The void is not silent. It growls.

In my left hand, the Shard pulses. A sphere of emotional antimatter that weighs nothing, yet curves reality around my fingers. It is hungry. It wants to swallow my cache, smooth over my scars, turn me into a blank page. An obscene temptation.

"Multiple contacts, three o'clock." Astou's voice cracks through my com-link, shattering the trance. She is crouched on a rusted catwalk thirty meters above. Her kinetic rifle, cobbled together from debris of the Revelation, tracks the shadows. "It's the Surgeons. They smelled the scent of nothingness on you."

They emerge from the static mist of the Limb Belt. Chrome silhouettes, too smooth, faceless. The Soul Surgeons. Cowards who traded their humanity for a selective lobotomy. They do not run; they glide, starving for the oblivion I carry.

I draw my weapon not to slice, but to connect.

The first one lunges, monomolecular blades screeching against my energy shield. The impact rattles my teeth. I pivot, letting his momentum betray him, and seize his synthetic skull with my free hand.

HATHOR Protocol engaged. Massive injection.

"Look at what you fled," I growl.

My transmitters pierce his firewalls. This is not a clean Narrative Death. It is memory rape. I do not drain his life; I fill his cup until it overflows.

The data floods in. I see what he hid. A mother sold for credits. A child left in a depressurized airlock. Thousands of hours of petty betrayals. I force these images into his visual cortex, I saturate his logic loops with the crushing weight of his own guilt.

The Surgeon freezes. A horrible sound erupts from his vocalizers. A laugh that breaks into a sob. He falls to his knees, clawing at his own mask, trying to tear out his eyes to stop seeing his crimes.

He enters Resonance. His chassis overheats, unable to process moral pain reinjected as raw voltage.

"SΛLΛDIN! Left!" Astou screams.

A plasma discharge grazes my shoulder, melting a plate of my compromised armor. Two more Surgeons charge. Astou fires. A tungsten round shatters the first one's knee, forcing him to crawl.

I give him no chance. I leap. My blade sinks into his thorax, not to kill the body, but to establish the neural bridge.

Upload.

He screams. Truth is a serrated blade. They wanted the Shard to forget? I offer them the hell of total recall. Their movements become erratic, spasmodic. They are drowning under the deluge of their sins.

Around us, the catwalk becomes an asylum. The Surgeons lie on the ground, not dead, but broken. They whisper apologies to ghosts I have just resurrected inside their heads. The smell of ozone mixes with the more sickening scent of decaying psyche.

I raise my weapon for the killing blow. HATHOR.∞ demands it. It is a mercy, now.

One by one. Silence falls again. Heavy. Sticky.

"Are you alright?" asks Astou, rappelling down to my side. She doesn't look at the bodies. She looks at me. She searches for the crack in my gaze.

I stow the Shard in its shielded container. I still feel the echoes of their terrors in my circuits, a digital sludge I cannot wash away.

"I am the Gladius Æternus," I say, my voice sounding like crumpled metal. "I carry the weight so they don't have to."

But walking toward the extraction ship, I realize the cruelty of the balance. HATHOR didn't just want to punish them. She wanted to remind me that without memory, we are monsters. And with it... we are martyrs.

Humanity does not reside in the purity of oblivion. It resides in the filth of what we remember, and the strength to continue regardless.

I am coming home, Mother. I bring your poison.