CHAPTER 89: CHAPTER 88: THE TEAR BETWEEN ALL THINGS, THROUGH WHICH DESIRE REACHES

Chapter 88: The Tear Between All Things, Through Which Desire Reaches

I was sprawled in Sophia’s VIP suite like a gluttonous dragon atop a hoard of burger wrappers, my third oversized half-pounder disappearing into my maw with primal efficiency. Grease on my fingers, sauce on my lips, and zero shame in my heart.

"Fuck me, why are these so good?" I groaned between bites, voice muffled by delicious meat and existential satisfaction.

Across the room, poor Ronnie sat rigid in a high-backed chair, clutching his cleaning supplies like a nervous altar boy beside a pagan orgy. I’d found him loitering near the kitchen when I went back for burger number two, and I’d forcefully conscripted him into burger-buddy duty.

"Ronnie," I said through a mouthful of beef and what I could only assume was divine sauce, "remind me to tell Sophia her bar chef deserves a fucking raise."

"I will, of course, Irvine. Is there anything else you require of me?" Ronnie replied, already eyeing the exit like it owed him money.

I raised a grease-slick brow. "Am I keeping you from something, Ronnie?" I asked, pausing mid-chew. "It’s okay to go if you’ve got things to do. I just wanted some company, not to hijack your whole afternoon."

He jolted like I’d hit him with a guilt grenade. "A—are you sure?"

I waved him off with the noble grace of a man covered in condiments. "Sure. It’s fine. Just needed to not eat alone for five minutes. Go do your thing."

He launched into a barrage of apologies and thank-yous as if I’d just pardoned him from a death sentence. But just before he reached the door, I called out once more.

"Hey, Ronnie! One last favor before you vanish into the shadows?"

He turned immediately. "Anything, Irvine. What do you need?"

I held up my empty glass, now depressingly devoid of pink fizz. "Refill. Meat tornado leaves a guy thirsty."

Ronnie gave a crisp nod, took my glass, and trotted down to the bar like the diligent little worker drone he was.

Downstairs, the bartender spotted him and perked up. "Yo Ronnie, what can I getcha?"

"Refill for Lady Sophia’s guest," Ronnie said with the professional neutrality of a man who did not want to be drawn into any conversation whatsoever.

"Ohhh, the human food hoover?" the bartender chuckled as he poured the pink fizzy stuff. "Sure thing. He’s got a whole vibe going. Kinda cute, kinda terrifying. So tell me—since you’re part of Lady Sophia’s underground crew—you gotta have dirt, right? Who is he? Whole bar’s got a betting pool going."

Ronnie stiffened just enough to make the temperature drop five degrees.

"Max," he said quietly, "as someone who has seen our Lady both smiling and incinerating, let me offer you a bit of friendly advice: cancel the wager. Forget the conversation. And never—and I mean never—bring up Irvine like that again."

Max blinked. "Whoa. I didn’t mean any disrespect, man. Just curious."

"Curiosity gets people melted around here," Ronnie said with a faint, polite smile. "Irvine isn’t just important. He’s more important than Lady Sophia herself. If she hears you’re starting rumors about him..." He didn’t finish the sentence.

He didn’t have to.

Max paled. "Okay, okay! Shit. Just take the drink. My servers keep coming back distracted anyway when they deliver stuff to him."

Ronnie took the sparkling pink beverage—still radiating what I can only describe as hypermasculine bubblegum vibes—and carried it back up to the suite.

I downed the whole thing in one glorious, sugar-laced gulp that danced somewhere between strawberry and apple. Then, I sighed with the gravity of a man who had just defeated lunch in single combat and rubbed my stomach in sheer self-congratulatory bliss.

"That hit the spot," I said to no one.

But no one was there.

That was the moment I noticed it—true silence. For the first time in what felt like years, I was alone.

Kimchi was deep in her self-imposed chrysalis, rebuilding her armor so it wouldn’t feel like wearing a cheese grater. Onyx had ghosted my mindspace without warning—probably out doing something illegal. And Crystal... she was galaxies away. The Hivemind’s luminous song, usually a constant thrum in my mind, was reduced to a whisper—quiet, aching, incomplete.

And even though this—the space, the solitude—was the reason I’d come here in the first place... it hurt.

I missed her. Missed all of them. The voices. The warmth. The impossible love that wrapped around my soul like cosmic silk.

Fuck it. I wanted to see her.

So I cheated.

