They say Blackrift City breaks everyone eventually. I guess I just broke earlier than most. I used to be somebody. Not a hero. Not a kingpin. But someone. A fighter. A survivor. The kind of guy that made people shut up when he walked into a room. Not because I was feared, but because I earned my respect with blood, sweat, and bruised knuckles. That was before the fall. Before the betrayal. Before I learned that even loyalty could be bought and sold in this city like a pack of cheap smoke. Now I'm a mop-wielding ghost in an orange vest, cleaning puke and piss out of subway corners for half the minimum wage. No one makes eye contact. No one cares if I breathe or bleed. I don't blame them. It was 2.17am. That time of night where Blackrift stops pretending to be a city and becomes what it really is. A gaping, rotting carcass, crawling with the desperate and the damned. I stood on the platform of Sector 9, watching a drunk teenager stagger too close to the edge. He laughed. His girlfri

Black Rift didn't just smell like rust and rot. It reeked of surrender. The Eastern Grid was where dreams came to die. Buildings hunched together like vagrants bracing for winter. Alleys coiled with shadow. Streets pulsed with things that didn't sleep and didn't need to. A hundred thousand souls packed into this forgotten artery of the city. Most of them ghosts already. The rest, just waiting their turn. In that sprawl of decay, one parasite was bleeding his dry, defeated power.[ Tier-E cultivator. System-wanted.] Organs harvested by hand. Statist wrapped in glyph ink and madness. And I was here to end him. Yui gave me the intel. Coordinates buried behind a broken web of neon ruins and collapsed steel. A decommissioned power station no one cared to remember. But thermal scans lit it up like a bonfire. Vico had made it a siphon nest. A place of slow death. [Primary objective: survive. Tier-E encounter. Bonus objective: terminate target.] Target has not come here. I reached the s

There are places in Blackrift where the air itself forgets how to move. The district they call Dagger Mile was one of them. Twisting alleys filled with rusted pipes, boarded windows, and the leftover whispers of those who vanished without headlines. It wasn't the kind of place people went unless they wanted to disappear, or bleed. That's where Yui sent me next. A name. A location. No explanation. I didn't ask why. I didn't need to. Something was always unraveling behind her eyes these days. Like she knew more than she was ready to say. And maybe she did. The building was buried behind a burned-out market. Three floors of concrete covered in black soot and faded blood glist. The doors were welded shut. The windows shattered. But something told me the place hadn't been abandoned. Not truly. I pushed through the side gate, hand resting on the hilt that the blade's growl had given me. The grip felt warmer these days, like the weapon had decided to stop judging me and start listening.

They said the inner sanctum of the Gilded Fang was a myth, a place that moved, a phantom fortress that slipped through cracks in the city's bones. Some claimed it was digital, housed in data and dream, only reachable by those willing to give up something real. Others swore it had been swallowed by war and rubble. They were all wrong. It was real. It didn't move. It hid. It waited. And I was going in. Sector 4 had another name, passed down by those who never left it. Ashlock. The last breath of light before the city went dark. No sunlight reached here. Not anymore. The buildings leaned like old men, windows bricked or blacked out, corners still scorched from wars no one remembered. Sigils seared into the walls, pulsed faintly, like coals that refused to die. Even the air carried history like a disease. Smoke, ash, and the smell of something ancient trying to crawl out. Yui walked beside me in silence. We wore the clothes of the forgotten. Ragged coats over armor-thin weave, no

The Void Chain Syndicate didn't build cities. They engineered leviathans. The fortress was called Monarch, and it moved across the wasteland like a god dragged through ash. Its frame stretched half a mile long, its wheels wide enough to crush. Monarch didn't settle. It fed on ruins, on data, on flesh. Inside its belly were labs older than most nations, prisons with no doors and secrets buried in silicon and blood. And somewhere within that mechanical beast lived a name. Ellen Troth, a neural scape architect. One of the few engineers who helped build the original Ghost Circuit. Back when it was still theory, still hope. He'd defected years ago, vanished beneath the radar. Some said he sold personality fragments on the black market. Others claimed he went mad, living in a dream he coded for himself. But I didn't care who he'd become. I needed what he still knew. Yui crouched beside me beneath a fractured overpass as Monarch groaned past us, slow and seismic. The rain was acidic he