Page 187 of Light Leech

She looked around the room. Everyone’s faces were full of confusion, save Kim’s close associates and Don who continued to ridicule the gestures of the man whom he had called “Dear Leader.”

“Now,” Kim demanded. No exclamation, no threat, just a word that even I wanted to obey.

She stepped forward and he placed his hand on one of the plates on the back of her neck. The light lines in his hands glowed, then pulsed in sync with those on Ralia.

His face disappeared from the prism, a violet cloud replacing him even though he continued to speak. “With my fragment of Dokkaebi and the fragments holding the Correction, we will now join them to the being itself. The neuronet’s knowledge and cohesion are as an outdated database prone to corruption compared to the cognitive network that we will have with… well, why don’t we hear it from the being himself?”

Ralia gasped, choked on her breath, then let out a long, steady moan.

Kim pulled his hand back. Multiple violet light lines connected the base of her skull to his hand. He stretched the lines, each of them pulling as if an electrical current was running down them and connected them to a metallic hub on the floating circle.

The violet cloud in the prison room formed into a dense shape as Ralia’s light fed it. What looked like an egg turned into a being in a fetal position, stretching its limbs as it awoke a deep hibernation.

“You are free!” Kim said. “No longer bound to the Journeymen and this shell of a human.”

“I am still connected to her,” the thing said. “Remove her hypothalamic implant and integrate the data into the system.”

I knew its face too well. His face. He shouldn’t have been here in such stark reality. I felt like my reality was collapsing under another cruel twist of Gong’s narrative. He was the same being that had fought for us in Luminate League.

Sha.

“No!” Ralia demanded. She reached back to rip Kim’s light lines from the base of her skull. He whipped her back onto the floor, using them like a leash. She continued to fight, but as Kim tightened his grip, her movements lost their strength.

“That is my Gui, not your Dokkaebi,“ Ralia said like a child who knew she was wrong but could not admit her fault. “Sha! Stop this!”

Sha laughed.

“One of the Journeymen?” the bald woman asked. She looked at Kim. “Sha is one of the Journeymen, is he not?”

“Indeed,” Kim said. “Care to explain yourself to your withered vessel, Dokkaebi?”

Sha glared at Ralia as he shed excess weight, becoming more of a well-toned goblin than a gargantuan ogre.

“You were always quite the perceptive one.” Just as his body had gone from behemoth to imp, so did his voice. “Though I knew I would win you over eventually.”

What. Is. This? I asked Zhu.

“A betrayal most vile,” he said.

“Zeg you!” Ralia shouted.

Kim laughed. “Like a child caught in frustration over a lack of understanding, she yells instead of pleads for clarity.”

“Such vermin,” Sha–Dokkaebi said, “deserve to suffer in ignorance.”

Kim let out a nervous laugh that he tried to fix by clearing his throat. “While I would like to agree, the rest of our council needs an explanation if they are to serve you as best as possible.”

Dokkaebi rotated in his prism, facing everyone with a perceiving glare, then landing on me with a sharper focus. “Revenge is best marinated over millennia, Zhu.”

“You killed our brother!” He spoke through me, amplifying my voice with his deep growl.

Dokkaebi laughed. “Did I really? I was the brother you loved since you believed I disappeared.”

“Please explain what is happening!“ Don groaned, not acting the least bit as intimidated as the others by the supernatural exchange happening before them.

Dokkaebi looked at Kim with a raised eyebrow.

The man nodded.