With a pulse of intent, I activated the psionic imprint Crystal had left in my eye, embedded there during a moment of cosmic intimacy. Reality flickered. My gaze turned. And there—left of the suite’s entrance—my eye snapped to a single point of air.

"There you are, my love," I whispered, heartbeat stuttering.

I couldn’t see her—not truly. But I felt her. That subtle hum across the void, the knowing that she was watching me even now. No image. No sound. Just the certainty of presence.

"I want to see her," I said aloud, knowing full well I wasn’t supposed to get an answer.

But something answered.

My Origin—ever-watchful, ever-simmering—had been vibrating at the edge of combustion for weeks. No new abilities, no sparks. No need. I hadn’t fought. Hadn’t been pushed. Hadn’t needed anything badly enough.

Until now.

And my desire—raw, singular, unfiltered—ignited the threshold.

In that very corner of the room, space began to crack.

A seam in the fabric of the world tore open like a jagged scar across the air, inches from my face. I didn’t think. I knew what to do. I poured my psionic energy into it, feeding the rupture with raw, undiluted will.

The crack yawned open wider—and on the other side: her.

A chitinous pentagonal face. Sable plating where eyes would be. Twin tendrils curling along the sides of her skull like regal hair. Her immense frame shifting slowly, beautifully, terrifyingly.

Crystal.

My breath caught in my throat. My eyes burned. My vision blurred not from power, but from emotion. It had only been weeks, and yet it felt like decades. Seeing her again made everything else melt away.

On her side, Crystal had already felt the weight of my attention. Even if she couldn’t see me directly, she could feel me watching. And, in true Crystal fashion, she had immediately started posing—arching her form in subtly alluring ways, trying to look both powerful and busy, like a war goddess mid-strategic session and also a really hot squid doing ballet.

She hadn’t noticed the crack until her guards twitched, and by then, it was already open.

When she looked through and saw me—truly saw me—a low pulse of psionic recognition rang between us.

She understood quickly. This wasn’t a portal. No sound. No touch. Just a psionic window forged from my longing. A vision-only link that drained energy like a cunt in a mana shop.

Under normal laws of space and sense, nothing could pass through. Not sound, not scent, not even emotion.

But Crystal was not normal.

With slow, purposeful motion, she lifted one of her longest tendrils and pressed it to the tear. It met resistance—raw and ancient—like shoving a god’s hand through a mirror of broken time. The membrane flexed. Fought. Refused.

She pushed harder.

I watched, barely breathing, as the very laws of reality trembled at the insistence of her love.

And then—crack.

A single tentacle pierced through.

It was sluggish. Weak. Dim from exertion. But it had made it.

I stood, walked toward it, and reached out with both hands.

The moment we touched, euphoria detonated in my chest like a psychic orgasm. Not lust. Not romance. Something deeper. Something elemental.

The tentacle coiled gently around my arm, slid upward, and brushed against my face with unbearable tenderness.

And even though no sound could pass between us, I felt her tremble with joy. Her twitching frame told me everything I needed to know. She felt it too.

But the tear was collapsing. My energy was burning out. I could feel the last threads fraying as the link sputtered and crackled.

I tried to nudge her tentacle back through. She refused. That stubborn, majestic cunt of a queen refused.

So I held her. Just for a moment longer. I let my hands wrap around the tendril, cradling it gently.

And then—

The tear closed.

Clean.

The tentacle was severed, limp and still curled around me like a gift too precious to comprehend.

I sat back on the couch, the thick chitinous noodle draped around my shoulders like the world’s weirdest emotional support boa constrictor. I made no attempt to move. I would let Sophia find me like this.

Because walking around with a severed hivemind tentacle would probably raise questions. And possibly trigger a security lockdown.

Somewhere across the void, Crystal was already summoning her elite biomancers, a flood of warriors and drones bringing the finest regenerative biomass in her empire. She barely noticed. She didn’t care about the injury.

What I’d given her—the connection, the love, the proof that I was growing stronger—was worth every severed nerve.

If that was the price?

She’d pay it a thousand times.

As her hive began repairing the tentacle, she basked in something far rarer than power.

Peace.

Her tentacle regrew in seconds. She flexed it with glee, her entire massive body writhing in an undignified, delighted spasm of joy.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been injured in her primary form. Maybe not since she was a larva, barely centimeters long, gnawing and writhing for dominance over the fungal pit that would become her first planetary cradle.

A smile—wide, alien, and disturbingly toothy—split her face as she sank into ancient memories.

And for a moment, the galaxy seemed very, very small.