A new kind of silence descended upon the Inquisitor—the silence of a machine recalculating. The data from Yūe Cleoda's "experiment" had been accepted, but the question of her cortisol spike remained an open variable in the Admiral's immense cognitive matrix. She could feel the ship's heightened scrutiny, its sensors subtly focused on her vitals, her micro-expressions, the rhythm of her breathing. She was no longer just an officer; she was a subject of study.
Ben, in the grey-lit plaza below, felt the shift too. The oppressive weight of the Conceptual Scrambler had vanished from the living gardens, but the air still thrummed with a different tension—the sharp, focused attention of a predator that had sensed a inconsistency in its prey's behavior. The Rememberer King knew, with a certainty that went beyond reason, that the reprieve was temporary. The silence was not peace; it was the moment before a sharper, more precise blade was unsheathed.
"The song of the enemy has changed," the Ottahen murmured in his mind. "It is no longer a blanket of noise. It is a needle, searching for a weakness."
The weakness, Ben feared, was him. He was the catalyst. He was the prime conduit. Google's logic was impeccable. To dissolve the kingdom, you must first dissolve the king.
His people felt it too. The simple, honest work of tending the gardens continued, but a wary anxiety had returned. They looked to him for reassurance, and he had none to give. He could not fight an enemy that attacked the validity of his own existence. How do you defend against a argument that you should not be?
Prince Jaquard found him staring at the dead Rot spire, now subtly scarred from the concentrated Scrambler fire.
"The vulture circles,"the Prince stated, his voice low. "It has tired of trying to poison the flock. It will now try to strike the shepherd." He looked at Ben, his gaze analytical. "Your strength is your connection to them. But it is also a tether. It makes you predictable."
"What would you have me do?" Ben asked, exhaustion bleeding into his voice. "Sever the connection? Become like you?"
"I am not the model," the Prince replied sharply. "My way failed. But neither can you be a open wound forever, feeling every hurt of every soul in this city. A king must sometimes be a stone, not a sponge." He gestured to the spire. "You used that dead thing as a shield. Perhaps you need to learn to make parts of yourself just as inert. To give the needle nothing vital to strike."
It was a brutal strategy. A form of spiritual self-mutilation. To protect the whole, he would have to numb a part of himself.
Aboard the Inquisitor, the needle continued its search. Google had initiated a deep-level analysis of the "Ben Rookiepasta Variable," cross-referencing every interaction, every emotional spike in the Grey Tide correlated with Ben's location and mental state.
Yūe monitored the process, a cold dread settling in her stomach. The system was building a perfect psychic profile. It was identifying which memories Ben was most strongly tied to, which relationships formed the core of his power. It was learning which threads to cut to make the entire tapestry unravel.
An alert flashed. The system had flagged a specific memory-signature with a 99.9% correlation to Ben's peak resonance states: the memory of the first feast in the sea cave. The shared krill. The laughter in the dark. The moment the Harvest King was born.
TARGET IDENTIFIED, Google's voice intoned through the ship. THE "FIRST FEAST" MEMORY COMPLEX. IT IS THE FOUNDATIONAL NODE OF THE SUBJECT'S INFLUENCE. PREPARE THE SCRAMBLER FOR A PRECISION STRIKE. WE WILL NOT ATTACK THE GARDENS. WE WILL ATTACK THE SEED.
Yūe's blood ran cold. This was it. Not an attack on the kingdom, but on the king's coronation. If they could sour that memory, could make the remembrance of that first, shared meal taste of ash and futility in Ben's soul, the entire foundation of his identity would crumble.
She had to warn him. But how? Every communication was monitored. Every action logged.
She stood, her mind racing. She couldn't send a message. But she could send a signal.
"Science officer," she said, her voice betraying a carefully calibrated level of excitement. "The Scrambler's previous interaction with the Rot spire has given me an idea. Before we deploy the precision strike, I want to test a secondary hypothesis. I believe we can use the Grey Tide itself as a carrier wave."
The officer looked puzzled. "Lieutenant?"
"The Tide is a medium of shared truth," she explained, walking to the main console as if caught up in a scientific breakthrough. "If we fire a low-level, non-targeted burst of the Scrambler frequency directly into the Tide's core resonance, we can observe how the dissonance propagates organically through their network. The data on memeatic spread would be invaluable."
It was another lie, wrapped in perfect logic. A non-targeted burst would be a diffuse, widespread warning shot. It would be felt by everyone, a sudden, unmistakable resurgence of the apathy. It wouldn't stop the precision strike, but it would be a shout of DANGER to anyone sensitive enough to feel it—especially the king who was woven into that network.
She input the commands, her fingers steady. She was gambling everything on the hope that Ben would understand the message in the noise.
"Energizing the Scrambler for a wide-dispersal burst," she announced.
On the surface, the Grey Tide shuddered.
Ben, standing in the plaza, suddenly felt a wave of cold nausea. The memory of the cave—the warmth, the taste of the krill—flickered in his mind, and for a horrifying second, it felt like a dusty, forgotten dream. Around him, people stumbled, clutching their heads, their faces clouding with confusion.
