Seven Years Ago — Hana Association, Sector Theta-9
The light in the observation chamber was artificial—pale, perfect, clinical. Lyra Viren sat alone in a glass booth overlooking a data-cradle, her spine straight, hands clasped on her lap like she'd been programmed to wait that way.
Outside the glass, a girl screamed.
Lyra didn't flinch.
The test subject—a failed Singularity host—convulsed beneath containment straps, flesh bubbling along the arms as the Ecliptic Lattice tore itself loose at the cellular level. Technicians watched through visors, voices calm as they narrated the breakdown. The girl begged for help.
Lyra's orders were to monitor neurological drift.
Not intervene.
The screaming stopped. A gurney carted the body away, trailed by the stench of ionized blood and ozone. Someone sanitized the floor like it was a spreadsheet error. Another line item on the anomaly log.
Lyra blinked once. Her pulse didn't change.
She checked her datapad.
SUBJECT #207 – DECEASED.
INTEGRATION STABILITY: 2.1%
RECOMMENDED ACTION: DISPOSAL / CORE EXTRACTION
"Unacceptable," said a voice behind her.
She turned.
Administrator Reilin. Pale suit, smoother than the walls, posture like a blade. His eyes didn't blink when he looked at her.
"You've run ninety-seven simulations with zero sustainable hosts," he said. "If you were anyone else, your division would be suspended. Explain."
Lyra stood, sharp and silent. "There is no flaw in my calculations. The problem is emotional turbulence. All previous hosts attempted resistance."
Reilin stepped closer. His breath didn't fog the glass.
"And you think you're different."
Lyra didn't respond.
Reilin tapped the glass of her observation cell. "You've volunteered for integration, yes?"
"Yes."
"Even knowing the Ecliptic Lattice erodes identity, emotional function, and autonomic memory?"
"Yes."
"You think stripping yourself to nothing makes you more human?"
"I don't care about being human," Lyra said. "I care about being correct."
Reilin smiled, faint and dead. "Good."
Five Years Ago — Post-Integration
Pain was a concept. Not a feeling.
Lyra lay in the containment bath, suspended in sterile gel. Blue light ran lines across her spine, mapping the lattice of the Singularity as it fused to her nerves. She remembered her own name the way someone remembers a half-read file—retrievable, but unimportant.
Her first post-op mission was a success.
Three fixers dead. Zero missed shots. No hesitation.
She remembered the sounds their bodies made when they hit the floor. Not because they disturbed her. But because she calibrated her aim based on bone density and floor material.
Every mistake got logged.
Emotions didn't.
At night, she stared at her reflection and saw a face still learning what expressions to make. Still calculating what mattered.
Until one mission. The Spiral had already begun then. The city was fracturing. Her squad was ordered to abandon a burning zone.
A civilian child—barely six—stood in the rubble, crying for someone no longer breathing.
Her commander said, "Leave it."
She didn't.
She crossed the fire line. Picked the child up. Carried her through a collapsing wall of glass and shrapnel.
It wasn't logical. It wasn't efficient.
But it was real.
Present – Post-Echo-Zeta, Outside The Mirror Scar
Lyra sat on a collapsed signpost outside the shattered zone, tuning her knives. The blue glow danced across her hands. Her mind was quiet, but not blank.
Vash was nearby, kicking debris, humming a melody too off-key to have ever been a real song.
"You ever think about what they took from you?" he asked, unprompted.
She didn't look at him.
"Yes."
"You remember anything about who you were?"
"A little."
"Do you miss her?"
Silence.
Then:
"Sometimes. But she wouldn't have survived this long."
Vash sat beside her. Didn't speak. Didn't press. Just sat. The way someone does when they don't have the answers but know better than to pretend.
After a long pause, Lyra spoke again.
"I saved a girl once. In the fire. No protocol. No data. I just… moved."
"Why?" Vash asked.
"I think I wanted to believe I wasn't gone yet."
She stood, her voice back to its calm, clinical tone. "Target data for the next job is in the cache."
And just like that, the moment passed. Filed. Archived.
But she remembered the girl.
And the flame.
The walk back was rather slow thanks to all the scattered debris in every place you could possibly think of.
The wind in the outskirts of Zone 2-A always carried static—little crackles of memory, distorted echoes, as if the City itself was whispering through malfunctioning speakers. Vash winced every time it buzzed too close to his implant.
