"Does it really have to be this early?" I grumbled, my voice still hoarse, as if the waking world itself hadn't yet signed off on my existence.
My steps were shakier than a fisherman's boat tossed by a vengeful storm. Even Erin—usually quick with a snark or a sigh—had yet to flicker into consciousness. Maybe he was still lost in a dream more comforting than anything my body could offer.
No surprise there—sleep had been a forbidden luxury these last two days. Simply brushing up against my own bed felt like committing a cardinal sin. I'd sprawled across a narrow chair, back knotted, head pounding—forced into unconsciousness by sheer exhaustion, not by any hint of choice.
But maybe, honestly, I should have gotten used to all this by now. Lately, I could summon two black sphere at once without feeling like I might rupture from the inside—though Erin's effortless dexterity was still enough to stoke some potent envy.
Before me, the northern district stretched out—a labyrinthine industrial corpse too stubborn to die. Rusted iron girders pressed shoulder to shoulder with translucent glass panels, streaked and cracked, overgrown with bluish-violet moss that slurped what little light dripped from the whisper-thin hanging corals. Steel pipes spanned overhead, some still belching plumes of hissing vapor. Condensation dripped in erratic rhythms, baptizing the grimy streets with a damp, arrhythmic symphony.
To the left, an open workshop was awash in turquoise-neon—its glow splintered by the sheen of wet floors, workers' shadows shattered and overlapping like ghosts in a fractured mirror. Quick footfalls, hollow-eyed stares, uniforms half-stained, heavy equipment slung like burdens, logistics crates dragged across the floor—living, but half-buried by exhaustion.
Harsh laughter and stray curses twined with the raw roar of machinery, generating an unbroken illusion of routine—a monotony never dull, merely brutal.
An old woman perched beneath a factory window, sparking up an electric cigarette that stank of cheap chemicals even at this distance. Her hand clutched a metal mug of coffee, its steam instantly pilfered by the glacial exhale of some titanic cooling engine behind her. She glanced at me—bleary eyes, yet sharp as broken glass—then looked away, back to the road, as if nothing here could surprise her anymore.
"I could've just gone with Ashsa—he left more than an hour earlier," Adonis muttered eventually, fighting off sleep with pointless chatter.
"Thanks for squeezing in time to hang out with your little brother," I replied, mustering barely a sideways glance as exhaustion crashed into what little dignity I had left.
"Not really. I just overslept."
Regret hit me instantly. For once, could you not nuke the mood with that brutal honesty?
"You ought to watch your sleep schedule too," he pressed on, slipping into the tone of a crusty professor. "I know your wild teenage hormones are hard to cage, but health first, yeah?"
Huh…? My brain scrambled to decode his words; it felt like trying to swallow a stone—dry, rough, and guaranteed to leave a mark.
"Every night I hear weird noises from your room," Adonis went on, voice suddenly matter-of-fact. "Creaking, banging… sometimes it sounds like you're wrecking the place."
I shot him a look—part suspicion, part genuine alarm. Don't tell me—
"I've done the same in my room, sometimes," he continued, weirdly nonchalant. "But even at my loudest, you outdo me. I've never once heard Ashsa or Paris get that wild."
I nearly choked. "Wait—no! It's not what you think—this isn't— I mean—"
Adonis raised an eyebrow, feigning innocence. "Relax, totally normal. Don't sweat it. Everyone goes through these phases."
"That's not it!" My voice cracked a full octave, ricocheting awkwardly off the metal pipes overhead. "It's just… training. Energy. Orbs. Mana. You know what I mean, right?"
Fantastic. Now I sounded even more suspicious.
Had I just been convicted of some bizarre roughhouse fetish?
Obviously not! I'm not some wild, uncontrollable creature. The one causing all that racket? Yeah, it's always me, but—honestly, it's Erin's fault. He treats throwing that black sphere in training like it's a full-contact sport.
They hit the walls with a sound like hollow metal drums hurled off a cliff—and yes, I used to be one of them. But now, ever since I've gained more control, the chaos has started to quiet.
As we walked deeper in, the sounds around us merged into a pounding symphony sharp enough to make your eardrums wince: the mechanical squeal of grinding rails, dense industrial fog whipping down alleyways, and the shouts of workers—whether cursing or cracking jokes, it was impossible to tell. All of it spilled wildly into the atmosphere, like a riot given rhythm.
No surprise there—this was the northern sector, the industrial heart of Tyan Flamino. Black smoke and choking pollution clung to the skyline like a blanket of slow-moving poison. The air didn't feel like breath; it was more like inhaling iron. The workers here... tightly packed, steel-willed, soaked in sweat and caked with carbon residue. Every street corner felt like a lung the city had overworked for far too long.
I couldn't remember the district's official name. Locals called it Sahel Rai—same as the one who ruled over it.
