They left the killsite an hour after the Tyrant fell. It wasn’t gone. Not properly. Whatever had animated that thing was being peeled back by the Void in ragged, deliberate pulses. Not a clean extraction. A punishment.
The slowness meant something, it wasn’t a mercy. It was a statement. At least one Harbinger was watching. The Void could reclaim its creatures instantly. This one was left to decay piece by piece. Torn ligaments drifted upward. Chunks of fractured carapace folded into nothing. Each section broke apart like the Void was judging it, dismantling it with disdain. One of its own had failed. And now it would suffer for it. It was also a warning. Caelin felt it in his bones.
The survivors didn’t speak. The cart creaked under Dara’s weight, its bent wheels dragging across fractured concrete. Her chestplate still pulsed faintly with residual Aether, bleeding warmth into cold metal and shivering limbs. Every flicker slowed. Her body was silent beneath the straps, but the pre-System body armor hadn’t gone dark. Not yet.
Caelin walked behind. Always behind. That space beside the cart wasn’t his. It belonged to the medic, a civilian with a salvaged satchel, a cracked diagnostic tablet duct-taped to his chest, and hands that shook more than they moved. He kept his eyes on the road and away from Caelin.
Caelin’s stride faltered every fourth step. His left knee wouldn’t lock. The joint had seized three times already, forcing a micro-reset each time it jammed. His ribs were grinding. Nothing that stopped function, just enough to notice. The Adaptation Engine wasn’t deploying clean stabilizers anymore. Internal systems were shifting to keep him upright, not optimal.
SOUL STABILITY: 4% WARNING: LATTICE STRUCTURE UNSTABLE
He dismissed it. At four percent, his lattice could barely hold passive formation. He couldn’t risk a scan. Any wide-field pulse would panic the group.
He didn’t need one to know they were avoiding him. They gave him distance. Ten meters or more. Always behind the medic. Always away from the Reaper. The monster. He had heard several of them refer to him as that.
The first corpse was crushed beneath fallen scaffolding. Bones pulverized. Skull flattened. No Soul. He moved on.
The second was an Echo. Weak. Still coherent. Caelin crouched, pressed two fingers to the chest, and activated Absorption. The spiral pulled into him cleanly. No memory fragments. Just pressure and motion.
SOUL STABILITY: 7% LATTICE RECOVERY: IN PROGRESS
He stood. Steady. The lattice expanded slightly. Ambient input stabilized to six meters. Edges flickered, but depth was returning.
Someone behind him whispered.
“He just did it.”
Another voice followed.
“Didn’t even check who it was.”
He had. He always checked. If they had nothing to give, he moved on. If they had value, he took it. That was the point. At the moment, every Soul, Original or Echo had value.
He kept walking.
The buildings around them collapsed inward, as if the city had tried to bury itself. Rebar curled through shattered plaster. Burnt insulation clung to girders like skin. A collapsed balcony hung by a single rusted hinge.
A glint in the steel caught his attention. A half-melted satchel. Still usable. He pulled it loose and dropped it beside the cart. The medic jolted but didn’t speak. He just adjusted the strap and moved closer to Dara, as if the proximity might protect him.
Another body against the wall. Water filtration rig intact. He ripped it free and threw it toward a pair of survivors trying to patch together a barricade with cargo racks and broken signage. One of them caught it without looking up.
The next corpse had a System Enhanced medpack. Compression-sealed. It hadn’t been opened by it’s unfortunate owner. Based on the quality, it had been a Class selection benefit. Looking down Caelin took in the young man. Weak.
Caelin placed it on the cart’s frame beside the medic.
The man hesitated.
“This is System-tagged.”
He blinked at it like it might detonate. Someone behind him muttered.
“But not looted by you.”
The medic licked his lips then called to a woman at the front of their small procession..
“Do I owe Kael’s Tax on it?”
“You didn’t take it yourself.”
“Doesn’t mean they’ll care.”
“Speak to Rourke, he’ll back you, considering,” the woman indicated Dara on the cart with a knowing glance. The medic frowned, then clutched at the medkit possessively.
Caelin didn’t react. He was already tracking another Soul signature, but he filed ‘Kael Tax’ away for later.
An Original. He absorbed it as he moved.
