They stopped calling him Chukwudi on the third day.
Not out of cruelty.
Out of procedure.
Names, the Continuum believed, created bias. Bias created belief. Belief created gods. And gods, as far as they were concerned, were a solved problem.
So they renamed him.
Subject Null–Severance Prime.
The name echoed through the chamber every time the observers spoke, every time a needle of logic pierced the space around him. With each repetition, something inside Chukwudi loosened—like a knot slowly undone.
He tried to remember his mother's face.
It blurred.
They began the deeper tests.
They introduced belief pressure—entire rooms filled with recorded prayers, ancient chants, fragments of worship siphoned from conquered villages. The air vibrated with desperate faith.
A god would have swelled.
Chukwudi bled.
Thin lines of dark red crept from his nose, his ears, the corners of his eyes. The prayers collapsed around him, folding inward, devouring themselves like snakes eating their tails.
The machines screamed warnings.
"Cognitive identity destabilizing!"
"Conceptual collapse detected!"
"Subject rejecting imposed meaning!"
The tall man watched, fascinated.
"He's not resisting," he murmured. "He's unbecoming."
Far away, Obinna screamed awake.
The ground beneath the cursed children split—not violently, but gently, like soil opening for a seed. Symbols burned themselves into the earth, old and forbidden.
The children felt it at once.
Something had shifted.
"He's forgetting us," the shadow-girl whispered.
"No," Obinna said, shaking. "We're forgetting him."
And that terrified the earth more than godslaying ever had.
In Ife-Nkewa, the city faltered.
Power grids powered by god-essence flickered erratically. Harvested alụsị fragments screamed inside their containers, reacting violently to Chukwudi's unraveling presence.
Engineers shouted.
"Stabilize the core!"
"The Severance is bleeding into the city systems!"
"Shut him down!"
The tall man hesitated.
For the first time, he hesitated.
Adaeze felt it like a knife through her coils.
Her roar split the sky.
Serpents erupted across the land—not summoned, not commanded, but remembering. Rivers writhed with scaled bodies. Forests hissed.
Idemili staggered beside her, pale.
"If you breach the city," the river goddess warned, "you may kill him yourself."
Adaeze's voice shook the heavens.
"Then I will hold him together with my teeth if I must."
She struck.
The city walls screamed.
Not metaphorically.
The stone had been built from god-bone, and god-bone remembered pain. As Adaeze's colossal form slammed into the barrier, cracks spread like veins. Serpent-fire poured into the sky, burning logic into ash.
Inside the chamber, alarms howled.
Chukwudi felt the impact like a distant heartbeat.
Something stirred inside him.
A fragment.
A name.
They tried to erase him faster.
Sigils flared. Machines descended, attempting to anchor him to predefined outcomes.
"Finalize extraction!" the tall man shouted.
Chukwudi looked up.
For a moment, his eyes were empty.
Then—something returned.
Not power.
Choice.
"If I disappear," he said softly, voice echoing wrong, "the thing after gods won't wait for you."
The chamber cracked.
Reality bent.
The name Chukwudi burned briefly across the floor—written in blood, soil, and memory.
The Correction roared beneath the city.
Adaeze tore through the outer wall.
And the Continuum realized too late—
They had not captured a weapon.
They had trapped a threshold.