The last rune dissolved into my muscle memory with a quiet, satisfying click.
I opened my eyes on the cold concrete of the watchtower as a faint gold-and-black glow slid back from my knuckles. It had cost me four thousand five hundred points, more than half of what Rift Zone 3 had paid out. But thanks to the Primordial Echo, I hadn't needed years in a martial school to learn it. Weight transfer, kinetic alignment, the path energy took from heel to hip to shoulder to fist: it was all just there, written into my body as if I'd practiced it since childhood.
[MARTIAL TECHNIQUE UNLOCKED]
- Tyrant Shattering Strike (Basic)
"Basic," I muttered, shaking out my right hand. "At least now when I hit something stone-hard, the force goes in."
It wasn't a flashy art. It was the opposite of flashy: a way of taking everything I had and narrowing it down to the thickness of a needle. But I'd felt the difference the moment I tried it on a slab of rusted girder. The old iron had gone through like wet clay.
Dugan would've liked this, I thought. No wasted motion.
The thought was warm, and a little lonely. I let it pass.
Bare knuckles would do for rats and goblins, but the troll had shown me their limits. I wanted reach. A blade, a spear, something with an edge that could open thick hide without making me eat a steel axle first. I opened the shop and tapped [WEAPONS & ARTIFACTS].
"Let's see what a decent sword costs," I murmured, and set the filter to [ENTRY TIER — F-RANK & GRADE 1 WEAPONS].
I'd just paid four and a half thousand for a technique, but that was knowledge, the kind of thing that turned a brawler into a fighter. An F-rank iron sword was a lump of metal. I scanned the first rows expecting a few hundred points at most.
My jaw dropped.
[Grade-1 Iron-Cleaver Broadsword (F-Rank)] — 3,500 Points
[Grade-1 Aether-Steel Spear (F-Rank)] — 4,200 Points
[Pair: Tyrant Brawling Gauntlets (F-Rank)] — 5,000 Points
[Refined Spatial Dagger (F-Rank)] — 6,500 Points
"Three thousand five hundred?" My voice bounced off the bare walls. "For an F-rank iron sword?"
A small footnote expanded at the bottom of the screen.
[SYSTEM NOTE: Cultivation manuals consist of pure informational data transferred directly to the user's soul-anchor, incurring minimal transfer cost.]
[WEAPONS AND PHYSICAL ARTIFACTS ARE MATERIA-BASED OBJECTS FORGED BY IMPERIAL BLACKSMITHS ACROSS THE COSMIC NETWORK. CROSS-REALM DELIVERY INCURS REALM-TRANSFER ANCHORAGE FEES AND SPATIAL FREIGHT TAXES.]
"Galactic shipping fees," I grumbled, thumping the back of my head against the wall. "I'm being robbed by the intergalactic postal service."
I had just over seven thousand points. Dropping five of them on a pair of F-rank gauntlets would gut my budget, and I needed those points for Body elixirs and Mind expansion and, somewhere on a list I never forgot, a few small pills for people I loved.
"Forget it," I muttered, swiping the window shut. "Fists and boots. I'll farm another ten thousand before I buy a stick."
I slung my canvas bag across my shoulder, tightened the laces on Chen's boots until the leather creaked, and went out into the cold.
Midnight in the Outer Garbage Rifts was usually dead quiet. Tonight, the air felt wrong.
I felt it first on the slag ridge above Rift Zone 2, near Drainage Canal 4. The yellow fog wasn't hanging still. Fast, high currents were cutting through it, and in my Soul Sight, small red lights blinked in the clouds at steady, mechanical intervals.
Drones.
They'd tripled. I counted six in two minutes, silver spheres sliding along the fog layer like pale beads on a string. I flattened myself against a stack of rusted shipping containers, the corrugated steel cold and wet against my cheek, and watched one hover fifty feet over the scrap valley, its optical lens throwing a wide red cone across the mud.
They've noticed. Four micro-rifts sealed in five days. Of course they had.
I thought of Vane's tired face, and Pell's steaming cup of chicory. Somewhere up in a clean glass tower, someone had decided the garbage fields were worth guarding after all, and I was the reason. Every one of those drones cost the district money it didn't have. Somebody upstairs was very annoyed with me.
Go back, said the sensible voice. Lie low. Wait it out.
But my balance was seven thousand points, and every pill I wanted to buy for the people in a certain tenement was another hundred and fifty. And I'd spent fifteen years being told where I wasn't allowed to stand.
Not tonight, I thought. One more hunt.
