Chapter 202: 203 | An Act of Reckless Empathy
"Mera. How many portals can you open right now. Honestly."
"Two. Maybe three if I don’t care about closing them cleanly."
"Cheon. Your Interface. Can you read the entity’s ability architecture? Map the connections between its thirteen signatures?"
"I can try." She was already pulling up her visor, the translucent blue display flickering to life across her vision. "But my ability works best on willing subjects. That thing isn’t going to cooperate with a diagnostic."
"It doesn’t need to cooperate. It just needs to be distracted."
I stopped running.
Mera and Cheon skidded to a halt beside me. Noel’s unconscious body shifted on Mera’s shoulder.
"Rome." Mera’s voice carried a warning. "Whatever you’re thinking. Don’t."
"I’m thinking that thing is suffering. I’m thinking there’s a person trapped inside all that hunger — someone who had a name, had a life, before they got strapped to a table in one of my father’s facilities and fed my stolen blood until the Essentia rewrote their entire existence from the inside out. I’m thinking my father built that horror using data he ripped from me before I was old enough to understand what he was doing, and that he sent it here specifically to hunt me down. And I’m thinking that if I let it catch me — if I hold the connection open long enough for Cheon to map the architecture, trace the pathways between those thirteen signatures and figure out how they’re wired together — we might find a way to dismantle the whole structure without killing whoever’s still screaming somewhere underneath all of it. Without making them into a statistic. Without letting this end the way it probably started — with someone being erased because they were convenient."
"That’s insane."
"Yeah."
"You could die, Rome. Actually die. Not hurt. Not injured. Dead."
"Probably."
"The drain in that thing has been starving for however long it’s been locked in a cell waiting to be deployed. The second you open a genuine connection — the second you give it a real channel instead of these surface skirmishes — it’s going to try to consume everything you are. It won’t drain you. It’ll hollow you out and wear what’s left like a skin."
"I know."
Mera stared at me. Her red skin was flushed darker across her cheeks. Her tail had wrapped around her own leg, a self-soothing gesture I’d learned to recognize in the weeks we’d spent together.
"You’re going to do it anyway."
"Someone has to."
"Why does it have to be you?"
The answer came without thinking. "Because I’m the only one who can reach whatever’s left of the person inside. Because my drain is the only thing in this courtyard that speaks the same language as the one trapped in that body. Because if I don’t try, they’re going to send heroes who will put it down like a rabid animal and no one will ever know that it used to be someone’s kid."
The entity appeared at the far end of the athletic complex’s entrance plaza. Spatial manipulation again. It was getting faster. Learning from the portal redirect. Adapting.
Cheon pushed her visor up and met my eyes. Her grey gaze was steady. Not happy. Not approving. But steady.
"Thirty seconds. I need thirty seconds of sustained connection to map its architecture. If you can keep it focused on you for that long without getting consumed, I can find the structural weaknesses."
"And then?"
"And then we improvise."
The entity stepped forward. The plaza tiles cracked beneath its feet. Not from weight. From the sheer wrongness of its existence pressing against reality.
I walked toward it.
"ROME." Mera’s voice cracked on my name. "Rome don’t you dare. Don’t you DARE walk toward that thing like you’re not coming back. I didn’t burn through my entire reserve getting here just to watch you—"
"Mera." I didn’t turn around. "I need you to trust me."
"I don’t trust anyone."
"I know. Trust me anyway."
Silence. Then a sound I’d never heard Mera make before. Something between a sob and a snarl.
"Thirty seconds. Cheon said thirty seconds. If you’re not back in thirty seconds I’m opening a portal and dragging you through it piece by piece if I have to."
"Deal."
I kept walking.
The entity watched me approach. The blank face tracked my movement. The hum shifted, becoming almost curious. It hadn’t expected me to come to it. Everything in its programming assumed the target would run.
Fifteen meters.
Ten.
Five.
I stopped within arm’s reach of a nightmare wearing human skin and opened the drain.
Not a crack this time. Not a thread.
Everything.
The entity’s hunger hit me like a wave. Cold and empty and vast and I understood immediately why my drain had locked itself down the first time. This wasn’t consumption. This was drowning. An ocean of need pouring through channels that were never meant to handle this volume.
I pushed back.
Not with force. With intention. With everything I’d learned about connection in the weeks since waking up in this body.
The drain wasn’t just about taking. It was about exchange. About opening yourself up to another person’s Essentia and letting them feel what you felt. About trust and vulnerability and the terrifying intimacy of letting someone else’s power live inside your chest.
I showed the thing trapped inside this prison what that felt like.
Mera laughing at her own joke in my kitchen at two in the morning. Cheon’s hand on my collar, straightening my shirt before sending me into danger. Noel’s glasses. Noel’s actual glasses, the round ones with the black frames that made her look like a completely different person. Aurora’s fingers on my cheek asking what would happen to Nolan. Laurana’s red lines glowing in the dark of her apartment.
Connection. Real connection. Not the empty hunger this entity had been programmed with but the messy complicated overwhelming experience of actually caring about people.
The thing inside the entity responded.
I felt it reach for the images. The feelings. The warmth. Like a starving man reaching for bread.
WHO WERE YOU.
A name surfaced through the chaos of competing Essentia. Fragmented. Incomplete. But there.
L... Li... Liam.
HOLD ON LIAM. SOMEONE’S COMING.
The thirty seconds stretched into eternity. Cheon’s voice cut through the storm of shared consciousness.
"I’ve got it. Rome I’ve got the map. Pull back. PULL BACK NOW."
I tried.
The entity didn’t want to let go.