SOUL STABILITY: 10%
This one pushed back. There was friction. Not defiance, but structure. Memory had held on, even through death. Uniform fragments. Loadout configuration. Pattern matched Logan’s field gear, old 2CO issue, field-modified with ceramic insert patches and surplus clips. Raider kit. A silhouette that used to mean order. Now it meant something else. To Dara it meant a lot of things, none of them good.
A personnel carrier blocked the path. Caelin stepped out, planted his shoulder, and shoved. The shell screeched across the ground, revealing two bodies beneath.
One Echo. One Original. He absorbed both.
SOUL STABILITY: 24%
The second Soul carried weight. Heavy layering. Fragmented Echoes packed beneath a dominant core. The lattice flared with new range and detail. A full threat map to ten meters. Enough to pull conversation threads without distortion.
He didn’t have to strain to hear them.
“They say he killed Logan.”
“The Warhound?”
“It was confirmed by Rourke’s scouts on our way out here. Same build. Same weapons. One of Elias’ old team saw the fight.”
“But that was two weeks ago.”
“He dragged himself out. Literally dragged. The Scouts said his legs weren’t working. He couldn’t walk.”
“Then just showed up here? Why?”
Caelin kept walking, pulling his attention away from the conversation. But the line stuck. Two weeks ago. Two weeks!
Campbelltown had been the shattered and burning station. The collapse. Logan’s blood on shattered ground. The speading Void field. The Adaptation Engine had nullified all healing. His legs had stopped working. He remembered crawling. Collapsing. The smell of fire, of Void, of pain… of death. He had slept, he was sure he’d slept. He could remember crawling into a mostly destroyed vehicle at least once getting to Dara. It had felt like two days. Three at most.
He’d just walked. Walked knowing that he was dead if he stopped. Still, two weeks? What had happened?
SOUL STABILITY: 27%
His perception widened. Ambient input returned. Motion tracking. Threat layer density. Heat maps. The structure of the city snapped into clarity around him like a hostile embrace.
A base. Fortified. Organized. He didn’t feel safer. Only heavier.
The street ended at what used to be a station, making Caelin pause.
The fa?ade had collapsed into itself. Concrete supports jutted from the ground like broken pylons. One of the lift shafts was barely upright, it had split down the middle, its inner framework exposed like vertebrae. A pharmacy on the corner had folded into the plaza, its faded signage slumped sideways against shattered concrete. Burn scars marked the edge of its awning. Whatever it had been, it wasn't anymore.
A wrecked bus stop lay half-crushed across the pedestrian approach. Railings were bent inward. The barricade ahead was stitched together from steel mesh, tram rail, and broken seating slabs. Spray-painted warnings, KEEP OUT, LOCKDOWN, QUARANTINE covered every surface in a flaking red smear.
Two guards waited at the breach.
Neither wore formal armor. Their gear was scavenged, old tactical vests strapped over ceramic plates, police riot pads mismatched with makeshift rigging. One carried a long rifle held tight against her chest. The other wore a brace-mounted scanner, patched together from commuter tech and salvage housing.
“Stop there.”
The medic raised a hand. “She’s the Seraphic. Dara Valkerys. She’s been here before.”
The scanner flickered as it passed over Dara. Aether shimmered around her frame. It was weak, but still structured. Her name registered. Logged. Cleared.
Then the scanner passed over Caelin.
It buzzed once, then froze. The screen turned white.
“No read. Just static.”
The rifle tilted higher.
“Name?”
“He’s the one who killed the Tyrant,” the medic said. “He’s the Reaper.”
No reply. No nod.
A rusted speaker bolted into the barricade crackled to life.
“Let them through. Valkerys to triage. Reaper to debrief. Sergeant Rourke will meet him inside.”
Metal locks disengaged. The barricade slid aside with a groan. The group advanced.
They passed a scorched support column. A warped sign still clung to its upper edge read PLATFORM 3. The stairs below had collapsed inward. In their place, someone had welded scrap planks and iron poles into a sloping ramp. Guide ropes were staked along the path. It led down into darkness.
The medic leaned toward Dara.
“This was the lift shaft off Macquarie Mall. You’re back at Liverpool Station. Deep Bastion’s under the line spine.”
Caelin heard him.
