Chapter 110 Death Switch

“Is that a threat?” I asked.

“Is it?” Mother replied smoothly.

Her tone was infuriatingly calm. It was neither playful nor hostile, but I could feel the tension beneath her words. My Empathy told me it wasn’t a threat, not exactly. It was desperation wrapped in control. A warning disguised as inevitability.

Bunny’s voice came through the comms, curious and wary. “What do you mean by die together? Am I going to die too?”

Mother turned her gaze toward the horizon, her expression hardening. “I saw it a long time ago,” she said. “He can fry someone just by looking at them, bursting their insides with the bioelectricity already within them. It doesn’t matter how far you run, because the moment you joined the Ten, he probably implanted you with a trigger. A psychic marker tied to his nervous system. He only needs a thought to kill anyone among the Ten. If you say no to me, I’ll make sure he’s informed of your… collusion with me.”

She paused, then said coldly, “And then we die together.”

I stared at her for a long time, my jaw tightening. “That doesn’t explain Assessor.”

Mother’s tone softened, not out of pity, but fatigue. “Before I got you involved, I was using Assessor,” she admitted. “I thought he could at least free Missive, given the right conditions. You know as well as I do that psychics are the most dominating class when it comes to technique. I revealed to him everything I knew. Something only possible because I could address him telepathically.”

I frowned. “And what happened?”

“He almost succeeded,” she said. “Almost. He got close to severing the psychic tether Ning placed on Missive. But in his arrogance, he tried to influence us instead, a feeble attempt to take control, or maybe to steal what I knew. Of course, he failed both ways. He couldn’t break the death switch Ning embedded in her mind, and he couldn’t bend ours.”

She looked at me then, and there was something almost like pity in her eyes. “It scared him… what Ning would do to him if knowledge of his trickery came to light. Not to mention, the truth he learned about Ning’s… true nature.”

Mother sighed. “So I helped him escape the Tenfold Keep. I masked his psychic signature, altered his memory patterns just enough to keep him unnoticed. I thought he’d vanish quietly. But I guess he went to the SRC… and for some reason, they helped him remove whatever death switch Ning left in him.”

I clenched my fists. “Leaving me to deal with him.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

I took a deep breath, feeling the dryness of the desert air burn in my throat. If I hadn’t seen the things I’d seen, if I hadn’t felt the echoes of that other timeline, I wouldn’t have believed her. None of it.

The thought of killing Ning wouldn’t have even crossed my mind. But after everything with the betrayals, the mind games, and the death I’d already lived through… I didn’t think I could just back out of this.

Honestly, I didn’t think I would lose. It probably had something to do with the psychology of my powers and the arrogance baked into how they worked. When you could phase through bullets and walk away from explosions, it did something to your head.

Still, I wasn’t stupid enough to think I was invincible. Confidence was a tool; delusion was a death sentence. And this was a fight I knew I had to face eventually, one I couldn’t run from.

I looked at Mother, her eyes hollow yet burning with that same faint psychic glow I’d come to associate with danger.

“Why did he kill you back then?” I asked.

“It was to activate my powers,” she said quietly. “He knew if I died, my past self would become aware of it. Because of Mrs. Mind’s tampering with Missive, she could also receive information from the future, though only fragments, bound by her perception and experience.”

She walked a few steps away, staring toward the dunes, the wind dragging her hair in thin streams. “By the time we return to the Tenfold Keep, Ning will probably be waiting for us… he won’t move the building until we’re back. He’ll want to make sure we’re inside before he has Dr. Sequence teleport the Keep somewhere else, away from the SRC.”

I frowned. “What’s Ning’s endgame? You said something about… world domination?”

Mother exhaled, slow and weary. “There’s not much I know, except he doesn’t have much of a history, except the fabricated ones. As far as I know, he’s not from this world.”

Bunny asked, confused. “An alien?”

“Maybe. There’s nothing much to go on, except what I remember from Mrs. Mind’s memories. But one thing’s certain… the reason Mrs. Mind became what she is now… is because of him.”

My voice dropped, the pieces finally clicking. “The Witch Fall…”

She nodded. “Yes. The Witch Fall… the day the Witch disappeared, and Mrs. Mind was born.”

It was one of those old Cape legends, the kind people whispered about during blackouts or when the news cut to static. A city gone quiet overnight. The Witch vanished after a battle that left no survivors. No one ever confirmed what really happened.

Mother continued, her voice calm but threaded with exhaustion, “Missive is unaware since, in most of her deaths with me, I would play my part in their erasure, to ensure she doesn’t do anything drastic. Trust me, she does a lot of mucking about… What can I expect? She’s a child at heart. Ning thought the missing memories were the work of Mrs. Mind’s powers or a side-effect from when she tried to take over Missive’s body. Still, if we’re gone too long, Ning will start looking for us. If we want to catch them off guard, we have to return as soon as possible. Of course, after making our preparations.”

I crossed my arms, the wind dragging streaks of sand between us. “This precognition time-loop of yours… How many tries do we have? And how many people can you bring along the way you did to me?”

Mother’s expression softened, but her words didn’t. “We… I only get one try. Because Mrs. Mind will definitely be aware of my existence this time. The difference between this loop and the last one is far too great. She’ll know something’s wrong. As for how many I can bring along… only one person.”

Bunny’s engine rumbled uneasily beside me, the glowing stripes across his frame pulsing in sync with his voice. “This’s gotta be the worst situation yet, Nick. Time-looping shenanigans!? Even my time with the SRC, I never saw anything this bizarre.”

I gave a half-laugh that didn’t quite reach my eyes. “Tell me about it.” Then I turned to Mother. “Explain that part about ‘one try’… Are you implying I can have a redo?”

She looked straight into my mask’s lenses, unflinching. “I have an idea,” she said slowly, deliberately. “And I don’t think you’ll like it, because for it to work, you’ll have to trust me.”

Mother told me the plan. It was convoluted and somehow straightforward at the same time… convoluted in the faith it demanded, straightforward in its brutality: I had to trust her, I had to die, and we had to sign our names to the SRC. There was no sugarcoating any of it. The death part was non-negotiable; the registration with the SRC was the leash.

I mounted Bunny with Missive clinging to the back. The bike purred under me, a calm engine in the middle of a storm. I had a direction in mind now.

Bunny’s voice came through, low and steady. “Just so you know, Nick… I always got your back.”

We pulled out, and not long after, the cargo truck fell into the shadow of Bunny’s guidance, its systems locked to our signature. They were following us, obedient as predators on a scent. We made a beeline for the last City-State we’d hit, the one Missive and I had decided to rob that bank in. The road stretched forward.

Silver whispered in my ear, soft as a reminder. “It’s better this way, Nick… you are helping another person…”

“Moreover,” Onyx added, darker, a grin in the tone I heard only inside my skull. “You get to kill a lot of people.”