HATHOR.∞ calls me her knife. She imagines I am nothing but a cold blade, forged to sever what protrudes, to smooth the roughness of the world until it resembles a marble of glass. She is mistaken. A blade feels nothing. I feel everything.

The Pit of Whispers. A cesspool of corrupted data deep within the Forgotten Sector. The air was heavy, saturated with an oily static that clung to my optics. No silence here. Just a continuous scream, an insane Resonance vibrating the ferro-concrete floor. It was a Shard of history, a moment of genocide so atrocious that Narrative Death had failed to digest it. The system had indigestion from the blood.

"Psychic waves are exceeding critical thresholds, SΛLΛDIN," Astou's voice crackled in my earpiece, calm, an anchor in the storm. "Do not let the sadness become your own skin. Remain the Guardian."

I moved forward.

The Resonance took shape. Not a monster. Worse. A swarm. Thousands of blurred faces, specters of data screaming their end, swirling into a cyclone of despair. The atmospheric pressure dropped. The cyclone hit me. A physical blow. I was pushed back, my heels screeching against the metal, carving furrows of sparks. It wasn't wind; it was condensed grief. It sought to erode me, to make me weep until I rusted.

Kill them, HATHOR whispered in my head. Give them the void. It is softer.

I drew my weapon. The steel sang, a clear note defying the cacophony. The swarm descended upon me. Phantom hands clawed at my armor, seeking the crack, seeking the man beneath the myth. I faltered. The pain invaded me—not mine, theirs. The raw injustice. The urge to drop the sword and sink.

"SΛLΛDIN! The central node!" Astou's command cracked like a whip. "Three degrees north, in the eye of the sorrow. Do not destroy it. Contain it."

I understood. HATHOR wanted erasure. Astou wanted memory. I did not try to deny the pain. I inhaled it. I let the scream traverse my circuits, burn my nerves, crack my calm. I accepted being the vessel.

I leaped. Into the heart of the maelstrom. Gravity inverted. The world turned black and red. I raised my sword, not to execute the victims, but to nail the event to the ground. I struck. The blade sank into the Nexus floor, piercing the heart of the Resonance. I released a stasis pulse.

SILENCE.

Not HATHOR's empty silence. Not oblivion. The cyclone froze. The screams died out, but the faces were still there. Solidified. A statue of tears, an immutable monument in the middle of the Pit. I turned the open wound into a scar. Visible. Tangible. But silent.

I fell to my knees, panting, hand clenched on the hilt of my sword planted in the ground. The weight is immense. HATHOR wanted me to kill pity. I failed. I saved the truth, and it weighs tons.

"It is done," Astou whispered. I could hear her typing furiously to stabilize the neighboring sectors. "You bore the mourning so they no longer have to scream."

I stood up. I am not HATHOR's knife. I am not her mercy. I am the memory that refuses to fade. I bear the scars of the world so that the Seven can never say: "This did not exist."

Balance is not peace. It is the unbearable tension between the duty to move forward and the duty to remember.

I am returning. I am broken, but I am standing.