2025-06-25 06:30:09It was 4.03 a.m. when I stumbled back into my flat, blood on my knuckles, sweat soaked through my shirt, and something new humming beneath my skin. Not adrenaline. Not fear. Power. The kind I hadn't felt since the underground fight rings.
Back when the world still called me something other than loser, janitor, or has-been. Back before betrayal turned my spine to glass and my heart to rot. I dropped onto the edge of my bed, the frame groaning beneath me like it was tired of carrying my weight, too. My hands trembled. Not from the fight, but from the change. A faint flicker lit the air in front of me, blue and ghostly. [Skill: basic combat enhancement. Strength: +10%. Speed: +10%. Reflexes: 10%. Status: stable. Synchronization: 76%] I flexed my fingers. The knuckle I'd split against a thug's jaw wasn't even bruised anymore. The skin had already begun to heal. “Okay.” I muttered. “This is real.” And that was a problem. Because real meant dangerous. This Ragnar Protocol, whatever the hell it was, wasn't some fever dream born from trauma and sleep-deprived rage. It was embedded in my nervous system, talking to me, feeding off me. And real tech? It had owners or enemies. The interface shimmered out as I closed it with a thought. Behind me, the rusted pipes let out a groan like the building was exhaling in its sleep. Twelve feet by eight. Cracked walls. Mini-fridge full of rot. Sheet metal bolted over a broken window. No cameras. No visitors. No warmth, except for the photo still taped to the wall. Me and Lena. She was smiling. I wasn't. I reached for it, then stopped halfway. Didn't matter. Not anymore. Not since last week when I found her in that synth-silk apartment with Donovan Cross. A low-tier clan enforcer. All implants and perfect teeth. Her hands were still around his waist when she saw me. She didn't flinch. Just looked me in the eye and said, “You're not going anywhere, Jace. And I can't keep waiting for someone who already gave up.” No screams. No explanations. Just that. I took the punch. Left without a word. But the echo? Still there. Footsteps in the stairwell snapped me back. Not the chaotic shuffle of attics. No stumbles. No coughs. Just the clean, measured pace of someone trained. I stood. Blood still warm. Heart still calm. The door creaked once. Then a knock. “Jace Ronan,” a woman's voice called. Smooth. Controlled. “I'm not here to kill you.” People who weren't going to kill you didn't start sentences like that. “Who are you?” I asked, voice low. A pause. “Someone who saw what you did tonight. Open the door, or I break it.” I hesitated. Part of me wanted to make her earn her entrance. But the rest of me, the part that had nothing left, unlocked the bolt and stepped back. The door opened. She walked in like the room owed her something. Tall. Lean. Black trench coat. Midnight braid. No visible weapon, but her posture was blade sharp. Cold. Efficient. Beautiful in a way that made you hot. “Name's Yui,” she said. “You just painted a target on your back.” I gave her nothing. She stared. “You really don't get it, do you?” “Saving a girl from a train's illegal now?” She scoffed. “Activating a banned protocol during a street fight is suicide. You think the clans don't have watchers?” I didn't answer. She moved past me, scanning the room like someone judging a corpse. I glanced at the photo again, her fingers still wrapped around Donovan's belt. “You're going to kill me before I go rogue?” “If I was, you'd be bleeding already.” Her eyes didn't blink. “I'm the only one who might help you survive what comes next.” “Why?” “Because the Ragnar Protocol isn't just outlawed tech. It's a living system. Adaptive. Experimental. Designed to evolve and choose.” “And you know what it is?” “Barely,” she admitted. “But I know enough to be afraid of it.” Yui tossed a sphere on the floor. It blinked red. “Anti-surveillance. We can talk now.” I crossed my arms. “So what now? You want me to be your errand boy?” She leaned in. “No. You're the hammer. I'm the eyes. If you want to survive, you work with me.” I laughed bitterly. “Guess I'm good for breaking things. That's all I've ever been.” She saw something in my face then. Maybe it was the old wound, not the fresh one. “What happened to you?” She asked. I didn't answer. Didn't need to. She nodded once, as if she already knew. Then the system chimed. [New quest. Chain reaction. Objective: Survive a live encounter with a teary cultivator. Reward: Skill unlock. Time limit: 72 hours. Failure: Forced system lockdown.] I exhaled. “You've got to be kidding.” Yui smirked. “Welcome to the upgrade.” She turned to leave. “Don't die before I find you again.” Sleep never came. Instead, I sat on the floor beneath the flickering bulb and stared at the photo one more time. Lena. The woman I bled for. Stole for. The woman who kissed me like I was her future and left me like I was her past. I tore the photo off the wall. It ripped down the middle. And still, her smile remained. By morning, I was in the old gym. Dust on the floor. Cobwebs in the rafters. Faint bloodstains on the mats. The place where I learned to fight. Where I earned my name before I lost it. The punching bag still hung from the ceiling. I wrapped my fists and I hit. Over and over. Bone. Bag. Breath. Again and again. [Training detected. XP applied. Progress 18%.] Pain didn't matter. Nothing did. Not Lena. Not the betrayal. Not the city that forgot me. That night, Yui messaged. INCOMING. I climbed to the rooftop, wind tearing at my coat. She crouched there like a gargoyle, tablet in hand. “Got something,” she said, showing me the screen. A man's face. Scar. Cybernetic eye. Tattoos like a map of violence. “Vico Dron,” she said. “Tier E cultivator. Drains street kids and feeds off their Chi. Clan protected.” “And if I stop him?” “You live. You level up.” “And if I fail?” “You die.” I stared out at Black Rift, drenched in sirens and decay. Lena's voice echoed somewhere in the bones of my memory. ‘You're not going anywhere.’ She was right. But not in the way she meant. I was done surviving. Now? Now I was rising. I cracked my knuckles and smiled. “Then I guess I better win.”
