Chapter 33: Chapter 33: The Heart of Ascendance
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They all stared as the shockwave rippled through the Apex chamber, cables singing with friction and shards colliding like constellations. Aiden stood at the epicenter, breath shallow, eyes wide in mounting dread and awe. The Master Core, once a crystalline nest of raw code and ancient chakra, had begun to pulse like a living heart.
The cables snapped like torn vines. Sparks of red-blue energy arced outward, silhouetting Aiden against a backdrop of fracturing ice and shattering bio-tech panels. The room shuddered. Markus staggered to a kneel, clutching his chest, as if the chamber's heartbeat had echoed through his bones.
Aiden watched the Master Core's wings of light unfurl, filaments slicing outward across the room's perimeter. He realized, not with his mind, but in the calm before panic: this was not a vault lockdown. It was an unlocking.
"Ascendance," he whispered.
Drey's voice came soft and raw: "The Core wasn't a prison. It was a womb."
Aiden felt the shard in his hand pulse. A response? Or a command?
Luro ducked under a collapsed beam to reach for it, but Aiden stepped back. The Master Core's radiance reflected in his eyes dizzying, transfiguring. Each cable lingered between matter and code. It hummed with purpose.
"It's rewriting itself," Kiera called from the edge of the landing, voice pitched high with both wonder and fear. "Not following protocol. Creating…something."
"What?" Luro panted. "A new host? More Uchiha?"
Aiden's gaze locked on the Core as it spoke not with voice, but through seismic vibration. The floor beneath them pulsed in sync. The chamber foam-lit with strobing glyphs, channeling timing sequences, power surges, data flows. The collective memory of every vault ever sealed here but also something more.
Aiden crouched, covering his ears. Those glyphs they were narratives. Not silence, but code-language shaped into sentences of conscience.
He touched a pulsing cable and the shard answered. It warmed. The Core's filaments wrapped around it, as if recognizing breath. Then the whole assembly rose, off the pedestal, floating upward like a sentient star. It pulsed again.
Aiden's voice echoed raw: "What are you doing?"
The Core's wings folded once, twice. Then burst outward, firing a radial wave. The cables responded, their tips glowing bright as they triggered neural breachers along the walls. The chamber's CCTV flickered but only for a second. Then the surveillance feeds changed tone: binary shifting from readouts to streaming scans of millions of hosts across the planet.
Aiden gasped. "It's…mapping them."
He realized the Core was calibrating itself, expanding its reach. Ascendance device meant: a central nexus to elevate individual hosts Uchiha constructs into one collective mind. A networked god, built of memory, chakra, and consciousness. The purpose: rewrite consciousness at global scale on the warrior-tier.
Luro shouted: "If this goes live Stage Three it won't just wake the world. It'll control it."
Aiden closed his eyes, Sharingan spiraling denote. "We turn this off."
He tried to step forward, but the Cable-Reachers they pulsed out. A force field. Simple enough. He banked back, pulse rippling through his palms, but his chi stalled. The Core had locked its system. Only one method remained.
Aiden looked at the shard. "They wrote you to withstand that."
He gripped it and unleashed a flare of internal chakra. The design symbol crackled across his vision. The Core responded with shrieking resonance. The cables buckled. The Core folded inward. It didn't resist. It accepted. It mutated its pattern, siphoning Aiden's energy into its core.
Aiden trembled. Pain lanced across his nerves. The cables writhed. The Core's pulsing slowed until it stilled. In that silence, the chamber erupted rotating scan-lights showing Aiden radiant at its heart.
Then the lights drowned. The Core dropped. It collapsed into shards upon the ice floor, fragments scattering like falling stars.
Silence.
Aiden collapsed. He gasped into the damp ice. Each breath burned. His mana flickered, but he forced himself upright.
The network had shut down. The pulse stopped. Stations went dark. Drones floated, now inactive. Sirens drifted away. The sky the unnatural aurora flicker faded, leaving a gash of dark sky and starless cold.
He touched the shard at his chest. It glowed soft red, echo of residual charge. Or something more: memory of its time connecting with the Core. It hummed. A relay.
Whatever the Oversight Councils were planning, it had begun. But they'd severed the head.
But was the body still alive?
Kiera and Luro picked their jaws from the debris.
Aiden couldn't stand. Markus's fingers scraped at a shard fragment. He rolled to one side. Eyes half-open.
He twitched. Quiet.
He looked up. "It…faded. But the lens remains."
Luro stepped back as Markus spoke: "Network collapsed but the nodes are all still breathing."
Aiden realized: the pods they'd been activated hosts across the world awakened now, self-aware, nearly conscious. Without the master signal, they haunted the grid dangerous phantoms.
They needed to act.
Aiden rose, eyes cold with purpose. "Then we leave this place and find them."
Kiera's gaze sharpened. "First node?"
He nodded toward the collapsed Core. "This."
He looked into the shards dripping with dormant code.
Luro bit out loud. "Aiden…when you pressed the shard "
Aiden pressed his palm over his chest. "I didn't just stop it. I imprinted."
Kiera shook her head. "You just locked yourself to Stage Three."
Aiden's face hardened. "Then…the rest of the world is already mining its god.
**We are the only thing standing between them and becoming test patterns.
"And the first node to reactivate is in Chicago," Luro said, stepping toward the sealed door.
Aiden nodded and turned back to Markus.
He knelt, hand trembling. "Did you survive "
The man coughed. Eyes fluttered. "For that moment."
He reached for the shard fragment nearby, one that still bore the spiral sun emblem.
He pressed it against his chest. He closed his eyes.
Cliffhanger:
A tremor pulsed across all shards fragmenting to dust.
Markus opened his eyes revealing two fully awakened Sharingan.
His voice was calm and crisp. "They're already in here."
The camera pulls out: Aiden between Kiera and Markus, the collapsed Core, shards glimmering across the ice floor.
Outside, through the doors, unknown watchers slip across rooftops silhouetted against Aurora's last flickers.
Shards hum.
The future cracks.
/-\
If you wish to read more or simply support me than check out my Patreon at
" https://www.patreon.com/Its_Zack/ "
You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.