POV: DUAL / SYNC: 100% — UNSTABLE
(LOCATION: THE WHITE VOID / STATUS: FUSED.)
(SYSTEM: PARADOX ENTITY STABILIZED. FORM: [VOID CONSUMER].)
(WARNING: IDENTITY EROSION IN PROGRESS. ESTIMATED TIME TO TOTAL COGNITIVE MERGER: 72 HOURS.)
I woke up, but 'I' was a lie. I was a scream caught between two throats, vibrating in a single chest that felt too small for two souls. I looked down at our shared hands. They weren't flesh; they were a flickering, unstable composite of black lightning and violet shadow. I tried to ball a fist, but my fingers spasmed—the index and middle fingers moving under my command, while the others twitched to Ha-joon's rhythm.
'Seo-jun? Get out of my motor cortex!' Ha-joon's voice hammered against the inside of my skull. It wasn't a sound; it was a raw, jagged injection of his frantic, chaotic ego directly into my frontal lobe.
'I am the Executioner, Bug,' I answered, my internal voice a heavy, iron weight trying to crush his spark. 'I provide the structure. I provide the logic. You are just the noise in the machine. Stay in your lane.'
We tried to pull apart. The moment our minds tried to put distance between our thoughts, our shared soul tore.
"AGH—!"
Our dual voice ripped through the white void—a dissonant harmony of a scream. In our separate bodies, ten meters of distance hurt. Now, inside one skin, independence was a sharp, ripping agony. Our shared heart stuttered, skipping three beats as the "Soul-Stitches" between our consciousnesses pulled taut.
(WARNING: INTERNAL CONFLICT DETECTED. PHYSICAL BACKLASH: CARDIAC IRREGULARITY.)
The fusion was a curse. Every time I felt a possessive urge to protect him, I felt his masochistic thrill at the danger. We were sabotaging our own survival.
The struggle for dominance became physical. I wanted to ground us, to analyze the void; Ha-joon wanted to feel the rush of the fall. I locked our shared legs, turning them into pillars of black mana that refused to move. Ha-joon retaliated by spiking our shared adrenaline, dumping a lethal dose into our bloodstream. My heart hammered against my ribs, racing toward cardiac arrest.
'Unlock the legs, King, or I'll blow our heart out!' Ha-joon's thoughts were a manic fire.
I didn't move. I forced our shared hands to reach up and pin our own chest, a desperate, internal grapple for control. It was a war of forced proximity. I could feel his every craving, his every twitch of desire for the pain. I squeezed our shared throat with our shared hand, a brutal attempt to force his mind into submission. We were drowning in each other, fighting for air that didn't exist.
Suddenly, a massive Order Beacon—a [PURGE ANCHOR]—activated in the distance. It was a homing signal for the [CONCEPTUAL CLEANSING DIVISION]. A rift opened. A single figure in white-and-silver robes stepped out. An [ARCH-ERASER].
"Paradox detected," the entity spoke. "Experiment 100 has exceeded safety parameters. Recalibration: Total Deletion."
'He looks strong,' Ha-joon thought, his excitement making our shared hands tremble.
'He is a Conceptual Threat,' I replied, my tactical HUD turning a deep, warning red.
As the Eraser raised its hand, I tried to open a Void Rift. Nothing happened.
'Ha-joon! Release the mana flow!' I roared.
'No! I want to see what he does!' Ha-joon's thoughts spiked with a suicidal curiosity.
Our body froze. The Eraser's beam hit us center-mass, and the world went white with the pain of non-existence.
_____
[POV: HA-JOON — DOMINANT MIND]
(STATUS: COMBAT ENGAGED / SYNC: 120% — OVERLOADING.)
I was in the driver's seat, but the car was on fire. Seo-jun was a cold, suffocating pressure in the back of my mind. The Arch-Eraser didn't use a whip; he used [NULL-COMMANDS].
"Gravity: Zero," the Eraser spoke.
The void warped. I tried to lunge, but our shared legs wouldn't move. Seo-jun was holding them back.
'Seo-jun! Open a rift!' I screamed internally.
'I'm busy stabilizing our mana!' he roared back. 'If I open a rift while you're spiking our adrenaline, our soul will leak out!'
The Eraser pointed a finger. "Existence: Denied."
A beam of pure non-existence shot toward our chest. I didn't dodge. I triggered (ECHO PAIN). The beam hit us, and for a second, I felt our shared heart stop. The pain was a blinding vacuum that felt like my skin was being unzipped from the inside out. But the reflection worked. The Eraser's arm vanished into pixels as the 'Echo' slammed back into him.
"AGH—!" Our dual voice screamed, blood—half black, half violet—leaking from our shared ears. The feedback loop was killing us. Every time I reflected pain, Seo-jun felt the raw agony too.
'You idiot!' Seo-jun's thoughts were a jagged mess of agony. 'Stop reflecting conceptual damage! You're tearing the bond apart!'
We fought like a broken machine. But every kill made the "Memory Bleed" worse. Mid-swing, I saw Seo-jun's first day at the Order. I felt his shame as they branded his soul. At the same moment, he saw my 50th life—the one where I got burned alive by the people I saved. My shared vision went dark. I couldn't see, but I could feel the heat of a fire that died fifty lives ago. My skin felt like it was melting off the bone again.
The adrenaline of the fight turned into a nightmare. As the last echo fell, our body collapsed. The memory bleed didn't stop—it intensified. I relived Seo-jun's first kill, feeling the weight of the sword in my hand, feeling his crushing guilt as if it were my own. It hit me mid-orgasm, the pleasure and the horror indistinguishable. We were drowning in shared blood and static, our shared skin burning with the friction of two minds trying to occupy the same space.
After the fight, we were disoriented for hours. Seo-jun saw double, every object in the void split into two ghost images. I heard echoes of every word he'd ever spoken to me, a cacophony of 'Bug' and 'Mine' screaming in my ears.
(SYSTEM: CONCEPTUAL INTEL ACQUIRED. TARGET: CORE LATTICE.)
(WARNING: THE ARCHITECT IS WATCHING.)
A new rift opened, and a rogue Executioner drone flew out, flickering with a message from Lira.
"You're merging too fast!" Lira's distorted voice warned. "If you hit 100% Synchrony, you'll lose your individualities forever. Reach the Lattice. Find the [IDENTITY ANCHORS]. Or disappear into each other."
'Find them?' I thought, feeling a sudden, cold dread. 'I don't want to disappear into you, King.'
'The feeling is mutual, Bug,' Seo-jun replied. But I felt his thought linger. He didn't want to lose me—he just wanted to own me.