I waited until the red beam swung east, then slipped across the open mud toward a cluster of three Rift Hounds feeding on a spirit-coal pile.
They were lean, rangy things with patchy grey hide and eyes the color of rust. Soul Sight showed them as bright orange sparks, quick and nervy. I came in low on the downwind side, the stink of wet fur and coal smoke thick in my nose, and put a clean, compact Tyrant Shattering Strike straight into the lead hound's ribcage.
BOOM!
It didn't roar. It snapped, like a green branch breaking, and the dense Essence detonated inside the beast's chest. The hound dropped without a sound.
[TARGET ELIMINATED: RIFT HOUND (F-RANK MID-GRADE)]
[QI ABSORBED: 15 UNITS → 150 POINTS BANKED]
Clean. The cleanest kill I'd ever made. For a second, I almost felt good. A hundred and fifty points: one more pill, paid for in a single strike.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Then a sharp, high PING rang out of the dark above my head.
I snapped my eyes up.
A second drone, small and dark, tucked into the low clouds right above the shipping containers, had swept its wide-spectrum lens straight across my position and caught the flare of my core in the instant I struck. Its eye flashed from calm green to a strobing, blinding red.
WAAAAAH! WAAAAAH! WAAAAAH!
The siren split the night open and echoed across the valley like a scream.
[WARNING: HIGH-DENSITY ENERGY FLARE DETECTED IN RIFT ZONE 2]
[TARGET LOCKED. TRANSMITTING COORDINATES TO MUNICIPAL COMMAND...]
"Crap!"
I kicked off the mud, rocketed fifteen feet into the air, and drove my left fist through the drone's glass eye.
CRUNCH.
The sphere burst apart in sparks and torn casing and tumbled into the dirt.
It didn't stop the alarm. The signal had already gone. Half a mile away, the white searchlights on the city wall snapped on in unison, long blades cutting through the fog. The heavy sirens of Checkpoint 9-B began to wail, deep and grinding, rattling the ground under my boots.
"Target spotted near Drainage Canal 4!" an amplified voice thundered from the wall. "Containment Squads One through Four, move in! Lock down the perimeter exit!"
I ran.
I didn't think about it. My body just went, boots pounding the slag, Primordial Core roaring in my chest, Essence flooding my legs so that every stride cleared twelve feet. I tore down a narrow canyon of crushed cars with the searchlights sliding along the wall behind me, and the whole world narrowed to the next foothold.
Overhead, the sky roared.
Three patrol craft crested the scrap ridge in a V formation: squat, ducted-fan gunships with red and blue strobes flashing against the fog. A searchlight washed across the ground, and for one awful second I was lit up in white like an insect pinned to a board.
Left.
I threw myself sideways. A spirit-carbine bolt smashed into the mud where I'd been, spraying hot, wet dirt up my back. Another cut the air by my ear with a sound like tearing silk.
Hyper-Cognition flared, and the world slowed to a crawl. Three red targeting dots crept along the wall in front of me, hunting. I could see the lead craft's gunner shift in his seat, his finger tightening, and I could see the exact curve the bolt would take before it ever left the barrel.
I wasn't going to outrun them. They were faster than me. But I didn't have to.
A length of rusted iron pipe, ten feet long and as thick as my thigh, lay half-buried in the mud ahead. I grabbed it as I passed, wrenched it free with a groan of tearing metal that rang up through my shoulders, and pivoted on one heel.
The lead craft was flying low, its ducted fans a few feet off the ground.
"Sorry," I muttered, and threw.
The pipe went end over end like a thrown spear and punched straight into the gunship's left intake.
CRRRRUNCH!
The fan shrieked. The craft slewed sideways, one wing digging into a mountain of scrap, and flipped over in a spray of sparks and torn metal. It hit the ground in a tumbling, grinding crash that shook the canyon. Black smoke boiled up, stinking of burnt insulation.
I stopped dead.
Did I kill someone?
It was a ridiculous time to ask. I asked it anyway. I flicked Soul Sight toward the wreck and held my breath, and there, small and bright and furiously alive, two auras scrambled out of the cockpit and dragged themselves into the dark. Bruised. Cursing, I imagined. But breathing.
My shoulders came down an inch. It was strange how much that mattered. I'm not here to kill the guards. They were men with orders and thin armor and bad shifts. Men like Vane.
Move.
I sprinted for the deep drainage trenches, where the searchlights couldn't reach.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
Four glowing blue canisters slammed into the mud twenty feet ahead of me. In a blink they unfolded into thick magnetic steel posts that locked into the stone floor, and a high-voltage energy net flared between them, crackling blue-white and sealing the trench completely. The air tasted of ozone.
