Corrupted Bonds
Chapter 115: Interference

Chapter 115: Chapter 115: Interference

The recursion screamed.

From the outer shell of the fracture, Ren emerged—precisely on beat, as though the recursion itself had set the stage for his arrival. Time split like silk under a scalpel, threads unraveling in reverse before flaring outward in a spiral of refracted light.

He dropped through the temporal rift mid-spin, cloak snapping like a flag caught in a storm, and landed in a crouch so controlled it sent a shockwave of resonance through the corridor. Shards of fractured time curled around him—echoes of a hundred past and future selves aligning in a single breath.

In his hand, a time-folded baton snapped into reality with a metallic hum, its edges rippling with chrono-energy. His chronosuit gleamed—polished despite the scuffs—trimmed in pale gold and flickering runes. He exhaled slowly, surveying the chaos like a connoisseur stepping into a ruined gallery.

"Lucian. Duck," he said smoothly, like someone ordering from a familiar menu—just before all hell broke loose.

Lucian dropped instinctively, and the air behind him cracked.

A streak of concentrated time-energy ruptured forward, catching the fake Lucian mid-lunge. The impact sent the illusion hurtling into a jagged partition of warping geometry. The wall cracked in slow motion, pixels bleeding light.

Ren stood tall, braced against the recoil of his chrono-mod. His suit was scraped, the edges frayed from the strain of piercing through recursive layers. But his resonance was firm—grounded.

"Sixty seconds," Ren said, eyes scanning the chaos. "Then this recursion tries to snap shut again."

Lucian breathed hard but didn’t turn. "Good timing."

"Terrible odds."

Together, they stepped toward the illusion as it picked itself up—still flickering, still mutating.

Rowan remained collapsed at the edge of the corridor, caught between panic and awe, his mind trying to reconcile the impossible: Lucian real, Ren real, and the world around him a lie unraveling.

Ren turned his head, voice calm. "Rowan, hold steady. We’ll handle this."

Lucian’s knuckles flared with violet light. "We’re ending it now."

Ren gave him a sidelong glance, baton spinning lazily in his hand. "You always say that like you actually plan things."

Lucian snorted. "And you always show up like a theatrical rerun."

"Hey, I time it for dramatic effect. It’s part of the charm."

A distorted howl from the fake Lucian silenced their exchange as the illusion lunged, its form twitching between perfect symmetry and monstrous glitch. The corridor around them cracked further, recursive threads snapping like overstrung wire.

Ren and Lucian moved as one—Lucian unleashing a sweep of violet flame from his hands while Ren flanked the creature, time-slicing around its strikes with pinpoint precision. Every blow from Ren staggered the fake with disjointed echoes, fragments of delayed pain reverberating seconds later. Lucian’s hits hit harder now—each one fueled by a tether that wouldn’t bend.

"Left!" Ren barked. Lucian pivoted, elbow cracking into the fake’s throat.

"I had it," Lucian growled.

"Sure you did."

From the side, Rowan stirred.

The world around him was collapsing—no longer soft and golden, but jagged and seething with exposed threads of unreality. He could feel the recursion clawing at his mind, trying to reassert the lie. But something deeper burned beneath it.

His hands trembled as he pushed himself up, first to his knees, then upright. A glow began to form at his chest—dim at first, then building, steady, insistent. His breath came hard, like surfacing from deep underwater.

Memories flooded in, no longer fragmented. Lucian’s voice. Ren’s jokes. The storm of Site V9. The booster. The pain. The choice.

He had made that choice long ago.

And now, with everything exposed—he made it again.

His spine straightened. Shoulders squared.

Eyes clear, Rowan stepped into the breach of reality.

His resonance pulsed in his chest. Steady. Fierce. Cinematic.

"Back off!" he shouted.

The fake Lucian turned—and Rowan’s guiding flared.

Brilliant gold spiraled outward from his body, forming lines of protective energy between him and the others. It struck the recursion like a lit match to dry kindling. The corridor howled again, walls stretching and warping under the strain.

Lucian’s breath hitched as Rowan stepped into place beside them, hands alight with resonance.

"I remember now," Rowan said. "And I’m not letting it take either of you."

