Chương 86: 85: Tour

She whirled toward the satchel, her voice cracking.

"I wanted my friend back! Not a leg! Not... whatever this is! I wanted her whole! You're too kind, Sugarbear. I have to be the villain for you, and I'll happily do it. I'll punish them for what they did. You never deserved any of this." She was shouting now. At the Nonagon. At the universe. At herself.

"JE VEUX MA MEILLEURE AMIE ENTIÈRE! PAS JUSTE UNE JAMBE! UN CORPS! SON CORPS! EST-CE QUE TU COMPRENDS, ESPÈCE DE SALOPERIE DE DIAMANT COBALTÉ?!" I WANT MY BEST FRIEND WHOLE! NOT JUST A LEG! A BODY! HER BODY! DO YOU UNDERSTAND, YOU COBALT PIECE OF SHIT?! The words tore from her throat like broken glass, raw, vicious and completely unfiltered. Silence swallowed the corridor. Butter's voice came back, small and bewildered.

"... When did you learn French?" Katherine let out a long breath. The fury drained away, leaving only bone-deep exhaustion.

"It's... a long story," she muttered.

"I'll tell you later."

"Fine. I'm holding you to that."

"You're a leg. You can't hold anything."

"I can hold a grudge." Katherine almost laughed. Almost. She turned toward the darkness stretching ahead.

"Right now," she said quietly, "I'm going to find that wolf. I'm going to make it pay for what it did to you. And I'm going to tear this place apart." Clock stepped up beside her, shattered violet eyes burning with impossible power.

"She's my sister. You're not facing this alone." Katherine glanced sideways. He looked so much like Butter. If Butter had somehow become a furious, shirtless rockstar with cosmic power bleeding from every pore.

"... Fine," she sighed.

"Just try not to kill me this time."

"No promises."

"Clock."

"I'm joking."

"You don't look like someone who jokes."

"I'm trying something new." She stared at him. He stared back. Silence settled, heavy with the sheer absurdity of reality. A living prosthetic leg was giving them tactical advice. Katherine glowed faintly with alien dream-energy. Clock, one of the most terrifying beings she'd ever met, stood awkwardly holding his sister. A laugh escaped Katherine before she could stop it, hysterical, exhausted and desperately needed. A reluctant smile tugged at Clock's lips. His expression suddenly shifted.

"Wait." He frowned.

"Where's Aria?" Katherine blinked.

"The book?" Clock nodded, the question carrying a weight that immediately erased the fragile levity between them.

"When I found Butter..." Katherine's smile faded.

"It was lying beside her. I tried to pick it up."

"And?"

"It wouldn't let me." She swallowed.

"The moment I reached for it, the Gloom took it back." Clock's brow furrowed.

"Took it... back?"

"It just disappeared." Katherine shook her head.

"One second it was beside her body. The next it dissolved into violet light, like reality rejected me touching it." Silence settled over them again, heavier than before. Butter's prosthetic suddenly hopped between them.

"Oh my. Are you two finished with your date?" she asked.

"Because I'm literally a leg standing here, and this is becoming progressively stranger." Katherine snorted.

"Right. Let's go." She bent and reached for the prosthetic. The first time she'd lifted it, it had nearly folded her in half. The deceptively compact limb was absurdly heavy, forged from impossibly dense alloy, packed with intricate machinery and saturated with Gloom. Even with Herculean active, she'd barely managed to wrestle it into the satchel. Power flooded every fibre of her body. She lifted the prosthetic and settled it gently into the satchel. The leather strap didn't even stretch.

Her spine remained perfectly straight. For now. Katherine straightened, silver-fractured eyes fixed on the darkness ahead.

"Wolf," she whispered.

"I'm coming for you." Clock smiled. It was the smile of a predator who had finally found prey worth hunting. Together, they disappeared into the darkness.... Behind them, the corridor echoed with their footsteps, accompanied by the faint, tinny voice of a prosthetic leg humming a triumphant little march. Katherine's breath caught. Pain wasn't the reason. Her rebuilt spine held her upright with cold, flawless precision. What unsettled her was the sudden shift in perspective.

The corridor, the blood, the shattered walls... they weren't simply a battlefield. They were one tile in a vast mosaic of madness. Something inside her unfolded. It wasn't conscious thought. It was information. A relentless flood her rewritten body absorbed without permission. Blueprints she'd never seen flickered behind her eyes, ghostly cobalt lines overlaying reality as corridors, elevators, ventilation shafts and containment blocks assembled into a complete structure. This wasn't a building. It was a labyrinth.

