My Shard Bearer System - Elias's Legacy-Chapter 241: Seeing Doubles

His gaze landed on Elias.

Paused.

Then dropped to Elara’s hand still hovering near his.

Elias sat upright, the shard flaring once more, its rhythm no longer matching the ward’s machinery—faster now. Defensive.

"Warden Geras needs a briefing," the guard said, voice clipped. Too formal to be offhand. Too steady to ignore the tension in the room.

Elara stepped back. The movement was fluid, trained. Her cheeks flushed, but her spine straightened, her posture snapping into form like a switch flipped behind her eyes.

"Understood," she said. "I’ll handle it."

Cubes lifted into motion beside her, its mist spilling out across the floor in delicate arcs. The cold followed her steps like a trailing breath.

Elias stayed quiet.

The guard didn’t move right away. Just watched him—too long. A beat past protocol.

Elias met his eyes.

Didn’t blink.

The moment passed, and the man turned on his heel, boots hitting tile with even strikes as he stepped back into the corridor.

Elara lingered for a half-second longer.

Then she was gone.

The door hissed shut behind her.

Elias’s hand tightened against the cot. The shard’s pulse ticked hard under his skin, syncing not with the machines—but with the weight pressing in on all sides.

The kiss. The questions. Cradle Planet.

The Federation would come looking soon.

And next time, they’d want answers.

A short time passed and Elias was sitting in a darker room with a desk across from him

A low, mechanical drone drawn from Cube X’s power grid, vibrating through steel walls that didn’t breathe or shift. Every surface gleamed—polished to an artificial shine that reflected the flickering LEDs above. The lights buzzed like insects. Surveillance drones perched in the corners, lenses twitching in slow, silent rotations. One emitted a soft click. Then another. The rhythm landed like breath in the dark.

The air tasted like metal.

Scorched copper layered with sterilized chemicals, sharp enough to sting the back of his throat. Each breath dragged through recycled oxygen, filtered to clinical perfection, but still too dry. The kind of air that made you think of blood and wires.

Elias didn’t move.

His chair was the kind designed to keep posture strict—edges biting into his thighs, frame too narrow to rest in. Every nerve in his legs felt mismatched. The muscles strained. His bones hadn’t forgotten the other gravity.

His fingers tensed against the rests. Just enough to feel the cold.

Across the room, a digital clock glared red against the gray wall.

7:00 a.m.

Two days.

That’s what they said. Since the crystal. Since the arena. Since Dot’s last whisper.

But his body didn’t feel like it had rested.

It felt like it had aged.

Like he’d carried something through too many worlds and left too much of it behind.

Warden Geras sat across the narrow table, his bulk drawing the space inward.

The uniform was regulation gray—pressed to sharp lines, but frayed at the cuffs, like it had seen too many campaigns and too little rest. The Federation crest gleamed at his collar, polished to a mirror’s edge, as if to remind Elias who owned this silence.

His eyes didn’t wander. Weathered and dark, they stayed locked on Elias’s face, reading not for emotion but for weakness. The kind that surfaced under pressure. The kind they punished before it could spread.

There were no guards. No allies. No Elara.

Only the quiet tick of hovering drones in the corners—each one tracking, mapping, recording. The lights buzzed overhead. The hum of Cube X’s grid cut through everything else.

Elias didn’t return the stare. His gaze drifted to the side—just long enough to take in the edges of the room, the places where steel met steel with no seam. A box meant for extraction, not comfort.

His chest ached. Not from pain. From memory.

Elara’s kiss pressed against his thoughts, sudden and soft, just hours old but already distant. Her hand on his, that last moment of quiet resistance—Don’t let them erase you—but she hadn’t said it out loud.

She hadn’t needed to.

Now she was gone, and the cold pressed in harder. The room felt narrower. Every second stretched a little thinner, as if the air rationed itself to those who obeyed.

He sat still.

Across from him, Geras hadn’t blinked.

Geras leaned forward.

The motion was slow, deliberate—built to tighten the air between them. His hands met at the center of the table with a dull creak, worn leather stretching across knuckles gnarled by too many campaigns. The scars weren’t for show. They were the kind no Federation medic wasted the time to smooth over.

"What happened," he said, "after everyone was snapped away?"

The voice wasn’t cold. It was clean. Measured.

A blade testing armor. Pressing—not yet cutting.

"They say you sacrificed yourself."

A pause followed.

"Then another figure appeared. Something no one could identify. What was it?"

The silence that followed wasn’t empty.

It cracked open something in Elias.

Silver eyes blinked open behind his ribs.

The crucifix stood again in memory—expression unreadable, body shrouded in red mist that moved like thought, like smoke inside glass. Its voice came not as sound but as weight.

Naive.

The word burned deeper than judgment.

It knew things Elias didn’t yet. It had seen pieces of the system Elias still couldn’t name. And it had let him go. For now.

His back tensed against the chair.

Giselsin can’t be mentioned. Not the crystal bridges. Not the twin-moon sigils. Not his father.

Not yet.

"My soul slipped," he said.

The words scratched their way out. Too dry. Too stiff. His throat hadn’t caught up with the rest of him.

He kept his eyes on the table.

The metal was scratched—long, thin lines like old coordinates no one had ever bothered to erase. He traced one with his gaze.

"There was this warmth," he said. "Brief. Like stepping through light."

He let the next breath sit before continuing.

"Then Dot was gone."

The words weighed more than he expected.

"I don’t know what the creature did," he added. "But when I came back, I was inside the crystal. And the thoughts... they didn’t stop."

If I die here... do I die there too?

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