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Chapter 13: The Ghosts of Flesh
It started with the trembling.Not the kind you could see — not a visible shake — but something beneath the skin, deep and wrong. Like my nerves were trying to hum in two different keys at once. My body wasn’t rejecting the Ghost Circuit anymore. It was syncing.The first time I noticed it was when Yui and I set up camp in the hollow of an old freight tunnel. We’d been silent most of the day, neither of us wanting to speak about what we saw in the Cradle Vault — about Mara. But silence has weight, and when you carry it long enough, it starts whispering things you don’t want to hear.By dusk, I couldn’t stop feeling them. Others.At first, it was faint — a static hum, like voices carried through radio fog. Then, little by little, the hum sharpened into words. Not human ones. Thoughts that came in pulses of emotion, not language. Pain. Hunger. Memory. Pleading.I remember freezing, hand halfway to my canteen, when I felt it — a rush of panic that wasn’t mine. It shot through my spine li
Chapter 12: The Cradle Core
The coordinates burned themselves into my mind.Not like numbers, not even like words—more like instinct. A direction whispered into my bloodstream. When I closed my eyes, I could see it pulsing behind my eyelids: a map drawn in veins of light. It pointed underground, deep beneath the cracked surface of what used to be the Ashgrid Cradle.Yui and I moved without talking much. The silence between us was a weight—thick, tense, filled with all the things neither of us dared to ask after what happened at the Crown Node. I could feel her watching me sometimes when she thought I wasn’t looking, studying me the way you study a countdown timer. Waiting to see if I’d tick or explode.The Cradle wasn’t easy to reach. What was left of it lay under miles of slag and concrete, the remnants of some old pre-war city now buried under its own bones. The ground there was toxic, gray ash still clinging to ruins that hadn’t seen sunlight in years. My boots sank into it with every step, the air heavy with
Chapter 11: Crown Node Reborn
The world didn’t end when the Crown Node woke up—but it felt like it should have.The air cracked open. I could feel the sky changing texture, like the code behind it was being rewritten line by line. The node pulsed, sending waves of raw data into the atmosphere—light that wasn’t light, sound that wasn’t sound. It was information, living and breathing, spreading like wildfire through invisible veins that stretched across the wasteland.Every tower for miles came alive. I could see their broken silhouettes flicker in response, like a corpse twitching at the echo of its own name.My body vibrated with the signal. I wasn’t standing anymore; I was anchored—like the ground itself had wired into me, using my veins as conduits. The shard’s light inside my chest throbbed with the same rhythm as the node, perfectly in sync.And the world began to listen.Above us, clouds split into a vortex of static, streams of digital rain falling upward. The air shimmered with floating fragments of code,
The Fracture Signal
The shard wouldn’t stop pulsing.It started the night after Monarch burned — faint at first, just a weak flicker under my coat, like a dying ember clinging to life. Then it grew steady, rhythmic, deliberate. A heartbeat that didn’t belong to me. When I closed my eyes, it followed me into the dream — that same one, repeating like a broken reel. A tunnel made of glass veins. Light bleeding through the cracks. Whispers that weren’t words, not really, but streams of binary that felt… devotional. Like something out there was praying through me instead of to me.When I woke, my pulse wasn’t mine anymore. It matched the shard’s.Yui didn’t say anything at first. She just watched me. From across the camp, under the turbines, face half-lit by the dying fire. Rainwater clung to her lashes; the smell of static still hung in the air. She kept her hand near her weapon, though she didn’t think I noticed. But I did. I saw it in the tension of her shoulders, in the way she measured every breath aroun
Chapter 9: Echoes in the Fortress
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
Chapter 8: The Defectors Code
We ran. Not for fear. For time. Through soot-choked alleyways and under the bones of highways that hadn't carried traffic since the last real government fell. Each step kicked up ash, fallout, and reminders. The kind that stuck in your throat like regret. Fang retribution would be swift. Surgical. Merciless. I didn't need the ghost circuit to whisper that. Yui didn't speak. She just moved. Dropped into an old tram station buried beneath the Ashlock District. A graveyard of rust and glass. Yui pried opened the interface of a shuttle grid and patched into a dead feed. Her fingers danced like she was born with code in her veins. A decommissioned cargo tram groaned to life, lights flickering like it was waking from a nightmare. It was loud. Sloppy. Lit up on every outdated satellite like a beacon for bounty dogs and zealots. But it was fast. Now, that was enough. We didn't talk until Blackrift was a smear behind us, reduced to shadows and sirens beneath the poisoned horizon.
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