Chapter 9: The Spine of MemoriesThe moment the Godspine moved, the world followed.

  It didn’t sprint, didn’t lunge—it simply stepped. But the space around it twisted to meet that step, reality bending like it had been waiting for permission. The entire chamber tilted as gravity faltered. Walls flexed. Time began to desync in microbursts, turning the battlefield into a living error.

  Ink moved first.

  Their body blurred—sigils shredding into a full-combat stance. Their limbs struck with ghostlike precision, knives and shapes forming from their skin mid-strike. They darted behind the entity, aiming for the back of its neck.

  But it saw them.

  Without turning, it twisted its arm impossibly backward and impaled Ink through the shoulder with a barbed spike of data-forged bone. Ink screamed in silence, glyphs spasming, entire patterns colpsing across their body.

  “Cover them!” Tessera shouted, extending her arms. Dozens of luminous threads exploded from her gloves, forming floating archival drones armed with refracted light weapons.

  She fired.

  The beams scorched into the Godspine’s torso—small scorches against impossible flesh—but they disrupted the creature’s phase field, forcing it to solidify for a breath.

  That was enough.

  Dogend charged, bdes igniting. “Die loud, freak.”

  He hit the thing dead on, both scatterbdes ripping into its chest with a mechanical screech—bits of hybrid pting split and hissed—but the Godspine retaliated fast. Faster than anything should move.

  A pulsewave smmed out from its core, sending Dogend hurtling across the chamber into a wall. His mask cracked. Blood sprayed. He didn’t get up.

  Cathex screamed.

  She unleashed a mind-burst—a wave of raw psychic memory radiating out from her mask in fractured, ancient pulses. It was like screaming through time.

  The Godspine staggered for a moment. Not in pain—just… surprised.

  But only for a moment.

  It pointed to her, and reality glitched—a ripple of retroactive force smmed into her chest, crushing ribs with the memory of impact. She colpsed beside Dogend, shaking and mumbling in recursive loops.

  “She's down!” Tessera yelled. “We’re bleeding too fast!”

  Vash stared on in anger as he threw a punch towards the Godspine.

  “You tried to take over Lyra...Now you're doing all this?!” Vash yelled. “You're gonna face...Retribution!”

  The gauntlet on his arm cracked open as a pulse node ignited beneath the metal. Raw crimson energy spilled out, swirling around his shoulder.

  “You’re not a god,” he said. “You’re not a memory.”

  Vash missed a punch before suddenly jumping back as he suddenly...

  Vash raised his hand and pointed at the Godspine.

  “My name is Vash…”

  The air around him warped, heat spiking, psma howling from the vents of his gauntlet as veins of light erupted across his back.

  A massive, crystallized red wing of fire exploded from his shoulder bde—jagged, semi-transparent, glowing like volcanic gss.

  “…and I’m gonna kick your ass!”

  He unched.

  A red shockwave tore the ground apart as he hit the Godspine full-force—his body smming into it with a bst that shattered the nearby wall.

  They brawled.

  Vash fought like with fierce power—pure aggression, motion without pause. The Godspine countered with shape-shifting limbs, bdes that moved like sentences in broken grammar. But Vash matched it, strike for strike.

  Fmes and code cshed in the air.

  Crimson bursts met spirals of ghost-data. Each impact shook the chamber. Each second was a war.

  "Such a showoff..." Lyra sighed.

  "He's gotten much stronger since I st saw him...Used to be an idiotic brat..." Tessera muttered back.

  "I believe in him. We'll be fine."

  Tessera changed the subject as she hurried up the situation. “We don’t have much time. What's the pn?”

  Lyra nodded. “We need to break its pattern. You said it’s a recursive system?”

  “Exactly. It’s not adapting—it’s predicting. But if we can force it to split attention between physical and logic input—”

  “—we create a feedback loop,” Lyra finished. “Something it can’t resolve.”

  “I’ve got one clean subroutine left. I can dump a recursive AI loop into its neural feed. But someone has to pnt it directly in its core.”

  Lyra’s eyes narrowed. “I can get in close. Vash keeps it grounded. You buy me the gap.”

  Tessera handed her a data-spike—ft, crystalline, carved with Hana glyphs. “You’ll have seconds.”

  Lyra looked across the battlefield.Ink was kneeling, reforming.Dogend was unconscious.Cathex was seizing.Vash was alone, fme-wing glowing, holding the line.

  She whispered, “He’s not alone.”

  Then she ran.

  Toward the fire. Toward the end.

  Toward the Godspine.