My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy-Chapter 192: A new View

The thought came holy‑bright, without permission, and lodged behind her ribs like broken glass. I loved him, and I never said it.

She blinked, once—hard enough that tears stung the corners of her eyes but didn’t fall. Her knuckles ached. She forced her grasp to loosen, fingers sliding from the railing as if each one weighed a ton.

Down there she told herself. Down there he dies, and up here you stand frozen.

A small figure shifted two rows below—Faye. The younger girl pressed both palms flat to her chest, feathered Ikona dim at her shoulder, eyes huge behind smudges of grit. Faye’s lips moved silently, repeating a litany Elara could guess: He pushed us. He believed in us. He made us more than we were.

Elara’s own pulse hammered at the words. Two different versions of Elias lived inside the stands tonight: hers, from a life before shards and systems, and theirs, forged in these iron months of training and blood. Both versions lay dying the same death.

Another tremor rippled underfoot; torches guttered, spat sparks into the air. Elara straightened, shoulders squaring. Grief could stand later. Right now, Kikaru was alone with a corpse and the Announcer was still grinning.

Elara’s hands slipped from stone to holster. The smooth grip of her sidearm grounded her; the cold barrel felt like purpose. She drew a breath—not steady, but enough—and stepped away from the railing, boots echoing on the slate as she started down toward the arena floor. If the system wanted witnesses, it would have to count her among them—alive, armed, and unafraid to speak the words Elias never could.Thought for 6 seconds

Her hands shook, fingers curling tighter around the railing, as she remembered their last real moment—outside the pod quarters, humming softly while he leaned on the doorframe and said, *Keep singing, Faye. It’s more than you know.* She’d brushed it off with a shy smile, but his words had lingered ever since, a quiet tether she hadn’t known she needed. Now that tether lay severed by his own hand, and the silence inside her felt heavier than any wound. Why hadn’t she told him what that small kindness meant? Why had she let pride, fear—this brutal system—keep her mouth shut?

The pressure behind her eyes grew until the world blurred. She swallowed it down, jaw locked, focus fixed on Kikaru—the woman kneeling where she should have been, cradling the friend she hadn’t had the courage to fight beside.

Below, Kikaru’s hands hovered inches above Elias’s fading chest, trembling, her quiet louder than any scream. Faye’s nails scraped stone, anchoring her against the swell of regret. *I should’ve been down there,* she thought, the realization a bitter sting. *I should’ve fought for him.*

The bird‑bright shimmer of her Ikona fluttered at her shoulder and released a single, faltering note before the melody died in mid‑air—an echo of all the words she never dared to sing.

Vincent Ruiz leaned forward on the railing, arms locked tight, his shard pulsing low at his wrist. Red light bled into the metal as he stared at the smear of color below—the blood, the body, the translucent shimmer eating through Elias’s form.

The hum of the realm pressed in like static. His jaw clicked once. Then again.

"He just threw it away," Vincent muttered. His fingers curled in. "All that potential. Just—gone."

No one answered. Not that he expected them to. The others were quiet, scattered across the stands like ghosts, too stunned to speak. Maybe mourning. Maybe lost in their own guilt.

But not him.

"I was going to take that shard," he said louder, voice cutting through the silence. "You all saw it. I had him. Back in the arena, I nearly had him. Should’ve taken it then."

His knuckles whitened.

"He was integrated. One of the only full fusions we’ve seen. Do you know what I could’ve done with that?" His voice cracked at the edge—not grief. Just rage held too long. "He could’ve fought again. We could’ve fought again. But no. He had to play the martyr."

A flicker of light pulsed from the shard at his wrist. Vincent glanced at it once, then looked away.

"Waste of a good fight. Waste of a good death, even. I would’ve made it clean."

The last words came quiet. But they stuck. Carved out of him. Real.

He stood there a moment longer, then let out a soft breath through his teeth. "I’ll take her shard instead," he said, eyes locking on Kikaru below. "If she walks out of there with it, I swear—Dot or no Dot—I’ll take it from her. Just like I was going to take his."

Then, softer: "Somebody should."

He shifted his weight, the platform creaking faintly beneath him, as he glanced at Kikaru, kneeling by Elias, her hands trembling, her silence a stark contrast to the fight she’d just endured.

Vincent’s lip curled, a sharp motion, as he muttered under his breath, "You threw it away."

His voice was low, barely audible over the realm’s hum, but the frustration was clear, a simmering rage at Elias’s choice, at the system that let such power slip through his fingers.

He’d never admit it, but there was a flicker of something else beneath the anger—shock, maybe, at the sheer will it took to break one’s own shard, to defy the system so completely.

His fingers tapped against his wrist, where his own shard pulsed faintly under the skin. That glow, that rhythm—he’d learned to trust it more than anything else. It was survival. It was power. And Elias had just... tossed his away like it meant nothing.

Vincent scoffed under his breath.

"Wasted," he muttered. "Wasted on a cook with a martyr complex."

The words tasted bitter the second he said them. He rolled his jaw, eyes narrowing at the scene below.

Kikaru hadn’t moved.

Neither had Dot.

And Elias...

Vincent clenched his fist. The glow at his wrist spiked, reacting to his rising pulse.

"I was supposed to beat him again," he said quietly. "I was supposed to take it the right way."

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