Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Mate I Never Chose: Kabanata 81 - Kabanata 90

"Don't listen to him, Rangga!" Arung screamed, his voice cracking violently as he clawed at the steel pipe for leverage, his knuckles turning stark white. "He's bluffing! The seismic feedback loop will incinerate his control room before the blast wave even clears the threshold!""Shut up, you bleeding parasite!" Thorne shrieked back, his composure completely shattering as his face twisted into an ugly, paranoid snarl. His thumb pressed down another millimeter against the rubberized cap of the detonator, his knuckles trembling so hard the heavy casing rattled against the metal railing. "I built this extraction protocol from the ground up! I calculated every single variable, every fracture point, every ounce of thermal resistance! You don't get to tell me my math is wrong!""Your math didn't account for a living core, Thorne," Rangga said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, resonant hum that seemed to vibrate directly inside the marrow of everyone's bones.Without breaking eye contact

"I gave the mountain its breath back," Rangga answered over the mounting roar of compressed steam and shattering metal.The air pressure inside the chamber dropped instantly, a sudden, violent vacuum that sucked the breath straight out of Thorne’s lungs and threw the corporate director backward against his shattered control terminal. Alarms blared in a frantic, dying rhythm—short, sharp electronic shrieks that were instantly swallowed by the apocalyptic hiss of millions of tons of superheated vapor tearing through the newly unsealed geothermal vents."The rigs! Look at the secondary ridge!" Arung yelled over the deafening cacophony, his good arm pointing frantically toward the massive extraction platforms bolted to the outer cliffside.Through the reinforced glass of the observation port, the colossal multi-million-dollar drilling derricks looked like fragile toothpicks caught in the wrath of a hurricane. A wall of white-hot steam and compressed earth erupted from the base of the peak

"Take my shoulder, Arung. I didn't drag you out of that corporate slaughterhouse just to watch you freeze to death on a pile of frozen gravel," Rangga commanded, his voice dropping into that strange, heavy resonance that felt less like speech and more like tectonic plates shifting beneath the earth.Arung let out a wet, agonizing cough, his good hand clutching blindly at the air before finding the thick, stiff fabric of Rangga’s jacket. "You're... you're breaking apart, Rangga. Look at your left arm. It’s not even skin anymore. It’s just stone.""The mountain took its toll, and I paid the debt," Rangga said, not looking down at his calcified limb as he hauled Arung’s dead weight upward with a surge of brutal, unnatural strength. "Now move your feet. The sun is coming up over the ridge, and I refuse to die looking at this corporate wasteland any longer.""A wasteland?" Arung chuckled weakly, a bitter, breathless sound that ended in a sharp wince of pain as they stumbled forward across

"The ground is giving way beneath us, Rangga! Move your feet!" Arung yelled, his voice tearing raw against the humid, steam-choked gale that blasted up from the fractured geothermal vents below."I am moving," Rangga rasped back, his tone devoid of breath, sounding entirely like heavy boulders grinding together in an underground vault. His calcified grey arm remained locked stiff at his side, acting as an unyielding counterbalance as he dragged Arung across the shifting, unstable mire.The sub-zero frost of the ridge had vanished in a matter of minutes, replaced by a treacherous, ankle-deep soup of black mud and thawing ash. Around them, the industrial scaffolding of Thorne’s extraction site groaned, metal bolts snapping like dry twigs under the sudden thermal shock."Up! To the switchback trail!" Arung pointed frantically with a blood-streaked hand toward a jagged rocky outcrop that overlooked the main valley basin. "If we can reach the upper ridge line, we can see what's left of the

The heavy iron door of the maintenance shack shuddered under the relentless onslaught of the wind outside, but inside, the air was stagnant, heavy with the sharp metallic tang of old grease and forgotten grease-traps. Rangga stood rigid in the suffocating darkness, his massive frame blotting out what little light managed to slip through the rotting timber seams. His left arm—now entirely encased in a thick, matte-grey crust of mineralized calcification—hung heavy at his side, its sheer density causing the wooden floorboards to groan beneath his boots."We can't stay in this rust-bucket," Arung wheezed from the floor, his back pressed against a stack of discarded rubber gaskets. He pulled his torn jacket tighter around his chest, his fingers coming away sticky and dark with his own blood. "The corporate security patrols aren't going to clear this sector until they find our bodies. Or worse, the extraction logs.""They won't find anything if we move before they sweep the lower access ro