"The final operation of a loyal man is silence, the kind that leaves a kingdom standing long after his heartbeat fades."
It was early the next day, and I realized that the four weeks Niko had promised would not pass; they simply failed to initialize. I lay in my bed in the quiet military quarters, and the reality was a cold, absolute fact: the dark resonance fracture had accelerated at an exponential, untreatable rate. The timeline, the metric I built my life around, was collapsing into a single, final day. The sensation was terrifyingly unique. It wasn't the searing fire of a traumatic wound; it was the chilling, profound emptiness of total systemic shutdown. My Beta core, the engine that regulated my psychic shield and my strategic thought, was no longer burning me from the inside. It was freezing me. Every moment was a descent into an internal silence, a cold void swallowing my energy pathways, extinguishing the vital warmth of my life force.
