System Rebirth: The Rise of Jace Ronan

Chapter 6: Ash In The Bloodline

The outer sectors of the Fang's reach weren't protected by sigils or soldiers. They didn't need to be. They were forgotten. And forgotten things rot on their own.

Here, the city peeled back its skin. Chain-link fences sagged like broken teeth, layered in static mesh and graffiti long since burned away by acid rain.

Street terminals sputtered with lifeless screens, weeping rust like old wounds.

The air stank of battery acid and something sourer, like history fermenting in gutter water.

Sector 17 didn't welcome visitors.

It devoured them.

I moved through the alleys with my hood low. Every step soaked in red rain. The sky bled dust and ash from some distant fire. Maybe a factory explosion, maybe a silent war, no one had the energy to report. The drops fell like rusted needles, painting streaks down my coat, seeping into the seams. I didn't mind. My conscience was already stained.

The building I needed rose like a carcass between collapsed towers. Four stories tall, spine-cracked, windows black with mildew. Once, it had been a Fang archive node. A minor outpost, buried under false records and erased blueprints. Now it pretended to be a gang-run bathhouse.

But I knew the truth. The Fang didn't abandon anything. Not data. Not even ghosts. I stepped through the shattered front window, boots crunching over glass and broken tiles. The mold hit first. Thick, bitter, and cloying. Then the tang of burnt oil. Prayer smoke still clung to the corners, whispering old mantras into the damp.

They said the sublevel held what was left of the archive. They didn't mention it was still guarded. He emerged from behind the broken reception desk like a shadow with teeth.

Older. Hard lines on his face. His long coat bore the faded weave of Fang sigils, spirals stitched into the fabric, barely glowing, only visible when the rain hit just right.

A scar split his upper lip and dragged down through his jawline, raw and red, like someone had tried to silence him the hard way. He didn't speak. He reached for the blade on his hip instead. I didn't give him the time.

My knife cleared my coat in a single motion, sweeping low in the slick filth as I moved. He met it halfway, steel shrieking against steel, sparks flaring like fireflies in the gloom. The echo of the clash rolled down the hallway like thunder. He was trained. His stance tight, breathing measured, but I wasn't trained. I was forged.

Three strikes later, he was bleeding from the thigh and listing on his knee, his blade skittering across the tile. I caught him by the collar and shoved him into the wall. My own weapon pressed just beneath his jaw.

“You're not guarding bath salts,” I said. He spat a thin line of blood across the floor.

“You're too late. They scrubbed it clean.”

“Maybe,” I said, tightening my grip, “but you're going to show me what's left.”

The sublevel stank of ozone and wet metal. The icy lights buzzed in the ceiling like flies circling a corpse. Most of the consoles were burned out, fried during some kind of partial purge. Shattered memory cores lay across the floor like bones.

Someone had tried to erase this place from the inside out, but they missed a terminal. Near the center, a screen blinked dimly, cracked and pulsing with soft blue static.

I dragged the wounded guard toward it and slammed him into the chair.

“Decrypt it,” I ordered.

He laughed, a broken, bubbling sound. “He won't give you peace, just pain.”

“Good,” I said. “Then, I'm already ready.”

He hesitated, then typed. The screen flickered once, then again. Then it began to play. Not lines of code—a footage, a grainy video. The kind recorded off an internal feed, archived, buried, and meant to be forgotten.

A boy, ten, maybe younger, thin, pale. His wrist strapped to a gurney, head twitching in pain. Wires buried into his scalp, blinking faintly as they said something. Maybe a signal, or maybe something worse, directly into his mind.

A woman stood beside him. Her face was just out of frame, but her voice, clear, soft, familiar.

“Don't be afraid, Jace,” she said gently. “This is what we planned. You're going to help the world.”

I froze.

I didn't know the memory, but I knew the voice. Not in my mind, but in my blood.

It was my mother.

The screen burned out seconds later. Too much power, too much time. Blood was running from his nose.

“You thought you were special,” he said, voice rasped. “You were never chosen. You were made. You're not a man, you're a program. A contingency.”

I slammed my fist into the wall beside his head. Not because he was wrong, because he wasn't.

And the truth was already flaring like acid behind my ribs. I tied him to the desk with his own belt and left him coughing blood and curses.

I didn't need more answers.

Just a direction to point my rage.

Yui waited three blocks out, perched on the hood of a dead sky-car like a ghost caught in mid-thought. Her hood was up.

Her eyes watched the alley long before I turned into it.

“You found something,” she said. Her voice was quiet, almost cautious.

I didn't speak at first, just stared at her. Let the silence drag the weight between us.

How much did she know?

How long had she known?

“You knew,” I said.

She didn't flinch, but the tension shifted in her shoulders. “Knew what?”

“That I wasn't just some street scab who stumbled into the circuit. That I didn't just get lucky.”

She was silent.

Finally, she nodded, barely. “There were rumors,” she said, “about a second experiment. After my brother, after he broke. They called it the Ash Protocol. They said it was buried, scrapped, a dead project.”

Her eyes met mine.

“I didn't know it was you. Not until you moved the way you did. Not until the circuit started answering.”

“You were meant to find me.”

“I was sent to confirm activation. Nothing more. And then…” her voice cracked. “Then I saw what they'd done. And I didn't want to be part of it.”

I nodded slowly.

The lie wasn't what hurt.

It was how much of me had wanted to believe she was clean.

We walked in silence until the sun died behind the city's ribs. The old checkpoint station loomed above the overpass like a broken spine.

We climbed the rusted stairwell to the roof and sat beneath the broken sky. Sirens blinked across the horizon, painting the skyline in slow, bleeding colors.

Yui curled up near the edge, hugging her knees. I stood facing the wind, my back to the east.

“You should go,” I said.

She looked up, confused. “What?”

“You've done your part. You kept me alive, pointed me toward the truth. But this next stretch? This is mine.”

“No.”

I turned.

She shook her head. “I made a mistake watching my brother die. Thought if I stayed distant, I'd survive it. Fix it. But distance didn't save me.”

She stood and walked toward me. “I already care, Jace. That's the mistake.”

I didn't answer.

Didn't have to.

We were both past the point of clean exits.

That night, the dream came again. A battlefield under twin moons. I held a sword, glowing faintly in my hand, humming with broken voices. A woman wrapped in firelight, standing atop a collapsing tower, whispering my name.

I woke with the blade beside me humming.

Not hot.

Not cold.

Alive.

And I understood something for the first time. The ghost circuit wasn't just giving me visions. It was remembering.

And it was bleeding into me. Or maybe I was bleeding into it.

Either way, there was no going back.