LOCATION: LIVERPOOL STATION RUINS COMMAND STRUCTURE: CIVILIAN-MILITARY JOINT COMMANDER: ELIAS MARCHANT STATUS: NON-SYSTEM DESIGNATION – DEEP BASTION
No System overlay. No map. No satellite markers. Just static. The name meant nothing to him. Only the silence felt familiar.
The corridor bent left. Tram rails had been lashed against the walls as support struts. Steel mesh layered in patchwork. Plasticrete bags and bolted road plates formed the floor. The descent deepened.
And then it widened.
Dim lighting buzzed along exposed wire hooks. The floor was cracked tile, half-submerged in stagnant runoff. The stench hit him first, a mixture of diesel, sweat, copper. The shadows opened into a platform bay lined with tents, cargo crates, and stripped furniture. Generator noise filled the gaps between movement and silence.
Children peeked from under tarps. A boy held a length of rebar like a spear. None of them spoke.
Then they saw her.
“That’s her.”
“She came back.”
“Valkerys.”
“The Seraphic.”
People moved aside without needing to be asked.
Then they saw him.
“That’s it.”
“The Reaper.”
“He doesn’t speak.”
“He eats people.”
“He doesn’t eat them. He takes their Souls. Raiders said he drained a lieutenant.”
“Vampire.”
Caelin’s lips twitched, they were the same as the group who had come to bring them back. No one got close. But still, vampire? The word tugged at something in his memory. Something that, on most worlds, was a myth. Like him. Something that lurked in the shadows. A hunter.
The cart reached a hard-shelled rig at the triage end. Medical staff appeared, they were all fatigued, stained, but coordinated. They lifted Dara from the cart and placed her on a scaffold cradle rigged from old train seating and insulation foam.
Her chestplate shuddered. Then Aether flared.
SYSTEM ERROR – LOOT DISPLAY FAILED: PARTY BUFF - SILENCED NATURE DETECTED ADDRESSING ISSUE… DISPLAYING OVER INFECTED SILENCED ONE NETWORK
SYSTEM – LOOT DISTRIBUTION: SERAPHIC PARTY MEMBER CONFIRMED
Combat Contribution: Detected Kill Credit: Shared (Duo Kill – Raid: 2)
Wave 1: Fragmented Aether Capacitor (Minor) Wave 2: Radiant Pulse Module – Hollowgnasher Variant Wave 3: Adapted Barrier Core – Regenerative Class Wave 4: Reinforced Mantle Frame – Precursor Shell
Merge Protocol Available Merge Confirmed by: Valkerys Synthesizing Compatible Gear Framework…
Caelin narrowed his eyes.
That wasn’t just loot. The Reinforced Mantle Frame wasn’t something you scavenged. It was a Seraphic-class integration core, a full-frame armor upgrade. Merge-compatible. Class-bound.
Then the final icon blinked into view beside the Tyrant’s sigil.
A pulse.
It split once.
He knew what it was before the System finished rendering.
An Ability Upgrade Token. Seraphic-tier. Rare. Borderline mythical. Forbidden to Silenced Ones.
INITIATING CLASS-SYNC: SERAPHIC VANGUARD PROTOCOL AETHER-BOUND MANTLE – HOLLOW ECLIPSE VARIANT INTEGRATION IN PROGRESS…
WARNING: HOST STATE – UNCONSCIOUS
PROCEEDING UNDER CRITICAL AUTO-SYNC CONDITIONS
Her rig shifted with a soft hydraulic groan.
The plating over her chest folded in on itself, segment by segment, like breathing metal. Caelin stepped closer, watching each component lock into place. The left pauldron extended, adjusted, then slammed upward and sealed. The right leg guard retracted into a slimline sheath before overlaying with radiant mesh. Aether-conductive, not reactive.
He’d seen that pattern once.
Vanguard cull team. System-built. Combat-bound.
The backplate split.
Two anchor rods extended from her upper spine and locked into socketed mounts near the shoulder blades, clearly preparing for wing load. Beneath the frame, Aether filament ignited in jagged paths through the undersuit, tracing her nervous system in luminous arcs. Lines pulsed outward from her spine, curled across her ribs, and fed into the restructured chestplate.
This wasn’t cosmetic.
It was invasive.
Every segment that moved had purpose. Every seal was tactical. Compression plating cinched her waist. Reactive vents formed over the thighs, fitted to bleed off Aether when it surged too fast. Shoulder ridges expanded, then narrowed as her vitals were re-mapped in real-time.
