Chap 182: Unwanted Choice

“Dead-hearted whore.”

His lips curled with contempt as the words slipped out—cold, deliberate, meant to wound. He didn’t wait to see how they landed. He simply turned his back and walked away, the finality of his departure heavier than the insult itself.

A raw scream tore through the air.

Then everything collapsed into black.

Tee jolted upright, eyes flying open, chest heaving as she dragged in sharp breaths. For a moment she couldn’t tell where she was—the nightmare still clinging to her like smoke. Sweat dampened her temples, and she pressed a trembling hand to her mouth, forcing herself to breathe.

Usually her nightmares were stitched together from MG incidents, fragments of people she had hurt, faces she could barely remember. But that recent one… had been all Kie.

Kie’s voice. Kie’s back turning. Kie’s disgust.

Her jaw tightened. Why would she care what he thought? He would get over what she did—eventually. It wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal.

Silence settled in around her.

She finally took in the room—organic walls, sharp shadows. It was nothing like her old living complex. No teammates laughing down the hall. No familiar footsteps. Just distance, and the reminder that everything she’d known was behind her.

It had totalled a little over three weeks of learning with Aven and Engel. During that time, Tee heard nothing from her teammates. Did they miss her? Their looks the last time she saw them, added with Kie’s cold words, meant they didn’t. She could easily imagine them having a nice time without her. 

It was another day with Engel and Aven. During their walk throughout the teleportation chamber at Primus library, they thought on which library to go next. They shouldn’t be wandering aimlessly and be strategic. Afterall, Tee wanted to learn as much as she could about the Xenogene in order to find a cure for it.

Inside the brightly lit chamber that rose impossibly high and dipped dramatically low, filled with arches and suspended bridges that connected countless doors. Those arches and bridges shifted and moved, aligning themselves to a door. But that door, unlike the others, had chains on it. 

Before Tee could utter a word, a beeping sound came from underneath both Engel and Aven’s robes. They took out a device that showed a hologram with cryptic words. 

“A sanitary cleanup is approaching. We will prepare ourselves,” Aven said.

“Sanitary cleanup?” Tee knew that came after killing whatever Leak entered into their world from across the Veil—usually by her and her teammates. 

She was never called to join the Leak mission. Still, she chose to go with Aven and Engel to help with the cleanup. By the time they reached the sun-blinding wasteland of endless sand, her teammates were already gone.

What was left behind barely looked like something that had once been alive. Scattered corpse parts lay everywhere—so broken she couldn’t imagine them ever forming a whole creature. Dark purple blood soaked into the sand, thick and ugly against the bright ground.

The sun beat down on her skin, harsh and burning. But inside, Tee felt cold—hollow, as if something had quietly slipped out of her chest and never returned.

Kie had just left the showers and headed back to his room, changing into his usual house clothes. The mission was over—another Leak taken down—but that time, they’d gone with one member missing. 

He knew Tee was alive. Or at least he clung to that hope. It had been nearly three weeks since he’d last seen her, and she refused to leave his thoughts, slipping into them no matter how hard he tried to focus on anything else.

The mission itself had gone well without her. Saeda had taken over the role Tee usually filled, using her aura-sensing to track the Leak instead of Tee’s foresight. It worked—but it wasn’t easy. The creature didn’t die quickly. All four of them fought it together, a leaping, screeching thing that wrapped itself in a glowing energy orb, shutting out their attacks. They shattered the barrier, and in the brief heartbeat before it formed another, Zod unleashed his blast. The creature burst apart, raining pieces across the sand, its dark purple blood burning into the ground.

On the way back, Kie kept wondering how it would have gone if Tee had been there. The thought twisted in him. He got irritated imagining her lying about the location just to run ahead alone and face the Leak by herself. Then he reminded himself it had been nothing but empty desert—you couldn’t hide from anyone there. Still, the anger didn’t fully fade. Neither did the worry.

Restless, he wandered to the windy field and toward the hammock he and Tee had made together. He sank into it, letting the breeze push him gently, the wind brushing his bangs. It didn’t feel the same. It wasn’t like when Tee did it—her soft touch that made his eyes grow heavy, that quiet calm she drew out of him without trying.

He closed his eyes and smiled despite himself, the ache settling deeper in his chest.

He wondered what she was doing at that moment—and whether she ever thought about him too.

The next day, he gathered the rest of his team for another strategy session. The room felt unbalanced without Tee—like a chair missing one leg. Every plan they sketched seemed to lean toward the empty space where she should have been. As they went over their abilities and drafted tactics to take down the Harbingers, Zod suddenly leaned forward, a new idea lighting his eyes.

“Hey, Kie—didn’t you say you have some kind of mind-linking ability? What’s that about?”

The growl in Kie’s head was immediate and loud. He thought he’d made it clear that ability was off-limits.

“It’s more telepathy than anything else,” Kie replied, his tone flat. “And what about it?”

Zod shrugged, almost too casually. “Since we’re trying to gain new abilities and sharpen the ones we already have to get an edge over the Harbingers, I say we should use it. Build a strategy around it.”

