Chapter 107: Glitch in the Burning Memory

"Do you truly believe a petty trade-off is enough to balance a scale with me, a frog brain?"

Cassius didn’t look up.

The rhythmic scraping of his thumbnail finally stopped.

Click.

He flipped a thick, tarnished metal coin between his knuckles. It was an old court token, its face worn smooth by decades of grease.

Outside the low stone vaulting, a blue fire flambeau crackled in its wall bracket, casting erratic, flickering cerulean shadows across the damp masonry.

Crackle-pop.

The blue light hit the wet surface of the coin as Cassius caught it flat against his palm.

He began to rhythmically tap its edge against a stack of waterlogged, leather-bound ledger sheets he had dragged from the rubble.

Tap.

Tap.

A faint, low-frequency hum resonated through the damp space.

It wasn’t a loud noise. It felt like a nervous twitch vibrating inside the bone of Fukuro’s jaw.

"Every skritch," Cassius murmured. His voice was smooth now. Level. Terrifying.

"Every stray vibration in the air... it leaves a mark."

Fukuro’s manic grin faltered. The lopsided wire-rims on his nose slipped.

Slid-tink.

"The iron down here has an excellent memory," Cassius said, tapping the coin again.

"Especially when the right current passes through it."

Tap.

"I don’t just clear scrap, like you..." Cassius turned the smooth metal token over his thumb.

"I listen to what it collects while people think they’re talking to the dark."

Fukuro’s narrow shoulders went completely stiff.

The blue firelight glinted off his grease-shiny nose.

He tried to force that sharp, breathless bark of a laugh, his thin thigh twitching for a wet smack, but his hand froze.

"Oh... oh, a philosopher!" Fukuro squeaked.

He tried to keep the theatrical bounce in his voice, but the blue shadows made his face look hollow.

"The slaveric vampire plays with dead currency and thinks he’s a court scribe!"

He leaned forward, his knuckles knocking against a loose zinc plate.

Clink.

"You think a little hum in the masonry scares a scavenger?" Fukuro hissed.

"I’ve dodged the laundry-shaft sweeps for forty cycles! I’ve got teeth, Mr. Victus!"

He brandished a dirty, split fingernail toward Cassius’s throat. His eyes vibrated behind the smeared glass of his lenses.

Cassius didn’t even flinch.

He slowly flipped the tarnish-black coin over his thumb one more time. He let out a cold, humoured puff of air through his nose.

"You’re a whole human, aren’t you, Human Fukuro?"

The word drifted out like heavy smoke.

Fukuro’s feral posture broke instantly. His jaw dropped.

Fug.

The ghost-word anchored itself in the space between them.

The eerie blue light from the flambeau flickered, painting Fukuro’s grease-slick face in a pale, bruised hue.

"Don’t play the theatre with me," Cassius continued, leaning his massive weight forward until the iron beam beneath them groaned hard.

Creak-crunch.

"You have the old memories. The real ones till now. Not the filtered contagious grease they feed each and everyone here."

Cassius continued with the same observant factual speaking aura,

"You remember what the sky looked like before Lord Vilucious drew the red line across it."

A thick drop of water fell from a copper conduit overhead, striking the stack of old pages with a wet, heavy thud.

Splat.

"How funny... visibility is just an equation," Cassius continued.

"If a single whisper of your true bloodline drifts up into the steam-valves, or if someone happens to find the right... ledger of your conversations the rulers hounds won’t just execute you."

Cassius stopped flipping the coin. He pinned the scavenger with a cold, magnifying intensity.

"They’ll dismantle you until there isn’t enough grease left of your name to wash a floor."

Fukuro’s teeth gave a single, sharp chatter. He tried to scramble backward, his bare heels digging into the metal trash.

His hands clawed blindly at a loose piece of copper tubing.

Tink.

"I... I have connections!"

Fukuro hissed, his voice dropping into a shaky, frantic whistle.

"Madam Florianthum wouldn’t let them scrape me! I’m the only one who knows the blind spots in the north cave and Madam’s true friend!"

He came closer to Cassius and then said,

"You need me, you big furnace! You don’t know anything---"

"I can reincarnate," Cassius interrupted, his voice dropping into a register so low it felt like a physical vibration in the floor stones.

"This kingdom might break this frame, but my sequence is written into deeper iron than this city. I will come back. I always do."

He reached out and tapped Fukuro’s narrow, hollow chest with the cold tip of the iron spanner.

Tink.