Caelin took one step closer, just enough to see the designation now burned into the upper backplate.
SERAPHIC VANGUARD PROTOCOL: AETHER-BOUND MANTLE – HOLLOW ECLIPSE VARIANT
A configuration he’d only seen listed in deep-system kill reports. Reserved for high-theatre units. Survivors of full collapse zones. The kind of armor that wasn’t handed out, it was earned in fire and sealed with blood.
He watched it lock into place.
And then the Aether caught up to it.
Dara’s body arched.
Aether slammed into her like a kinetic lance. Her limbs seized. Fingers curled so hard her gauntlets flexed against the structure of the rig. Magnetic seals across her chest buckled once then clamped.
Her armor flared section by section.
Each plate responded with rising light. System overlays danced across her skin, a mixture of rotating glyphs, calibration diagrams, fusion markers mapping bone and spirit alignment.
LEVEL GAINED: +3
NEW ABILITIES UNLOCKED
Grace of the Vanguard
Passive: Every 3s, pulse healing to all allies within 6 meters. Strength increases the longer Dara remains grounded.
Valkyrie Reprisal
Triggered: On Aether overload or activation of Valkyr Aflame. Emits a 15-meter radiant burst. Bonus damage against corrupted targets.
Her back locked rigid.
Then Valkyr Aflame ignited.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
The wings exploded into view, twin burning arcs of radiant energy, curved and sharp, blinding gold and white. Dara lifted from the platform without control. Her eyes snapped wide open, fully lit with golden-white fire. Her jaw clenched. Her body trembled but held.
She didn’t scream.
She endured.
Aether vented from her core.
A radiant shockwave pulsed outward. Grace of the Vanguard triggered on contact, radiant healing waves licked out in every direction. Minor wounds closed. Vital signs stabilized across the room. Even the rig steadied.
Then came the crash.
Her wings faltered.
Her eyes flickered.
And she dropped.
The rig caught her before the impact. The light faded. Her armor stabilized. Her body curled slightly, then fell still.
The corridor was gone.
There was no moment of transition. No glitch. No overlay. Just a shift in weight. One step forward, and the pressure returned.
The walls weren’t walls anymore.
They were cold. Lined with conduit buried in black plating. Lit by frozen pulses that never reached the floor.
The Soulspire had not reappeared. It had never left.
He didn’t remember walking into the room. He just knew he was there.
The chain through his chest held him upright. Anchored behind the sternum, set through bone and plate. It wasn’t there to restrain him. It was there to align him. To keep him upright when the rest of him failed.
It had always failed.
He couldn’t remember the first time.
But he remembered this one.
The forearm restraints weren’t new. The skin didn’t blister. The ports had been surgically fixed during his induction. Threaded to prevent dislocation. Flex-tolerant. Re-education standard.
He remembered the blood soaking down the channels.
Not from this time.
From before.
It never mattered which time it was.
The frame accepted him again without resistance. No grinding. No pulse-lock. No external override.
The frame already knew he belonged to it.
Arkaelyn stood to the side.
He didn’t speak.
He never did.
No corrections. No doctrine. No lessons. Just observation.
He’d been like that the last time. And the time before. The chain, the frame, the silence, those were his instruments.
Others used words.
Arkaelyn used failure.
The pain wasn’t pain anymore.
It was process.
Frost began to form where blood slowed. Crystalline threads along the arm restraints. Pooled condensation beneath the backplate. His jaw trembled once. Then stopped. He didn’t resist. He didn’t scream. He didn’t move.
That wasn’t the goal.
The goal was to outlast it.
To stay silent.
And he did.
For a long time.
He stayed still. Let the weight hold him. Let the ache dig past muscle into memory. His body didn’t protest. It remembered its place. The lattice had stopped flickering. No access. No connection.
Just the frame.
Just the cold.
He felt the breath slip.
Not through lungs. Not through effort. Just a release of air. The sound wasn’t even real. Not a gasp. Not a plea. Just the first thing to leave when silence broke.
It was always the breath.
Not words.
Never words.
But the silence was gone.
And that meant it was over.
Arkaelyn didn’t move.
He never did.
But Caelin knew he had lost.
He knew the correction had succeeded.
It didn’t need a declaration. It didn’t need a nod.
