My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy
Chapter 174: Hero’s Moment

Chapter 174: Hero’s Moment

He cursed under his breath and picked a direction, boots slipping slightly on the smooth floor. The mechanical hum followed him, steady, uncaring.

The guilt stayed louder.

How many minutes had he wasted already?

How many more would he bleed out chasing ghosts through dead halls?

The timer hovered again at the edge of his vision, ticking down like a noose tightening.

[3:42]

Elias gritted his teeth, the taste of blood sharp in his mouth. His shoulder throbbed with every stride — Vira’s strike, a dull reminder that even the people you trusted could tear you open when it mattered most.

Not that he had any right to feel betrayed.

Not after what he’d done.

Not after who he’d left behind.

His shard pulsed harder against his chest, the blue glow leaking out faster, uncontrolled.

Dot’s presence flickered nearby — silent, steady — but he couldn’t even bring himself to look at her yet.

One more turn.

One more empty hallway.

One more chance to screw it all up.

Elias didn’t slow. He couldn’t.

If he stopped to think, he wouldn’t move again.

The shard pulsed harder—[3 minutes remaining]—and somewhere ahead, a scream ripped through the stillness. Raw. Desperate. It cracked apart the heavy silence just before the hiss of plasma fire split the air and bodies hit the ground with sick, wet thuds.

Elias stumbled to a stop, boots screeching against the steel floor. His chest heaved once, breath burning in his throat. The battle sounds pulled at him—louder than the pounding of his own blood—a thread he could still follow through the maze.

"Dot—something to break through. Now!" he snapped, voice frayed and hoarse from the sprint.

Dot’s glow surged at his side, her hum spiking higher as she conjured a sleek spear in midair. Steel gleamed along its shaft, gunpowder laced into the volatile tip. Elias didn’t hesitate. He seized it in both hands, drove it down into the floor with a guttural grunt. The impact rang through his arms, metal shrieking against metal. Sparks exploded upward as the embedded compounds ignited, blasting the ground apart in a jagged, molten burst.

The floor gave way.

Elias dropped through the smoke and flame, the spear dissolving into flickers of light as he fell. He hit the hub below hard—ankles jolting, knees buckling—and shoved himself upright through the shock.

The air slammed into him. Thick. Metallic. Choked with the stink of scorched flesh and burning oil. Blood slicked the floor in dark, sluggish pools, smeared across shattered consoles and the twisted ruins of steel beams.

Jasmine and Culdrin lay crumpled nearby—charred, broken, barely recognizable through the seared, blistered remains of what had been armor and skin. Silas’s anti-shard gas had done its work too well.

At the center of the wreckage, Vira stood alone. Blood streamed down her face in thick rivulets, pooling under her boots. Her serpent Ikona—Snippy—coiled limply beside her, its scales darkened and oozing red.

Around her, a dozen Federation guards closed in. Their plasma rifles hummed with lethal tension, visors gleaming under the broken lights, boots grinding through the blood-soaked wreckage without hesitation.

Vira turned her head slowly, one eye swollen shut, the other bloodshot and glassy. Her gaze found Elias through the smoke and broken light. A ghost of a smirk pulled at her cracked lips, more blood than mirth behind it.

"Yo," she croaked, voice a ragged scrape of breath. "Took you long enough."

Blood trickled down her chin as she spoke, painting her teeth dark.

Her gaze flickered, searching—desperate, almost pleading beneath the battered defiance.

"Where’s the teleporter kid?"

Snippy coiled tighter at her side, the serpent’s tendrils twitching weakly, the dull glow of its red scales dimming with every breath Vira dragged in. Even now, the Ikona mirrored her — stubborn to the end.

Elias opened his mouth—he didn’t even know what he meant to say—when movement split the scene.

Oliver stormed into the hub, his Federation uniform half-scorched, smeared with streaks of ash and blood. The launcher slung across his back gleamed with oil and alien metal, stark against the wreckage around him. His boots splashed through the pooled blood without hesitation, each stride a hammer beat across the ruined floor.

He didn’t pause.

With a snarl, Oliver lunged, driving his knee into Vira’s face.

The crack of impact echoed through the chamber—wet, brutal.

Vira’s head snapped back, the motion too fast, too violent for her battered body to absorb. She crashed through a pile of twisted conduit tubing, her frame collapsing with a hollow, boneless thud. Sparks rained down from severed wires, flickering against the blood already spreading beneath her.

Vira didn’t rise.

Her breaths came shallow now, chest hitching against the sharp, broken angles of metal jutting from the floor. Blood sheeted from a gash across her forehead, running into her eye, blinding her completely.

Around her, the guards closed in.

Their rifles locked onto her body with mechanical precision, barrels humming with charge, visors reflecting only cold, blank light. The line of Federation soldiers tightened with each step, a silent noose drawn by protocol and bloodlust.

Oliver didn’t slow.

He pulled a device from his belt—a smooth, compact launcher Elias had seen once before in Silas’s private labs—and leveled it at Vira’s chest from point-blank range.

The device snapped forward with a muted thud.

A canister punched into Vira’s ribcage with enough force to fold her sideways. She flinched on instinct, a rasped grunt escaping her cracked lips as she caught sight of the thing embedded there. Recognition flickered in her one good eye—a slow, shuddering awareness of what was coming.

A hiss followed, soft and lethal.

Green vapor leaked from the canister, curling upward in slow tendrils like fingers reaching to pull her under. The same gas that had melted Jasmine and Culdrin alive. The same toxin Elias could still taste faintly in the scorched air.

Vira’s head lolled back against the broken steel beneath her.

Her eye caught the fractured lights high above, the jagged edges of glass and metal throwing shards of color across her bloodstreaked face.

She smiled. Barely.

"Betrayal’s my shadow," she rasped, voice splintering as blood welled at the corner of her mouth. Her gaze didn’t leave the ruined ceiling above, as if the stars themselves were trapped somewhere just beyond it. "Thought I’d outrun it this time... guess not."