**Zulphithos**
**
Dark Age of Apes – Year 520 post-Agreement
Minneapolis, Midwest Recovery Zone
(where the roads still bear tracks of tires that no one uses anymore, and the wind carries echoes of applause that never existed)
Karma didn't remember exactly how he became a cyclist.
Maybe it would never have been anything else.
Maybe the most recent reset would have spit him out in Minneapolis with an old bike with a rusty steel frame, tires as thin as broken promises, and a name that still hurt his tongue: Karma.
He pedaled along deserted avenues, dodging craters that looked like open mouths, carrying with him the same hunger that Ana had carried — hunger to be seen, hunger to exist beyond the echo he left in people.
Three weeks earlier, during an impromptu community event at Mill Ruins Park (what was left of it), a post-apocalyptic talent scout spotted him.
Karma didn't sing.
I didn't dance.
He pedaled.
But he pedaled as if he were dancing with death: impossible leaps over debris, wheels spinning at angles that defied gravity, body tilted until it almost touched the asphalt, sweat mixed with blood from old cuts.
It was performance.
It was stylized survival.
It was a howl in the form of movement.
The scout, a thin man with eyes like someone who has seen many resets, said:
"You enter the final of the Global Talent Revival.
Transmission via underground network.
Millions will see.
You can be the first to make the world stop looking down."
Karma accepted.
Not for fame.
For something simpler:
If the world saw him cycling, maybe it would stop asking where Ana was.
Maybe he'd stop remembering that she'd cut herself in the Temecula basement.
Maybe the silence inside him would lessen.
The final was in Chicago — or what was left of Chicago.
An improvised stadium in the rubble of Soldier Field, floodlights powered by stolen solar generators, an audience of survivors who still believed in shows.
Karma left Minneapolis at dawn.
Not by car.
By bicycle.
Because no car could handle the roads anymore.
Because he trusted his own legs more than any machine.
But 120 kilometers from Chicago, on Highway 94 almost swallowed by mutant weeds, the chain broke.
It wasn't an accident.
It was a clean break, as if someone had cut the link with invisible scissors.
The front wheel locked.
Karma fell.
He tore his knee, broke two fingers, and crushed the handlebars.
The bicycle remained there, lying like a slaughtered animal.
He stared at the broken chain for long minutes.
The cold Minneapolis wind still stuck to my skin.
The final would start in three hours.
He could give up.
Could go back.
I could let the silence win again.
Instead, he stood up.
He took what was left of the bicycle — frame, a single wheel, pieces of chain.
He placed it on his back like an iron cross.
And he started running.
It wasn't a human race.
It was the race of someone who had already been a wolf, a shadow, a killer, a cleaner, a brother, a reflection.
It was the race of someone who carried the weight of a dead sister in their chest and still needed to get to the stage.
He ran 120 kilometers.
No water.
No food.
Non-stop.
When he arrived at the stadium, the body was destroyed:
knees bleeding, lungs burning, eyes sunken like craters.
The final had already started.
The acts took place on the internal screen.
Karma didn't ask for permission.
He simply limped in from the side, pushing past security guards who hesitated when they saw his condition.
He came on stage during the interval between a knife juggler and an old ballad singer.
The presenter stuttered.
— Sir... are you the cyclist?
Karma didn't respond with words.
He dropped his bicycle frame onto center stage.
He picked up the broken wheel.
And he began to spin it in the air, with injured fingers, with his body trembling, with his heart beating like the Hundred Hearts that still beat beneath the earth.
It wasn't dancing.
It was resurrection.
The wheel turned.
The sound of metal against metal echoed like knocks.
He spun along, limping, bleeding, howling softly.
Sweat dripped and formed puddles that reflected the spotlights.
The audience was completely silent.
Then he applauded.
Not out of pity.
Not out of pity.
For recognition.
Transmission via the underground network reached all enclaves.
Millions saw it.
Millions cried.
Millions remembered that it was still possible to get to the stage even when everything breaks down.
Karma won.
Not by perfect technique.
Not because of rehearsed choreography.
He won because he was living proof that a reset doesn't erase everything.
That if you fall, you can get up and keep spinning.
That night, he became a worldwide celebrity.
Interviews on clandestine channels.
Photos of him with a broken wheel on his back became icons.
"the cyclist who came running".
But when the lights went out and the crowd left, Karma sat alone in the makeshift dressing room, looking down at his bruised hands.
He whispered into the void:
— I arrived, Ana.
I shined.
But you weren't there to see it.
And for the first time since her suicide,
the silence within him did not respond.
Because silence, sometimes, also learns to applaud.
**End of Volume 2 – Chapter 2**