Riven – Sector 12, South Line Slums | 01:42 UTC
They say you feel it when someone you're bound to dies.
That's a lie.
I didn't feel anything when the shot dropped him. Not the weight of it, not the sound.
Just silence.
One second he was pacing under the rusted tower, muttering fragments of dead languages like he always did when his hands shook and his runes flared out of sync.
The next, he was on the ground—skull cracked against wet synthcrete, eyes wide open to the storm overhead.
The pulse round had been rune-etched. That was the first sign. Residual glyph-burn carved into the wound like someone had stitched silence into the bullet. Clean hit. No exit wound. Whoever pulled the trigger used a dissonance trigger—tech designed to fry both flesh and spirit in one silent flash.
"He's dead," Vex said, like I couldn't see it. Like my fingers weren't already pressed against the blood-soaked collar node, checking out of reflex.
The node was melted straight through—no backup data, no pulse-mem trace, nothing. The rune-circuit embedded at his nape was slag. Whoever did this wasn't just after his life. They were wiping the record.
"Red Blades?" Cree asked behind me. She had a prototype caster slung low and still hot—too late as usual. Always armed. Always loud.
"No." I stood, watching the city's grime and his blood swirl together under the drainline's faint glyphglow. "Too clean for them."
"You're saying this wasn't a hit?"
"I'm saying it wasn't their hit."
Let her mutter about retaliation. The Blades were still pissed about that smuggled rune-core shipment we hijacked last month. Two of theirs left pulsing on the metro tracks—souls half-anchored to their own blood, a warning in luminous script.
But I knew.
This wasn't about turf. This wasn't about power.
This was about truth.
My father wasn't a soldier anymore. He was a vault. A liability. And he was trying to tell me what was locked inside.
He spoke just before it happened—words frayed at the edge of meaning, but heavy with intent.
Something about the Gate. About the child.
About me.
And one final name.
"Start with Rho Emeric. He never left the Gate's edge."
Then the round hit.
Now I stood in a backline alley, rain carving lines through flickering ward-graffiti on the walls, my crew around me, their assumptions still buried in old wars.
They didn't know the truth. Not yet.
I looked down one last time.
No grief. Only a question burned into silence.
Burning the body would be cleaner—no trace resonance, no forensic glyph-traps. But not yet. Not until I knew whether they buried a failsafe in him, or worse—a message.
"Vex. Strip the corpse. Scan for embedded tech, rune-wards, echo circuits. Burn him after."
Vex knelt without a word. His gauntlet flared a diagnostic rune as he began.
Cree's jaw worked like she wanted to challenge it. But she'd heard that tone before.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Out." I turned. The wardlights lining the street flickered as if the city was nervous.
"To do what?"
"To hunt ghosts."
Sector 12 – Outlands Edge | 04:18 UTC
The edge of Sector 12 doesn't have walls. It just forgets to keep existing.
Streetlights flicker and die. Pavement gives way to cracked ferroglass and exposed roots, like the city tried to crawl away from itself. The sky's always dirty here—thick with interference. No cams. No drones. No law.
Perfect place to go when you want to vanish.
Or when you're already dead, and just haven't stopped breathing yet.
That's where Rho Emeric had been spotted last. Edge sector, three blocks past the Blackline metro.
Retired technician, my ass. You don't retire to this place unless you're hiding something too dangerous for the Inner Grid.
The man had ties to the original Gate research.
My father said Emeric never left the Gate's edge.
Now I understood what he meant.
I found him in a derelict substation, halfway swallowed by wildgrowth and rust. Broken terminals lined the walls like tombstones, and the hum of inactive rune-tech still clung to the air like static ghosts.
He didn't look surprised when I stepped inside.
Just sat there behind a shattered console, hunched and twitching, cigarette hanging from his lip, watching me through an old Lucari neural visor like I was part of some recurring nightmare.
"You've got your father's eyes," he muttered. "And his stupid timing."
"Then you know why I'm here."
He snorted. "You think killing me will make the answers come faster?"
"I think not killing you might."
He chuckled. That laugh had the texture of static. "You don't even know what you're part of, boy. You think this is personal? Think the Gate took your daddy and left you hungry for revenge?"
I didn't move. "Six left."
That made him go still. Visor twitching slightly.
"Ah. So he did tell you."
"Not enough."
"No. He never did say enough, did he?" Emeric rose slowly, joints popping, cigarette hissing out in the damp. "Your father didn't just stumble onto truth. He helped build it. All seven of us did."
"And now they're dying."
He nodded. "Because we knew what should've never been born."
"The twin soul."
Emeric's visor dimmed. "…So you really are one of them."