A geometric cancer carved into the New Zealand wilderness. They stood at its far eastern edge. Ground Floor. Sector 7-G: Low-Priority Containment and Corridor Maintenance. The realization chilled her. If this insignificant corner housed monsters, pods and experimental slaughter...... what waited at its heart? The western wings. The central core. The deeper levels. More experiments. More Operatives. More Steppers. Entire ecosystems of horror quietly thriving beyond her sight. Another detail struck her even harder.

After the explosions, collapsing chambers, temporal distortions and Clock's continent-shaking scream of grief... Nobody came. Her stomach tightened. This place didn't treat chaos as an emergency. Chaos was routine. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. Fragments of stolen memories surfaced without invitation. A Stepper eating lunch while distant screams echoed through reinforced walls.

A Talon polishing feathered armour as another sector shook from an impact powerful enough to rattle the ceiling. Researchers calmly continuing paperwork while containment sirens wailed somewhere far away. This fortress hadn't merely been built for war. It had been built inside it. Silence would've been the anomaly. Butter was alive. That miracle shone like a tiny star in the darkness. She lived inside a hopping prosthetic leg. Katherine looked down at her hands. The cobalt tracery beneath her skin glowed brighter.

Her shattered spine no longer hurt. Instead, possibility hummed through her body like a high-voltage current. Cell by cell, dream by dream, she was becoming something imagined rather than born. Happy? Heartbroken? Both. Neither. Those emotions felt strangely distant, as though they belonged to Sylvia Lacroix, whose identity was quietly dissolving into the growing Katherine-system. A cold tactical framework assembled itself before she could stop it.

Primary Directive: Assist Asset 'Clock' in retrieval of Asset 'Butter''s cranial unit. Secondary Implication: Advance deeper into hostile labyrinth. High probability of encountering superior hostile forces. Available Assets: • Self - Apis anomaly undergoing Dream-Weave metamorphosis. • Asset 'Clock' - Transcendent-class telekinetic. Emotionally compromised. • Asset 'Butter' - Consciousness contained within prosthetic. Tactical intelligence intact. • Artifacts - Harmony (sentient), Nonagon (primary power source).

Katherine blinked. The clinical overlay dissolved. She was just a girl whose best friend had become a leg, whose brother had become a storm, and whose satchel carried a battery that somehow...... loved her. — The corridor stretched before them, a vein of polished stone and humming light threading through the dark heart of the fortress. They moved like ghosts through its pulse. Katherine led. She didn't know how she knew the way. The knowledge simply existed, a cold crystalline map unfolding behind her eyes.

Every security camera, pressure plate and silent watcher in the walls revealed itself. The fortress had become an extension of her awareness, its countless mechanical eyes feeding into the strange architecture of her mind. She could even feel Thornburgh, a dense, smouldering presence somewhere in the west wing, like a dying star waiting inside its crater. The most direct route swarmed with life. Operatives marched in formation. Laboratories held restless experiments pacing reinforced cages.

They could carve a path through them if necessary, but numbers mattered. An elephant could crush a hyena without effort. A hundred hyenas became a different story. Another route emerged. Longer. Narrower. A forgotten maintenance artery winding through the fortress's oldest layers, where obsolete machinery and neglected security systems still lingered. It demanded precision. Every hatch had to be resealed. Every sensor pacified with exactly the right frequency. Difficult, but possible. She breathed out.

The path settled into her bones.

"This way," she whispered, her voice carrying the faint echo of somewhere older. Paris, perhaps. The cadence of a girl who once argued with magistrates and painted Metro walls beneath the cover of night. They moved. Clock floated a finger's width above the floor, his bare feet disturbing nothing, his presence a contained storm wrapped in violet and white. A fitted grey compression shirt now covered his torso, matching his complexion almost perfectly.

Butter's voice crackled through the Gloom resonance, tinny, familiar and heartbreakingly alive. She sniffed.

"Hey... you're walking. You're carrying me. You're... you're alive. What the fluff happened back there? I thought..." Katherine's grip tightened around the prosthetic.

"I was injured," she answered quietly.

"One of the Steppers used a wormhole generator. It tried cutting me in half. Sonata..." Her fingers brushed the cracked gemstone at her throat.

