The Last Mortal

"Kneel before the plate, trash, or I'll break your legs myself."

The border guard’s hand slammed onto my shoulder, his fingers digging into my collarbone with the weight of a hydraulic press. Around his forearm, a dull brown light pulsed with a heavy, rock-like density. It was the mark of an active Iron-rank bloodline, the lowest tier of divine essence permitted inside the Upper Ring gates, but still more than enough to crush an ordinary citizen.

I didn't move an inch. I kept my weight centered, my boots planted firmly against the cold obsidian floor. "The machine is just lagging. Give it a second."

"The city mainframe doesn't lag," the guard sneered, shoving me harder against the metallic scanning plate.

Above our heads, the automated security turnstiles of the Upper Ring border gate flashed a violent, blinking red. The high-altitude tracking arrays hummed, casting a blood-colored glare over my face. The terminal screen on the pillar refreshed twice, displaying the same system alert in bold runes.

Warning: Null Error detected at Sector 4 Relay. Biological signature unmapped. Suppress the anomaly.

The crowd behind us went dead silent. The low-frequency hum of the city's energy grid seemed to drop an octave as hundreds of wealthy citizens backed away from me. They held their silk robes tight against their chests, their eyes wide with a mixture of terror and disgust. In a world where every single human being awakened a divine ancestral power at birth, a blank reading was a physical impossibility. I was a walking systemic glitch.

The guard stepped into my line of sight, his face twisting as he looked at my grey eyes. "A body with zero essence is an illegal node. I'm purging your core before the corruption hits the main transit line."

He raised his right hand. The skin across his knuckles split and reformed, turning into jagged, solid gray stone as his Stone-Shaper bloodline flared to life. The heat of his divine energy warmed the air, filling the narrow corridor with the scent of dry dust and scorched clay. He drove his fist straight toward my ribs, intending to liquefy my internal organs and drop me right onto the tiles.

The fist hit my chest.

There was no explosive crack of bone. There was no kinetic shockwave. The rock-shaping energy failed instantly. The absolute vacuum of my mortal body drank the current whole, pulling the heavy elemental pressure out of his knuckles before the force could transfer to my spine. The brown light along his arm sputtered, choked, and dissolved directly into my pores.

The guard froze. His stone-covered fist remained pressed against my chest, but the gray rock was already crumbling into fine white powder. The arrogance vanished from his face. He stared at his trembling fingers, his eyes widening as his internal biometric systems glitched. "What did you do? My connection to the ancestor is gone."

"Your ancestor was just a man who forgot how to bleed," I said.

I grabbed his wrist before he could pull back. My bare fingers locked around his leather cuff, establishing a direct physical loop between his marrow and my empty directory. The Null key inside my mind slammed open, activating a heavy, silent vortex that targeted the genetic code inside his blood. I could feel his thin, fragile line of power—a clumsy, unoptimized sequence passed down through generations of forced lineage breeding.

I pulled.

The guard choked. His knees buckled, hitting the obsidian tiles with a dull thud as his face turned a sickly, hollow white. The remaining warmth in his marrow was dragged out through his arm, sucked straight into the silent static of my palm. He thrashed against my grip, his lips moving soundlessly as the last spark of his lineage was uninstalled from his DNA.

Divine Energy Input: Stone-Shaper (Iron-Rank) detected.

Action: Executing total consumption.

Status: Complete. Technique archived in mortal directory.

I let go. The captain crumpled onto the floor like an empty sack of flour, clutching his powerless hands to his chest. He shivered violently, his skin pale and devoid of the healthy glow that divine essence provided. He was a baseline mortal now. He was the exact thing his sacred house spent centuries executing in the name of evolutionary purity.

The gate sirens began to wail at maximum volume as the local relay station struggled to process the total formatting of an official. The automated defensive laser grids dropped into the floor, their power supplies short-circuiting as the terminal entered a forced emergency reboot. The heavy steel security barriers groaned, locking themselves halfway down the track.

I didn't wait around for the reinforcement squads to deploy from the upper towers. I reached down, snatched the guard's silver registry token from his belt, and forced a thread of my newly stolen stone-shaper essence into the core. The metal coin flashed a green, authorized signal, overriding the local lock.

I pushed through the unpowered turnstiles and slipped into the crowded, neon-lit avenues of the Upper Ring just as the searchlights of the first vanguard gunships began to sweep the gate.

The upper city was a different world entirely. Tall, ivory towers reached toward the sky-scar, their balconies draped in golden silk and glowing essence crystals that lit the streets below in a warm, amber hue. The air here was clean, scrubbed of the toxic sulfur and industrial soot that choked the slums of the Lower Ring. Well-dressed aristocrats walked past me, their private bodyguards radiating bright Silver and Gold-rank auras that warped the air with pressure.

I kept my head down, burying my face beneath my cloak as I navigated the winding pathways. Every corner had an automated scanning drone hovering overhead, its blue optical lens scanning the crowd for unauthorized signatures. My artificial Iron-rank pulse was holding for now, mimicking the dead captain's frequency, but the encryption on his silver token wouldn't last more than an hour before the mainframe flagged the discrepancy.

I needed to find shelter, and I needed it fast.

I reached into my inner pocket, my fingers brushing against the crumpled scrap of parchment my lower-tier informant had given me before I crossed the border. It contained a set of coordinates for a location hidden within the mid-tier commercial district—a place that allegedly operated outside the strict oversight of the Ministry of Optimization.

According to the map, the entrance was located behind an elite boutique that specialized in custom essence-weaving for minor nobles. I turned down a narrower alleyway, the bright amber light of the main avenues fading into cool, indigo shadows. The text on the brass sign above the door read Solenn Atelier.

I placed my hand on the handle. The wood was cold, embedded with fine silver threads that twitched slightly as my palm made contact, testing for an authorized bloodline signature. Instead of fighting the seal, I let a fraction of the stolen Stone-Shaper energy leak from my skin. The silver threads accepted the code, and the heavy lock clicked open with a quiet, oily hiss.

I stepped inside, closing the heavy door behind me to shut out the distant wail of the gate sirens.