My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy-Chapter 248: Silver bonded Pain

That hum—he remembered it.

Spirit gems syncing to his shard. His pulse. That same rhythm thudding through his skull now.

He hadn’t done enough there.

Hadn’t stopped what was coming.

I failed then too.

The guilt didn’t fade. It just shifted forms.

This time, the stakes were higher.

A voice snapped him back.

"You’re telling me," Marcus said, tone sharp now, "that I got pulled out of my life for this?"

He didn’t yell. But the bite was there.

"My parents were at my graduation, Elias. Watching me walk. I was supposed to be designing neural interfaces. Real work."

His words came tight, fists behind them even if his hands couldn’t move.

"Now I’m playing spy? With people who kill Wardens and burn entire squads alive?"

Elias’s chest tightened, a knot forming deep in his sternum.

The guilt sat heavy—worse than the restraints, worse than the pressure behind his eyes. He could still hear Geras’s voice, the calm behind the dart. He could still see the hollow look on Marcus’s face.

The crucifix’s warning lingered at the edge of his mind.

Naive.

He deserved the word. And worse.

"I didn’t know it’d go down like this," he said.

His voice wasn’t strong. Just honest.

"I thought... I thought I was protecting people. Elara. Kikaru. My mother."

He looked across the dim hold, barely able to make out Marcus in the red-blurred gloom.

"But I dragged you into this mess. And I’m sorry."

There wasn’t time for a reply.

Before Marcus could speak, Elias shifted his weight, digging his heels into the grooved steel beneath him. His arms flexed against the remaining shackles. The restraints groaned under the tension—then snapped.

The sound was violent.

The main ring shattered first, splitting down the seam with a sharp metallic crack. Links whipped loose around his arms and flew across the hold like shrapnel, clattering against the walls in a high-pitched scatter that echoed through the ship.

Red lights ignited instantly.

A blinding glare flooded the hold, bathing every surface in harsh, angular shadows. The hum of the engines deepened. Alarm klaxons pulsed once—twice—then held.

Elias caught Marcus’s expression in that red glow—a frozen second of surprise. His right eye was swollen shut, the skin bruised purple-black, blood crusting near the temple.

A mic popped overhead.

The voice came through warped and distorted, but the authority behind it cut through everything else.

"Elias Kael. Murderer of two Ikona users. Sit down and restrain yourself."

He barely had time to react.

A panel at the far end hissed open, and two Federation soldiers stormed into the room, rifles raised. Their visors shimmered under the red lights, smooth and spotless—too clean. Too perfect.

Something’s off.

Elias’s eyes narrowed.

The visors caught no glare. The armor joints were seamless. Their steps too synced.

Decoys.

Movement to his right—fast.

The lead unit fired.

The bolt came slower than it should’ve. A dull blue streak, not the crackling white of live plasma.

Training rounds.

Marcus flinched as the bolt scorched past his shoulder, hitting the floor with a harmless flash.

"The hell—why are they using non-lethals?" Marcus barked, voice rising over the alarms.

"They want us alive," Elias snapped. "Or they’re testing something."

He didn’t wait.

With his left hand still partly bound, he hooked his fingers under the edge of the leg restraints and yanked hard. The links gave after two pulls. He twisted his legs free, rolled once to the left, and came up in a crouch.

Another blast whined past.

He lunged forward, slamming his shoulder into the nearest decoy. The impact rattled through his chest—the thing was heavy, maybe denser than it should’ve been. He drove it backward into the wall, used his elbow to wedge under its helmet, and twisted.

The head spun with a mechanical pop before detaching. Sparks burst from the socket. The body convulsed, then collapsed sideways with a crash.

"Look at their faces!" Elias shouted, turning sharply. "They’re not real!"

He ducked as the second decoy turned toward him and fired. The bolt scorched the wall near his ear.

Marcus scrambled forward, legs still half-bound, but his fingers moved fast. He yanked a rifle from the downed unit and spun, hands trembling as he brought it to his shoulder. The blast that followed wasn’t clean, but it hit.

The round struck the back wall near an exposed panel.

The force of the impact triggered something deep behind the plating—a vibration that climbed in pitch.

Then the lights turned solid red.

A ripple shot through the ship’s frame. Pressure shifted.

A low whump hit the floor like a gut-punch, and then came the explosion.

It tore through the rear hold with a concussive blast that sent Elias sliding across the steel, heat rippling past his face as the wall blew outward in a shower of metal and fire.

The ship groaned.

Something popped overhead—cables whipped loose and sparked. The deck tilted five degrees, then ten. Loose debris skidded across the floor. A control case shattered in the corner, metal shards dancing across the walls.

Elias rolled once, slammed his shoulder into the wall to stop his momentum, and scanned the room.

A red light blinked in the corner—steady, rhythmic.

A surveillance node. Still active.

He pushed through the haze and scrambled toward it, boots skidding on warped steel. The drone above twitched, trying to reorient. He reached up, grabbed the base of the device, and found a single latch.

One press.

A chip slid out from the compartment—narrow, transparent, marked with a thin band of gold data etchings.

Geras’s present.

He shoved it into the inside pocket of his restraint vest.

Then the drone exploded.

A secondary blast blew the rest of the back wall open giving a tight ripping sound.

Cold air screamed into the cabin. The ship buckled hard as altitude caught up with them.

Beyond the tear, clouds ripped past. The curve of the horizon peeked through the breach—thousands of feet below, a blur of land and distance that had no shape.

This 𝓬ontent is taken from fre𝒆webnove(l).𝐜𝐨𝗺