CHAPTER 142: THE ROOT STIRS I

The Fork was breaking apart.

Everywhere Kaito looked, the sky was splitting open. Huge black cracks stretched across the heavens like veins, and from them poured a pale, flowing light. It didn’t feel warm or gentle. Instead, it stung the eyes, sharp and painful, as if looking at an exposed nerve. Staring at it for too long made Kaito’s vision ache.

The towers that once stood tall and steady began to bend. Their spires stretched and twisted, pulled by invisible forces, as though some giant hand was tugging them out of shape. It was the sound that unsettled him most—their very foundations groaning, a grinding noise like stone being chewed between teeth.

On the ground, shadows spread where they shouldn’t have been. They were too dark, too sharp, as if carved into the world itself. They shifted and crawled across the earth even when nothing was moving to cast them.

And beneath everything, deep under the world itself, Kaito felt it—the beat of something vast.

A heartbeat.

Slow. Heavy. Unstoppable.

The shaking didn’t travel through the air like normal sound. It moved deeper, running through the very bones of existence itself.

Each pulse struck Kaito’s body hard enough to make his chest tremble and his teeth clatter together until he thought they might break. It wasn’t something his ears could truly hear—the sound was too low, too strange.

Instead, it was a vibration, a beat made of code itself, spilling out through the cracks in the Fork. It wasn’t music, nor thunder, but something older and heavier, a rhythm that didn’t belong to any world he knew. It was the heartbeat of something vast, something that existed outside the laws of reality.

The Root was stirring.

Kaito stumbled forward, his boots scraping against stone that was no longer stone—the surface was oily, half-liquid, half-solid.

Every step was unnatural, like he was walking on the hide of some giant creature, its muscles squirming underneath him.

"It’s bleeding through," he muttered to himself, half-out loud. "The Root... it’s not waiting anymore."

Nyra caught at his arm, her own balance wavering as the world tilted around them. Her hair streamed against gravity, silver-black locks rising and falling as though caught in a wave none of them could sense.

Her eyes flamed in the dying light, twin silver knives fixed on him. "Then we don’t have time. If it wakes completely—"

"It won’t stop." Kaito finished speaking darkly. He could feel it as well: the Root was not an entity. It was hunger, naked and boundless. It wanted to overwrite, to reclaim whatever it came into contact with. And Kaito—Reaver, intruder, mistake—was in its path.

All around them, the echoes started to fall apart. NPCs, half-formed memories, even the shadows of dead players who had been swallowed by the Fork began to stir. They moved like broken puppets, jerked around by invisible strings.

Some of them flickered and shifted between shapes, their forms unable to stay solid. Faces stretched, bodies warped, and then pieces of them unraveled into strands of glowing code. The strings dripped down into the ground like streams of pale light, vanishing into the cracks below.

Others shook violently, trapped in endless convulsions. Their arms jerked and flailed in directions they weren’t meant to move, their eyes rolling back until nothing was left but blank, white emptiness. Their mouths hung open, frozen wide, but no sound came out.

Even so, Kaito heard it—screams without voices, cries that never left their throats. They pressed against his mind, echoing inside his skull, impossible to shut out.

Nyra unsheathed her sword, the shadowsteel blade humming in the warped light. Blacker than the darkness that surrounded it, a line of defiance that would not be obliterated. Her fingers were set, though her lips were sealed. "They’re being rewritten."

One of the echoes staggered toward them. It looked like a knight at first, but most of what made it human was already gone.

His armor had split down the middle, torn apart as if his own body could no longer bear to wear it. The chestplate hung in pieces, showing what was left beneath—half ruined flesh, half broken strands of glowing data that crawled across his body like veins.

His eyes burned with a harsh, white static, empty of anything human. Then his jaw stretched open far wider than a human skull should allow, splitting in a silent scream. The sound never reached the air, yet the shape of it cut through Kaito’s mind like a knife.

