Chapter 79: Personality Fragmentation
The ride back to the warehouse was a funeral procession.
No one spoke.
The silence was a thick, suffocating blanket, heavy with the weight of what they had all just witnessed.
Jax, for the first time since Michael had met him, was completely quiet, his usual manic energy replaced by a deep, unsettled stillness.
Jinx drove, her knuckles white on the steering wheel, her eyes darting between the road and Michael’s reflection in the rearview mirror as if she was expecting him to start breathing fire.
Chloe sat in the back beside Michael, her usual datapad forgotten. She was just... watching him. Her face was a pale, grim mask of calculation and a new, unwelcome emotion he couldn’t quite identify.
Fear.
He was the asset. The weapon.
And his weapon had just gone off in the middle of a peace talk, without his permission.
When they arrived back at their new, terrible home, the unspoken tension finally broke.
"Okay," Jinx said, slamming the van door shut, the sound echoing in the cavernous space. "What in the name of all that is holy and unholy was that?"
"That," Jax added, his voice a little too quiet, "was not Spooky."
They all looked at Michael.
He just stood there, swaying slightly, the psychic echo of the dragon a dull, throbbing ache in the back of his skull.
"I told you," he whispered, his voice a raw, ragged thing. "It wasn’t me."
"I know," a new voice said.
It was Chloe. She had walked over to her main console, her professional mask back in place, though it was brittle now, fragile.
She typed a series of commands, her fingers flying across the keyboard with a frantic, almost desperate energy.
"What I saw in that room was not an emotional outburst," she stated, her voice a cold, clinical monotone that didn’t quite hide the tremor in her hands. "It was a system override."
"A hostile takeover of the primary user’s cognitive functions."
She turned, her cold, gray eyes fixing on him.
"I need to run a full diagnostic," she said. "Now."
The diagnostic chair felt less like a tool of science and more like an executioner’s seat.
As the restraints slid into place, a wave of cold, stark terror washed over him.
What was she going to find?
Was there anything of ’him’ left?
Chloe’s face was a mask of pure, unadulterated focus, her eyes darting between the data streams that were now flooding her screen.
Jinx and Jax stood a few feet away, a silent, anxious pair of sentinels.
"Okay, Boss Lady," Jinx said, her voice a low growl. "Talk to us. In English, if you can manage it."
Chloe didn’t look up from her screen.
"His Soul Corruption is stable at 5.0%," she began, her voice a flat, clinical report. "The psychic feedback from the event has subsided."
"But..." she paused, her fingers freezing over the keyboard.
She zoomed in on a single, spiraling, and deeply corrupted line of code on her screen.
"The data from the Umbraxis echo... it’s not just a memory anymore. It’s not just a whisper."
She took a slow, deep breath, as if bracing herself.
"It has established a parasitic sub-routine within his own personality matrix."
"It is... integrating."
She finally looked up, her face pale, her professional composure completely gone, replaced by a look of raw, undisguised horror.
She looked at Michael.
"The echo is no longer just a ghost in your head, Michael," she said, her voice a quiet, terrified whisper. "It is actively attempting to overwrite your core identity."
A new, terrifying notification flashed on her screen, a stark, red warning that seemed to scream at them from the display.
[PERSONALITY MATRIX INTEGRATION WITH ’UMBRAXIS ECHO’ AT 7%.]
[USER IDENTITY AT RISK OF PERMANENT FRAGMENTATION.]
The words hit him like a physical blow.
He wasn’t just a host anymore.
He was being consumed. Eaten from the inside out.
A hysterical, humorless laugh bubbled up in his throat.
"So, who am I then?" he asked, his voice cracking. "Am I just... a container? A meat-puppet for a dead dragon?"
He ripped his arms free from the restraints, the metal groaning in protest.
He stumbled out of the chair, his mind a whirlwind of fear and a new, profound, and utterly terrifying identity crisis.
He was losing himself.
He didn’t know where he was going. He just knew he had to move.
He ended up in the training room, the ’Pain Palace’, a place of control in a life that was now utterly out of his.
He started hitting one of the training dummies.
It wasn’t a spar. It was a desperate, frantic, and utterly pathetic attempt to fight the enemy he couldn’t see, the one that lived inside his own skin.
He hit it again and again, his fists bloody, his lungs burning, until he finally collapsed at its base, a sobbing, broken mess.
He was alone.
He was a monster.
He was a ticking time bomb.
A quiet footstep echoed in the vast, empty room.
He didn’t look up.
It was Chloe.
He braced himself for a lecture. A new training regimen. A cold, clinical solution to his very messy, very human problem.
She didn’t offer any of them.
She just stood there, a few feet away, a silent, steady presence in his personal hell.
She just... watched him.
When he finally ran out of tears, his sobs subsiding into ragged, hiccuping breaths, she spoke.
Her voice was quiet.
It was steady.
It was, for the first time since he had met her, completely devoid of any analysis, any tactics, any logic.
"We will find a way," she said, the words a simple, profound, and utterly unshakable promise.
"I will not lose my primary asset."
It was the coldest, most clinical, and most ridiculously romantic thing he had ever heard.
And it was exactly what he needed.
He looked up at her, at the fierce, stubborn, and utterly undeniable loyalty burning in her cold, gray eyes.
He wasn’t a tool to her. Not anymore.
He was her tool.
And she wasn’t going to let anyone, not even a dead god, take him away.
Just as a fragile, exhausted, and deeply grateful smile touched his lips, a sharp, insistent beep echoed from her comms unit.
An encrypted message. Priority one.
She pulled up her datapad, her professional mask snapping back into place.
Her eyes scanned the screen, her brow furrowing in confusion.
"It’s from an anonymous, heavily shielded source," she murmured. "The encryption is... S-Rank."
She worked for a moment, her fingers a blur.
The message decrypted.
It was short.
It was cryptic.
And it was from his father.
Chloe’s eyes widened, and she read the message aloud, her voice a quiet, wondering whisper.
"They didn’t just build monsters."
She paused, her breath catching in her throat.
"They built a cure."
"Find the ’Alkahest’."