My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy
Chapter 152: Pained Feelings

Chapter 152: Pained Feelings

Elias nodded, more to himself than anyone else. The steady pulse of Dot’s hum against his wrist helped tether him to the ground when everything else inside him screamed to move, to fight, to do something.

But Veyra’s question still circled like a blade inside his mind, cutting every thought that got too close to comfort.

Will you break?

He drew in a breath through his nose, sharp and cold, and stepped fully out from the shadow of his pod.

"Well," Elias said, voice low but firm, "what should we do?"

The words hit the narrow corridor harder than he intended, snapping a few of the others out of their frozen states.

His sleepwear clung damply to his back, but he ignored the discomfort, setting his jaw and sweeping a look toward the others. Kikaru’s pod glowed with the jittery flare of her Ikona. Faye’s figure was barely visible behind her screen, standing stiff and silent.

"You think the other blocks are just gonna sit there and wait for the military to sweep in and fix this?" Elias asked, his gaze drifting to the sealed bolt-locks that loomed like monoliths at the corridor’s end.

"Oliver said ’a few’ went rogue. Not all of B Block. But these doors..." He shook his head once, jaw tightening. "They’re built like Lockaway’s. Four, maybe five layers of revolving steel. Maximum security style."

His shard pulsed dully in his chest, the weight of old memories rising with it — memories of how prisoners had pounded their fists bloody against doors like that, screaming to get out while the world on the other side burned.

Before Elias could say more, a sharp voice cut through.

Tidwell.

The half-dressed shard user leaned against a pod frame, spinning his knife loosely between his fingers, the blade flashing with every slow rotation. His cloud Ikona churned around him, tighter than before.

"Sleep it off," Tidwell snapped, the words dry, biting. His frustration rode just under the surface, tight as a snare ready to spring. "It’s their problem. That’s what happens when you lock a bunch of shard users together and pretend it’ll end any other way."

The usual lazy jests were gone.

Only the raw scrape of irritation remained.

Elias exhaled slowly, letting the breath grind past the tightness in his throat. He leaned back against the nearest pod wall, the metal cold enough to bite into the sweat along his spine.

"What if they kill guards?" Elias said, quieter now, the thought clawing up his throat. "Or worse?"

Images he hadn’t invited shoved themselves forward — memories from the last battle, the bloodbath that Roachaline’s Chaos Reign had unleashed, Lyra’s Tempest Rush carving through soldiers like they were nothing but wheat to be cut down.

His hands tightened into fists at his sides.

"We could help," he said, the words thick. "We could stop them. Save lives."

But even as he said it, he felt the old weight settle deeper across his shoulders — the awful, gnawing question that had no clean answer.

Tidwell’s knife paused mid-twirl, the blade catching a flicker of red light from the emergency systems as it stilled between his fingers.

He stared at Elias, the casual slouch in his posture tightening into something harder, sharper.

"What, like we’re heroes or something?" Tidwell snapped.

His voice cut across the narrow hallway like a blade, sharper than anything he was actually holding.

"Please, Elias," he added, spitting the words with a rough laugh that didn’t hold an ounce of humor. "Even with all the nice shit they give us — the food, the training, the new IDs — we’re still just weapons on leashes."

The last word dropped heavy, bitter, final.

The old playfulness that usually colored Tidwell’s voice during training — the jabs, the half-jokes, the reckless daring — was gone now.

What was left behind was raw, and brittle, and much closer to the truth than Elias wanted to admit.

He felt the words land deep — deeper than he could afford.

His shard pulsed hard against his ribs, the beat out of rhythm with his breathing, a cold warning he didn’t need Dot to interpret.

Across the corridor, another figure stirred.

Paul pushed open the cracked screen of his pod and stepped into the corridor, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with one hand. His sleepwear hung wrinkled and loose around his frame, his hair flattened on one side from whatever restless half-sleep the explosion had torn him from.

But despite the exhaustion in his body, Paul’s eyes were steady — steady in that tired, resigned way that said he wasn’t surprised anymore when the world found new ways to collapse.

"It sounds lame, Elias," Paul said, sighing as he ran a hand through his messy hair, "but... I sorta agree."

He crossed his arms loosely over his chest, voice flattening out under the weight of things they all knew but never said out loud.

"All we hear is bad story after bad story. Death, kidnappings, another rogue shard user snapping somewhere halfway across the continent. And then the damn alien invasion everyone’s been whispering about since the spires cracked open."

His Ikona shimmered faintly at his side — a soft, wavering presence that reflected the sag in his shoulders.

The words didn’t come bitter from Paul.

They came heavy, tired, like a man already carrying too many bodies on his back.

Tidwell scoffed from where he leaned against the wall, his knife flicking once between his fingers before settling.

"Oh, come on," he said, the disbelief heavy in his voice. "Yeah, aliens are real — we’ve all seen what they left behind."

His cloud Ikona stirred sharper, frustration bleeding through.

"But worrying about some third-wave invasion while we’re stuck behind four layers of steel with rogue shard users loose? Kinda feels like the wrong apocalypse to panic about right now."

He pushed off the wall with a grunt, the tension in his shoulders rising along with the swirling mist around him.

Kikaru crossed her arms tightly, her golden orb Ikona pulsing low against her chest, casting fractured light along the floor. She shifted her weight, her gaze sharp but measured, the tension in her posture coiled tight.

"Being heroes isn’t the worst thing," she said, her voice cutting cleanly through the heavy air. "But we’re valuable, Elias. You can’t start thinking like the Epics — killing just because you have the strength to."