The sunrise over Las Vegas brought no hope today. It only brought light, forcing everyone to see just how badly the city had been wounded. Orange morning light cut through the low-hanging haze over the Strip. But it was not ordinary desert dust. It was pale gray, fine as powder, and it smelled… like burned ozone. It was Monster Ash. The remains of thousands of Orcs, Gargoyles, and Demons, their bodies forcibly disintegrated by last night’s anti-magic wave. The ash blanketed the streets, coated dented car hoods, piled along the sidewalks, like filthy snow after a winter storm. Oliver staggered forward through it. Each step he took left deep dragging marks. Srek… srek… He used a bent piece of rebar as a cane. His right arm stump was hidden beneath what remained of his suit, now little more than rags. His left hand, missing its ring finger, gripped Claire’s arm tightly. “Crowded,” Claire whispered, her voice hoarse, eyes scanning the ruins ahead. “But not

The Greyhound bus terminal on the outskirts of North Las Vegas smelled like a mix of diesel, sweat, and broken dreams. The building was half-destroyed. Its tin roof was riddled with holes from the magical meteor rain a week ago, and the walls were cracked, now patched up with blue tarps. But the terminal was alive. Crowded. Thousands of people, refugees, stranded tourists, and locals who had had enough, lined up in long queues to get tickets out of this cursed city. Oliver stood near a concrete pillar covered in spray-painted graffiti, leaning his weight on a cheap wooden cane. He wore an oversized secondhand flannel shirt and a pair of jeans roughly cut at the ends to accommodate the thick cast on his right leg. The right sleeve of his shirt was tied off below the elbow, hiding the absence beneath. He looked like a defeated war veteran. Or a homeless man who happened to shower. “Hot,” Oliver muttered, squinting at the blazing afternoon sun. There was no mo

Their laughter faded, leaving behind a hollow echo in the dusty corners of the room. Oliver wiped the tears from the corner of his eyes with the back of his left hand. His breathing was still uneven from laughing, and his ribs ached, but it was the kind of pain that felt good. The kind that reminded him he could still feel something. Across the table, Lucyan coughed lightly, straightening the collar of his dirt-stained shirt with what remained of a fallen nobleman’s dignity. Between them, resting on the scratched wooden table, lay a single card. The fifth card. The deciding one. It was still face down. Its back was blue, patterned with standard diamonds. Cheap paper. No magical aura. No hum of fate. Just pressed pulp from some factory. “You...” Lucyan pointed at the card with a trembling finger. “You haven’t looked at it, Oliver.” “Not yet,” Oliver replied. He leaned back casually in his chair, despite the ache in his spine from the hard wooden backrest

Rain fell. But it didn’t fall to the ground. The droplets rose from the cracked asphalt, drifting upward into a sky filled with static noise, then bursting into white pixels when they touched clouds that looked like unrendered cotton. Oliver stood in the middle of the highway, head tilted back, staring at the insane phenomenon with stinging eyes. “Local gravity… inverted,” Oliver muttered. His voice sounded wrong, a metallic echo trailing behind it, like he was speaking through a broken microphone. He looked at his own hand. His severed right arm was still flickering, blinking between existence and absence. Sometimes he could see bone, sometimes just a blue wireframe, sometimes nothing at all. It didn’t hurt. It itched. Not on the surface, but inside his soul. Like some part of him was being slowly erased by a giant eraser. “I’m still here,” Oliver thought, clenching his intact left hand. “I’m not completely deleted yet. That means the system crashed before the

White. White again. But this was not the cold, sharp white of snow in Sloth’s arena. This was not the radiant white of heaven’s light promising salvation. This was the white of a blank sheet. Oliver opened his eyes, or at least he felt like he did. There were no eyelids blinking, no sensation of facial muscles moving. His awareness simply snapped online in the middle of a void with no corners, no shadows, no gravity. “Hello?” Oliver called out. No sound came. There was no air to vibrate his vocal cords. His thoughts echoed only within his own skull, bouncing against imaginary walls. He tried to move. His legs, which should have been broken and in a cast, felt nothing. His right hand, which should have been gone, felt whole. Oliver looked down. His body was there. But his body was... a wireframe. A skeletal structure of glowing blue lines forming the silhouette of a human. No flesh, no blood, no clothes. He was naked in pure data form.