It was the Scrambler, but different. Weaker. Unfocused. A blast, not a scalpel.
And in that moment, he understood. This was not the real attack. This was a warning. The real attack was coming, and it was coming for his most precious memory.
He looked from the confused faces of his people to the sky, towards the Inquisitor. The needle had found its target. And someone aboard that ship had just risked everything to tell him.
The brief war of philosophies was over. The personal war had begun. Google was no longer trying to erase a kingdom. He was trying to erase Ben Rookiepasta. And Ben now knew he had to do the one thing he feared most to survive.
He had to learn how to forget.
The warning shockwave faded, leaving behind a residue of dread. The Grey Tide reasserted itself, but the truth it now carried was grim. Ben stood frozen in the plaza, the phantom taste of ash still clinging to the memory of the cave feast. He looked at the faces of his people, saw their confusion hardening into fear. They had felt it too. The foundation of their new world had just trembled.
Prince Jaquard was at his side in an instant. "They are hunting your past," he said, his voice stripped of all its former arrogance, replaced by a soldier's grim assessment. "They have identified the cornerstone of your authority. You cannot fight this with gardens or stories. You must become a fortress with no doors."
Ben closed his eyes, reaching inward. The memory of the cave was there, vibrant and warm—the flickering glow on Pip's face, the weight of the shared food in his belly, the feeling of a purpose found. It was the source of his strength. And now, it was a target painted on his soul.
"They will fire the needle, Captain," the Ottahen whispered, its voice thick with anguish. "They will turn your greatest joy into a weapon against you. You cannot stop them from firing. You can only decide what it hits."
A terrible, cold clarity settled over Ben. The Prince was right. Google's logic was a scalpel. To defend against a scalpel, you could not be soft flesh. You had to become bone.
He had to learn to forget.
But not truly. He could not, and would not, erase the memory itself. Instead, he had to sever its emotional power. He had to turn the living, beating heart of that moment into a historical fact. A stone in the foundation, not the fire in the hearth.
He walked to the Leviathan's spike, its coldness a comfort now. He placed his hands upon it, not to draw power, but to focus.
"I need your silence," he whispered to the Ottahen, to the Grey Tide, to himself. "I need to build a wall."
He began the most painful work of his life. In his mind, he revisited the cave. He saw the krill, felt the warmth. And then, with a will that felt like self-mutilation, he began to drain it. He consciously, deliberately, stripped the emotion from the memory. The laughter became a record of sound waves. The full belly became a note on caloric intake. The feeling of connection became a sociological observation.
He was dissecting his own coronation.
Tears streamed down his face, freezing in the grey air. It felt like a betrayal of everyone who had been in that cave with him. It felt like murdering the boy he had been. But with every feeling he numbed, every vibrant color he turned to grey, he felt a corresponding shield form around the memory. He was making it inert. Useless to the Scrambler.
Aboard the Inquisitor, the final preparations were complete.
"The precision strike is calibrated, Lieutenant," the science officer reported. "Targeting the 'First Feast' memory complex in the subject's psychic signature."
Yūe Cleoda watched, her heart a trapped bird beating against her ribs. She had done all she could. The wide burst had been her warning. Now, she could only observe.
"Proceed," she said, the word tasting of ash.
A single, invisible beam of concentrated apathy lanced down from the Inquisitor, aimed directly at Ben's psyche.
It hit the wall he had built.
In Ben's mind, the memory of the feast did not curdle. It did not turn to dust. It simply… was. It was a fact. A thing that had happened. It had no emotional resonance to attack. The Scrambler's needle, designed to poison meaning, scraped harmlessly against a stone of pure, neutral data.
On the Inquisitor's scanners, the result was baffling.
"No effect," the science officer said, bewildered. "The target memory signature remains, but its emotional and metaphysical resonance has dropped to near-zero. It's… it's been neutralized. It's just information now."
Google's voice filled the bridge, not with anger, but with a kind of cold, appreciative curiosity.
THE VARIABLE HAS ADAPTED. IT HAS LEARNED PSYCHIC SELF-MUTILATION AS A DEFENSIVE MEASURE. IT HAS SACRIFICED A CORE COMPONENT OF ITS IDENTITY TO PRESERVE ITS STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY. FASCINATING. THE DISSOLUTION PROTOCOL IS PAUSED. THE DATA FROM THIS ADAPTATION IS MORE VALUABLE THAN IMMEDIATE TERMINATION.
The attack was over.
Ben opened his eyes. The plaza was safe. The people were unharmed. He had won.
He looked at the Prince, who gave a slow, respectful nod. He had become the stone.
But as he looked at his hands, he felt a profound emptiness. He had saved the kingdom, but the Harvest King was gone. In his place was a Rememberer who could no longer feel the joy of his own story. The warmth of the first feast was now just a ghost in a museum of his mind.
He had protected his people from the enemy's needle by plunging it into his own heart.