CHAPTER 1243: SICK OF IT.

The spire pulsed once—just once—but the pulse traveled through the ground, through the haze, through the air itself, and Cain felt it crawl along the bones in his arms.

Recognition hit him like a punch to the ribs.

Nebula.

Or at least, one of his echoes.

The scattered remains were picking a direction.

Cain’s pace sharpened. The terrain responded again, smoothing out, forming a direct path, as though the world itself acknowledged his trajectory.

He hated that.

Each step tightened the pressure around him. The air thickened, not with heat or gravity, but something psychological—the same kind of oppressive ambience one felt standing in the presence of an Archfallen. The sense that something immense was not looking at him, but looking through him.

By the time Cain reached the base of the spire, the sky had darkened to a bruised-indigo spiral. The needle tower stood silent, no entrance, no carving, nothing.

Then it cracked open.

Not like stone splitting—like skin parting.

A vertical seam tore down its length, revealing a hollow interior flooded with silver light. Not warm. Not cold. Just... aware.

Cain stepped inside.

The interior hollow was impossibly vast. Bigger than the spire. Bigger than the space it should occupy. The walls curved outwards, lined with drifting fragments—shards of memory, suspended like broken glass in zero gravity. Some glowed faintly; some flickered.

Cain stopped cold when he saw what they were.

Moments.

Battles he’d fought. Lives he’d crossed. Faces that once meant something. Every shard a ripped-off piece of his history.

Nebula hadn’t just fragmented himself.

He had grabbed fragments of Cain on the way down.

Cain clenched his fists. "You thieving bastard."

The fragments drifted away from him like startled birds. The chamber vibrated, then something formed at the center of the space—slowly pulling itself together from the debris of Nebula’s essence.

A silhouette.

Tall. Narrow. Glitching through states like something half-loaded, half-erased.

Nebula’s voice emerged first, distorted, distant, layered.

"Following me... was a mistake."

Cain stepped forward. "You’re not back together yet. Don’t try speeches."

The half-formed echo tilted its head, pieces of its face sliding and reassembling. "This plane... responds to whoever has the stronger imprint. You. Or me."

Cain felt the world shift again. The chamber darkened behind him. The air took on a density more aligned with Nebula’s presence than his.

A territory contest.

Perfect.

Cain braced his stance. "You started this. I’m finishing it."

Nebula’s echo raised an arm—barely stable, flickering—and the chamber responded instantly. The drifting memory shards twisted, turning razor-sharp, forming a cyclone of cutting trajectories. Cain slid back as the first volley sliced through the space he had occupied a second earlier.

The shards tore through the air with the velocity of meteors. Cain flickered across the chamber, body blurring with a burst of his anchoring technique, and the cyclone missed him by a breath. But the world reacted to that movement too—its surface deforming, stretching toward Nebula’s preference.

Cain snarled. "You’re not claiming this place."

He slammed his palm to the ground. His stabilizing aura radiated outward—pure, hard-edged, structured. The cyclone faltered as the chamber’s shape momentarily agreed with Cain instead of Nebula. Gravity locked down. The fragments dropped—only for Nebula’s echo to seize half of them telekinetically and fling them in a concentrated spear.

Cain dodged the first. Deflected the second. The third grazed his arm, slicing open a line of light instead of blood—his body was still resonating with stellar residue from the previous realm.

Nebula’s echo flickered. "You’re decaying. A borrowed shell cannot withstand inter-plane transitions."

Cain wiped the glowing line on his arm with a scowl. "I’ll manage."

"You won’t."

The chamber liquefied behind Cain, walls melting upward into spires of shimmering metal. They arced toward him like a closing jaw.

Cain drove his heel into the ground, triggered a vertical blast of force that sent him rocketing upward—straight toward the unstable core of the echo.

Nebula tried to scatter, but he wasn’t whole. His form came apart too slowly.

Cain’s fist connected with the echo’s head—and the entire chamber convulsed.

Light burned outward. The walls distended. The plane screamed.

Nebula’s form shattered again—not destroyed, but dispersed. Recoiling. Retreating deeper into the plane.

Cain drifted back down as the chamber stabilized, breathing hard, body flickering between physical and energy-states.

He looked into the darkness where Nebula’s fragments fled.

"Run if you want. I’m not leaving until you’re erased."

The world trembled beneath him.

And for the first time since Cain arrived, it trembled in agreement.

The chamber did not return to calm—it simply reset its shape around Cain, like a beast licking its wounds after a failed strike. The ground folded inward, flattening into a perfect obsidian platform suspended in a void that hadn’t been there minutes ago. The spire walls dissolved, breaking apart into drifting panels that hovered like shattered monoliths.

Cain rolled his shoulders. "You’re rebuilding the stage already? Desperate."

The plane answered with a low, resonant pulse that rattled the panels. Nebula wasn’t gone; he was moving—fast—redistributing his fragments deeper into the architecture of the realm. Cain felt the tug of it, the gravitational shift of a presence reasserting dominance.

He stepped forward and the world rippled again, reacting not just to his weight, but to his intent.

Good.

That meant Nebula wasn’t fully in control yet.

Cain lifted his hand and the platform beneath him rearranged—forming a path that curved downward like a descending spiral. A clear direction. A point of pursuit.

He took it.

As Cain moved deeper, the shards floating around him began to spark with echoes—flashes of memory triggered by Nebula’s interference.

A battlefield.

A ruined altar.

The first time Cain ripped a Fallen’s blessing from their hands.

The last words of someone he couldn’t afford to mourn.

Cain grit his teeth. "Stay out of my head."

The world didn’t listen. It wasn’t attacking him, not yet—it was showing him what Nebula was using as leverage.

The spiral path tightened. Panels shifted in sync, closing behind him. The realm funneled him forward like a maze rearranging its walls mid-step.

Ahead, the path opened into a wide basin. Floating core-nodes—crystalline, black and silver—circled the center like a drifting halo. Nebula’s dumped fragments. Cain could feel their pull, the way they bent the space around them, each one radiating a piece of Nebula’s will.

Cain stepped into the basin.

Instant reaction.

The nodes snapped toward him, orbiting tighter, forming a slow cyclone. The basin cracked under their pressure.