One sound. One breath.
That was enough.
The frame didn’t release.
The pressure didn’t lift.
But Caelin understood what had happened.
That he had failed. Again.
When the Soulspire let go, it didn’t vanish.
It receded.
Left pieces behind. Threads that didn’t dissolve. Cold that didn’t thaw. Scars without cuts.
The chain was gone.
But he could still feel the pull.
His arms were free.
But they didn’t move.
His mind issued the command.
But nothing happened.
Then gravity returned.
It wasn’t far to fall.
But it was enough.
He hit hard, first his knees, then hands, then finally a shoulder. No catch reflex. No defense. Just collapse.
There was no sharp inhale. No grunt. Just contact. Accepted. Understood.
A body with no will.
A mind with no fight.
The Soulspire hadn’t taken him.
It had reminded him what he was.
He stayed there.
Cold concrete under his hands. Grit stinging his palms. Dust in his teeth.
His forearms burned.
His sternum ached.
Nothing was bleeding.
But everything felt open.
The tether pulsed again.
Faint.
But steady.
Not a command.
Not a summons.
Just presence.
He didn’t respond.
But part of him shifted.
Part of him knew he would.
Later.
There was light ahead.
Not warm.
Not welcoming.
Just real.
He blinked once.
Twice.
The Soulspire was gone.
But the weight hadn’t finished settling.
A low pulse hit the chamber.
Soft.
Radiant.
Uninvited.
Golden light spilled across the floor.
No heat.
No pain.
Golden wings, broad and luminous unfolded behind him.
Not his.
He didn’t know whose.
But they held.
The pulse moved through him.
Steady. Healing. Not for him. But enough to stop the break from spreading.
He looked up.
Slow. Measured.
He expected pain behind his eyes.
Expected the static.
It came.
NETWORK SYNC IDENTITY MATCH NAME: ARKAELYN RANK: NINE
Caelin froze. Fear, pure and primal, crashed violently through his mind. He felt chains snap around wrists, ankles, throat, ice-cold and unforgiving. The walls of Deep Bastion fell away, replaced by sterile darkness. The Soulspire closed around him, suffocating, endless. Arkaelyn had come. They'd found him.
His pulse hammered against his skull. Nausea churned violently in his gut, bile burning in his throat, muscles seizing painfully as panic overtook reason.
"No." His voice broke, fractured, desperate. "Not again. I can't." The chains tightened, memory becoming reality. Every muscle jerked reflexively, skin crawling with remembered pain, with dread. "I'll die first," he gasped. "I won't go back. Never. I'll rip myself apart first."
NETWORK CORRUPTION IDENTITY REBUILD IN PROGRESS ERROR ERROR LOADING…
Caelin staggered forward, vision splintering. Breath caught, lungs refusing air. Reality flooded back, distorted and raw. He blinked furiously, trembling violently, struggling to reassert control.
NON-LINKED ENTITY DETECTED NAME: CALLUM ROURKE RANK (PRE-COLLAPSE): SERGEANT AFFILIATION: ROYAL AUSTRALIAN ENGINEERS – 5TH ENGINEER REGIMENT (5ER) ROLE: FIELD SECURITY/RECON LIAISON – DEEP BASTION STATUS: ACTIVE LEVEL: 15 CLASS: LINEBACKER SAPPER NOTES: Served under Elias Marchant throughout Holsworthy’s urban collapse transition Known to enforce policy precisely as written, unless contradicted by Marchant himself Avoids speaking during patrols but logs every interaction verbatim in a ragged field journal Once spent three nights fixing a scavenged coffee press while recovering from a leg injury
The notes landed. Clear. Normal. Too normal. He blinked. Once. Twice. The Arkaelyn overlay hadn’t faded right. Static crawled across the corner of his vision. The tether held steady, but everything else still felt misaligned. Like parts of the Soulspire hadn’t let go. Callum stood where he was. Still watching. Still not speaking. No weapon. No stance
Callum Rourke stood where Arkaelyn had been.
Silent.
Watching.
“…avoids… speaking?”
Caelin’s voice cracked. Not from emotion. From damage.
“Dara…”
The rest didn’t come clean. A cough. A ragged breath. The Soulspire still clung to his chest.
But he forced it.
