My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy
Chapter 234: Sliced Feelings

Chapter 234: Sliced Feelings

"Shit," he whispered.

His hand trembled slightly.

He glanced down.

A flicker on his glove’s touchpad. The haptic interface buzzed, a feedback spike where none should’ve registered. The static discharge had singed the glove’s outer coating—an unintended pulse. His wrist flexed on instinct, swiping away the alert, but the warning remained.

Abnormal EM output detected.

Mira looked up.

"We’ve got discharge. From inside. Power buildup."

Elias strained.

His right arm jerked, a twitch more instinct than movement, but the result was real—another crack split across the crystal’s inner wall, a sharp fissure hissing outward. Slivers of blue glass-like material flaked loose. The pieces scattered near his boots in a soft cascade, the sound deceptively delicate in the sterile hush of the lab.

He gritted his teeth.

The shard embedded in his shoulder throbbed—each pulse a flare of pain, sharp and surgical, like a needle lancing muscle on repeat. The rhythm synced with something beyond his body. He could feel it now. A deeper pattern. The vibration of Cube X’s infrastructure humming beneath its glossy floors and gleaming white panels. Hidden servers. Power conduits. Surveillance grids. All of it part of a system that felt too clean to be trusted.

He tried to move again.

Tendons pulled taut. His leg jerked once—then stopped.

Veyren’s body, he thought. That weight, that fragility... it’s gone.

But the cycle hadn’t left him untouched.

He could feel it in the gaps.

His adult body felt foreign—disconnected. A machine rebooted after running someone else’s code too long. Muscle memory lagged. Nerve signals staggered. Even breathing took effort.

His mind flicked sideways.

Dot—where are you?

No reply. No whisper. No flicker of her glow across his senses.

Nothing.

Her presence had always been there, a soft layer behind thought, a tension in the spine before danger struck. But now? Silent. Muted, maybe. Or stretched across distance. She’d been chasing Kikaru’s trail last he remembered—tracking some doctor involved in the research net. Probably still locked in system space, her voice unable to reach this side.

His chest tightened.

Kikaru. Oliver.

Where the hell were they?

He pictured Kikaru’s trembling frame. Oliver’s pale stare after the arena. Junjio’s broken voice. The flash of betrayal still fresh in his mind.

And behind it all—Geras.

His fists clenched again, slow and raw.

Why lie to me?

The Chairwoman’s words—veiled and polished—looped behind his teeth. So many promises. So many omissions.

"Your father’s gone."

"Cradle Planet’s lost."

What if both were lies?

The thought didn’t come from nowhere. It had been building. Quietly. Tied to what he saw on Giselsin.

Forty-five years ago, a blue-face war machine fell. A hero—Kael Ironhand—slaughtered in the dirt. The crash site was still worshiped. Still scarred. And the more Elias had pieced together, the more it aligned.

Giselsin’s wounds mirrored Cradle Planet’s collapse.

And the occupation timelines didn’t match the official histories. The dates were off by years—decades even. Records erased or rewritten. An entire generation locked under a rule they never agreed to.

Sixty-five years.

That number kept appearing.

The occupation. The silence. The Federation’s reach.

It wasn’t coincidence. It was design.

I trusted too easily, he thought.

His leg twitched again.

The movement dragged a groan from the crystal—long and low. Another fracture crawled upward from his ankle toward the ceiling. This time, it didn’t stop.

Far away, sealed in a lower complex beneath the facility, Elara Croft sat alone in a chamber thick with artificial cold.

The room was lined with vertical coolant columns, tall and smooth, glinting with internal light. Their surfaces breathed soft mist into the air, kept precisely calibrated by environmental stabilizers embedded beneath the floor. Thousands of them stood in silent rows. Backup containment. A cryo array for system reserves and dormant test data. No one came here unless they had to.

Elara didn’t look at any of it.

She sat with her back straight, arms folded in her lap, breath fogging faintly in front of her lips. Her uniform was sharp—regulation black with a silver unit patch pressed above her breast, denoting clearance level and division—but her posture wasn’t military.

She wasn’t waiting for orders.

She was trying not to break.

Above her, the ceiling’s projection grid flickered with faint diagnostic pulses. A soft line of light passed slowly overhead, mimicking natural daylight, though the simulation felt false. Cold. Disconnected.

Her pale face—tight jaw, high cheekbones, eyes that used to read everything and now read nothing—didn’t move.

She was staring at nothing.

Her thoughts churned behind that stillness.

It’s happening again.

The mission. The arena. Elias’s body in her arms. The blood. The way it shouldn’t have happened. She’d told herself she was ready. That she could be the one to stay calm when others folded.

But it was all breaking again.

Across the room, her Ikona floated low, translucent, geometric, almost mineral—Cube-like, artificial. It hovered in silence, its edges refracting light as if trying to disappear entirely. No glow. No emotion. Just presence.

Cooling the air.

Buffering her thoughts.

Elara barely felt the chill anymore.

Her hand flexed in her lap, fingers tightening, releasing, tightening again.

When will I be strong enough to save the people I care about?

The words didn’t sound like self-pity. They sounded tired. Like they’d been rehearsed so long they lost their sting.

Her breath came slower.

Do I really have to sell myself—again—just to fix something?

To serve under the same military that forced silence. Under the same Federation that buried Cradle Planet. Under leaders who dressed their cruelty in protocol.

Her eyes closed.

Whispers lingered behind her ears—not real voices, just memory. The voices of dead soldiers she couldn’t forget. Cadets who never made it off Cradle. Her father’s orchard, burned into ash. Elias’s laugh when he was a child, clear as anything, always louder than the classroom behind them.

And his face.

The last moment.

When he turned toward her and said nothing, because he knew she was already breaking.

Her boots were rimmed with frost now. Her hand trembled slightly at her side. But she didn’t wipe the moisture from her lashes. She let it stay there.