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Chapter 68: No Way Out

Penulis: Lady V
last update Terakhir Diperbarui: 2025-02-26 03:52:21

Lena Thompson had made the deal.

She had signed the contract.

She had crossed the line.

But now?

Now they were asking her to do the one thing she couldn’t.

Jessica Ramirez’s face stared back at her from the file in front of her. A standard dossier—black-and-white photo, known aliases, last known locations, skills assessment.

It was cold. Clinical.

Like she was just another name on a list.

But she wasn’t.

She was Jessica.

And that meant Lena had exactly twenty-four hours to decide if she was going to become a killer… or if she was going to burn this entire thing to the ground.

Cain had given her the illusion of control, the promise of power, the idea that she was making a choice.

But this?

This wasn’t a choice.

This was a test.

And she wasn’t going to play their game.

Not like this.

Not with Jessica’s life on the line.

Michael's Hunt

Michael Carter wasn’t a strategist.

He wasn’t a hacker, a spy, or a master manipulator.

He was a soldier.

And when the enemy took something from him, he d
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  • Broken Illusions   Epilogue: The Place Without Record

    There are no official histories of what happened after the final circle.No files.No archives.No indexed nodes echoing their coordinates.Their names faded from systems first—wiped not by violence, but by consent. One by one, they had walked away from the scaffolding of recognition, choosing anonymity not as a vanishing act, but as a final offering. What they had carried for the world was never meant to last in databases or testimonies. It lived now in posture, in silence, in how others chose to remember what they had once tried to forget.Some say Lena was the last to be seen—standing barefoot on the shore of the Ash River with her coat folded neatly beside her, the mirror-stone in her palm as she stared toward the fog-swathed horizon. She didn’t speak. Didn’t wave. Just breathed once, deeply, and stepped beyond the last of the mapped ridges. After that, no one looked for her.They didn’t need to.Because her work had not vanished.It had simply changed form.In the decades that fo

  • Broken Illusions   Chapter 120: The Final Circle

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  • Broken Illusions   Chapter 119: The Archive That Forgets

    By the time they left the valley of stones, the sun was high and the road ahead no longer hid itself. The path unfolded as if it had always known they would return this way—threaded between low hills and broken fences, past streams that hummed with forgotten hymns. They walked without speaking for the first hour, not out of tension, but because silence had become their most sacred language. Every few steps, Lena would touch the inside of her coat pocket, fingers brushing the mirror-stone like a heartbeat. It pulsed with no light, no sound, but she swore it remembered her skin.It was Jessica who broke the silence first, her voice low and contemplative as she navigated the path ahead, boots crunching against frost-slick leaves. “Do you think it ever stops?” she asked, not directing the question at anyone in particular. “The remembering? The echoes? I used to think there’d be a moment—some clean conclusion. Now I think it’s just recursion. Grief turning into form. Form becoming story.”

  • Broken Illusions   Chapter 118: The Room with No Walls

    There was no impact. No threshold. No moment of crossing. One blink—and Lena was elsewhere. Not in darkness. Not in light. In memory. But it wasn’t her memory. The world around her shimmered with stillness. Not silence—this place hummed softly, like the inside of a cathedral long after the choir had gone, the echoes still folding into corners. She was standing. Barefoot. The air was warm, scented with lavender and dust, like a room closed too long and just now reopened. There were no walls. Only the idea of a room. No floor, but she didn’t fall. No sky, but she wasn’t beneath anything. It was space rendered by knowing—not built, but remembered.A voice spoke. Not loud. Not even external. It was her own. “You archived what they asked. You forgot what you chose.” Lena turned. The space shifted gently, like breath in a sleeping body. Before her stood a child. No older than seven. Dark hair. Bare feet. Eyes too large for her face, wide with recognition. Lena knelt slowly. “What’s your nam

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    The wind was different here.Not colder. Not sharper. Just older—like it had been waiting in place long before they arrived. Lena felt it through her coat, a pressure not against the skin, but beneath it. She didn’t speak. None of them did. They stood at the mouth of a valley without name, having walked six hours past where the lattice maps claimed the earth ended.Eleni adjusted her scarf but didn’t break the silence. Torin checked his footing, then looked back up at the trail behind them—steep, scattered with moss-worn stone. Jessica was already scanning the area, though not for danger. Her fingers moved along a thread-bound field journal. No tech. No interface. Just notation. It was what the villagers had asked: no devices inside the hollow.Lena stepped forward first.Below, the valley curved inward like a bowl, its basin filled not with water, but stone. Thousands of them. Each one upright. No order. No names. Just presence.She took another step. Then another.At her third step,

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