"... held. Afterwards, another attack forced its impact inside my body. My organs ruptured. I was bleeding out on the floor." Clock remained silent. His jaw stayed locked, violet eyes fixed ahead, yet tension radiated from him like heat from a furnace. Butter's voice shrank to a whisper.

"How are you even walking?"

"The Nonagon." Katherine glanced down at herself.

"It didn't heal me. It replaced me. My liver, spleen and spine aren't human anymore. They're structures made from cobalt logic and condensed potential. They work better... but they aren't mine." Her expression dimmed.

"I remembered things while I was dying." She paused.

"I remembered who I really am." Sylvia Lacroix. Paris. A rooftop shared with her friends. A cigarette glowing beneath a violet evening sky. A Talon appearing from nowhere. A needle driven into the base of her skull. The endless blue drowning inside the pod. Fragments became sentences. Sentences became memories. As she spoke, they crossed three security checkpoints. Her fingers danced across forgotten keypads with effortless familiarity, feeding ancient systems frequencies they expected to hear.

Butter stayed quiet for a long while.

"Oh my..." she finally breathed.

"That's why you speak French so fluently. You aren't pretending. You actually are French. Sylvia." She rolled the name gently across her tongue.

"Sylvia Lacroix. That's... that's really you." Katherine nodded.

"That's me." The words felt like a key turning inside a long-forgotten lock.

"Unfathomable." Butter's voice cracked.

"Your parents, Sylvie. They're still out there. They've been looking for you this whole time. Do you know how long? How long were you in that pod?" Katherine's throat tightened.

"I don't know. Time moves differently here. It could've been months. Years. I..." She swallowed.

"Seven years, maybe. I don't know why, but that number feels right."

"It doesn't matter," Butter said fiercely.

"We're getting out of this hellhole, we're finding them, and you're going to hug your mother so hard she forgets how to breathe. That's a promise. A Butter Guarantee. I've never broken one."

"You've never made one before."

"First time for everything. Now stop crying. I can hear it in your voice, and it's making my chassis damp." A hiccupping laugh escaped Katherine. She wiped at her eyes, the laughter growing lighter until something suddenly clicked.

"Oh." She blinked.

"I almost forgot. The Gloom. I figured it out." Butter paused.

"... What?"

"While I was dead. Or... while the Nonagon was rebuilding me. I saw how it works." Her eyes brightened.

"Sugarbear, you've been using it wrong this whole time." The prosthetic leg went rigid.

"Excuse me?"

"You're not a brawler. You're a client. The Gloom isn't a power, it's a lawyer. You keep trying to punch the bailiff when you could just exploit the contract." The words poured out faster and faster, lit by cobalt certainty.

"Crescendo isn't a multiplier, it's accounting fraud. Gather a tiny amount of Gloom, apply the multiplier at the moment it leaves you, and reality accepts the inflated number because it never audits the transaction. You've been paying a ninety-eight percent tax when you own the mint." She barely stopped to breathe.

"Arpeggio isn't a punch. It's a loophole. Apply it across your whole body and you're never technically present when the attack arrives. Sforzando? Stop absorbing force. Just send the attacker into the pocket dimension and close it. They never come back. Melody..." She grinned despite herself.

"Melody lets you argue with anything. Concepts. Laws. The idea of defeat itself. You could punch the concept of losing and win by definition." Silence. The leg vibrated.

"Say all of that again," Butter whispered.

"Slowly. I'm writing it down. Actually... I'm a leg. I don't have pockets. Clock, are you getting this? Please tell me you're getting this."

"I'm getting it," Clock replied. His tone stayed calm, but something in his violet eyes sharpened. Katherine finally noticed how close he was floating. The pale light caught the angles of his face, the white of his hair, the sapphire glint of his grills whenever his lips parted. She abruptly became aware that she was lecturing a god about metaphysical tax fraud while carrying his sister's consciousness in a prosthetic leg. She looked away.

"Your accent's getting thicker," Butter observed, amusement creeping back into her voice.

"You sound like you're about to order a croissant and overthrow a government." Katherine covered her mouth. She hadn't noticed.

"Je m'en fous," she muttered automatically, then groaned.

"I can't stop it. It's like my mouth forgot which language it's supposed to use."

"Don't stop," Butter laughed.