His hands rose, and the resonance within him ignited with amplified force. Not just memory, not just clarity—conviction. The golden threads lashing outward from his core surged into the corridor with blinding brilliance. Shields bloomed around Ren and Lucian in tight, arcing domes. Spires of radiant energy cracked through the ground beneath the fake Lucian’s feet, forcing him to leap backward with a snarl.

But the recursion wasn’t done fighting.

From the flickering depths of the unraveling hallway, others stepped forward.

Elias. Juno. Ari. Quinn.

They moved with practiced ease, weapons and resonance gleaming—but their eyes were wrong. Too still. Too perfect.

"They’re not real," Rowan whispered, horror tightening in his throat.

"They’re puppets," Lucian growled. "Copies."

The fake Lucian grinned with cracked mirth, now flanked by four perfect counterfeits. "He wasn’t just meant to forget. He was meant to replace you."

"Five against three," Ren muttered, spinning his baton. "I like those odds."

Rowan’s glow surged brighter, flaring outward with a sound like breaking dawn. Guiding sigils formed in the air around them, gold spiraling into synchronized latticework.

Lucian’s breath steadied.

Ren grinned.

Rowan stepped forward. "Then let’s end this."

They moved.

The battlefield fractured beneath their feet, but the three stood like anchors in the tide.

Before the first clash could even resound, the fake Quinn raised his hands, muttering a recursive incantation under his breath. Thin silver glyphs spun in concentric rings around her chest, glowing brighter with each cycle. A pulse of synthetic resonance surged outward, latching onto his allies—Elias, Juno, Ari, and the fake Lucian.

Their forms shimmered, brightened. Speed intensified. The air rippled with empowered hostility.

"Buffing protocol. Great," Ren muttered. "Because they weren’t fast enough already."

Lucian growled, flexing his grip. "He’s a support node. Take him out pronto."

And then chaos struck.

Lucian met Ari’s double head-on, their blades crashing in a shower of sparks that lit the corridor like lightning. Ari’s movements were refined, perfectly executed—every slash and step orchestrated with unnatural symmetry. She moved like a duelist programmed to win.

Lucian dropped low, spinning beneath a feint, then came up with an upward cleave that forced her back. She responded with a crescent sweep of her twin blades—Lucian pivoted, letting one graze his shoulder as he slammed the haft of his weapon into her hip.

Ari retaliated instantly, flipping over him with a twist that mirrored their old sparring matches—but Lucian had learned. He reversed his momentum mid-swing, drove his elbow into her jaw mid-air, and caught her blades with his own, locking them together in a grind of vibrating metal.

"You’re not her," he growled. "You’re just a reflection."

She hissed—expression flickering—and broke the lock with a blast of resonant force from her palm. Lucian tumbled back, rolled, came up slashing again—raw and precise.

Their fight was brutal—flashes of old rhythm warped into war, every exchange echoing the years of shared technique twisted by recursion’s mimicry.

Ren vanished mid-step in a blink of quantum shimmer, a spray of golden clockface sigils flaring in his wake. He reappeared behind Quinn’s echo just as time fractured—striking with his baton in a spinning arc that blurred with afterimages. Quinn’s copy reacted, parrying, but Ren smirked—tapped the chrono-band on his wrist—and rewound the moment in a single pulse.

The strike repeated, but faster, harder, from a different angle—like time itself bent to ensure impact. Quinn reeled, unable to correct.

Around Ren, ripples of folded moments echoed—ghost versions of himself lunging, shifting, locking Quinn’s limbs mid-motion. He wove between possibilities, each version moving milliseconds apart, a synchronized dance of inevitability.

"Gotta love preemptive rewinds," Ren muttered, vaulting backward in a loop-kick that looked like it occurred twice—before and after the parry.

He ducked under a blade that hadn’t swung yet.

Juno’s copy thrust both palms forward, and a twin torrent of fire erupted from her hands—spiraling into a focused lance of heat aimed directly at Rowan. The flames roared through the warping corridor, twisting unnaturally with the recursion’s distortion. Rowan’s guiding aura reacted instantly—shielding him in a pulsing dome of light that shimmered against the licking heat. With a roar, Rowan twisted his arms outward, unleashing a radiant burst that met the firestorm mid-air—shattering it into a cascade of molten embers and golden sparks.

