NOVEL NEXT WORLD Chapter 11: CHAPTER 10 ｜ Cobalt Radiance Spreads Through the Crystalline Arm
The First Sakabane's laughter fractured into stardust as Rin's crystalline arm erupted with searing cobalt light. The Church lab pod's hull rippled like living flesh, data cables slithering from fissures to coil around her limb.
"Are these…memory transfusion lines?" Hayate's wrench remained embedded in her father's corpse, Stardust blood corroding the floor into smoking craters.
Rin couldn't answer. Her retinas burned with data artillery—hundreds of clone experiment logs, gene-chain collapse reports, real-time footage of cryo-eel vertebrae implantation. Silver-blue ooze seeped from her arm's cracks, each droplet solidifying into miniature Church insignias with bloodshot mechanical eyes.
"Fight it!" Hayate severed a cable, its severed end spewing infant wails instead of sparks. The cries synchronized with lab-conditioning frequencies in Rin's skull.
Her arm bent backward with a snap.
Bone-crunch sounds preceded pain by half a second—Church data streams rewriting her nociceptors. Five cryo-eel vertebrae erupted from fissures, tips blazing Paradox Corsair Ψ sigils yet thrusting with Church execution stances toward Hayate's throat.
"Gene-parasites!" Hayate rolled beneath the strike, his wrench scraping her arm in a Stardust spark shower. Sparks kissed eel vertebrae, triggering the First Sakabane's archived voice: "…When Ψ and Ω coexist in flesh, the Sea births new laws…"
Blood trickled from Rin's right eye. Dual visions overlapped—her current battle and three-year-old self strapped to an operating slab. Cryo-eel spines pierced both versions' spines simultaneously, surgeons' masks revealing Hayate's profile.
"Is that…future you?" she rasped, her rogue arm slashing at his Stardust Eye.
Wrench and blade collided in a shockwave ring. Hayate glimpsed the truth in the sparks—microscopic Church contracts coating each eel vertebra, all signed Sakabane Rin in flickering glyphs.
"They turned your DNA into living pact-scrolls!" Hayate roared through bloody teeth. He grabbed a vertebrae, letting its tip impale his palm. "Breathe with the Sea's rhythm—three in, seven out!"
Frostsalt air flooded Rin's lungs. The Sea's waves pierced the pod, clashing with Church dataflows. Eel vertebrae convulsed, releasing stolen memories—
(Shadowed hull. The First Sakabane implanting cryo-eel embryos into his arm. A Church dagger strikes his back, only to corrode from eel-gene backlash. His face peels into Ψ-shaped Stardust fissors.)
"The First…was infected too." Rin's arm exploded, crystalline shards revealing writhing eel nerve clusters. Translucent tendrils seized Hayate's wrench, rewriting its Stardust resonance.
Hayate's eye overloaded. Twelve futures split his vision—the clearest showed Rin's eel-transformed arm spearing him on a Church altar.
"Betting on this one!" He jammed the wrench into the nerve cluster. Reverse Stardust transfusion made the vertebrae shriek dying ultrasonics.
The pod's alloy floor melted. Hayate's blood mingled with Rin's ooze, painting a colossal inversion sigil. At its center, the First Sakabane's corpse rose, the wrench in its chest quantum-entangled with Hayate's weapon.
"Now!" Hayate seized Rin's quivering hand, slamming both onto the sigil's core.
Eel vertebrae detonated. Ten thousand luminous elvers erupted from Rin's wounds, devouring Church data streams. Each consumed pact turned an elver into Ψ-shaped Stardust, rebuilding her bones and flesh.
As the last elver vanished, Rin's hand regenerated—now bearing crackled porcelain patterns matching Hayate's eye. The Sea boiled beneath them, waves lifting countless memory bubbles of the First Sakabane, each reflecting Hayate and Rin fighting side-by-side.
"The new law…" Hayate lifted a Church contract fragment—Sakabane Rin rewriting itself into Paradox Warden.
Rin touched her reborn skin, feeling Stardust-eel symbiosis beneath. When she looked up, Hayate's eye had fully crystallized, its depths mirroring her Ψ sigil.
The pod disintegrated into bioluminescent eel-scales, merging with the Sea's surge. The First Sakabane's laughter returned, now blended with Hayate and Rin's voices—a bond beyond bloodline awakening in its echoes.