"It's cute. Hey, Clock, isn't it cute?" Clock made a vague sound that could've meant anything. Katherine wished the floor would swallow her. She fixed her attention on the corridor ahead, on the security feeds flooding her mind, on anything except the way the dim lights caught his hair. Her heart betrayed her anyway. Why does he have to look so much like Butter? It was infuriating. A gloomy Butter.

"You're awfully quiet," she said, forcing a teasing edge into her voice.

"No brooding commentary? No dramatic speech about violence? I'm disappointed." One corner of Clock's mouth lifted.

"I'm conserving energy."

"For what?"

"For apologizing." She glanced at him.

"I didn't look," he admitted quietly.

"I assumed. I needed someone to blame, and you were there." His jaw tightened.

"I was wrong. I'm... sorry." Katherine studied him for a moment.

"Acknowledging it is the first step," she said with mock seriousness. A beat passed.

"You have very nice eyebrows for someone so dramatic." The words escaped before she could stop them. Heat rushed into her cheeks. She stared stubbornly ahead, refusing to look at him. Silence lingered beside her. Finally, very quietly:"... Thank you." Something about that answer softened the space between them. Katherine's pulse did something completely unreasonable. The Nonagon had nothing to do with this one. It was entirely, embarrassingly, her. She cleared her throat.

"Your Gloom. It's different from Sugarbear's. I'm guessing yours has something to do with chess?" Her eyes drifted to the elegant chess-piece earrings swaying beneath his hair. Clock glanced at her, seeming to recognize the question for what it was: an escape from heavier things.

"Her Gloom negotiates," he said.

"Mine commands." Violet light gathered between his fingers, quiet and absolute.

"It took years to learn the difference. Years of failure. Years of almost erasing myself. You don't learn to seize time by the throat." His hand closed, extinguishing the glow.

"You become the sort of thing that can."

"I wish I could do that," Butter muttered from the leg, her voice carrying equal parts envy and curiosity.

"Just... stop everything for a second. Breathe. Think. Instead of bargaining with reality every time I want a miracle."

"You'd hate it," Clock replied.

"Everything freezes. No music. No chaos. You'd last a minute before complaining."

"Probably," Butter admitted with a sigh.

"Still... it'd be nice not having to ask permission for once." Katherine watched the last traces of violet fade from his fingers.

"Are you ever scared?" she asked quietly.

"When you fight. When you know you could die."

"I don't have time to be scared," Clock answered.

"Fear doesn't change whether I live. It only changes how clearly I think while I'm alive. If I'm going to die, I'd rather die thinking clearly." His gaze flickered toward the prosthetic.

"I owe her that much." Katherine absorbed the answer in silence. It was such a Clock response. Disciplined. Practical. Almost painfully honest.

"I was scared," she admitted.

"When that Stepper's attack detonated inside me. I was terrified." Her hand rested over her chest where alien structures now hummed beneath her skin.

"And then I died." She looked down.

"Now... I don't think I'm afraid anymore. Is that strange? To die and come back only to realize fear stayed behind?" The prosthetic jerked violently.

"Wait," Butter blurted.

"Back up. You said the Nonagon replaced your organs. I thought you meant you almost died." Katherine winced.

"I... forgot to mention that part."

"You FORGOT to mention you DIED?"

"There was a lot happening! I remembered my past life, figured out the Gloom's legal system, your brother tried to crush my windpipe..."

"YOU DIED!"

"I got better!" The leg vibrated so violently Katherine almost dropped it.

"But the Nonagon didn't heal you," Butter said, her voice suddenly thin with panic.

"It resurrected you. Those aren't the same thing. Healing repairs reality. Resurrection tells reality it was wrong." She hesitated.

"Do you understand what that means? It decided you should exist... and reality obeyed." Katherine fell silent.

"Butter..." she whispered.

"No." Butter's voice trembled." Things that bring people back from the dead don't do it for free. Ever. There's always a cost." Neither Katherine nor Clock answered. Clock had gone perfectly still. His gaze drifted across the artifacts she carried: Sonata resting against her chest, Harmony secured at her waist, and finally the satchel where the Nonagon pulsed with its patient cobalt heartbeat. His expression revealed nothing. A seam opened beside him without ceremony.

He reached into it and withdrew a pair of sleek silver headphones, settling them over his ears. The gesture was so ordinary it felt almost unsettling. The conversation ended there.