The starbeast’s first strike missed the players.
Its shoulder hit the gas bridge above the outer gate.
Thirty yards of copper pipe tore loose with a sound that reached Mia through her teeth.
Warning fields flared around every player below it.
Red arrows showed them where the bridge would land, and their dodge assistance had already begun shifting their weight before the first support cable snapped.
The residents pushing an evacuation cart saw nothing.
“Left!” Mia shouted.
Faces turned upward.
Nobody moved fast enough.
She called the saved collision delay and went through a freight crate that blocked the mouth of the street.
Cold flooded her chest as the wood passed across her body.
She came out inside the fall zone, caught the cart’s front axle with the hook of her cane, and threw her weight sideways.
The wheels jumped half a yard.
The copper bridge struck behind them.
The impact lifted Mia from the road.
Her back hit brick hard enough to empty her lungs.
For an instant there was only white light and the taste of mortar.
[ROLLBACK INDEX: 5%.] [ANOMALOUS TRAJECTORY WITNESSED BY 43 PLAYERS.] A player dropped from the wreckage beside her.
“Did the guide just blink through that crate?” His companion caught his arm.
“Leave it.
The boss is changing phases.” They ran toward the gate.
Mia forced air back into her chest and checked the cart.
One wheel had folded inward.
The woman at the handles was bleeding from the scalp, but the residents inside were moving.
Two dockworkers dragged them clear while broken copper rolled in the street, hot enough to hiss in the frost.
Ahead, weapon fire traveled over the starbeast’s shell in bands of blue and gold.
Its black crystal armor shone like wet coal.
Players crowded around one forelimb and poured attacks into the same marked joint, reducing a creature large enough to break the gate to a health bar suspended over its back.
White Crown reached the front first.
Their capture spike was longer than a dock crane’s boom.
The head bore the guild’s white crown, polished so brightly that the symbol stayed clean even while ash gathered on the hands loading it.
“Drag it west,” the raid commander called.
“The streets are open there.
We’ll have room to burn it down.” The western streets were not open.
Almost two thousand residents had refused evacuation.
Chimney Lane lay directly behind the old hoist tower White Crown had chosen as an anchor.
Mia stepped into the commander’s path.
“Do not draw the starbeast toward the west ward.
People are still inside those houses.” The commander looked past her at his targeting field.
“They’ll reset.” “They won’t,” Mia said.
“Move.
You’re blocking my camera,” the commander said.
The capture spike fired.
Its steel cable crossed the square and buried itself in the starbeast’s shoulder.
The other end locked around the west hoist.
The beast lurched, felt the restraint, and turned toward Chimney Lane with a roar that made every loose pane in the district burst inward.
Players cheered.
Mia could not attack them.
She could not revoke the event or force the commander to release his weapon.
She looked at the hoist base.
Three safety rails blocked the direct route.
Going around would take forty seconds through the player crowd.
Passing through them would take twelve.
The Glitch Manual opened against her wrist.
[SAVED GLITCH UNDER ACTIVE OFFICIAL MONITORING.] [REPEATED USE WILL INCREASE ROLLBACK INDEX.] Mia ran.
The first rail passed through her ribs.
It felt as though someone had filled her chest with ice water and sealed it there.
After the second, she could no longer remember which street she had crossed to reach the square.
Time broke before the third.
One moment she was upright beside the rail.
The next she was on one knee beneath the hoist with blood across both palms.
[ROLLBACK INDEX: 7%.] She did not search for the missing seconds.
Tasha had modified the hoist gears years ago.
Mia knew where the emergency release sat, though the mechanism would not answer to her permissions.
She jammed the broken end of her cane between two teeth and let the starbeast’s pull tighten the cable.
The raid commander saw her too late.
“Get away from that hoist!” he shouted.
The gear turned against the cane.
Wood split.
The limit pin bent, held, and tore free.
The cable went slack.
Without the westward pull, the starbeast pitched forward.
Its foreclaw struck two streets short of Chimney Lane.
Black crystal burst from the impact and scythed through the nearest shopfronts.
One shard went through a wooden sign, the brick behind it, and the empty bed on the second floor.
Mia turned from the wreckage and found a player standing behind her.
Lin Qi had not joined the first-kill raid.
She still carried the rusted short sword from her first tutorial.
While Mia crossed the rails, Lin had taken the legal path around them and fought her way through the crowd.
“You told him the residents won’t reset,” Lin said.
“What did you mean?” The system closed around Mia’s throat.
[UNRELEASED SETTING.
PLAYER DISCLOSURE PROHIBITED.] Lin glanced toward the west ward.
“Are they in real danger?” “Please proceed to a designated safe area,” Mia said.
The default warning came out smooth and empty.
Lin did not move.
She followed Mia’s gaze instead.
The baker was running out of a half-collapsed doorway with her child under one arm.
Behind her, the kerosene seller leaned against the wall, staring at the creature he had insisted on seeing for himself.
The burned bread basket from his shop hung over one wrist.
“I’ll take them to the bridge,” Lin said.
Mia got to her feet.
“There is no quest reward.” “I heard you,” Lin said.
Lin ran for the lane.
The old man refused to leave the basket.
Lin tied it to the outside of her inventory pack and let the added weight slow her.
A player could replace speed with another attempt.
The old man might have been carrying the last thing his son had touched.
Three crystal-backed juveniles crawled out of a drainage trench.
Lin’s short sword held one.
The other two went around her.
She called for help in the temporary raid channel, but a White Crown member answered that pulling lesser mobs away from the boss would hurt the score.
Lin shut the channel off.
She struck one juvenile across the jaw and ran into an empty side street, dragging all three after her.
Their claws clicked on the stones.