He lifted both hands high.

Guiding lattices pulsed and formed over the others—barriers adapting in real-time, slowing hostile resonance, enhancing Lucian’s strikes, stabilizing Ren’s distortions.

"Lucian—open left!" Rowan called.

Lucian moved without question, catching the opening Rowan predicted and slamming the butt of his scythe into Ari’s gut. She reeled.

"Ren—trap point above Juno. Four-point echo."

Ren grinned. "Already there."

He twisted time around the space Rowan had locked, creating a trap zone of vibrating echoes. Juno stepped into it—and was struck three times from three past Ren-versions. She collapsed, flickering.

Rowan’s eyes glowed white-gold now, voice steady. "I see every pattern. Every crack. This recursion’s breaking, and we’re going to break you with it."

Lucian and Ren stood flanking him as one more pulse of unity rippled outward.

But Elias—his copy gleaming with distorted poise—lunged from the opposite end of the corridor, blade drawn, wrapped in recursive static. He didn’t come alone. With a snarl, he cast a net of electrified resonance toward Ren.

Ren spun mid-step, baton twirling with an audible crack of chrono-disruption. "Oh, I really liked you better when you were a stubborn realist," he quipped.

Elias answered with a wordless warcry, slashing downward—only for Ren to blink backward in a scatter of golden afterimages.

"Rowan, he’s keyed to my movements," Ren barked. "Cut his feedback!"

Rowan raised both palms and hurled a slicing arc of guiding resonance between them. It bisected the recursion’s tether, causing Elias’s form to glitch—briefly staggered by destabilization.

Ren capitalized, surging forward with a blur of time-folded motion, baton clashing against blade. Sparks flew. But the air around Elias shimmered strangely—thicker, heavier.

Ren faltered for a beat. His arm burned. "He’s laced his aura," he muttered. "Poisoned resonance."

Elias’s copy grinned, dark veins webbing from his fingertips as he struck again. His blade left streaks of viridescent aftershock, and where it grazed the floor, corrosion bloomed—spreading like venom through glass.

Ren dodged, narrowly avoiding a toxin-laced arc. "Rowan! Purge it!"

Rowan extended his hand, summoning a guiding pulse that cascaded in a fan of radiant light. It enveloped Ren’s frame, neutralizing the creeping toxins that shimmered at the edge of his chronosuit. Ren blinked, steadied, then moved.

This time, his baton struck fast—twice, then a third time—looping through Elias’s corrupted field. Chrono-aura surged in defiance, displacing the poison’s momentum. A shimmer of violet-gold curled around the baton’s tip.

Elias reeled, retreating a step. The poison sizzled into the air.

Ren flipped his baton once, twirled it behind his back, and lunged. "Borrowed elegance," he muttered. "But you forgot—we dance to my tempo."

The recursion groaned.

And the counterattack began in earnest.

The fake Lucian surged forward, boosted by Quinn’s resonance field, moving like a blur through the storm of collapsing recursion. His scythe flared a sharp silver-white, fracturing the air as he clashed once more with the real Lucian.

Their blades met in a scream of steel and light. Lucian grunted, blocking high, twisting just enough to deflect the arc before countering with a reverse grip slash aimed low. But the fake anticipated it—his foot slammed into Lucian’s ribs, sending him staggering back into a wall of flickering code.

"I WILL TAKE BACK WHAT’S MINE" the fake hissed.

Lucian spat blood, eyes blazing. "In your dreams."

They collided again, scythes spinning, carving the very walls around them. Sparks flew as their weapons locked. The fake forced Lucian back with a two-handed spin, his movement almost identical—eerily so—but it lacked the weight, the soul. Lucian’s strikes had fury, will behind them. The fake only mirrored tactics.

Lucian ducked under a slash and swept low—knocking the fake’s leg off balance. He vaulted over the stunned copy, landing in a skid.

"Rowan—now!" he shouted.

