“What?”
The word slipped through Levi’s lips like a sharp protest, nothing like he intended.
This was yet another jolt of surprise flowing through his already fraying nerves. He’d been certain the System was the source of his newly rising torment
But Lyra had just shattered that certainty.
“You’re telling me it’s not the System?” he asked, his voice low but strained like a rope on the verge of snapping. “Then what the hell is it?”
Lyra tilted her head, almost like she was listening to something far beyond the silence between them. Her eyes clouded—not with ignorance, but with something uncertainty.
“I know you’re about to ask,” she said softly, her voice almost a whisper wrapped in resignation. “But even I don’t know what it is. I can’t name it... but I can feel it. It’s powerful,
