Pain stopped making sense a long time ago.
Lucen’s small frame shook hard against the flooded pavement.
Another sickening crack echoed down Willow Street.
Gravity slammed his spine back into the broken road, bending it at a wrong, unnatural angle.
His fingers curled inward.
His nails dug deep, bloody scratches into his own palms.
A scream clawed up his throat, but only thick blood spilled over his lips.
The heavy rain washed the red away instantly, mixing it with the muddy gutter water.
Then, the burning fire in his nerves started to fade into a cold, terrifying numbness.
Static filled his fading sight.
Strange pictures flooded his dying brain.
A broken stone room floating in endless darkness.
Whispers in a dead, unknown language.
Giant metal gears grinding against nothing.
The frantic beating of his ruined heart slowed.
Warmth chased the freezing rain completely out of his blood.
The pain didn’t follow him all the way down into the dark.
It just faded into a heavy, absolute quiet.
Then, a sharp, brilliant light pierced straight through his closed eyelids, refusing to let him sleep.
His eyes fluttered open.
A small, triangle-shaped object floated right in front of his face.
It pulsed with a bright white light, cutting through the gloomy storm.
The floating metal shell gave off the exact same calm feeling now resting in his chest.
Lucen stared at the glowing metal.
A forgotten memory clicked into place.
This was the exact same energy he had felt back in the damp basement, reaching out into the dark, trying to connect with Kai.
The object flashed with blinding light.
Its metal shell snapped open with a sharp click.
A smooth, finger-sized dagger hung inside the glowing core.
Before he could even blink, the dagger shot forward.
It buried itself straight into his heart.
Static swallowed his sight.
Every muscle locked up.
The burning ruins of Sector 135 simply vanished.
⋙ ──── ✦ ──── ⋘ No rain.
No thunder.
Lucen opened his eyes to total silence.
He stood in a place that made zero sense.
Endless, heavy dark stretched in every direction.
Dozens of broken stone rooms floated in the empty space.
Ruined doorways hung in zero gravity.
Chunks of black rock drifted past his shoulder, spinning slowly in the dead air.
He blinked, staring at the floating debris.
Looking down, he checked his hands.
He flexed his fingers.
He punched the empty air, cutting the silence with a speed his real body had never reached.
No weakness.
No burning lungs.
He looked down at his boots.
A strange, impossible urge pulled at his mind.
He shifted his weight.
His right leg actually moved.
He planted his foot forward.
The empty space gave him solid footing.
The invisible ground felt like smooth glass beneath his shoes.
Lucen froze completely.
His breath hitched in his throat.
His eyes went wide with pure, unfiltered shock.
For his entire life, his legs had been dead weight.
Useless.
He had never taken a single step.
He had never felt the ground push back against his soles.
His hands shook as he reached down, gripping his own thighs.
He squeezed hard.
He felt the pressure.
He felt the muscle tense in response.
Desperate to prove it was a lie, he took another step.
Then a harder one.
He stomped his boot against the invisible glass, the sharp sound echoing in the dark.
He stumbled slightly, his brain completely overwhelmed by the alien feeling of gravity and balance, but his legs caught him.
They held him up.
A shaky, breathless laugh escaped his lips.
He took another step, clumsy at first, but growing faster.
He started walking.
Ahead, a pale light flickered in the dark.
Drawn to the glow, Lucen picked a path through the floating junk.
He ducked under a giant, rusted gear and stepped over a broken stone pillar carved with strange faces.
No wind blew.
It wasn’t hot or cold.
He finally stepped into a giant, ruined room.
The ceiling was entirely gone, leaving it open to the endless black above.
A massive, round workbench sat right in the center.
Glowing blue lines marked its stone top like complex building plans.
The letters next to the drawings belonged to a totally alien alphabet.
Sharp, jagged angles formed words he couldn’t even guess at.
Stepping closer, Lucen tracked the blue light with his eyes, tracing the impossible geometry.
He reached out.
His fingertips brushed the cold, ancient stone.
The broken workbench sparked to life.
Strange runes carved into the edge lit up one by one, filling the ruined room with pale light.
Dust lifted from the stone, floating upward like reverse snow.
Static cracked through the total silence.
“…Kha’el…
Vaeris…
Shath…
Aelion…” Lucen grabbed his head as the syllables vibrated right through his bones.
The alien words scraped the inside of his skull, forcing their way in.