I stepped closer, voice low. "You were there. When the Gate opened. When the soul split. You helped make it happen."
"I kept the logs," he whispered. "I tried to warn them. They locked me out, buried me in this pit."
He gestured around him like it was a throne room instead of a cage.
"I need the records."
"You won't find them here. They're offline. Locked in an old backup vault beneath the substation of Sector 7. No grid access. No AI trace."
"Why?"
"Because the soul they split? One half was meant to die. It didn't."
"And the other?"
"Was meant to be controlled." His voice broke on that word. "But something went wrong. They thought the separation was perfect. It wasn't."
He turned to face me directly. "They didn't just make two lives, Riven. They made a fracture in reality. And now it's bleeding."
His visor flickered.
That's when I noticed it — a low hum pulsing under the floor, a shimmer of broken glyphs climbing the walls like mold. But it wasn't rune-tech. The patterns were wrong. The symbols didn't follow any known logic. They twisted.
Emeric staggered.
He gripped the console's edge, coughing—wet, guttural. His neural visor cracked down the center. Blood, too dark and too thick, leaked from the corners of his mouth. I stepped back, slowly, as the light around us warped.
"I—" he gasped. "It's too late. I stayed too close. I stayed too long…"
"Emeric—"
He shrieked.
Not a man's voice. Not even a beast's. Something else tore out of him — raw and laced with distortion. His back arched, bones splintering. Flesh peeled from his shoulders in curling strips as something underneath moved — black tendrils threading from his spine, twitching like they were tasting the air.
The scent hit next. Burned soulglass and static.
Nullspawn.
I'd seen a few on the outer rims. But this wasn't a spawnling.
This was a birth.
No time to think.
I slid the release on my bracer. The artifact coil hissed open with a snap of pressure, a dozen magnetized blades snapping into orbit around my arm.
"Mode three," I murmured.
The blades shimmered violet — anti-etheric charge, tuned to breach layered soul fields. One of the few things that could carve through Gate-born corruption without triggering chain reaction feedback.
Emeric lunged — or whatever was left of him.
I rolled under the console as he crashed over it, claws splitting the metal. Sparks exploded above me. I sent two blades wide — no hesitation — and they struck center mass. The thing convulsed, limbs seizing in place, voidlight bleeding from the wounds.
"You… were supposed to die…" it rasped in a voice stitched from memory and rot.
I didn't answer. No reason to waste words on something that didn't understand the weight of silence.
Instead, I tapped the core embedded in my wrist.
The orbiting blades surged inward, detonating in an implosive spiral. A roar of compressed force ripped the thing apart mid-scream, folding it into itself — light, flesh, essence — until there was nothing left but ash and the whisper of what had once been human.
I stood, exhaling once.
Then twice.
The substation was quiet again, if you ignored the static on the walls.
I ran a clean diagnostic through my bracer — no lingering corruption, no ambient resonance.
The Nullspawn was gone.
But something had changed.
I retrieved the cracked Lucari visor from the floor, still flickering with broken memory threads. Fragile, but it might still hold data. With the right tools, maybe even voice imprints.
Not much. But enough to work with.
I'd seen what the Gate could do from a distance.
But this... this was personal now.
Tactical Review
First priority: containment.
I triggered a micro-suppressor capsule from my belt and dropped it into the center of the room. A silent pulse expanded outward, cancelling all remaining magic signatures within ten meters. It wouldn't last long, but it'd give me a clean window.
Second: extraction.
I had the fragment. The site was compromised. Nullspawn transformation this far from an active Gate meant the infection radius was wider than anyone had guessed. That meant someone—or something—was leaking the Gate's residue on purpose.
Third: the Vault.
Emeric had said Sector 7 held the backup logs. Offline. No AI trace. No remote grid. That was old tech—buried deep, probably pre-collapse. Accessing it wouldn't be simple. I'd need a bypass key. Maybe more than one.
I clipped the visor to my thigh holster and scanned the ruin one last time.
No grief. Only calculation.
Another dead man in a long line of ghosts.
I tapped my comms. "Vex. Prep the Vaultbreaker — full arc-stabilizers. If those locks are as old as Emeric claimed, we'll need deep-feed splicers just to open the outer ring. Cree too. We're moving by dawn."
A pause. Then static.
"You find something?" Vex asked.
I looked down at the ashes curling across the floor. At the last smear of blood that still pulsed faintly with glyph-burn. The substation walls still hummed with residue, like the Gate had reached through and touched this place long before I got here.
"Yeah," I said. "We're not alone in this."
I turned toward the exit, the artifact blades collapsing into their sheath.
"And whatever's coming — it already started."