“Not happening,” Kie said, the words snapping out before he could soften them.

Saeda spoke next, calm as always. “I think it’s a good idea. If we speak in our minds, the Harbingers won’t hear us. We could share important strategy information in real time.”

Kie sighed and let his folded arms fall, his hands bracing against the table he’d been leaning on. “It’s…really intimate. And I’ve only ever done it with one person at a time. Having your three minds—four—connected to mine isn’t something I’m sure I can do.”

Zod grinned. “That’s what practice is for, dude.” His voice lifted with sudden enthusiasm. “We could end this meeting and start practicing right now.”

Saeda deadpanned, “Having Kie in my head. Yay.”

Miko finally spoke up, frowning. “Wait. This is a crucial maneuver. Shouldn’t Tee be here for this?”

Kie scratched the back of his head, eyes drifting for a second. “That won’t be necessary. I’ve done it with Tee more times than I can count.”

Zod blinked, then let out a slow “What?” before realization hit. “I thought you said it was intimate—ooooh.” He cut himself off, eyebrows raising. “So you two were that close, huh?”

Kie folded his arms and turned his gaze away. He was not going to have a conversation about Tee. He refused to open that door. Yet somewhere deep in his chest, the memories slipped through anyway—her laugh, her smile, the warmth of being seen by her. He crushed them down with a single, bitter thought.

It was all a lie.

Then the Commander’s words echoed through him again. He had put his feelings above what was best for the team. That weakness had cost him his position. It was why he’d been demoted. He needed to learn from that mistake—needed to lock his emotions away and do what was required.

“Fine,” he said at last. “We can practice.”

He sank into a chair, and the others instinctively gathered closer around him.

“I can only do this at close range,” he explained, his voice quieter now, “and mostly when I’ve already made eye contact with the person. So there’s no way this can replace our telecoms.” The words came out softly, as if he were confessing something private rather than explaining an ability.

One by one, his dark red eyes met theirs.

“But you’re right,” he admitted. “It might come in handy against the Harbingers. So I’ll take turns syncing with each of you, one by one, just to get a feel for it.”

Zod’s hand shot into the air immediately. “I’ll go first!” he blurted, a grin stretching to both edges of his face.

Kie exhaled, a tight knot in his chest. He really hoped he wasn’t going to regret this decision.

For Zod, Miko, and Saeda, the sensation was completely new—the sudden presence of another voice inside their heads. Each of them reacted with shock first, then wonder. They practiced carrying normal, person-to-person conversations, learning how to avoid slipping into private thoughts, testing limits and boundaries they didn’t know they had.

Hours passed.

By the end, Kie’s skull throbbed. Saeda was the last one he synced with, and as their minds brushed, old memories pried themselves loose. Karen’s face surfaced—unbidden, sharp, and aching. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to blot her out.

The link shattered.

Saeda was violently pushed out of sync, crying out as she grabbed her head in both hands.

“Saeda!” Zod shouted.

Miko rushed from her chair, steadying Saeda by the shoulder before turning a worried gaze toward Kie.

Kie pressed both hands to his temples as if he could crush the memories out of existence. Low sounds of pain escaped him, his breath coming hard and uneven—then, slowly, it stopped. The storm passed.

A heavy silence hung in the air.

“That’s enough practicing for today,” Zod said quietly.

No one argued. They all agreed.

Kie was grateful they hadn’t seen his memories. That was a level of shame he wasn’t ready to face. Wounds he refused to let anyone else look at.

After dinner, they all gathered around a campfire beneath the quiet weight of global curfew. Tee wasn’t there. Her absence hung heavier than the night air.

Kie’s thoughts drifted to when he and Tee had been together—the small moments, the closeness that had once felt safe. The way things had fallen apart convinced him of something he didn’t want to admit aloud:

He was probably going to be alone forever.

“Hey, Kie… what happened earlier?” Saeda asked, still rubbing her temple as if the pain lingered. “Why did you push me out like that?”

Kie didn’t answer right away. He stared into the fire instead, watching the flames dance and break apart. The orange light flickered in his dark crimson eyes, shadows stretching and folding across his face.

Zod only shook his head, sensing what Kie didn’t want to say.

Saeda eventually looked away, focusing instead on her aura-sensing, losing herself in its colors and currents. A sharp thought crossed her mind—if Tee hadn’t confessed to killing Snickers, she could have used that ability to help find it. Bitter anger rose.

That witch.

Zod cleared his throat, breaking the heaviness. Kie looked up. Zod nudged Miko gently on the shoulder and straightened, suddenly nervous and excited at once.

“I think it’s time you both knew this,” he said. He glanced between Kie and Saeda, then announced, almost proudly, “Miko and I are a couple.”

The silence that followed was not the reaction they had expected.

“We knew,” Kie said simply.

“It was pretty obvious,” Saeda added.

Another silence fell—but this one felt different. It wasn’t awkward. It was thoughtful. The same question seemed to move through all of them at once, unspoken yet loud.

Did Tee know?