He braced for a blinding headache, for the terrifying feeling of an invasion, but it never came.
It wasn’t a hostile attack.
It was the exact same feeling he got every time, when he pushed his Origin energy out into the dark to connect with Kai.
Except this time, the connection wasn’t a thin, desperate string.
It was impossibly heavy.
Pure.
A forgotten song snapping back into rhythm.
Slowly, the static cleared.
An ancient voice echoed through the ruined room.
“Welcome, Spark of the White Light.
The Origin Workshop remains broken.
Commencing repairs…” Before Lucen could pull back, a deep heat bloomed inside his chest.
His Origin Energy woke up on its own.
Power didn’t explode like a bomb.
It unraveled.
Silvery-white threads slipped from his chest.
Each line glowed with soft starlight.
They drifted through the dead air like silk pulled from an invisible spool.
One by one, the glowing lines found broken wooden beams.
They wrapped around collapsed walls, cracked gears, and ruined stone.
The second the light touched a broken gear, the metal hissed.
Rust fell away in sheets.
Jagged edges melted and turned perfectly smooth.
The threads started stitching the room back together.
This wasn’t brute force.
It was perfect, impossible repair work.
Like a master tailor fixing a torn shirt, every glowing string crossed another.
They tied stone to stone and metal to metal with terrifying exactness.
Slowly, the ruined workshop remembered its true shape.
Lucen watched without making a sound.
He wasn’t steering the energy.
The strange power inside him moved on its own.
Far past the floating rocks, where the dark felt thickest, a red flash tore open the empty space.
It wasn’t just lightning.
The red glow bled through the dark, sweeping over the floating rocks before snapping directly onto Lucen.
It didn’t just shine.
It stared.
A deep rumble rolled across the empty zone, shaking the newly fixed floor under his feet.
Instantly, his white threads went stiff.
The glowing silk shook.
The Origin Energy pulled back, vibrating with pure terror.
Lucen slowly lifted his chin.
At the very edge of the dead world, something stared back.
Its shape stayed hidden in the shadows.
It was too big for a human mind to understand.
Two distant, burning red lights locked onto him from the deep dark.
Watching.
Waiting.
Ice crawled down his spine.
The hairs on his arms stood straight up.
A gut instinct screamed to turn and run until his newly functioning legs gave out.
He swallowed hard, broke eye contact, and stared strictly at the mended floor.
Around him, the workspace had fixed itself just enough to run.
Bright lamps clicked on along the mended walls.
Heavy machines woke up with a low hum.
Rings of glowing runes spun smoothly in the air above the desk.
Hovering right over the center of the workbench, a single white bead appeared.
It was tiny.
It wasn’t blindly bright.
But hanging in the pale light, the small ball felt heavier than a dying star.
The air around it warped from the pure weight.
A deep hum vibrated in his chest, pulling his hand forward.
Lucen reached out.
The second his skin touched the smooth surface, the dead world collapsed.
⋙ ──── ✦ ──── ⋘ Smoke.
Blood.
Screams.
The deafening roar of the ruined city slammed back into his ears.
Rain hit his face.
Everything felt totally different now.
The world wasn’t just loud; it felt painfully clear.
A messy wave of sound and feeling crashed into his brain all at once.
Every falling raindrop sounded like a bullet hitting glass.
He smelled the exact chemicals burning in the cars.
He could taste the sour fear sweating off the Hunters fighting three blocks away.
His senses stretched way past human limits.
He felt the metal groans of every single falling building in Sector 135.
He heard the wet tearing of monster flesh across town.
He heard the scared, quiet breaths of children hiding under a steel shelter door down the street.
A mother holding her breath.
A teen praying silently.
A hurt soldier gripping a useless gun.
Across the broken skyline, giant Riftborn stood over seven different underground doors.
The massive beasts opened their jaws wide.
Time slowed to a crawl.
Lucen watched chaotic, red energy gather inside the throat of the nearest monster.
The bright light warped the falling rain.
The heavy air from the charging attack shook the massive steel gate below.
Cracks spread across the thick concrete.
Muffled, desperate cries leaked from the people trapped inside.
Then, the red beam fired.
The heat spiked.
The thick steel gate flashed orange, then white.
The metal melted instantly.
A blast wave ripped through the underground shelter, crushing air and bodies without a second thought.
Hot metal chunks replaced the door.
Silence followed the blast.
