My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy
Chapter 175: Idiocy or Bravery

Chapter 175: Idiocy or Bravery

Her hand twitched, searching the floor until it found Snippy’s battered coils. She brushed her fingertips against the Ikona’s trembling body—barely a whisper of a touch.

"Sorry, buddy," she breathed, so soft that even Elias, standing only feet away, barely caught it.

Her fingers slackened.

The light in her eye dimmed.

The shard pulsed harder against Elias’s chest—[2 minutes 30 seconds remaining]—its glow bleeding through the damp, torn fabric of his sleepwear. The green vapor coiled closer, seeping outward from the canister embedded in Vira’s ribs, each wisp a lethal hand reaching for her.

Elias didn’t think. He moved.

He threw himself forward, boots slipping on the blood-slick floor. The gas brushed the edge of his vision, oily and translucent under the flickering hub lights. His shoulder slammed into Vira’s side, and together they hit the ground hard, sliding across the ruined floor. Blood smeared their path in a jagged line, the cold bite of it soaking through Elias’s clothes as he twisted, forcing himself over her body to shield her from the cloud.

Vira’s weight under him was wrong—too limp, too light. Her breath rattled in her chest, barely more than a scratch of sound against his ear.

For a moment, she didn’t move.

Then her good eye cracked open, dazed and bloodshot, finding his face. Confusion flickered there—raw, almost childlike—as her split lips parted, trying to form words.

Behind you.

The shape of them ghosted across her mouth. No sound came.

Elias’s shard burned hotter, the system prompt hovering just out of reach:

[Save a life.]

The words gnawed at him. Who?

Vira? Junjio’s father? The others trapped in the blocks?

Who mattered more?

His jaw locked tight. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He wasn’t letting another person die under that green mist. Not today.

"You don’t get to quit yet," he muttered, voice low and cracked from running, from breathing the scorched air. His fingers dug into the ruined fabric of her uniform, feeling the tremble still running through her body.

A shadow fell across them.

Elias turned instinctively, just in time to see the rifle butt swinging down toward his head—fast, brutal, the kind of strike meant to end a fight before it could start.

Dot flared without warning.

The air rippled beside him as a sheet of dense metal materialized, catching the blow with a hollow, gut-punch clang. Sparks burst outward from the impact, the noise bouncing off the ruined walls of the hub. The force still jarred through Elias’s arm, numbing it to the elbow, but the shield held.

Elias gritted his teeth and rolled, boots scraping blood and ash as he shoved himself upright.

Yui Raki stood before him, gauntlets blazing with violet light.

His Federation armor was cracked at the edges, smoke curling from his vambraces, but the fury burning in his eyes was undimmed. The light from the hub’s broken panels flickered over his face, casting sharp, shifting shadows across the sneer twisting his mouth.

"What are you doing, Elias?" Yui bellowed, his voice echoing through the shattered chamber. He swept a furious arm wide, gesturing at the carnage around them—blood pools thick enough to drown in, bodies broken and still twitching, the smoldering wreckage of what had once been Cube X’s strongest.

"She’s a killer!" he roared, spit flying from the force of it. "Why save her?!"

His boots splashed through the blood as he stepped closer, every line of his body radiating disbelief and rage. The violet energy curling off his gauntlets flickered dangerously, unstable.

"How the hell did you even get out of your block?"

The question cracked the air between them like a whip, but Elias barely heard it. His shard’s pulse drowned out everything else—the timer screaming in his mind, the system prompt digging its claws deeper into his spine.

[Save a life.]

The gas curled at the edges of his vision, the green mist hungry and rising again.

And behind it all, the choice.

Oliver flanked him, boots slamming down hard against the blood-slick floor. His ash-streaked uniform stood out like a scar against the chaos, the bulk of the anti-shard launcher still slung across his back. Smoke curled from its muzzle, green residue staining the barrel where the canister had fired.

He stopped a few feet from Elias, close enough that the sharp chemical stink of the gas still clung to the air between them.

"Looks like he’s one of them now," Oliver said coldly, his voice flat and mechanical. "Or just another fool chasing freedom he doesn’t deserve."

The words hit harder than Elias expected. Maybe because there wasn’t any heat behind them. Just the emptiness of someone who’d already decided he was trash.

Elias shook his head once, trying to clear the pounding in his ears. His breath rasped in and out—broken, raw—every pull of air tasting like smoke and blood. His body screamed at him to stop, to lie down, to give in. But the shard in his chest still pulsed, stubborn, furious, as the system timer flared against the haze:

[2 minutes remaining.]

The words tumbled out before he could stop them, sharp and messy, slurring around the copper taste in his mouth.

"It’s not that simple," he ground out, the syllables scraping his throat raw. "I wanted to fight. I still do. But they took Junjio—Asurik and Goji set this up. Used the kid as bait... bolted while we bled."

The walls, slick with blood, seemed to lean inward, closing around him like a trap sprung too late to escape.

Oliver shifted his stance, easing his grip on the launcher. The hiss of the canister faded, but the acrid bite of the gas clung to the walls, to the ruined floor, to Elias’s lungs.

"She still killed eighteen today," Oliver said quietly, almost conversationally, as if he were commenting on the weather. His eyes stayed narrow, cold. "So tell me, soldier—"

He took a slow step forward, boots splashing through the blood.

"What’s your justification?"

Elias tried to answer. He really did.

But the words wouldn’t come.

The world tilted sideways. His knees gave without warning, slamming into the floor with a wet splash. His hands slipped, blood smearing across his palms as he struggled to push back up. His shard pulsed again—off rhythm now, erratic, panicked.

Dot’s glow flickered somewhere at the edge of his vision, her hum broken, distorted.

He tasted copper.

Heard the distant roar of plasma fire.

Felt the cold floor biting through the last scraps of his strength.

His head dropped, the lights above swinging wildly in his blurred sight, fractured by tears or blood—he couldn’t tell anymore.

Then he saw a clock flash—bright enough to blind:

[10:00.]