Corrupted Bonds
Chapter 118: Ren’s Watch

Chapter 118: Chapter 118: Ren’s Watch

The command deck dimmed as the recon team deployed. Shadows pooled across the floor like spilled ink, the emergency lights casting long amber arcs that pulsed in time with the base’s low hum. The temperature had dropped several degrees, and the air carried the faint scent of scorched circuitry and ozone—an aftertaste of timelines burned raw.

Ren stood alone at the anchor node, the glow of the chrono relay console casting silver across his features. Behind him, the walls shimmered faintly with recursive shimmer, unstable reality bleeding through in slow waves. The hum of the deck wasn’t mechanical anymore—it felt like breath, like the room itself had lungs.

Code flowed across the terminal like water made of light, lines bending and flickering as if reacting to unseen currents. Every keystroke echoed unnaturally, the sound resonating beyond the metal. Ren monitored each pulse, each field sync—his heartbeat aligned with the cascade.

He was listening to the system like it was breathing.

And it was breathing. But not alone.

Ren exhaled slowly, resting one palm on the table. "Stabilizers nominal," he muttered to no one. "Temporal lock holding."

Behind his eyes, something flickered.

Flash—

Rain. Fire. Shattered stone. A hundred versions of the same world, all ending in ash.

Rowan’s scream. Lucian’s silence. A tower burning across the sky.

And always—

That voice:

"Keep him safe," Vaughn_00 had told Rowan.

But Ren had heard it, too—clear as if it had been said to him.

He remembered the moment.

Flash—

They were both alone—he and Vaughn_00—inside a fractured control nexus at the edge of a dead recursion. Power lines snapped above their heads, humming like angry wasps. Ren had been kneeling beside a failed relay, trying to reroute a stabilizer burn, sweat streaking his face despite the freezing air. Vaughn_00 appeared not with grandeur, but like a ripple in the corner of Ren’s vision—emerging from a thin split in space, no more dramatic than a breath.

"Ren," he said—not with command, but curiosity.

Ren sat back, wary. "You’re not supposed to be here."

Vaughn_00’s expression shifted with something close to amusement, though his fractured glow gave it a ghostlike quality. "Neither are you. And yet here we are."

There was a pause. Vaughn_00 stepped forward, the ripple of his form quieter than silence. "You’ve touched the lattice."

Ren frowned. "I stabilized it. That’s all."

"No," Vaughn_00 said softly. "You remembered it. That makes you different."

Another beat. Then—more quietly—he added, "You always remembered, even when we didn’t want you to."

Ren blinked. "What are you talking about?"

Vaughn_00 studied him for a moment. Then, almost like an afterthought: "Keep him safe."

Ren narrowed his eyes. "Rowan?"

Vaughn_00 gave a near-invisible nod. "He’s... the key. But not the lock. That’s you."

And then he was gone. No light, no sound. Only the low buzz of the relay node as Ren sat there, shaking slightly, breath short.

He had never told anyone.

Not just a command. Not even a warning.

It had been a truth.

A tether placed on his soul.

Not just a command. A confession. A truth from one recursion to another.

Ren had never forgotten.

He wasn’t just running code. He wasn’t just stabilizing vectors.

He was guarding a friend. A constant. A promise.

Another flicker. Another timeline where he’d failed. One where Rowan had vanished entirely. One where Lucian had lost himself.

He ground his knuckles into the console, the pain grounding him in this now. "Not this time."

The console chirped—an anomaly spiking from the team’s position.

Ren’s eyes sharpened. "Talk to me," he murmured. "What are you seeing?"

In the code, a pulse. A heartbeat. Something familiar.

His mouth went dry.

The tower.

But this time, it was closer.

Ren’s fingers flew across the interface. He was no longer just holding the line.

He was preparing to rewrite the end.

Then came the pain.

A searing, splitting throb cracked behind his eyes—bright and hot, like time itself was trying to claw its way through his skull. He staggered against the console, one hand gripping the edge, breath shuddering as a new flood of visions crashed into him.

Flash—

Lucian cradling Rowan’s lifeless body in a field of red light.

Flash—

A tower splitting open to reveal endless copies of himself—each one screaming.

Flash—

Ren—alone—sitting before a black mirror that spoke his name in every tongue time had forgotten.

He gasped, the pressure mounting. "Make it stop..."

A gentle hand gripped his shoulder.

"Ren."

Evelyn’s voice was calm but firm. She knelt beside him, guiding his trembling form down to the bench with practiced steadiness. "Breathe. Anchor yourself here."

Ava was already pulling up a medscan, frowning. "Temporal overload. You’re syncing too deep—your resonance is bleeding through cycles."

Ren squeezed his eyes shut, jaw clenched. "I have to hold it. If I lose focus, they’ll lose their way."

Evelyn’s hand didn’t leave his shoulder. "We won’t let that happen. But we need you alive to pull them back."

The pain ebbed slightly. Not gone. Just leashed.

Ren’s breath slowed. "They’re close to something. The tower’s signal—it’s bleeding through everything now."

Ava looked at the data spike on the monitor. "Whatever it is, it’s beginning to react. And it’s reacting to you."

Ren leaned forward, sweat beading at his brow, eyes burning. "Then I’ll be the mirror it can’t break. The knot in its thread."

But even as he said it, something else stirred at the edge of his consciousness. The tower’s pulse—its presence—wasn’t just reacting. It was resonating.

With him.

A whisper formed behind his thoughts, not words, but something like recognition. Like memory folding inward on itself.

Flash—

A timeline he didn’t remember living, but felt. He stood inside the tower, alone, its walls a spiraling cathedral of bone and gold, humming with the echoes of a thousand lost names.

Flash—

Vaughn_00 beside him, not speaking, only watching. The tower opened for Ren—not Lucian, not Rowan. Him.

