Chapter 37: Chapter 37: Shatterpoint
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Immediate Fallout: The Ascendance Break
The moment the Berlin host awakened fully, the ripple wasn't just metaphysical it was seismic.
Aiden staggered back, pulling the host away from the collapsing center of the hall. The sigil inked into the ceiling burst in a spiral of dark red light. Furniture twisted. Shards of glass hovered, defying gravity for a beat before being flung outward like shrapnel. Kiera shouted, shielding two followers with a projection disk as the blast peeled a support beam from the roof. Echo darted forward, grabbing a collapsing rafter mid-fall and tossing it aside like a twig.
Mandara had barely touched the ground before he was upright again, Sharingan spinning. "He's not fully in control!" he barked.
"No he's channeling a memory loop from the Master Core!" Drey's voice crackled through the comms. "Get him out of there before it feeds back!"
Aiden felt the Berlin host's body go rigid in his arms, spasming as if two different wills were colliding inside him. The shard embedded in Aiden's own chest hummed violently in protest, burning like a branding iron. Whatever had been awakened in that host wasn't just him it was something ancient, threaded into the original directive.
"Pull out!" Kiera yelled, her voice barely audible over the rising siren of citywide alerts.
They didn't need convincing. With Mandara supporting the staggering host and Echo forming a barrier behind them, the team escaped through a fractured window and descended into the alley as the cult hall imploded. The shockwave sent dust, wood, and crumpled sigils into the dawn.
As they vanished into the shadows, above them, the sigil reformed itself etched into the Berlin skyline in phosphorescent red. A warning.
Los Alamos Subplot: The Hidden Scientist
Thousands of kilometers away, beneath the scorched rocks of the New Mexico desert, Drey stood at the entrance of the Los Alamos Anomalous Research Annex. His knuckles were white around the datapad as the door hissed open to reveal a tall woman in a rust-colored coat, sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her eyes sparkled with latent intelligence and something else.
"Dr. Selene Ward," she said, offering her hand. "You have something that shouldn't exist."
Drey nodded stiffly. "We need help stabilizing host-shard neurobehavioral feedback. You've studied "
"The Shisui Phenomenon. Yes," Selene finished. "The memory resonance loops in transgenic chakra hosts. What you call 'ghost harmonics.'"
She followed Drey into the lab, passing shattered casing arrays and decompiled shard schematics. But as she walked, her gaze wasn't on the data. It drifted toward the map of shard-anchors across the globe pausing briefly on a glowing node in Cairo, another in Toronto.
"Why do you really want to help?" Drey asked.
Selene smiled too quickly. "Because I think it's the next step in human evolution."
He frowned.
She leaned close. "And because… I've seen this before. In a vision. When I was eleven."
Drey's breath caught.
She turned toward the isolation chamber and muttered, more to herself than anyone: "Ascension isn't accidental. It's encoded. Someone wants this… but not all of us will survive it."
And somewhere on her belt, hidden beneath her coat, a private shard pulsed with something older than even Drey had imagined.
Clash of Memories: Mandara vs. Berlin Host
Mandara and the Berlin host sat across from one another in a safehouse beneath the Tier‑2 train lines. Outside, the city buzzed with confusion distortion tremors still occasionally cracking asphalt or dimming grid lights. Inside, the tension was near-breaking.
The Berlin host, his skin traced with subtle vein-like sigil patterns, stared into his tea without drinking. Mandara watched him closely, Sharingan deactivated, his expression guarded.
"You remember things that aren't yours," Mandara said finally.
"I remember being torn apart," the host replied. "Pieces of me screaming across timelines. Then… silence. Now I feel like I'm two people. One wants to help. The other wants to burn it all down."
"Which one are you now?"
"I don't know."
Mandara leaned forward. "We anchor the memories. We guide them. That's our purpose not dominance."
The host's eyes flickered. "Or we're just filters. No will of our own."
"You're not a puppet," Mandara said. "You're a mirror. And right now, you're reflecting chaos."
Their chakra brushed faint, like a breeze passing between two fires. Mandara's Sharingan spun once. The host's flickered in return, faint but real.
"You're strong enough to choose," Mandara said softly. "But if you choose wrong others will follow. Into madness."
The Berlin host stood. "Then I'll walk the edge until I know which voice is mine."
Echo and the Sleeper Cell: Mercy or War
Echo knelt in an abandoned shelter beneath a collapsed monorail station. Across from him sat three sleeper operatives young, gaunt, trembling. Their sigil-marks had begun to fade after exposure to the memory waves from the cult hall.
One of them, a girl no older than seventeen, trembled. "It started as visions. Beautiful ones. We thought… we thought we were meant for something."
"And then?"
"They told us we'd be conduits. That our memories would help awaken the Core."
Echo nodded. "And what did it cost?"
Another mid-thirties, twitchy answered. "We lost time. Days. Names. I think I killed someone."
Echo's fingers tightened around a memory shard. "You were used."
"Are we enemies to you?" the girl asked.
He didn't respond immediately. Instead, he pulled a signal flare, modified with an old encryption.
"No. You're survivors."
He tossed the flare on the ground, pressed a code, and a low pulse spread through the shelter.
It wiped the remnants of the inverted sigil's conditioning from their systems.
As they blinked, disoriented but free, Echo whispered, "Tell others. There's another way."
Behind him, a sniper drone powered up.
He turned, caught it mid-activation, and reprogrammed it in one smooth motion.
Then, silently, he disappeared into the shadows again.
Aiden and the Fracturing Shards
In the heart of the Berlin safehouse, Aiden sat in a resonance chair. Electrodes mapped his spine. The stabilization chamber pulsed faint light. Across from him, Dr. Ward now integrated into their task force adjusted code matrices on a holographic interface.
"This won't hold," she warned. "You're synchronizing with two unstable shards."
"I don't have a choice," Aiden muttered. "The host's psychic resonance is linked to mine now. If I let go, he'll lose himself again and trigger another cascade."
The shard in Aiden's chest cracked audibly, sending tendrils of lightning-like chakra down his arms. His Sharingan flared, then flickered violently.
"You're going into feedback," Selene warned. "Abort now."
"No," Aiden grunted. "Stabilize the shard. I'll hold the resonance."
Mandara entered, setting a shard-tempered chain on the table. "This might help. But it'll cost your chakra."
Aiden reached for it.
His vision blurred. Inside, he saw flashes of other lives pain, fear, joy. It was too much.
The chamber overloaded.
Dr. Ward screamed, "It's fracturing!"
Aiden convulsed. His eyes flared, sharingan spinning madly.
And then silence.
A perfect stillness filled the chamber.
Cliffhanger: The Shatterpoint
It shattered like glass.
Aiden's Sharingan cracked not figuratively, but literally. Hairline fractures bloomed through his eyes like spiderwebs. A soundless scream echoed in the chamber.
Then came the pulse.
A chakra wave burst outward, piercing every wall of the safehouse, rising through layers of concrete and steel, into the open sky and into orbit.
Above Earth, the Horizon satellite net flickered. The network blinked once… twice… then a crack, like lightning through space, split across its relay structure.
Alarms blared in orbital command stations.
And as people across the globe looked up at the sky, they saw a new constellation form red, spiraling, familiar:
The Uchiha sigil.
The world didn't just see Aiden.
It felt him.
/-\
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You can Get Access to 3 More Chapters OR 7 More Chapters if you want.