaughn_00 slowed.

But he didn't flinch.

He stepped through the haze—resonance unraveling in waves around him, like it recognized him.

"You were supposed to be their light," he said, quiet. "But you became their silence."

The reflection's smile didn't waver. "Light burns out. Silence endures."

"No," he said. "Silence forgets.

And I remember everything."

He reached toward her—not with aggression, but with grace.

She raised her hands to strike, to unravel him from the inside out—

But Vaughn_00 did not strike.

He simply breathed.

A single note whispered from his chest—pure resonance, uncorrupted, unfiltered, whole.

It struck the battlefield like a cathedral bell made of memory.

The reflection staggered.

Her charm stilled.

The threads she had pulled taut snapped.

Her own voice trembled. "No... no, this isn't—this isn't mine—"

"No," Vaughn_00 said. "It never was."

Her form began to split.

Not violently.

But sorrowfully.

Her body unraveled like a lullaby remembered wrong. Each piece of her—voice, emotion, memory—detached from the whole and vanished, like a song losing its melody note by note.

She reached for her chime—only to watch it disintegrate in her palm.

Her eyes widened, just before the light claimed her.

Gone.

—

Jasper's Reflection cracked his knuckles, wind snarling at his feet.

Ren's Reflection blurred in beside him, grinning wide, twin daggers humming with temporal static.

They moved as one.

"Let's put on a show," Ren's Reflection laughed, already flickering through time, phasing in and out as he dashed forward.

Jasper's double rose into the air, arms raised as the vortex built behind him—an artificial hurricane twisted from corrupted resonance, sharper than steel, faster than thought.

"Try standing when your atoms don't know what time it is," Ren's Reflection taunted, looping behind Vaughn_00 like a flicker.

"Or breathing without air!" Jasper's double roared, wind curling into spears.

They struck in tandem—

A blur of ruptured time and weaponized weather.

But Vaughn_00...

Moved once.

One foot forward.

The chamber bent with it.

The hurricane froze mid-roar.

Ren's flicker snapped back into place like a puppet yanked by its strings.

"You are echoes," Vaughn_00 said calmly, voice echoing through every molecule of the chamber. "One lost in moments... the other in noise."

Ren's Reflection lunged. Jasper's unleashed the full wrath of the vortex.

Vaughn_00 raised a single hand.

Reality collapsed.

The wind shattered—slamming backward into Jasper's double with a screech of rending flesh and splintered bone. He was torn apart midair, shredded by his own elemental fury.

At the same time, Ren's Reflection surged—blade raised—only to halt mid-stride, frozen.

Vaughn_00 stepped behind him.

His voice, lower now. Measured. Knowing.

"You think you bend time because you run along its surface."

"But the real one?" His gaze flicked toward Ren, slumped near Rowan. "He is the fault line. The catalyst. Time bends for him because it fears what he might become."

He placed a hand over the back of Ren's neck.

Time folded inward—dragging the reflection through his own reversed timeline, moment by moment, loss by loss, until he became nothing more than a glitch unraveling.

Gone.

Both of them.

The wind fell still.

The echoes of time faded.

And Vaughn_00 stood alone.

Unshaken. Unmatched. Unwritten.

—

All was still.

No more wind.

No more fire.

No more echoes screaming through the cracks of a broken chamber.

Only one remained.

Lucian's Reflection.

He hadn't moved.

He stood alone amidst the ruin, boots planted in the scorched floor, cloak torn at the hem, scythe still gripped tight—its blade twitching with fractured space, pulsing with restrained wrath.

But his smirk had faded.

The arrogance... dimmed.

Vaughn_00 turned.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

He looked at the last reflection—his reflection.

And for the first time, his voice didn't carry power.

It carried grief.

His voice didn't rise.

It didn't shake.

It cut.

"You remember everything I lost.

But tell me...

When did you forget why I fought for it?"

And the silence that followed was the first thing that made the reflection flinch.

The chamber pulsed—once.

Then silence.