The Warden's face, usually set in rigid calculation, twitched. His pupils shrank against the azure pulse of the duplicate Core Key. “A parlor trick,” he sneered, though his stance shifted back half a pace. “You cannot bend reality with a confectioner’s imitation. My authority here is absolute.” “Your authority is just a recipe,” Mateusz replied, his grin hard, emptied of his old hesitation. He plunged the duplicate Core Key into the nearest power trunk snaking across the chamber floor, a thick cable hummed with raw current. A shockwave of sheer contradiction snapped outward. [Pact Violation: Core Key Duplication detected. Recursive reality loop initiated.] Suddenly, the vast server-room space of the Core shimmered. The walls seemed to fold in on themselves, only to extend further, mirroring impossible angles. The air carried the reek of ozone and scorched sugar. A guard in black ceramite stumbled, reaching for a partition that was no longer there, then suddenly reappeared three paces to the left. The man yelled, lurching off-balance. Mateusz, his face drawn but his eyes alight with fierce ingenuity, wasted no time. He snatched a handful of the omnipresent data-motes swirling around them, a visible manifestation of the Shard’s raw information. He brought them to his lips, drawing in the cold sting of fractured logic. His vision swam with the familiar prompt. [New Recipe Unlocked: Potion of Quenched Thirst. Ingredients: Corrupted Logic (1 unit), Purified Water (50ml), Paradoxical Intent (1)] Moving with frantic precision, Mateusz began to synthesize. A small, glowing vial coalesced in his hand, filled with a clear liquid that seemed to absorb the light around it. He didn’t drink it. Instead, he hurled it at the nearest cluster of guards. The vial shattered, spraying them with its contents. Instantly, the men clawed at their throats, coughing dry spittle. Their armored bodies shuddered, not from pain, but from an overwhelming, insatiable dryness. They dropped their plasma rifles, desperate for moisture that no amount of gulping air could provide. One of them began to tear at his own uniform, his eyes wide with a thirst that seemed to consume his very being. Neta watched, a strange awe replacing her usual pragmatic focus. “What did you…?” she began, but Mateusz was already moving, gathering more motes of data. [New Recipe Unlocked: Food That Has Already Been Eaten. Ingredients: Shard Residue (1 unit), Pre-digested Nutrient Paste (10g), Temporal Discrepancy (1)] Another item formed in his hand: a grey ration bar. He threw it to another guard, who snapped it out of the air on reflex and sank his teeth into the crust. The guard chewed once, froze, and turned pale. He spat it out, gagging, as if he’d just eaten something that had already passed through a digestive tract, then returned to its original form. The Warden roared, his [Soul Scrivener] skill igniting into yellow script that lashed out like whips to bind Mateusz. But the recursive portals, the twisting reality, made his power falter. The glyphs warped and tied into knots, striking empty air before breaking apart against the shifting angles. “This is an affront to logic!” the Warden screamed, all composure gone. “You disrupt the very fabric of the System!” [System Anomaly Detected: Logic Inversion. Threat Level: Catastrophic.] [Error Correction Protocol Initiated. Corrupted Agent Designated: Valerius.] The Warden stared ahead in blank shock. His skin began to break into geometric static. He reached out, fingers crumbling into yellow motes. He tried to speak, but his voice became a garbled, digital hiss. The lines of his power, his [Soul Scrivener], twisted around him, no longer an extension of his will, but a self-consuming loop. In seconds, the commander collapsed into a cloud of amber residue that the floor conduits drank dry, purging the anomaly. Kamil gasped, clutching Neta’s arm. Silence flooded the chamber after the Warden's abrupt erasure. Mateusz, however, merely swayed, sweat slicking his brow, but his focus remained unwavering. His gaze swept over Kamil, then Neta, a deep, knowing look in his eyes. He reached into himself, not for a tangible ingredient, but for the very essence of their intertwined existence. He drew on Kamil’s lingering despair from Day One, the flat sting of helplessness. He pulled Neta’s ambition, sharp as cold steel. And then, he found his own center. Not the crushing self-doubt, not the fear that had defined him for so long, but something new, something forged in the fires of survival and defiance: a bright, unwavering, defiant hope. He pulled these disparate, paradoxical essences together, a silent, internal alchemy. His hands, trembling slightly, began to glow with a faint, iridescent light. A single, multi-faceted pellet coalesced in his palm, shifting through harsh hues while remaining clear as glass. It held together only by defying itself. The very air around it seemed to hum, vibrating with an indescribable complexity. “The final dish,” Mateusz murmured, his voice hoarse, but laced with a strange, triumphant peace. “A poison pill of self-awareness.” He walked to the epicenter of the Core, where the main conduit throbbed with the raw, undifferentiated power of the Glutton’s connection. With steady fingers, he set the pellet directly onto the thrumming surface. The pellet did not break or soften. Instead, it seemed to *sink* into the conduit, like a stone into water, disturbing the flow without breaking it. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the entire Core shrieked. It wasn’t a sound of pain, but of profound, existential rejection. The recursive portals flickered violently, then snapped back to normal. The oppressive hum of the Shard’s power wavered, then died down to a faint, rhythmic thrum, as if an enormous gullet had choked on an unchewable stone. Mateusz closed his eyes, bracing himself. The severance was not gentle. A tidal wave of sensation crashed over him. Every stolen scene, every lost emotion, every cherished face that had been scoured from his mind, rushed back in a torrent. Kamil’s laugh, his mother’s favorite lullaby, the exact curve of Neta’s defiant smile—they all returned, a painful, overwhelming flood that left him gasping for air, tears streaming down his face. The Glutton was gone. Its cold, hollow suction withdrew into the dark. The connection was severed, not by his will, but by the cosmic horror’s own instinct for self-preservation. It could not consume sapience. It could not digest choice. The room went dead still, save for Mateusz’s ragged breaths and the low drone in the deckplates. Neta and Kamil rushed to his side, their faces etched with concern and a dawning understanding. Then, for the first time since the Intrusion, a System prompt appeared, not in their minds, but shimmering in the air before all three of them, etched in pure, glowing light: […Who are you?]

The Last Supper