A giant cloud of crushed concrete and dust shot into the stormy sky, raining dirt down on the ruined street.
Lucen didn’t need to see through the smoke.
With his new senses, the ugly truth burned directly into his mind.
Thousands of frantic, scared heartbeats beneath that shelter were just gone.
Wiped out in less than a second.
Something deep inside his soul broke.
His hands pressed flat against the cracked road.
His jaw locked tight.
Blood pounded in his ears like a war drum, drowning out the thunder.
His sight, perfectly clear a second ago, rapidly turned a violent red.
Somewhere beyond reality, the dead workshop shook again.
Red thunder rolled across the dark space.
A sharp, splitting pain drove a spike through his temples.
His mind fractured.
A flood of foreign, violent intent forced its way into his head, violently tearing away his self-control.
The fragile walls holding back his anger simply vanished.
A dark, ancient presence woke up in the back of his mind.
It didn’t ask for permission.
It just took control.
The veins under his pale skin started to glow.
Pitch-black lines pumped with a terrifying rhythm, moving under his flesh like living roots.
The black blood pushed up his neck, crawling toward his face.
The boy stood up from the pavement.
The movement was entirely wrong.
It looked too smooth, like a puppet pulled by perfect, invisible strings.
He didn’t push off the ground.
He just drifted upward until he was standing.
Ink-black tears spilled from his eyes, cutting dark tracks through the dirt on his cheeks.
He tilted his head back, and a slow, wide smile stretched across his lips.
That expression didn’t belong to a human.
The eyes staring out at the burning city held nothing but a cold, bottomless void.
Then, a violent burst of static ripped across his bleeding vision.
It wasn’t a neat, glowing screen.
It was raw, jagged energy forcing itself into a language his broken mind could read, burning the letters right into his retinas.
The words glitched and flickered in the dark, heavy and unnatural.
The static snapped into a broken, bleeding line: [conqueror’s lobby detected] Then, the letters violently scrambled.
They tore themselves apart and reformed, locking into a final, fractured warning: [malakor mode activating] ⋙ ──── ✦ ──── ⋘ On the other side of Sector 135, Alexander Voss watched the distant shelter blow up.
The blast wave rippled through the rain, washing over his black suit.
Warning alarms buzzed inside his ears.
He had been fighting like a madman to reach that gate.
But he was too late.
Right in front of him, the Mawqueen let out a wet, clicking hiss.
She was still in his way.
Even after taking his heaviest hits, the giant beast stood her ground, totally blocking the main road.
Black blood sizzled as her thick armor plates knitted themselves back together in front of his eyes.
Voss ground his teeth.
Pure energy flared around his fist, glowing bright blue in the dark.
“Move, you ugly son of a b…” Then… A violently cold shiver crawled down the back of his neck.
His muscles locked.
He didn’t choose to stop.
Every single survival instinct, sharpened by years of brutal war, screamed at him all at once.
Don’t move a single muscle.
The feeling spread faster than a thought.
It was absolute.
Even the heavy sheets of rain seemed to pause in mid-air.
It wasn’t just him.
The giant Mawqueen froze.
An unnatural, terrifying shake ran through her massive shell.
The top predator of the swarm stopped breathing.
She didn’t roar.
She didn’t swing her claws.
She just stood totally still, staring blankly ahead.
Across the ruined city, the feeling dropped like a suffocating blanket.
This wasn’t a sudden panic.
It was pure, heavy dread.
In the muddy streets, Hunters and monsters were locked in a brutal death match.
But the fighting simply stopped.
Elite hunters dropped their weapons.
Spears and rifles clattered loudly against the flooded roads.
Hardened veterans fell to their knees, gasping for air as their chests tightened in a ghost’s grip.
The monsters didn’t use the chance to kill them.
They couldn’t.
The blinding red light charging inside the other beasts’ mouths flickered, then died completely.
In the distance, a Disaster-Class beast slowly lowered its huge body to the wet road.
It pressed its forehead into the dirt, shaking violently, without even knowing why it was bowing.
A sniper on a nearby roof stopped pulling her trigger.
Her hands shook so badly the gun slipped from her grip and fell three stories.
She curled into a ball, crying silently onto the concrete.
Fear was what you felt before a fight.
Fear was hoping you might survive.
This was dread.
It was a terror way older than human instinct.
A raw, inescapable truth speaking directly into every living cell on the planet.
“You are prey.”