With a sudden burst of broken movement, the knight lunged forward. His sword dragged behind him, its edge dripping with shards of fractured geometry, as if the weapon itself was tearing holes through the world with every step.

Kaito moved before his head could catch up. The Reaver within bellowed in fury at the threat with animal reflex, and his scythe sliced through the knight in one mighty sweep. The body fell apart instantly, shreds of unwinding light drifting around like tatters of banners.

But the evil remained. Even as the pieces disappeared, Kaito felt it—the Root wasn’t merely killing these shadows. It was putting them on, reworking them, fitting the Fork like a hand slipping into a new glove. Every shattered body was sampled data, digested, remembered.

The heartbeat grew louder.

The world leaned. Towers leaned inward, their spires bending toward a sagging center point over the shattered sky. The earth in front of Kaito’s boots collapsed and undulated, stone behaving like water. He fought to steady himself, his scythe biting into the earth like a hook.

Nyra’s grip on his wrist tightened. Her face was pale in the warped radiance, eyes scrunched against the eye-searing light. "It’s taking a form."

The shadows lashed again, sweeping across the horizon in fractured waves like storm clouds of ink. They did not spread randomly. They piled. They furled inward toward the radiating cracks, where white fire consumed hotter with each incoming breath.

Fork was mere glass suspended over a void now, thin and ready to shatter. In the gaps, Kaito could see something titanic—caverns of light and darkness twisted together like arteries, boundless, coiling, stretching. They pulsed with a beat too huge for human thing. And from their turns, something was moving.

A shadow. For at this instant shapeless, but taking form.

The Root was awakening.

Kaito’s breath was raw, his chest aching with the ancient pull of the Reaver. The emptiness inside him shuddered like a predator smelling blood, starving, famished.

His curse wanted to answer the Root in its own voice, wanted to devour that which could not be devoured. He clenched his teeth and forced it beneath, each nerve quivering with the effort. Not yet.

Nyra whispered, her voice raw, "Brother... if it comes through fully, we’re finished."

"I know." His throat felt carved from glass, but the words steadied him. He couldn’t let her see the full terror clawing at his mind—that the Reaver wanted this, that maybe it was meant for this.

The four cracks flared, their light spilling across the Fork in the white heat of explosion. The sound of broken glass shattering crashed through all surface, sharp as a razor.

The Fork convulsed with a force that shook the marrow of code itself, foundations collapsing into the void with wails of information as the only eulogy.

The Root’s voice—no words, but feeling. Pain in their heads. A need that was not a need, mere need.

The echoes curled. Some fell to their knees like strings cut, their bodies folding in on themselves before dissolving into flashes of light. Others blew apart entirely, vanishing without so much as a scream. Those that lived twitched and spasmed, their faces hollow, their bodies stiff.

Kaito was immobile. His scythe dug into the ground, pinning him in place against the impossible gravity that pulled all things toward the cracks. His body shook, not with terror but with refusal, every muscle rebelling at the compulsion that howled to surrender.

The Reaver within snarled defiance, refusing to surrender even as the pressure of inevitability bore down.

Nyra shoved against him with desperate strength, her hand clamping onto his. "Don’t let go. Not of yourself. Not of me."

He crushed her fingers in his so hard his bones ached, his jaw locked. "I won’t."

The sky shattered.

The Root surged through.

It was not a form—not yet. It was shadow and light, naked code woven into twisting fibers, bleeding into the Fork as rivers melted. It writhed, huge and formless, its edges uncoiling like a storm seen through broken glass.

Its existence leaned upon them like the horizon collapsing, like the void consuming the sun. The Fork groaned as if it could not bear the weight of what poured into it.

Kaito’s heart thundered, every pulse answering the Root’s, his own no longer separated from the world’s. The curse inside him howled to be unleashed. It devoured him, begging to rise, begging to respond to the Root’s hunger with its own.

He knew the choice would come, and soon: to give in, let the Reaver rise completely, or struggle and risk being destroyed before the battle had even begun.

The Root had awakened.

And it was staring him straight in the face.