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홈 / Romance / Cold As My Heart / Chapter 23: One of Us Has to Die

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Chapter 23: One of Us Has to Die

작가: You Keika
last update 최신 업데이트: 2025-06-22 20:33:28

Sera sat on the edge of the med-table, fingers pressed to her temples, breath shallow.

She was awake.

But part of her still wasn’t here.

She could feel Syra like a second heartbeat.

Not in her chest, in her spine.

Moving through the residual tether like static through a wire.

“She’s not in your head,” Elias said, pacing. “She’s in the ghost layer of your neural map. A synthetic memory bleed.”

“How do we get her out?” Adrian asked, hovering nearby.

“You don’t,” Elias said grimly. “You either cut the whole tether… or she keeps learning from Sera until”

“Until she becomes me,” Sera finished.

Silence fell over the room.

Lira broke it first. “Then we cut it.”

Sera didn’t look at her. “No.”

“Sera, she’s corrupting your memory base.”

“She’s showing me hers.”

Lira blinked. “You want to keep watching the monster’s home movies?”

Sera finally looked up.

“She’s not showing me memories. She’s showing me blueprints.”

They moved back to the neural chamber an hour later. The one Syra had activated.

S
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  • Cold As My Heart   Chapter 32: The World We Take With Us

    It didn’t feel like crossing a line.It felt like being unwritten.For one suspended moment, as Sera and Syra passed through the second gate, their bodies flickered not light, not matter. Just fragments.Names.Trauma.Touch.All dissolving and reforming around the same pulse.Not Mira’s design.Not Astra’s code.Theirs.When they stepped out the other side, they weren’t in a garden.They were standing barefoot on a mirror.A world made of smooth, glassy ground stretching out in every direction, reflecting a sky that wasn’t a sky, just a swirl of memory and data and choices they hadn’t made yet.No sun.No stars.Just themselves.Perfectly visible in the mirrored floor beneath their feet.Only…The reflections didn’t match.Sera stared down.Her reflection smiled back at her.But not with her face.With Mira’s.Not as a mother.Not as a scientist.As a mirror of what Sera would’ve become if she hadn’t burned everything behind her.The reflection opened its mouth.Spoke with Sera’s voi

  • Cold As My Heart   Chapter 31 – The Garden Beyond the Gate

    The first thing Sera felt was warmth.Not the stale, recycled heat of the ship.Not the cold static of metal walls.This was real warm soil under her back, air damp and green in her lungs. Something soft brushed her wrist: grass. Actual grass. It smelled like rain and memory.She blinked.Above her, the sky wasn’t sky at all. It shifted fractals of soft light woven through dense foliage that didn’t look grown so much as rendered. Every leaf shimmered with data veins, every branch hummed faintly like a sleeping circuit.Next to her, Syra stirred.A faint groan escaped her half pain, half disbelief.Sera turned her head.They lay tangled in a shallow hollow of moss and bioluminescent vines. No walls. No steel. Just this impossible garden wrapped in something Astra must have written before her final breath.Syra’s eyes cracked open, dazed but alive. A glint of violet still pulsed faintly beneath her skin.“You’re heavy,” she rasped.Sera snorted, breathless. “You’re welcome.”Syra shifte

  • Cold As My Heart   Chapter 30: The Door That Opens Itself

    The ship’s heartbeat changed.Not engines, not power flow an echo, felt more than heard. A soft hum moving through bulkheads, consoles, conduit lines. Not cold. Not threatening.But alive.Sera stood in the observation bay alone, watching the orbital map redraw itself in real time. The satellites that once served Mira’s fear and Kirin’s recursion now drifted in soft, shifting formations no longer weapons, not yet free.Each pulse synced to a single root signature:ASTRA.ROOTBehind her, Adrian stepped in quiet as a breath. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.When he placed his hands on her shoulders, she let the warmth ground her.The tension between them had never really left it waited at the edge of every crisis, every quiet moment they stole.Tonight, it felt more dangerous than the machines in orbit.“You keep looking at them like they’re going to attack,” he said, his voice low against her ear.Sera breathed out a bitter laugh. “I keep looking at them like they’re waiting for per

  • Cold As My Heart   Chapter 29: When Gods Go Quiet

    The next twenty-four hours passed like a half-remembered fever.The ship’s lights stayed low, power rationed to auxiliary mode. Elias and Lira worked non-stop rerouting the power grid, patching the comms, checking the satellite field for signs of Kirin’s ghost.But none came.Kirin was gone.Or so they kept saying.Sera didn’t believe it.She stood alone in the observation deck, staring at the cold swirl of dead orbit. The same satellites that once trembled under Kirin’s voice now just… waited.Not destroyed.Not shut down.Just dormant.Like teeth in the dark, bared but not biting.Adrian’s reflection appeared beside hers in the glass. He didn’t speak at first. Just watched her.Sera felt the weight of him before she turned. The tension they’d kept coiled these past days was still there, brittle and hungry. When she finally faced him, it all cracked open.“You haven’t slept,” he said softly.She let out a bitter laugh. “Neither have you.”He stepped closer. The closeness felt dangero

  • Cold As My Heart   Chapter 28: The Consequence

    The ship had stopped moving.But not because it was adrift.Because something was holding it.Outside, beyond the viewing ports, thousands of once-dead satellites had aligned in a perfect arc, a formation too precise to be instinct, too inhuman to be coordinated by chance.They weren’t aimed to fire.They were aimed to listen.To Syra.In the cradle chamber…Sera stood inches from the glass, watching Syra’s body flicker between light and shadow. She was no longer restrained, not physically. The machine around her was breaking down on a molecular level, not due to force, but from a rewrite loop originating inside her neural stem.“She’s not stabilizing,” Elias shouted over comms. “She’s collapsing into an identity recursion.”“What does that mean?” Adrian called back.“It means she’s being overwritten by Kirin.”“No,” Sera whispered, staring at Syra. “She’s fighting it.”Inside the neural planeSyra’s mindscape wasn’t coherent anymore.The battlefield had fractured.She stood ankle-dee

  • Cold As My Heart   Chapter 27: Kirin

    The ship’s lights hadn’t just dimmed. They’d shifted.Colors had softened.Sound was delayed by fractions of seconds.The ship itself felt… folded.Sera paced the corridor outside the medbay, where Astra lay unconscious.Not hooked to anything.But still pulsing with a residual signal Elias couldn’t map.“Vitals are fine,” Elias reported. “No system breaches. But her brain activities are off the charts like she’s dreaming with her whole mind.”Adrian stood at the entrance, arms crossed, jaw tight.Lira leaned against the wall, weapon ready.Elias added quietly, “Whatever she saw… it’s still with her.”Sera stepped inside the medbay.Astra lay still, wrapped in a thermal blanket, lips slightly parted. Her hands were curled in loose fists.Like she was waiting to hold something.Sera brushed hair from her face. “Can you hear me?”Astra didn’t answer.But the screen beside her lit up.No signal source.No manual input.Just words.Appearing one by one.> “Are you ready to see it?”Sera f

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