Zai Ren woke to agony.
It wasn't the dull ache of a beating or the stinging burn of scrap-metal cuts. No—this was fire in his veins. A thousand lightning bolts cracking down his spine, short-circuiting nerves, rewriting flesh and thought. His back arched off the cold vault floor, muscles seizing as code scrawled across his vision in languages he'd never studied but somehow understood.
[NEURAL LINKING PROTOCOL: 78%... WARNING: SUBJECT VITALS CRITICAL.]
His scream didn't echo. The alien metal of the chamber drank it in, like the place had heard countless others before him break just like this.
He couldn't move.
He couldn't breathe.
Then, a voice.
Smooth. Amused. Sarcastic.
"Oh good. You're not dead. I hate onboarding corpses."
A glowing blue sphere pulsed above his chest, rotating with slow intelligence. The voice came from it.
"Welcome, Paradox Candidate. System initializing: Nano Sage Core v0.91.1. Call me Specter. Your brain is now partially synced. Full integration requires... well, let's see if you live long enough."
Zai gasped as the pain subsided to a simmer. Every cell in his body felt awake. Overclocked.
"What did you… do to me?"
"Technically? Injected quantum-threaded nanites through every capillary, forced your nervous system into sync with a tenth-gen alien combat AI, and lit up parts of your cortex humans don't usually touch until their third evolution cycle. Or ever."
Zai sat up slowly. His fingers trembled. The air glowed faintly to his new senses—heat signatures, electrical fields, decaying energy lines.
"I can see everything..."
"Neat, isn't it? But be warned: your meat sack isn't optimized. Prolonged sync could cook your organs. Also, the system is damaged. You'll have to rebuild most of the combat libraries manually."
Zai looked around the vault. The chamber's ambient light had dimmed, revealing deeper ruins and locked doors ahead.
[ALERT: TRAINING SEQUENCE ACTIVATED. BASIC PROTOCOL COMMENCING.]
"Wait—what?!"
His world blinked.
Suddenly, he stood in an endless black room. Digital grids lit the floor. Three humanoid figures formed before him, crackling with glitchy energy. One had claws. One held a blade. One shimmered with speed.
"Survive sixty seconds," Specter said cheerfully. "Or die trying."
Zai barely dodged the first strike.
The clawed one came fast, swiping low. Zai rolled, momentum carrying him into a sprint. The sim felt real. Too real. The air burned his lungs, his feet struck something solid.
He ducked under the blade-user's swing, grabbed a broken pole from the ground—when did that get there? His mind was moving faster now. Faster than it should.
Thirty seconds in, he was bleeding. The speed-unit tagged him with a burst that slashed across his ribs. But he countered—leveraging physics, momentum, improvised tools. Every choice meant something.
[43 SECONDS... VITALS UNSTABLE.]
He roared, using the pole as a staff, feinting the blade and slamming the clawed unit into the other. The sim flickered. They staggered. Zai dropped, rolled, kicked upward into the speedster's chest.
[60 SECONDS COMPLETE. TRAINING HALTED. USER: ALIVE. BARELY.]
He collapsed, vomiting blood onto the vault floor.
Specter hovered beside him, almost... impressed.
"You know, for a starved street rat, you've got promise."
"You nearly killed me."
"Please. I mostly killed you. There's a difference."
Zai tried to stand, bones shaking. He could still feel the enemies in his mind. Their patterns. Their algorithms.
"We need to get stronger."
"Finally, a proper protagonist line."
Then the alarm blared.
[EXTERNAL BREACH DETECTED. MULTIPLE HOSTILES INBOUND.]
A distant thoom echoed through the vault's halls. Zai turned to the chamber entrance. Shadows flickered.
"Guess you tripped a beacon during your little hack job," Specter said. "Congratulations. You've attracted scavengers. Real ones. The kind who rip tech from corpses."
"They coming for me?"
"No. They're coming for this system. You're just the meat wrapper."
Panic flared. Zai grabbed the cracked datapad, stuffed it into his satchel. The vault doors groaned open behind him.
"Can you fight them?" he asked.
"You just burned your neural net on Basic Protocol. You're running on nanite fumes. My advice? Run like hell."
He didn't need telling twice.
Zai dashed down the tunnel, heart slamming against his ribs. Behind him, distant footsteps. Voices. One spoke with calm precision:
"Vault breach confirmed. If the host has bonded with the system, extract the cranial unit intact. No exceptions."
Zai didn't stop to process it.
He just ran.