Chapter 232: Awake At Last

Chapter 232: Awake At LastElias’s eyes snapped open.

Blue light flooded his vision—sharp, jarring, like a severed cable sparking loose. He braced for the usual weight of Veyren’s infant body—the numb limbs, the oversized head, the bite of wood against his palm where the rattle usually sat. But something was wrong. The moment he tried to turn his head, the effort collapsed.

His neck didn’t move. Muscles locked. Jaw clenched.

It was like being fused in stone.

He focused straight ahead. A shimmering wall stretched before him, translucent but firm, its surface pulsing with faint blue veins—slow, rhythmic, like a heartbeat trapped behind glass.

I’m stuck in something?

The thought hit fast. Cold. It bled into another voice—Dot’s, blurred by distance but panicked, echoing from Kikaru’s point of view.

He’s trapped. Encased. Not waking.

His palms grew damp.

Not Veyren’s.

His.



That single, familiar detail grounded him. He had his hands back. Adult hands. Fingers clenched reflexively, but they didn’t move far. Couldn’t. Everything around him pressed in like a cast.

I have them back, but I still can’t move. What is this?

The air buzzed with sterility—clean and tight, tinged with ozone. A faint hum vibrated through his chest, syncing with the shard buried in his shoulder. Cold. Sharp. Like a splintered needle threading itself deeper.

Shapes flickered beyond the crystal.

White walls. Console lights blinking—green, amber. The hum steady. Repaired.

Cube X.

It looked the same, but cleaner. The damage had been patched. Sleek new panels replaced the torn sections. Barely a smear of scorch remained.

Fire gems warmed the lab. Wind gems churned the air—both flickering, imperfect. Human-made. They lacked the sharp clarity of the blue-faces’ systems. Their precision.

A plexiglass barrier loomed just beyond the crystal’s edge, cordoning off the space. Plastic curtains layered behind it swayed from the filtered flow of air. Their edges rimmed with frost.

Kikaru. Elara. Oliver.

Where the hell am I?

He pulled against the shell—shoulders tensing, calves twitching—but nothing moved. Every attempt recoiled. His body fought like it had forgotten how to fight.

Like movement had to be relearned.

Like every instinct had gone silent.

Panic surged.

It started in his chest—tight, compressed, barely allowing breath—and spread outward, shallow pulls of air trapped in his throat. The hum grew louder. What had been a faint resonance now rose to a rhythm, tying itself to the shard embedded in his shoulder. Every beat matched his pulse. Every pulse a jolt of pain, sharp and needling, as if the crystal wasn’t just holding him, but feeding off him.

A subtle warmth pressed against his back. Not painful. Not even unpleasant. But there. Soft. Insistent. It filtered through the crystal’s veins like sunlight bleeding through water. Or a spotlight trained on a corpse.

His brow tensed.

Was it all a dream?

Giselsin. The Kaelithars. The blue-faced scientists with their polished tools and unreadable stares. He tried to hold the images still, but they shifted—edges fraying, details slipping out of reach like water through cracked glass. Seraphine’s quiet smile. Gavric’s broad shoulders and twin axes slung across his back. The warmth of the infant body. The quiet moments in the manor.

Gone?

His chest pulled tight again. This time it wasn’t panic. It was grief. A thought clawed its way up from the pit of his stomach, bitter and dry.

I could be dead.

His jaw clenched, throat tight.

And this is just... death.

He closed his eyes. Not from defeat—but because the hum was all he had left to anchor him. It filled the space around him, coiling through the crystal’s structure, vibrating into his bones. It sounded mechanical at first—like background interference—but it shifted. It breathed. Like something alive. Like something watching him.

Time stretched.



Five minutes. Maybe ten.

Maybe longer.

He drifted without measure. No heartbeat. No footsteps. No system prompts. Just that sterile buzz, and the weight of himself, suspended, unmoving.

Then something clicked inside him.

A flicker of thought. A voice not spoken aloud.

No.

His teeth ground together, molars scraping.

I’m not giving up that easily again.

Even if Giselsin was just a fabricated sequence—some twisted dream crafted by the system or the crucifix—it meant something. The godless crucifix’s words, the memory of his father’s eyes, the mission etched in the gem hidden beneath Seraphine’s robes—it mattered. It had weight. It cut deeper than anything the Federation had told him.

His fists flexed again, slow but steady.

I relied on Dot’s perception too much. I let her guide everything during the fight with Kikaru. I let myself act through her eyes.

He hadn’t trusted his own instincts. Not really. He’d second-guessed, deferred, defaulted. His judgment had become reactive. Hollow.

That was on him.

The betrayal stung worse now than it had in the arena.

Geras. His mentor. His commander.

Why did he lie?

The thought hit harder than expected. It didn’t come with rage—it came with frustration. An ache behind his eyes. A slow twist in his gut.

The Chairwoman... whoever she even is. Why the deception?

He tried to shake his head. A reflex. A muscle memory.

The motion didn’t come—but the attempt mattered.

A sharp crack rang through the chamber, loud and sudden.

The crystal shuddered.

Hairline fractures spidered out from the point above his collarbone, branching across the shimmering wall like frozen lightning. His breath caught. That had been real. Not imagined. The structure had responded.

A grin tugged at his lip—but it faded just as fast.

Naive, he thought.

Of course they lied.

The Federation’s promises had always been a woven net of half-truths. Carefully tailored propaganda stitched together for maximum obedience. Hope, weaponized.



They lied about his father.

They lied about Cradle Planet.

And the lies hadn’t just started recently.

They went back decades.


No—longer.

Conspiracies he’d dismissed in training suddenly roared back in vivid clarity. Civilian rumors about blue-face cover-ups. Lost transmissions. Planetary evacuations that didn’t match the records. The 65-year occupation—he knew it had started with ships like the ones he’d seen in the skies above Giselsin.

He hadn’t imagined that.

He couldn’t have.

His arms strained again, the tension raw in his shoulders. Veins pushed against his skin. He rotated one wrist slightly, pain sparking through the joint, but the movement felt real. Possible.

Silas.

The Primed Epics.

Junjiro’s father.