I skidded to a halt, boots plowing deep furrows in the wet dirt.
"Blockade," I breathed.
It's a trap.
I'd walked straight into it. They hadn't been chasing me. They'd been herding me. Every searchlight, every siren, every gunship had pushed me exactly where they wanted me.
I spun to find another route, and the shadows around me moved.
Dark shapes dropped off the high iron girders, one, then another, then a dozen, landing in crouches with soft, practiced thuds. Twelve figures in grey alloy armor formed a tight ring around me, short-barreled spirit-carbines raised, optical visors locked onto my chest. In the receivers of their weapons, Grade-2 Fire cores glowed orange, humming with a sharp, aggressive heat I could feel on my face. These weren't cracked stones like Vane's. Somebody had paid for these.
Behind them, a tall figure stepped out from the shadow of a collapsed boiler.
He walked slowly, unhurried, and the searchlight caught him full in the face. A lean man with a hard, tired jaw, in spotless grey alloy armor, a broadsword slung across his back, one hand resting easily on the hilt above his shoulder.
His cold, sharp eyes swept over me. My faded linen tunic. My patched trousers. My bare forearms. Chen's heavy boots.
"Stand down, kid," said Captain Raymond Drake. His voice was low, calm, and absolute. "You're surrounded by twelve Realm 1, Level 8 marksmen and an energy net. Raise your hands where we can see them."
I didn't.
I dropped my center of gravity, let my right fist draw back toward my hip, and ran the numbers.
Soul Sight laid it all out. Twelve orange Spirit signatures in a perfect ring, each one burning steady and clear. And in the chest of the man in front of me, something else entirely: a massive, dense, liquid sea of Qi, pressurized and hot, radiating across a ten-foot radius like a stove.
Realm 2.
If I fought, I could probably break through three of the marksmen before the rest cut me down. But Drake was a true Foundation Establishment cultivator, and he had an energy net, a ring of carbines, and two patrol craft idling overhead. Even Hyper-Cognition couldn't make that math come out in my favor.
I can't run, I thought, with a sudden, sick clarity. I can't blink. I can't do anything but fight on the ground.
I had speed, and strength, and a very hard head. But I had no movement art, nothing to carry me over a net or out of a ring. I'd learned my lesson from the troll, and I'd learned the wrong one. I'd bought a fist, not legs. Four and a half thousand points, and I'd spent them on the wrong half of the problem.
"I said raise your hands." Drake took three slow paces closer, his grip tightening on the hilt. "We're not here to execute you, orphan. Director Holloway and the Imperial Envoy want you alive."
The Envoy.
Something cold went through my gut: the memory of a pale face at a stone railing, and a locked door clicking.
Alive.
I almost laughed. In my experience, nobody wanted a kid like me alive. They wanted whatever they thought was inside him.
I'd made up my mind. I'd shifted my weight onto my back foot and started to draw breath when the sky above us turned white.
WHOOSH.
It was a flash of pure white light, so bright that every shadow in the canyon snapped sharp. The engines of the two remaining patrol craft died at once. Their searchlights guttered and went out. And a vast, freezing pressure rolled down over the canyon like a lid, an Aether weight so heavy my ears rang with it and my knees wanted to fold.
All around me, the twelve marksmen grunted. One by one, their knees buckled. Carbines dipped. Even Captain Drake took a hard step backward, his eyes snapping up, his sword hand dragging his blade three inches out of its sheath.
A single figure was descending out of the dark.
He didn't use a harness. He didn't fall. He drifted down through the yellow fog like a silver leaf, one hand trailing at his side, and when his feet touched the top of an energy-net post, the metal didn't so much as flex.
Envoy Vaelen.
He stood tall against the bruised glow of the distant rifts. His robes of shimmering Aether-thread caught the pale light like water. His long silver hair hung loose over one shoulder. His pale blue eyes moved slowly over the twelve kneeling men, over Drake, and finally came to rest on me.
He looked at my face. He looked at my bare, healed forearms.
The bored, arrogant expression left his face the way it had at the stone railing, for that one second. This time, it didn't come back.
"Registration Number 4092," Vaelen said softly. His voice rang through the quiet canyon like a struck bell. "The unawakened orphan who broke my testing terminal."
I stood in the middle of the ring of marksmen, bare knuckles clenched, my core spinning silent in my chest. I looked the Elven Envoy straight in the eyes and didn't blink.
"Envoy," I said flatly.