But really... this wasn't a place where anyone grew up soft.
We reached a three-way fork in the road. Left led to the agricultural plains—a vast network of enclosed farms that fed nearly the entire city. Right, on the other hand, took you to the seafloor mining facilities and the subaquatic launch docks, where scavengers and deep-sea divers prepped before plunging down into the crust of the ocean and venturing into unmapped ash zones.
That's where they boarded compact submersibles—or sometimes strange amphibious crawlships, like scaled iron insects.
Despite being called the "mining zone," the area served far more than that: it was a hub, a makeshift port, even home to families of marine hunters through deepwater trenches.
My thoughts drifted aimlessly, tangled in pipes and gutters and bioluminescent overgrowth creeping up through fractured foundation stones, when my eyes finally landed on the Alteker headquarters in the distance.
The building towered above the clutter like a nomad fortress, ringed in thick iron fencing that shimmered faintly with an electric pulse running through its edge. Two guards stood poised at the massive front gate, clad head to toe in Alteker's signature tactical gear. The moss green uniforms—they matched Adonis perfectly.
While I stood there ogling the sheer scale of the facility, dazed, Adonis had already stepped forward—calm, unhurried, carrying the weight of someone who never needed to doubt his presence.
"Ahhh, Adonis," said one of the guards, his voice tinged with metallic distortion from the helmet's speaker. "Doesn't happen often that we see you show up late."
Adonis's face didn't shift. Still ice-cold. But I could swear he almost smiled.
"I'm still trying to peel off the last shift," Adonis drawled, slouching like a man half-subsumed by sleep.
One of the guards—a burly man with oily skin and mischievous, glinting eyes—snorted softly. "By the way, your Captain was sniffing around, looking for you at the breach yesterday. Ashsa's already gone out on expedition hours ago. Oh, and… this your little brother?"
Before I knew it, the man had shuffled closer, his heavy hand dropping onto my shoulder in a friendly trap. His scent was an odd cocktail: sharp salt air laced with rusted metal.
"You two don't look alike at all, do you? Hahaha…"
Seriously? In what ocean is that considered small talk?
"I'm Dovin," he said, voice crackling with mock pride. "If you're wondering why I'm stuck outside—well, duty calls. I'd actually love to be out on patrol, but the Captain nailed me to this spot."
"Wanna trade?" Adonis called out, his trademark phantom grin slipping into view.
"You take my patch shift, I'll keep the gate warm. Bet I make it look easy."
Dovin chuckled, shaking his head. "You've got it backwards. I want out, not patchwork. Sitting here wasn't exactly my childhood dream," he said, half-joking.
"Oh, come on. Isn't hanging around the gate supposed to be relaxing? Safe, bone-dry, no pressure zones or abyssal terrors to worry about."
"Sure, it's comfortable," Dovin admitted, "but I didn't join Alteker just to warm a chair. My family's all fishermen, you know? My old man—he used to head out before dawn with his crew. That was before the whole Western District mess hit."
For a moment, his features clouded over, wistfulness seeping into those curious eyes.
"You get it, don't you? Growing up wishing you could chase the edge of the city, watching your dad come back, hair still dripping, skin slightly wrinkled from hours underwater, hauling up nets so heavy he could barely carry them, laughing like the ocean was his best friend. It's no wonder the deep called to me too."
He paused, drawing a breath as if sampling wind no longer his to claim. "Someday, maybe I'll find out what it's really like. But by the time I was old enough, my father… never came back from another accident out there. After that, my family put their foot down—no more following in his wake."
"So you joined Alteker instead?"
Dovin shrugged, resignation lacing his voice. "There wasn't any objection at home, so I went for it. These days I'm just another gatekeeper. But I know—my turn will come. They can't keep me penned up forever."
He ended his story with a thin, almost apologetic smile. "Ah, sorry. I must've rambled a little too much, huh?"
Honestly, that "sorry" was far too late. He'd already bartered away his entire life story in five minutes flat—I'd nearly lost myself, swept up and forgetting what I was even here for.
From the corner of my eye, I caught Adonis waiting, arms crossed, wearing an expression halfway between boredom and silent warning—a cue louder than a starving dragon's roar.
A hush lingered as I left Dovin's orbit—my footsteps scattering what little warmth remained between the factories and midnight-green uniformed guards. The city's heartbeat thudded in the pipes overhead, echoing through the distance behind me, relentless and metallic, like someone refusing to let go of a memory.
The morning, if you could call it that, pressed in from all sides—gray, expectant, laced with the taste of ozone and old machinery. I glanced once more over my shoulder: Adonis had already slipped into headquarters, swallowed up by the blinding light of its gates; Dovin stood watching the horizon too long, as though searching the waves for someone he knew wouldn't return, everyone bracing for another day's grind under the creaking bones of Sahel Rai.