“How long,” he groaned as pain and cold pulsed through his chest, “How long after the System emerged did the Leviathan die?”
Callum didn’t speak for a long time, but when he did, it was succinct.
“Nine months.”
That was all.
Caelin didn’t move.
The Void had held him for nine months.
Ansen had known.
Then... the day he returned... he’d done what he was forged to do.
No thought.
No resistance.
He’d followed orders from a Harbinger that was gone.
Who was he without Death?
Was he still a Silenced One?
None of his brethren had looked for him.
They hadn’t even known he was gone.
Ansen... the Nine...
There was nothing left for him.
Nine months. Two weeks. Nothing.
All sound in the corridor dulled at once, like Deep Bastion had been buried beneath miles of stone. Voices, movement, even the groan of generators collapsed into a suffocating pressure without words or rhythm. His lattice followed, retreating inward, threat maps fracturing, motion trackers curling into blind static. His senses turned against themselves, severing input before the world could finish crushing him.
Color bled out. Depth fractured.
Only a strip of grey floor remained, stretching into nothing.
His vision constricted violently, reality collapsing inward, reducing his awareness to a suffocating pinpoint. A static roar consumed everything, deafening, relentless, tearing at the edges of coherent thought.
He felt it deep beneath the bone, behind the sternum, where memory of the chain still lay buried. A pressure, raw and invasive, clawing outward through muscle and sinew, twisting like something alive.
None of his brethren had noticed.
None had looked.
He'd been abandoned, discarded, meaningless. Forgotten.
His breath seized, locked painfully behind ribs.
Serrakia should've claimed him.
He shouldn't be breathing.
It started in his chest.
Not the lungs. Not the ribs. The point where the chain had sunk into him just behind the sternum, where Soulsteel had fused to bone. Where they'd driven it in to keep him aligned. To keep the machine from twisting out of shape under pressure.
The Soulspire was gone.
The chain was not.
The cold came back like it had never left.
It spread through marrow, across joints, behind the eyes. Not burning, not numbing, it was just wrong. Like something beneath his skin didn’t belong to him anymore. The same metal they’d used in his Soulblade. The same he’d driven into thousands before. Now it was inside him, threading through him, laying claim to what little of him was left.
His breath caught. Not from panic.
There was no panic.
Just systematic shutoff.
He’d felt it before.
Not here.
Not now.
Other places.
Other wars.
Places without names, just dates and directives. Planets that weren’t even planets anymore. Dust. Fire. Cities erased from orbit because someone spoke the wrong words.
Serrakia.
He remembered the silence after.
The blood on polished tile.
The weight of the blade in his hand.
The order that didn’t make sense.
The survivors they told him weren’t real.
But there were others.
He couldn’t name them.
That was worse.
He remembered the fallout, but not the trigger. The faces, but not the screams. The blood, but not whose.
Something had locked those memories away, and he was still bleeding for them.
His limbs were heavy. Movement took effort. Thought took effort. Everything in him wanted to lie down, not in rest, not in safety, just in absence.
The will to rise was gone. Not broken, filed down, through time and obedience and loss. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to recover. He wanted to stop. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to recover. He wanted to stop.
Not to sleep. Not to heal. Just to end.
It started at the sternum.
Where the chain had been. Where Soulsteel had fused through bone, fed into nerve, taught him stillness. The metal hadn’t been removed. It had been left there, dormant. Waiting.
The cold spread like punishment. Familiar. Sharp. Measured.
Like obedience returning.
He tried to call his blades.
No response.
No flicker.
No weight.
No answer.
He tried again. Harder. Reached for the bond forged into his spine. Reached for something that had always been there.
Nothing.
The Soul didn’t answer.
His hands shook. Slowly at first. Then harder.
When he looked down, they weren’t covered in light. They weren’t covered in steel.
They looked smeared. Black. Burnt.
A memory of blood that had never washed off.
He blinked.
Still shaking.
Still empty.
The tremors started small, spasms running uncontrolled through fingers, wrists, knees.The armor meant to stabilize him only amplified the betrayal, carrying every lurch, every jolt, through muscle and memory.
He pressed his palms against the floor, driving pressure into joints already locking tight, but the tremors bled up through bone and nerve, stripping away the last illusion of control.
He remembered the ring of planets. The King seated beneath them. Waiting. No army. No guards. Just one man in the ashes of a fallen people, bowing his head beneath the weight of extinction.
