Chapter 9 Memory Predator

The predators did not roar.They remembered.The moment they moved, Kaelthar felt it—not in his muscles, not in his bones, but behind his eyes. A pressure, like fingers pressing into the softest part of thought. The corridor warped as they advanced, the walls briefly reshaping themselves into places he almost recognized.Almost.He stepped back instinctively. The floor rippled beneath his boots, reacting late, as if time itself hesitated to obey him.“Don’t look at them,” he whispered to himself.Too late.One of the creatures tilted its head, its face an asymmetry of flesh and alloy, eyes shimmering like liquid glass. When it met his gaze, something pulled.Kaelthar staggered.For half a heartbeat, he was no longer in the buried city.He was standing over a corpse.The same one that had started everything.THEY FED ON DOUBTThe memory slammed into him with surgical precision.The ritualized body.The carved symbols.The way the blood had crystallized unnaturally, frozen mid-splash despite the warm air.And worse—The moment he had hesitated.You missed something.The predator lunged.Kaelthar rolled sideways, boots scraping sparks from the metallic floor. The creature’s limb passed through where his head had been—not cutting, not striking, but passing through, dragging fragments of sensation with it.His left ear rang.No—That wasn’t ringing.It was absence.He touched his head reflexively. His hand came away trembling.Something was missing.“Voice,” he hissed, panic threading through his breath. “What did it take?”There was a pause.Too long.It removed a peripheral memory, the voice finally said, carefully neutral. Not essential. Yet.That word twisted something cold in Kaelthar’s gut.Yet.THE FIRST TRUE FIGHTThe corridor widened suddenly, opening into a vast subterranean atrium. Pillars of frozen light rose from the floor to a ceiling that disappeared into darkness. Massive cables—older than cities—hung like petrified veins.The predators spread out.Not tactically.Instinctively.They moved where his attention went, herding him not with force, but with thought.Kaelthar felt Psychomorph stir.Not advancing.Not awakening.Just… reacting.His thoughts split—not cleanly, not comfortably. One part tracked the predators’ positions. Another monitored his own fear. A third—unbidden—began sealing memories away, wrapping them in conceptual distance.It hurt.But the pressure eased.One predator lunged again.This time, Kaelthar moved before it did.Momentus flared.The world slowed—not fully, not cleanly—but enough. The predator’s motion fractured into stuttering frames. Kaelthar pivoted, grabbing a fallen shard of crystallized light from the floor.He didn’t think.He remembered forward.The shard struck where the creature would be, not where it was.The impact didn’t break flesh.It broke connection.The predator convulsed, its form destabilizing, memories bleeding out as static whispers that evaporated before reaching him.It dissolved silently.Kaelthar didn’t feel triumph.He felt smaller.THE COST OF SURVIVALThe remaining predators adapted instantly.They stopped attacking his body.They attacked his hesitation.Every feint carried a memory hook. Every movement tugged at a moment of uncertainty—cases he’d doubted, choices he’d delayed, lives he hadn’t saved fast enough.Kaelthar gritted his teeth.“No,” he growled. “You don’t get those.”He did something dangerous.He stopped defending his memories.Instead, he emptied himself.Psychomorph responded—not as a Step, not as growth, but as raw survival instinct. His sense of self thinned, became flexible, fluid. The predators lunged—and found nothing solid to grasp.Their movements faltered.Confused.For the first time, they made a sound—a low, distorted resonance, like a question without language.Kaelthar struck again.And again.Each blow landed not on flesh, but on assumption—on the idea that he would resist, that he would cling.One by one, the predators unraveled.When the last one collapsed into drifting fragments of unrealized thought, the chamber went still.Too still.AFTER THE FEEDINGKaelthar dropped to one knee, breathing hard.His hands shook.Not from exhaustion.From absence.He tried to recall his childhood street.Nothing came.He tried to remember the face of his first partner.Blurred.Not erased.Just… unreachable.The journal slipped from his coat again, opening on its own. New text bled into the page, written slower than before.You survived because you let go.Do not make a habit of this.Kaelthar swallowed. “You knew this would happen.”The voice answered immediately this time.Yes.No apology.No justification.Just truth.The floor beneath him shifted, the atrium beginning to reconfigure. Pathways opened downward—deeper than before.Toward places the simulation had avoided until now.You are being prepared, the voice continued. Not trained.That distinction landed harder than any blow.Kaelthar stood.Whatever this was—Whatever he was becoming—There was no turning back.He stepped forward, into the descending light.