My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy
Chapter 170: Visuals Galore

Chapter 170: Visuals Galore

His words came out steady. His eyes didn’t.

There wasn’t much point pretending — Jasmine, Culdrin... all of it had started with him. The plan had been simple. Just a push. Just enough to give them a reason to move.

He shifted his weight, the corner of his jaw tightening. That truth sat heavy behind his face, out of reach.

Junjio’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking. The portal Ikona at his fingertips flickered again, a faint ring of light guttering like a flame caught in the wind.

A sharp breath rattled out of him. Dirt clung to the wet tracks cutting down his face, the raw red of his eyes standing out in the glow. His fingers clawed at nothing, too slow to catch what was slipping away.

"I’m trying, Elias. I swear," he rasped. His voice cracked on the last word.

The portal flared, then stuttered again, the corridor on the other side warping out of shape like heat off asphalt.

Elias stepped in, setting a firm hand on the boy’s shoulder.

"You’ve got this, kid," he said, steady and low. Each word weighed out before it left his mouth.

The boy kept shaking. His eyes, wide and scared, jumped to Elias’s face like he was hanging onto the sound of his voice.

"Your dad’s out there," Elias said. "And we’re bringing him back."

The shard pulsed harder against his chest.

Out of the corner of his eye, the system timer floated—11 minutes. The numbers ticked down, sharp and relentless, each second hammering into him.

His mind spun.

Hiroshi’s the key. He clung to it, grabbing hold before the chaos inside could pull him under.

But A Block wouldn’t let go.

Kikaru’s pale face cutting through the smoke.

Faye’s hands trembling so hard she could barely hold her Ikona steady.

Tidwell bleeding out, half-conscious, the blood already drying black around him.

Paul standing back, the doubt in his eyes louder than anything he’d said.

Wes meeting his gaze with a look that didn’t waver, even as the strength drained out of him step by step.

Their Ikona were dimming. The glow that had once carried them was thinning out, flickering in and out like a signal cutting across static.

They were still tied to him — still fighting, still burning themselves out for this chance.

Elias gritted his teeth, dragging his focus back to the portal.

The weight of it stayed. He could feel their energy pulling at him, the strain of it running down the line between them. He couldn’t cut them loose. Not now.

Jasmine’s mist Ikona wove through the hub, a shifting veil of silver that clung close to her body.

It blurred the sharpness of her movements, ghosting around the quick turns of her frame, but it didn’t touch her eyes.

Her gaze stayed locked in, cutting clean through the smoke and chaos.

Every step she made was sharp, deliberate — the work of someone who had spent months tearing Cube X apart piece by piece in her mind.

Grief pushed beneath it, hot and buried — her sister’s memory twisting into every command she gave.

"Hold the line!" Jasmine shouted.

The mist snapped upward, catching a plasma round in midair. It hissed, buckling the shot just enough to leave the guard open.

A half-second later, he hit the floor, blood dragging behind him in a broken streak.

Culdrin stood a step behind her, solid as a wall.

His bone Ikona wrapped around him, a mass of jagged ivory plates that shifted and locked with each movement.

The armor looked almost alive — too rough to be crafted, too deliberate to be natural.

Cracks ran through it like veins, spiderwebbing wider every time a shot landed. But he didn’t move.

Didn’t even flinch.

The strength holding him there wasn’t just muscle.

It came from somewhere deeper — quieter — the kind of grief that didn’t show unless you knew where to look.

His brother was still down there. Somewhere in the guts of Cube X.

Culdrin had chained himself to that promise. He wasn’t breaking it.

"They’re not breaking us!" he roared.

His voice hit the air rough, grinding through the clash around them.

He swung — one clean arc — and the guard’s rifle cracked apart in his hands.

Wood and metal splintered, clattering across the blood-slick floor.

The hub swallowed the sound.

Culdrin didn’t stop. His rebellion wasn’t something you could reason with.

It was a hammer — forged the day Vardency fell — and he swung it like nothing else mattered.

Through the smoke and shouting, Yui Raki and Kimi pushed forward.

Their black tech suits caught the light in flickers, energy fields rippling just beneath the surface.

Thin gas canisters clinked against their belts, hissing with every step as vapor curled into the scorched air.

Yui’s gauntlets burned with a cold violet glow.

The light ran up the sharp cuts of his armor — harsh, clinical — a mirror of the look on his face.

He moved fast.

Too fast.

A blur across the broken hub, hitting Culdrin again with a strike that snapped fresh cracks through the bone armor.

Shards flew off in sharp little bursts, skittering across the floor.

Yui didn’t even pause.

He sneered, a sharp, ugly thing pulling at the corners of his mouth.

"Pathetic rogues," he said, voice slicing flat across the chaos, like they weren’t even worth his time.

Beside him, Kimi spun through the wreckage.

The pink edges of her armor caught the dim overhead lights, flashing like knife points in the dark.

She moved light, almost too light — the edge of something harder buried under the way she laughed.

"Yui, don’t be so grumpy," she called, voice sharp and sweet at the same time.

"Let’s wrap this up!"

She flicked a canister into the air without breaking stride.

It burst mid-arc, throwing a cloud of shimmer into the space between them.

The vapor slammed into Jasmine’s mist.

Both forces twisted together, hissing, recoiling, dragging the air down thick between them.

The hub trembled with it — both sides grinding forward, neither giving ground.

A new figure shoved his way into the hub.

Oliver.

The Federation uniform he wore still looked clean, the white and navy sharp against the wreckage around him.

In both hands, he gripped a canister launcher — sleek, polished, nothing like the battered tech strewn across the floor.

It gleamed under the broken lights, wrong somehow, like it didn’t belong here.

It didn’t.

The anti-shard arsenal Silas had hidden...

Oliver had it now. And he wasn’t hiding it anymore.

"Yui! Kimi! Why the hell aren’t you using the gas?"

His voice slammed across the chamber — flat, hard, too loud to ignore.

His eyes cut into them, sharp enough to leave a mark.

Yui’s gauntlets powered down with a soft whine, the violet glow bleeding out.

He didn’t look away.

Didn’t flinch.

He just sneered, the line of his mouth curling with open disgust.

"It’s a coward’s tool," he said, low and bitter. "Real fighters don’t need it to crush these rejects."

Beside him, Kimi spun a slow circle, the pink trim on her armor catching the overhead lights.

She shrugged, lazy, unbothered.

"We’ve got this, boss," she called, voice bright, almost laughing.

"Gas is such a drag."

The words barely hit before Oliver’s glare hardened even further.