The first caught her before she reached the corner.
Her body broke into revival light.
She returned at the nearest spawn point and ran back.
The second time, she drew the juveniles farther from the lane.
One pinned her against a pump housing and tore through her armor.
Revival light filled the alley again, bright and clean, leaving no blood for the next version of her to step in.
When Lin returned for the third time, the kerosene seller was still sitting where she had left him.
His age had not reset.
The ash on his shoulders remained.
A split in his thumbnail still held the same line of blood.
He stared at her.
“How are you standing again?” Lin looked toward the mouth of the street, where the juveniles were beginning to turn back.
“I don’t know how to explain it.
Can you walk?” The old man pointed toward a fallen wall.
“There’s a boy under there.
He won’t come back the way you did.” Lin dug with her hands until she found him.
The boy’s leg was trapped beneath masonry.
He made no sound when they lifted the first stone.
By the second, his breathing had become a thin wet rattle.
There was no revive prompt above him and no automatic field dressing in his interface.
Lin opened her pack and selected the most expensive combat medicine she carried.
[WARNING: USE ON ENVIRONMENTAL NPC WILL WASTE 80% OF ITEM EFFECT.] She pressed CONFIRM.
The medicine stopped the bleeding.
It did not free the leg or repair the crushed bone.
Lin put the boy on her back.
His blood ran down the inside of her bracer, hot and sticky against skin the system had restored twice in ten minutes.
She took the old man’s arm and walked them toward the evacuation bridge.
Combat reminders opened in front of her.
[YOUR FIRST-KILL CONTRIBUTION HAS FALLEN BELOW 10,000TH PLACE.] [RETURN TO EVENT AREA?] Lin dismissed each one.
She did not save the street.
She carried the three people she could reach.
At the bridge, the old man sat with both hands locked around the smoke-blackened basket.
A medic cut the boy’s trouser leg away.
Only then did a temporary rescue quest appear in Lin’s interface.
[HIDDEN CASUALTY DISCOVERED.] [REWARD: 30 COPPER.] Lin refused settlement.
“I didn’t find him,” she told the medic.
“He did.” The quest text would not change.
Mia arrived moments later.
She asked the kerosene seller to give the location in his own words, then had the medic enter both names in the admission record.
The system kept its version.
At least the boy’s chart carried the path that had brought him there.
The baker from Chimney Lane was working beside the medic.
Her tray of morning bread lay somewhere beneath a collapsed ceiling, but she still had flour sacks tied around her waist.
She tore one into bandages while her son sat beneath the bridge counting everyone who came off it.
“Thirty-eight,” the child said when Lin carried the injured boy past him.
Then he saw the blood on the bracer and started again from thirty-seven.
The baker put a hand on his shoulder.
“Keep the number you’ve got.
We can check it later.” Mia watched the child mark thirty-eight on a broken roof tile.
His figures leaned into one another, white flour ground into black slate.
The system’s event counter was already processing thousands of bodies elsewhere, but it had no field for a child who feared he had counted one person twice.
Captain Brann brought the refusal list down from his coat and crossed off the kerosene seller’s address.
The paper had gone soft with sleet and sweat.
Three other lines remained unchecked in Chimney Lane.
“I have one patrol left,” Brann said.
“The west roofs are coming down.” “Take the nearest two houses,” Mia said.
“Give the third address to the bridge team as soon as they return.” Brann’s jaw tightened.
He did not ask which household mattered less.
He copied the third address onto his glove and ran.
Across the district, White Crown drove the starbeast’s health below half.
Dead players returned to the fight in columns of light.
In the streets behind them, some doorways stayed empty.
Mia passed a collapsed kitchen and saw three bowls laid out on a table beneath the dust.
One had a chipped blue rim.
A spoon rested in the smallest.
No one answered when she called inside.
She copied the house plate onto the unconfirmed-casualty list.
She did not mark the occupants as environmental loss.
That phrase would have ended the search before anyone moved the stones.
Mia gave the address to a district recorder and waited while he repeated it back.
Her forced route was already forming beyond the intersection, a gold line brightening over broken pavement.
She had less than a minute before the system pulled her away.
“Number fourteen, Kiln Street,” the recorder said.
“Three residents listed.
Search after the bridge team returns.” “Correct,” Mia said.
Only then did she turn toward the gold line.
No rule in the tutorial library explained why she had spent those seconds on the names of people she might never find.
He Xinyi’s camera caught up with her near the ruined hoist.
Xinyi rode a steam board over the rubble while a spare mechanical eye streamed the scene above her shoulder.
The feed kept replaying Mia’s route through the safety rails.
[THE HIDDEN BOSS CAN BREAK GUILD EQUIPMENT.] [LOOK AT WHITE CROWN’S COMMANDER.
HE’S LOSING IT.] [WHY IS SHE SAVING BACKGROUND NPCS?
DON’T THEY RESPAWN?] The starbeast raised its head.
Though it had no eyes, it turned directly toward the mechanical eye.
The broadcast unit’s high-energy signal had drawn its second-phase targeting routine.
Black gill plates opened around the beast’s face.
White light gathered deep inside them.
Mia knew the animation.
The published event script called for one piercing attack.
He Xinyi would die and purchase a revival.
The beginner guide would run into the shot, absorb its first impact, and die in a cinematic close-up designed to make the player’s return feel costly.
Version 2.0 had not begun, yet Skyglass had already moved Mia’s death onto the stage.
Even the camera angle was ready.
[KEY PLAYER ON LETHAL TRAJECTORY.] [FORCED STORY ACTION INITIATING.] [THREE.] [TWO.] A gold route appeared between Mia and He Xinyi.
Mia’s body stepped onto it.