POV: The Rogue Overlord
The wind felt different tonight.
High up on a rusted tower, the Rogue Overlord stood still. His eyes were closed, face tilted toward the dark, ash-filled sky. He looked like a statue made of shadow. But inside him, something was loud.
The Spiral had awakened.
He didn't feel it like light or heat. He felt it as command, a deep, pulsing signal hidden beneath reality itself. For the first time in hundreds of years, that signal wasn't just coming from him.
Someone else was connected to it.
Kael.
He clenched his jaw.
The boy had finally changed. Somewhere deep below, locked in a cold cage, Kael's body had stopped resisting. Something inside him had started to grow.
This time it wasn't like before, during their fight, when the Spiral only flickered. Now, the signal was strong. Alive. Fully awake.
The Rogue opened his eyes. A soft red glow flickered inside them, in rhythm with something deep in his bones.
"He's heard it," he whispered.
He crouched low, barely making a sound. Below him, behind thick metal walls, Kael sat in chains meant to hold monsters. But the chains were breaking. The Rogue could sense it in Kael's blood, in his shifting genes. The boy wasn't falling apart.
He was changing.
"I warned them," the Rogue said, a small laugh escaping. "You can lock up beasts. But not kings."
His thoughts drifted to his own awakening. The first time the Spiral twisted reality around him. When guards screamed as their weapons broke into strands of DNA. When his blood refused every limit. When he saw the world not as shapes but as code.
Kael was seeing it now.
And he was afraid.
Good.
"Fear silences the noise in the mind," the Rogue said. "He'll need that quiet for what comes next."
He noticed a tiny red spark deep inside the Sector. No one else could see it. But he could. It was starting.
The voice would follow soon.
The same voice that once spoke to him, long ago.
"Awaken, Heir of the Spiral…"
He said the words softly. Once, they were meant for him. But now the Spiral had chosen someone new.
It had chosen Kael.
Not him.
The Rogue didn't know what to feel anger or awe.
"I should kill him," he muttered. "End this before it becomes something greater."
But his hands didn't move.
Instead, he just stood there. Watching.
Kael Riven once nothing but a gene reject had stepped into something ancient. Something more powerful than GenCore, older than the bio-wars, older even than the stars above.
The Spiral had claimed him.
And the Rogue, once the only Overlord felt something he hadn't felt in a long time.
Not just power.
Purpose.
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End of chapter 10