Flash—

A sigil embedded in the stone—a recursive spiral etched with his name.

The tower had marked him. Long before this moment.

He jerked out of the vision, gasping. Evelyn steadied him instantly.

"Hey hey... You okay? What did you see?" she asked, voice taut.

Ren swallowed hard. "It knows me. Not just from now. From before. From timelines I haven’t even lived yet."

Sharon paled. "Then this isn’t just targeting us through Rowan and Lucian."

Ren’s voice was low, haunted. "No. It’s been watching me too. And maybe I was always supposed to open the door."

He stared into the flowing code, and for a second, it didn’t look like a system interface at all—it looked like a lock. Not mechanical. Not digital. Organic. A recursive gate made of memory, resonance, and identity. And the strands weaving through it weren’t random. They were familiar.

They were his.

Another flicker of memory burst into view—blurry, surreal.

Flash—

Ren, younger, surrounded by broken timelines in a space where nothing should have survived. The tower rising before him like a judgment, and him stepping forward—not with fear, but with purpose.

It had opened then, not because he forced it. Because it recognized him.

Because he was already part of it.

End flash

Ren’s eyes burned. "It doesn’t just know me. I think... I was part of it. I’ve been part of the tower’s fabric before—maybe I helped create it. Or maybe I was meant to finish what someone else began."

He pressed a hand over his chest, as if steadying something within. The pulse beneath his skin wasn’t just his own anymore—it echoed with the same rhythm he felt in the tower’s call.

"Rowan, Lucian... it wasn’t just a fluke that we all found each other. I think we’re part of a pattern—something encoded across timelines."

Evelyn leaned closer, her voice soft but sure. "You think the tower chose you?"

Ren gave a small, humorless laugh. "No. I think we chose each other. Back then. In some recursion. Maybe even before the fractures began. The tower just remembered us better than we did."

He looked up, eyes burning silver at the edges. "And now it’s waking up... and it wants us to finish what we started."

He tapped into the system interface again, fingers steadier now. Every keystroke echoed like a countdown.

Evelyn stood over his shoulder now, her presence steadying. She wasn’t just watching—she was memorizing the shifts in Ren’s expression, ready to ground him if he faltered again.

Sharon joined them at the adjacent console, typing with calm precision. "I’ve got secondary relay pings on standby. If anything in that structure disrupts their physical signals, we’ll ghost-latch onto their echo signatures."

Ren nodded, impressed. "Smart. That might actually buy us time if the tower tries to phase them out."

He zoomed in on a convergence spike rising on Kira’s node. His breath hitched. The data wasn’t spiking. It was spiraling—like the system was tracing the pattern of something ancient.

"I’m embedding resonance markers into their suits," he said. "A delay loop—if anything tears them out of time again, I’ll hold their signatures here long enough to pull them back."

The system pulsed in response—not a rejection, but a flicker of acknowledgment. For the first time in hours, it felt like the system recognized him again.

Ava looked up, concern deepening. "Whatever you’re interfacing with... it knows you’re trying to counter it. That feedback loop isn’t static—it’s listening."

"I know," Ren said, voice steady despite the sweat at his brow. "But so am I."

Evelyn raised her eyebrows. "That’s theoretical."

"So was living through all these recursions," Ren muttered, voice dry but laced with fire. "I’ve mapped their threads before. I can do it again."

Ava glanced up from the monitor. "Signal just destabilized. Kira’s node is showing inconsistent time phasing."

Ren’s hands froze over the console. "She’s seeing it."

Evelyn looked sharply at him. "Seeing what?"

"The tower. The real one. Not memory. Not echo. It’s watching back."

Reconnaissance

In the field, wind screamed across broken terrain.

The recon team crested a rise, their suits dimmed to near-silent pulse. Elias raised a fist to halt.

Ahead, half-buried in the churned soil, rose the top edge of a buried structure—etched in black-gold glass, whispering with the scent of burnt ozone and ash.

Kira stumbled slightly, eyes going wide as something flashed across her vision.

Flash— a spiral tower eclipsing a bleeding sun.

Her breath caught. "It’s here," she whispered. "It’s under us."

The team moved cautiously toward the edge of the slope, weapons drawn but lowered, senses sharp. The closer they came to the exposed structure, the more the air changed—thickening, as if reality itself was folding tighter around them.

Jasper crouched near a fracture in the soil. "It’s humming... not just inside my ears—through my bones."

Sloane ran a gloved hand along the glassy edge. "This isn’t just architecture. It’s alive."

Quinn checked the scanner again, frowning. "Temporal echoes off the scale. We’re not alone down here. And I don’t think we ever were."

Zora raised his blades slightly. "Something’s pulsing beneath. Like it’s waiting for us to step inside."

Mira’s voice was a low murmur. "No sudden moves. We go in slow. Controlled. And we mark our path."

But as they stepped closer, the ground beneath their boots resonated with a deep, warbling chime.

Inside the command deck, alarms flared.

Ren leaned forward, voice rising. "PULL BACK NOW. THE STRUCTURE JUST OPENED A RECURSIVE GATE BENEATH YOU."

His fingers flew across the console. "It’s pulling resonance threads—yours. It’s trying to map you!"

Kira turned, face pale. "We’re already in its reach."

Around her, the terrain began to shimmer—not visually, but felt. The edges of her vision warped, as if her memories were being unraveled and examined mid-thought.

Jasper stumbled back, clutching his helmet. "Something’s inside my head. It’s digging. Pulling pieces."

Zora swore under his breath, forcing his boots into the ground as if anchoring himself physically could protect his mind. "We have to get out—NOW."

Lucian’s voice crackled through the open comms from the command deck. "Ren, shut it down—do something."