The Loneliness Ends

The resonator’s hum pitched into a death scream, a high-frequency wail that vibrated through the very stone of the floor. As the machine began to consume Volta’s power in a ravenous, uncontrolled vortex, the Fulgurite Cathedral groaned around them. Veins of splintering crystal shot across the vitrified walls, and the resonator’s metal chassis began to sag and weep molten slag. It was not an explosion but a gravitational collapse, pulling the world inward toward its shrieking heart. Wounded, betrayed, and incandescent with rage, Volta turned the last of his divine fury not upon the machine, but upon Nicolas.

“You!” Volta roared, his voice cracking. “You think you can unmake a god?”

The battle was not of flesh, but of will. At his silent command, the electric ghosts that haunted the cathedral converged, a shrieking torrent of phantom limbs and crackling jaws that swarmed Nicolas. But in his mind, the chaotic assault was a perfectly choreographed ballet. His precognition laid out the future a fraction of a second at a time, painting the air with the ghostly trajectories of every spectral attack, the precise destination of every arc of lightning.

He moved. One ghost lunged, its electric touch meant to paralyze, but Nicolas was already gone, sidestepping as if he’d known its path for an eternity. A bolt of raw power erupted from Volta’s fingertips, aimed at his chest, but Nicolas was already dropping into a roll, the energy vaporizing the air where he’d just been. During the fight, he had come to understand the cruel device on his neck. It was a circuit designed for pain, but a circuit nonetheless. He focused, turning his own body into a lightning rod, willfully drawing the stray energy currents into the implant. Each absorption was a fresh wave of agony, a fire that threatened to consume his nerves, but he gritted his teeth and endured, feeling the stolen power accumulate within him, a dangerous and volatile reservoir.

“I am more than you, boy!” Volta screamed, pure electricity now weeping from his eyes like tears of light. “I am the evolution of this world! Its future!”

“You’re just a lonely man in a cage you built yourself!” Nicolas yelled back, narrowly weaving between two converging specters.

The conflict reached its apex. Nicolas, now a vessel for Volta’s own stolen power, saw his opening—a single, fleeting moment of vulnerability as Volta drew on the last of his strength. Nicolas surged forward, not attacking, but maneuvering, forcing Volta back step by step until the madman’s back was pressed against the groaning, buckling housing of the self-destructing resonator. He could feel the lethal heat radiating from the machine. He could kill him. But first, he had to know.

“Why, Volta?” Nicolas asked, his voice cutting through the mechanical din. “Was all of this… the power, the madness… was it just for the loneliness?”

The question struck home, a single point of clarity in a storm of psychosis. For a fraction of a second, the divine fury in Volta’s eyes wavered. In its place, Nicolas saw a ghost—not of electricity, but of a man. A brilliant scientist laughed at in a boardroom. A forgotten mind stewing in a silent apartment. A soul who had fled into a digital world only to find a new, more profound isolation. Volta hesitated, his entire being caught in that single, paralyzing moment of truth. For Nicolas, that moment was an eternity of opportunity.

He did not waste it. He slammed his palm flat against Volta’s chest. This was not a strike of anger, but an act of grim finality. An execution. With a single, focused thought, he discharged the entire reservoir of energy he had collected, forcing Volta’s own lightning back into him in a concentrated, overwhelming surge aimed directly at his heart. It was a personal, brutal, and absolute end.

Volta’s body went rigid, a statue carved from shock. The storm in his eyes was instantly extinguished, leaving only a vacant darkness. As he crumpled to the floor, a final, broken whisper escaped his lips. “Finally… the loneliness ends…”

As Volta’s lifeless body collapsed at his feet, Nicolas fell to his knees, his own strength failing him. This wasn’t an NPC. This was a player, a real person who had once harbored dreams and fears, a life now snuffed out. The moral weight of it, the cold, heavy stone of having killed another Zinox, settled deep in his soul. His mind was instantly flooded with the dying echoes of Volta’s consciousness—not just thoughts, but a torrent of raw sensation: the sharp sting of professional rejection, the dull ache of unending solitude, the desperate, screaming spiral of a mind embracing insanity as its only shield. The phantom memories churned in his gut, and he doubled over, retching as his body trembled uncontrollably. A journalist’s job is to report the story, he thought through a haze of nausea. Did I just become the ending to his? He had crossed a line from which there was no return.

Pazzo was suddenly at his side, his face a mask of grim pragmatism. With a single, expert twist of his fingers, he located the implant at the nape of Nicolas’s neck, broke its crystalline structure, and ripped it free. The sudden absence of its low-level hum was a relief so profound it was dizzying.

“Get up, boy,” Pazzo said, his voice flat. “The show is over.”

As if on cue, the resonator, its hunger finally sated, gave a final, deafening boom. It did not explode outward; it imploded. The energy it had consumed tore a wound in the very fabric of their reality. For one stunning, impossible instant, through the collapsing walls of the cathedral, they saw what lay beyond their world: a sterile, featureless, white infinity composed of raw, flowing code. It was a dimensional “white wound,” a temporary glimpse into the system’s source code, a bridge to nothingness that was already sealing itself shut.

Pazzo grabbed Nicolas by the arm, hauling him to his feet. “Move!”

With Harmon close behind them, they fled the collapsing labyrinth of fulgurite, the very ground dissolving into a cascade of molten glass and fractured stone behind them.

Hours later, in the relative safety of a hidden cave, they sat in a tense silence around the flickering warmth of a fire. The adrenaline had faded, leaving Nicolas with a hollow, bone-deep exhaustion. Pazzo had been watching him for some time, the old dynamic of captor and captive having been shattered and replaced by a hesitant, unnerving equality. Finally, Pazzo reached over and placed a hand on Nicolas’s shoulder.

“We’re more alike than you think, boy,” he said, his voice devoid of its usual mockery, containing only the cold weight of a shared, terrible truth. “Because we both have passion. And ambition.”