"What about you, little scavenger? When they put the lead-solder down your throat, where does the whole human go? There is no second ledger for your kind. Just the soup."

Inside Fukuro’s skull, the frantic calculations spun completely out of control.

He’s tracking the past informations. He’s sentences are true to be practical. He’s three steps ahead of his own opponent right now then who am I?

The defensive, stubborn fish-pout on Fukuro’s face collapsed.

He looked incredibly small and wrinkled under the blue firelight.

"Okay," Fukuro whispered, his voice flat and drained of all its theatrical bounce.

He stared down at the black transformer fluid oozing around his bare socks. "Okay... I will tell first. Just... keep the coins still, Mr. Victus."

Cassius slowly let the coin drop onto the leather-bound pages.

Thud.

He leaned back against the corroded boiler wall, his massive frame settling into the junk heap with a heavy, deceptive stillness.

"Did you realize how I didn’t say anything to you?" Cassius asked, his voice casual, almost conversational.

"But you assumed."

Fukuro blinked, his eyes looking small and naked behind his crooked lenses.

"That’s your problem," Cassius murmured, a faint, cold smirk touching the edge of his jaw.

"But yet... the things I can do? You can never even guess what the next move would be."

Fukuro flinched, his thin shoulders hunching up instantly as if expecting a blow.

He threw his hands up in a desperate, placating gesture, his knuckles knocking a loose zinc plate.

Clink.

"Please, Mr. Victus! Please, keep the iron quiet!"

Fukuro stammered, his voice frantic, completely cowed by the giant’s psychological chokehold.

"No more guessing! No more moves! I’m cooperating! I’m spilling the ledger, see? Just... calm down, don’t let the plates record anything else!"

Cassius didn’t blink.

He just let his massive chin drop half an inch toward his grease-crusted collar.

"I’m neither angry nor recording," Cassius said, his voice flat as a frozen ditch.

He paused, letting the distant, rhythmic thump-thump of the water pumps fill the silence.

Thump... thump.

"But you," Cassius added, "are a frog brain."

Fukuro’s trembling lips split to speak, but the words never cleared his sand-dry throat.

Cassius didn’t hear him anyway.

His mind was already slipping, dragging him backward through the dark, iron-locked vaults of his own skull.

The blue light of the flambeau didn’t fade; it violently warped, triggering a memory he kept buried beneath a mountain of scrap.

*** Flash ***

Suddenly, the underground tunnel was gone.

Cassius wasn’t remembering a story... he was living it again, the memory so raw it bit into his skin.

Everything was fire.

He opened his eyes not to the dark masonry, but to the suffocating four walls of his own human bedroom from the world before.

The air was a thick, roaring sheet of pure orange fury.

ROAR.

Crackle-pop-snap!

The heat slammed into him like a physical fist.

He started to cough violently, a desperate, hacking rattle that shook his entire chest.

The smoke was a heavy, black grease rolling down from the ceiling, filling his throat with liquid ash.

He felt like he was about to die right there on the edge of the mattress.

Whoosh!

The fire caught his arms.

It caught his legs.

He looked down through the stinging, watery haze, expecting his old human clothes, but his mind recoiled- even in this human memory, his body was trapped in the identical celebrity t-shirt and rough canvas trousers of the vampire kingdom.

The low-tier cattle uniform, burned into his very identity.

He shouted. He screamed until his throat was raw.

He tried to slam his fists into the burning walls, tried to tear the door from its hinges, tried to do everything to alter the memory.

Thud! Thud!

Nothing happened.

The fire just kept eating the room, completely indifferent to his strength.

He was completely trapped in the nightmare.

Then, his hyper-analytical eyes caught a glint through the wall of white-hot heat. On the edge of the charred dresser sat a tiny, silver rectangle.

The lighter.

The exact lighter that had been completely missing ever since Lord Vilucious had unleashed his blinding flash magic:

Maybe the apocalyptic spell that had wiped humanity’s records and left the sky bleeding old.

It shouldn’t have been there. It was a glitch in the history.

Cassius lunged forward, his blistered hand cutting through the roaring flames.

Sizzle.

The moment his fingers touched the cold silver metal, the memory fractured.

The roar of the fire went dead silent.

The orange flames froze in mid-air, jagged and static like frames in a broken animation.

Every line of the room sharpened into a strange, hyper-clear, stylized clarity.

Shhh-clink.

Cassius watched, paralyzed, as his own hand, his wrist, and his massive forearm began to turn completely transparent.

The white bones showed through.