He hadn’t spoken.
Hadn’t begged.
Just waited.
And Caelin had reaped him.
Because he was told to.
Because silence was easier than doubt.
Because no one had ever said no.
His HUD blinked again.
SILENCED NATURE: ACTIVE HOLD TO DISENGAGE
Caelin stared at the prompt, absolute clarity returning. Cold logic. Tactical assessment. Disengaging meant direct System exposure. Death was inevitable, immediate. Collateral was certain. Deep Bastion would fall within moments, everyone inside obliterated, their survival tied directly to his existence. Dara, vulnerable and unconscious, would be among the first casualties.
He processed it silently, clinical detachment overtaking hesitation. Their deaths weighed against his operational irrelevance. Tactical calculation was swift, brutal, unavoidable. They had become acceptable losses, sacrifices made necessary by his collapse. His death would be a mercy. Theirs, an acceptable forfeiture. He wasn’t a man anymore. He was a malfunction, a blight, a tactical error that demanded correction.
His fingers steadied, hovering precisely over the prompt. One simple gesture. One moment of decisive finality. It was cold. Rational. It was the only logical outcome remaining.
Yet his hand hesitated, muscles rigid, frozen at the brink. Dara's face surfaced briefly, unbidden, forcing a fragmentary disruption in his analytical detachment.
He struggled silently, locked between logic and irrational attachment, trapped on the edge of annihilation.
He reached for it.
Not because he wanted to die.
Because there was nothing left to hold him here. No Nine. No Harbinger. Death was gone. No command. No directive.
No one left to ask if this was wrong.
I don’t just hate you for surviving. I hate you for existing.
Orakhis.
Final words from a member of the Nine. The member Caelin had killed.
A man who’d seen what he was, and spat truth with his last breath.
They thought you took the coward’s way out. I left you muted. No one noticed.
Ansen.
The one who forged the Nine.
The one who silenced him.
Caelin’s hand hovered.
Still. Shaking.
Almost there.
Sudden movement, too close. Callum crouched, cautious, voice a distorted noise, unintelligible, meaningless.
Caelin’s body jerked violently away, reflexive terror snapping through every nerve simultaneously. He twisted sharply, pain flaring as his shoulder ground hard against the concrete, vision shattering into bursts of light and shadow.
His hands clawed blindly at the ground, muscles spasming. Sound rushed into his ears, raw, incomprehensible noise. He was drowning, dragged beneath currents of sensory overload, torn apart by memories that weren’t his own, thoughts that didn’t belong to him.
He lay rigid, shuddering violently, chest heaving in ragged gasps, as fractured senses rebuilt the world around him in painful, disjointed segments.
"You don’t want to do that."
Quiet.
Not urgent.
Not kind.
Just true.
Caelin didn’t answer.
Didn’t look.
But the hand stopped.
And then everything hit.
The pain. The weight. The failure.
All of it. At once.
His back folded. His knees buckled. His spine twisted down and hit the ground hard. He didn’t catch himself. Didn’t try.
It wasn’t a fall. It was gravity reclaiming what no longer had purpose.
His shoulder struck stone. His chest cracked down on armor plate.
And he stayed there.
Breathing. But only just.
Then the presence.
Old. Cold. Real.
Life. They didn’t speak at first.
Didn’t shift. Didn’t judge. Just watched.
A Harbinger without warmth. Without mercy. A Harbinger.
Caelin didn’t look up. He didn’t need to. He felt the verdict settle into the air.
"You were never meant to survive alone, Caelin. You were forged for purpose, not abandonment. Death broke you. I wouldn't fail you. Come to where pain ends. Where doubt is silence. Where you are not one, but many. No loneliness. No failure. Only certainty. Only unity. You will never be forgotten again."
Then they vanished.
No mark left behind.
No echo.
Just silence.
The HUD flickered.
The prompt faded.
Gone.
Callum did not move closer.
He just watched, still crouched, tension bleeding into the air around him, holding himself at the very edge of reach.
Death was gone. No orders. No directives.
But he was still here.
Flicking his eyes back to his HUD everything faded away until only one line was left.
Deactivate Silent Nature? Yes/No
Life’s words from so long ago echoed within his head. Another lie.
"What if I told you weakness was never your problem?"
