CHAPTER 199: CHAPTER 200: ASCEND

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Atlas opened his eyes.

White.

An endless, devouring white.

There was no sky. No ground. No horizon. Just a void so absolute it mocked the idea of distance or time. No warmth. No cold. No air. Not even silence. Just absence, so complete it felt like a scream that never started. His breath didn’t echo—because there was no breath. His body wasn’t floating. It wasn’t sinking. It just...was.

Weightless.

Like a thought unspoken, waiting to become real.

Something inside him was fading. Or reforming. A sensation not of pain, but of dissolution. Of layers peeling away—flesh, memory, meaning. Leaving only the raw core.

His name, even, felt heavy. Foreign. Not because he forgot it. But because it was too small now.

"You’ve crossed over again," came a voice.

Deep. Low. Inevitable.

Like the cracking of glaciers. Like the creak of a rope over a hanging beam.

Atlas turned—or at least willed himself to—and saw the one thing that should never be seen.

Death.

He wore no hood, no cloak, no bones. Just presence. Immense, ageless, patient. A silhouette of silence and shadow, darker than the void surrounding it. His voice, when he spoke, didn’t enter through ears, but through marrow.

"Atlas."

The name hung heavy, like a bell tolling over a mass grave. Every syllable called ghosts. Every vowel felt like it echoed across lifetimes.

Atlas stared.

And for a moment, he felt nothing.

Not fear. Not awe. Just... familiarity’.

Like he had stood here before. Maybe in a dream. Maybe in the memory of a life that had already ended. Or maybe during many times he had lost his life.

Or maybe all of them.

"...I’m dead?"

A flicker passed across Death’s form. He tilted his unseen head.

"For now..... Or not yet. The line is thin when you live like you do. And I can’t touch you. Or to be more accurate... I don’t have the right. But this time is different. You... you are more....hmmmm... More than the avatar of the Guide."

A low pulse throbbed in Atlas’s chest.

His heart.

It wasn’t beating right—it was heating, warming, flickering like embers under ash.

He looked down.

[ALERT: HEART STATE—UNSTABLE]

[GUIDE RECONNECTION INITIATED]

[REQUESTING POSSESSION RIGHTS]

[REQUESTING PERMISSION TO OVERRIDE HOST]

The notifications didn’t appear in front of his eyes—they burned behind them. Like brands pressed into the skull. Not data. Not code. But commandment.

The Guide wanted in. Again.

Not just to control him—but to become him.

To overwrite his breath, his blood, his spine, his name once more.

He gritted his teeth.

"....Shut the hell up."

The white pulsed slightly, as if echoing his resistance. Death’s presence darkened, ever so slightly.

Amused.

"It calls for you often, doesn’t it? Your little parasite. The so called Guide. The so-called liberation."

Atlas looked up, eyes narrowing. "For demons... yes."

"No....." Death’s voice sharpened, slicing cold. "...he’s a chain made of prophecy. And it doesn’t know you yet...."

"...I know."

He clenched his fists.

His fingers were weightless—yet the phantom ache of every sword he’d ever held pulsed through them. Blades forged by memory. Kury’s laughter. Denish’s fury. Claire’s silence.

"Sometimes I feel it...It wants to overwrite what I am."

He stepped forward, and somehow his breath fogged the air—in a place that shouldn’t have air.

A contradiction. Just like him.

"You’ve seen it, haven’t you?" Atlas asked.

"The Guide?" Death nodded. "Yes. I’ve buried its victims. Or your. victim."

That struck like a spear between ribs.

There was a silence then.

Not empty.

But dense.

Like the pause between thunder and rain. Like lungs holding back a scream they weren’t sure would end.

Then Death said it.

"But you... you’re not like them.... His previous incarnations."

Atlas didn’t speak.

Because he already knew.

"You are something else," Death continued. "Something that should not be. A branch that grew against the wind. A glitch that bled."

A flash: the rain on the battlefield at Wyrm’s Spine. Lara’s hand trembling. Claire’s lips on his cheek the night before the fall. The sword he’d buried into his father’s chest.

’....vision.’ He thought.

".....I am more," Atlas whispered, "....More than Atlas."

Death didn’t smile. But the void felt like it exhaled. As if the truth itself had weight.

"And now," Death said, "you teeter on the edge of becoming."

[ALERT: HEART STATE—UNSTABLE]

[GUIDE RECONNECTION INITIATED]

[REQUESTING POSSESSION RIGHTS]

[REQUESTING PERMISSION TO OVERRIDE HOST]

Atlas laughed.

But there was no joy. It sounded like a weapon forged out of breath.

"Even now, it doesn’t understand."

Death turned away, staring into the blank horizon.

"It never will."

"So what now?" Atlas asked. "You won’t take me?"

"No."

Death didn’t move.

"Your first incarnation, Atlas... me, fate, and Dracula... we made a pact."

That name cracked through the void like lightning.

"...You were friends with Dracula and the Guide?"

A beat.

"Color me surprised."

"Once," Death said.

Atlas’s voice dropped to a whisper.

"What happened? You lot fight? Disagree on something?"

He stepped closer. Every step rippled the white into fractures, like stained glass buckling under pressure.

"Or just—"

"You will know soon...," Death cut in, quiet but final.

Atlas’s heart thudded.

Louder.

Hotter.

Blood surged through his limbs—not red, but gold and crimson, like molten sunlight.

[WARNING! YGGDRASIL SEED FAILING TO ADAPT TO THE VIRUS]

[NEED STRONG IMMUNITY. OPTION AVAILABLE...]

[AWAITING HOST DECISION: ACCEPT EVOLUTION?]

Claire’s face flashed in his mind. Not how she last looked, but how she had the night she almost kissed him beneath the broken stars. The way her breath hitched. The way her walls almost fell.

Kury’s voice: "You don’t get to carry this alone......"

Denish, bloodied, laughing in the ruins of the stone tower: "If we die, we die swinging."

The visions clouded him again....

Death turned back to him.

And Atlas stepped forward.

Eyes now glowing—...fiery orange rimmed with emerald..., like molten gold reflecting a shattered world.

"I bled for Eli...," he said. "Even discarded my life. Oh how human I was..."

Death asked, voice barely audible.

"Was? You won’t be in the future?"

Atlas grinned.

Not a smile.

A snarl of defiance. Of choice.

"Yeah..."

His voice cracked with heat and memory.

"I will evolve."

The words felt carved from thunder.

And then it began.

A pulse of light exploded from his chest—not white, but crimson-gold. Like blood made divine. Like sunlight dripping from a god’s wound.

It tore through the void. It shattered the white.

It *ripped the silence like glass struck by lightning.

[HIGH HUMAN PATH UNLOCKED]

[CONGRATULATIONS, HOST]

Death flinched. Not in fear.

But in awe.

The Guide shrieked in Atlas’s skull—frantic, enraged. The code bent. Broke. Recoiled.

Too late.

Too human.

Too much.

Atlas fell.

Back toward the world.

Toward war. Toward fire. Toward every scream he hadn’t answered.

But this time—

He wasn’t returning.

He was ascending.