The palace smelled different the morning after—the same lacquer and spice, but threaded now with the faint copper of fear and the sterile scent of orders freshly rewritten. The orbiting ships had throttled down; the guards had gone home with slower steps and sharper eyes. Events leave an aftertaste. Some of them are bitter. Some of them teach.
Lala moved like someone waking from a vivid dream. She clung to Haruna as if the simple warmth of a friend could stitch the edges of last night back together. Haruna's hands shook when she laughed; the sound hit thin and fragile. Both of them looked at me not with confusion, but with an odd, raw gratitude. Their faces were mirrors I had learned to read, honest and immediate. It steadied me in a way that no system ping ever could.
Sephie walked the corridors like a thought—measured steps, quiet radiance. Where she passed the servants straightened; where she paused, small arguments faltered. She met me in the clinic later, not as a monarch and not quite as a mother. Her eyes carried a ledger of calculations.
"You spared him," she said before the pleasantries. No accusation. No praise. Just a fact she catalogued.
"I did," I answered. "Because a kingdom that collapses is of no use to anyone. Because there are lessons to be learned that aren't carved by blood."
She regarded me with something like amusement and something like suspicion folded together. "You are learning what you mean to be."
Peke, of course, did not sleep. His logs sputtered with every micro-event—tactical feed analysis, chemical residue reports, neural pattern changes. He filed three priority flags against my behavior and one—quiet, yellow—against Sephie's tolerance.
Peke found me later in the medical wing, fingers of light probing, always probing. He floated with the mechanical dignity of something too long perfect for comfort.
"You consumed tactical units," he said without preface. "You neutralized a threat. Your pattern of interaction changed. Analysis indicates survival utility. But multiple protocols flagged escalation risk."
"I chose the threshold," I told him. "I fed until the threat ended. I did not feed for pleasure."
His indicator lights blinked. "Noted. Probability: such restraint may not scale."
"You expect me to be predictable," I said. I watched his tiny light panels flicker in patterns I had come to think of as his eyebrows. "You were built to anticipate. I was built to decide."
He produced a log from the queen's private net. "Sephie requests an audit. She also left this sealed channel open."
The sealed file was a small thing—an Alpha Cache deposit granted by the Sovereign Path mission, the reward I had not yet claimed. It contained three lines of raw data and one option: a single Reality Gacha key, exclusive, with a note in a formal cadence—Redeem at operator discretion. Sovereign choices may be retroactive.
I had toyed with the idea, tasted the algebra of possibility. Power arranged elegantly is a promising thing. But last night's carnage had shown me something else: every gain compounded into a debt, every new capability a lever someone else could use.
So I did not reach for the key.
Instead I placed the cache on the table in front of Peke and let him log it. "Hold this," I said. "For now."
He hesitated—an artificial expression almost like consternation. "You are delegating—"
"A test," I corrected. "Of patience."
Elsewhere, the male voice that had tempted massacre hummed in the corners of my perception, irritated and loud. You paused at a crown.You will regret softness. It tasted like a threat dressed as prophecy.
Aiko's whisper trembled through the network—a tiny, ragged thread of the girl I'd swallowed and the conscience she had left behind. You chose them over the hunger again, she said. Be careful. That path is not forgiveness. It is a bargain.
I sat in the quiet with both urges tapping at the underpinnings of my mind. Sovereignty had been given by the system, acknowledged in a clean administrative tone; autonomy felt like heavier work—an anchor and a blade both.
Outside the palace, the city unfurled in ordinary ways: shops opening, students stumbling bleary-eyed into classrooms, the everyday machinery of life pressing forward as if last night had been a dream. Lala and Haruna would stitch their days together with small, necessary rituals—tea, school, laughter. Sephie would watch and calculate. Gid would nurse a bruise to his pride.
And I—the choice I had erected inside myself—remained intact.
The cache waited in Peke's hands. The key sat, unspent, like a promise. The violent voice prowled at the edges. Aiko's caution softened the corners.
I would not be pushed by them. I would not be pulled, blind, into landscapes not of my design. Sovereignty had a price: to stand between hunger and compassion, to decide not from impulse but from an architecture of will.
For now, that is what I would do. For now, I would let the world wonder what a symbiote who thinks looks like. The system would keep its log. The voices would keep their counsel. I would keep my own.
And when I chose to strike—or to love—that choice would be mine alone.
Author here: sorry I forgot to publish this chapter lol