Rowan responded with a pulse of guiding light that wrapped around Lucian’s limbs like armor, reinforcing every movement. Lucian charged forward, resonance seething off his frame like a second skin.

The fake Lucian tried to parry—only to be blown back by the sheer force of Lucian’s strike, his blade cleaving straight through a glitch-ridden wall.

But he wasn’t done.

Snarling, the fake pushed up from the rubble, eyes glowing with something vast and unnatural. The recursion pulsed violently around him as he raised his hand and tore a jagged seam through the air.

Cosmic void poured in.

Vaughn_00’s stolen power spilled from the rift—an imitation of celestial resonance that shimmered with sickly nebulae and fragmented stars. Gravity shifted. Time stuttered. The fake Lucian’s body stretched and contorted, bathed in that corrupted radiance.

"You think you deserve his legacy?" the fake rasped, voice fracturing like static. "I am what comes after—the perfected evolution. Not a flawed echo clinging to borrowed light."

He hurled a spiral of condensed cosmic annihilation straight at Lucian.

Lucian didn’t flinch.

His resonance surged from his chest in a pulse of true Vaughn_00 light—pure, harmonic, undistorted by recursion. It met the fake’s blast mid-air. The collision detonated in a wave of spatial inversion—walls buckled outward, color inverted, air howled.

Lucian stepped through the maelstrom, golden fire wreathing his limbs, his voice like thunder. "You were made to copy him."

He raised his scythe, eyes fierce. "I carry him."

With a roar, he plunged forward—through the broken cosmos the fake had summoned—and brought his weapon down with the full weight of the legacy he bore.

The fake Lucian retaliated mid-swing, dragging the cosmic rift wider with both hands. Threads of corrupted starlight coiled around his body, forming an ethereal armor of imploding galaxies. He rushed forward, no longer grounded by the recursion’s floor but gliding inches above it, leaving scorched void in his wake.

Their weapons met again—scythe against scythe—but now each clash cracked reality, sending lightning arcs of resonance in every direction. Lucian’s eyes flared gold-white, sweat and blood streaking his jaw. He twisted mid-air, slashing downward as his blade sparked with Vaughn_00’s true resonance.

"I’m not your shadow," Lucian snarled. "I’m the storm you never saw coming."

The fake screamed, and with a final pulse of corruption, launched a second blast of cosmic ruin.

Lucian vanished.

And then reappeared behind him in a flash of golden resonance.

He didn’t speak.

He just drove the scythe clean through the false one’s chest.

The corridor erupted.

Light swallowed everything—brilliant, blinding, real—as the recursion began to implode from within, finally rejecting the corruption that had taken root.

And Lucian stood over the fading echo, victorious but shaking, as the world began to come undone around them.

But the fight wasn’t over.

A scream fractured the air—raw, jagged, feral.

Ari’s double lunged again from the haze, her blades whirling in a blur of recursion-stabilized rage. Rowan caught sight of her too late—until Lucian hurled a pulse of resonance in her path, sending her crashing against the walls of flickering code.

Quinn’s echo surged in with a flash of silver kinetic energy, aiming straight for Ren. But Ren saw it before it arrived—he rewound time mid-motion, dodging, reappearing beside Rowan. "Okay. He’s gotten smarter," he muttered.

Rowan lifted his arms, golden rings of guiding lattice snapping into place around Ren. "I’ve got you. Let’s finish this."

Across the corridor, the fake Elias snarled, poison lacing the floor beneath his boots. He moved with the poise of the real one—blade drawn, aura hissing. "He’s leaking decay," Rowan warned.

Ren vaulted over a collapsing banister, baton spinning in an arc of luminous gold. "Then we burn it clean."

Juno’s copy rose once more, fire flaring from her hands. "I’ll handle her," Rowan growled.

He launched himself forward, guiding sigils spiraling under his boots as he ducked beneath a lash of flame. His shield slammed into her chest, then pulsed outward—sending her crashing into Quinn’s copy just as Ren cornered him.

The corridor exploded into motion—blades, fire, time, poison, and guiding light entangling in one last desperate brawl.

Each move was refined chaos.

And the recursion shuddered as the remnants of its defenders fell one by one beneath the will of the originals.

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