"You know the day destroys the night.
"Night divides the day.
"Tried to run, tried to hide!
"Break on through to the other side!"
- Break on Through (to the Other Side), The Doors
~
The room was too quiet for something alive.
Even the flesh-grown walls refused to speak. Not out of reverence, but disgust. The air didn't reek of rot. It stank of reverence gone sour — something sacred left out too long. Like something sacred had spoiled.
And at the center of it all stood Yapool.
No armor. No theatrics.
Just Yapool—barehanded, kneeling in a half-lit chamber soaked in a silence that didn't belong to darkness, but to absence. His fingers brushed against a cracked neural orb, black veins spidered across its surface — not cracks, but deliberate threads, like fossilized synapses.
"Ood 3 Beta 2," he whispered, "Or should I call you 'Oxford,' as the humans insist?"
No reply.
Of course not.
The Ood's body lay still on the slab—its mind crystal shattered, its communicator orb half-sunken into its throat like it was trying to bury itself. The delicate coils along its skull had stiffened into brittle, spike-like ridges. Even its robe had folded in such a way that it seemed to flinch away from the world.
Yapool didn't touch the corpse again. He just stared.
"You had one job," he murmured, almost too quietly to hear. "You were supposed to hate me. That was the plan. You were supposed to fight me. Call me monstrous. Call me wrong."
He tilted his head.
"But instead... you listened," he whispered before gritting out, "as your disgusting kind always does."
His lip curled. Not with grief. With offense.
"You should've spat at me," he said, rising slowly. "Should've told me to burn. Should've warned the boy. Instead—"
He paced, boots soft on the fleshy floor.
"Instead you watched. Logged. Calculated."
He turned, the dome of the chamber flickering with the heartbeat of the fortress around him.
"You called yourself a scholar. But you couldn't even recognize a weapon — not even when it sang of murder in your ear."
His eyes flicked to the MP3 player now — resting on a pedestal of bone-root and nerve, suspended in the middle of the chamber like an altar.
Still glowing. Still defiant.
He approached it.
"You think I don't know what you are?" Yapool whispered to the player. "You think I haven't felt the pressure beneath your silence? My hatred for your kind runs too deep for blindness."
He leaned in, breath fogging the containment field.
"Every pulse you emit carries memory—not of sound, but of design. You're not a relic. You're a roadmap."
A pause.
"And I won't let you chart a future without me."
His voice dropped into something colder.
"I want that roadmap torn out of my story—vein by vein."
He turned back to the corpse of Oxford, voice sharpening now—not loud, but edged.
YOU ARE READING
Inheritance of Giants
Science FictionIzuku Midoriya learned early that the world was stranger than most people admitted. The skies were too loud. The shadows moved wrong. And sometimes cities vanished off the news, only to reappear in whispers and scars. Kaiju exist - not as legends, b...