Lyra didn't react. She'd already tuned her internal filters. She always did.
They reached the landing platform, a half-collapsed overpass reclaimed by moss and old metal bones. The skimmer was waiting, engines idle, lights off. Even machines knew to stay quiet here.
Vash leaned against the hull and cracked open a ration bar with his teeth. It tasted like salt and battery acid, but it was calories. He chewed slowly, watching Lyra check her weapon integrity without a word.
"Does it ever bother you?" he asked.
She didn't look up. "What?"
"That there's nothing after this."
She paused for half a beat. Just long enough for him to know the question landed.
"I used to think there was," she said. "Something cleaner. Some light at the edge."
"And now?"
Lyra finished her calibration. Slid the knife back into its sheath.
"Now I think the City is the after."
Vash let that sit.
"Damn," he muttered, rubbing the side of his head. "That's bleak, even for you."
"Bleak is a baseline. Anything above that is luck."
He sighed and looked out toward the Splinter. The horizon shimmered like a mirage. The place they just escaped from didn't even look real anymore—like a memory already decomposing.
"I keep thinking about the people we've lost," he said. "Names I can't remember, faces I can't place. Every time I power up this thing—" he flexed his gauntlet, the heat coils flickering "—I feel like something else burns away. I don't even know what anymore."
Lyra stepped beside him. Close, but not touching.
"That's because it's not just memory loss," she said quietly. "It's identity erosion. You're not forgetting. The City is editing you."
He looked at her, surprised. "You knew?"
"I ran diagnostics on you three months ago. Didn't tell you. Didn't want it to become prophecy."
Vash's jaw clenched. His eye glowed faintly red, even in rest mode.
"Why are you telling me now?"
Lyra looked up at him.
"Because when you hit that Echo copy… I saw something. The real you. Not the version the City keeps rewriting. And I think it matters."
Vash stared at her. Unblinking. Something raw passed between them, like heat off a burned-out engine. Not romantic. Not soft. But true.
"You've still got pieces left," she said. "So do I. We hold what we can."
He opened his mouth—then closed it. Thought better of words.
Instead, he reached out and pressed his forehead gently against hers. Just for a moment. Her optics dimmed, not in retreat, but in recognition.
When he pulled back, the wind had shifted.
A storm was coming—he could taste it.
But right now, for a flicker of a second, there was silence between them. Not the hollow kind. The kind that felt earned.
Then Lyra's HUD pinged.
A priority pulse.
Lyra's HUD blinked. Vash's implant buzzed low behind his eye.
SOURCE: THE FOUNDRY
PRIORITY: SUMMONING – ACTIVE OPERATIVES
LOCATION: SECTOR 4A — PLATFORM NODE 17
NOTE: WARP TRAIN ACCESS GRANTED
MESSAGE: "COME ARMED. COME READY."
Vash tilted his head. "No target?"
"Not yet," Lyra murmured. "But The Foundry doesn't call meetings unless something's coming apart. Or about to explode."
"Either way," he said, already sliding his gauntlet into active sheath mode, "we're going."
The station had been reclaimed by rust and graffiti, its walls layered with posters from five different decades, all crumbling and bleeding into one another. Despite the grime, the warp train still ran—one of the last functioning underground lines left in The City. Rumors said the tech wasn't maintained, just afraid to break in front of the wrong people.
Vash and Lyra boarded without speaking.
The car was empty except for a drone conductor bolted into the ceiling, its lenses watching them with passive, predatory calm.
The train launched forward. Outside, time peeled sideways.
Warp transit didn't move through space. It cheated through it. For fifteen seconds, the windows showed versions of The City that had never been—cities made of bone, wire, inverted towers of glass where the sky dripped like paint. Lyra ignored it. Vash stared. He always stared.
"Still gives me vertigo," he muttered.
"Then stop looking dummy."
He grinned.
The train jerked to a halt, exactly fifteen seconds later.
The Foundry — Sector 4A
The subway entrance descended further than the maps said it should.
The Foundry was never marked on official records. It was a myth with plumbing, a hidden colony built from scrap, tech salvage, and stubborn survival. Housed in the shell of a collapsed metro interchange, the place pulsed with generator glow, vendor calls, and the smell of synthetic oil mixed with cooked meat.
Makeshift buildings lined the underground tracks—taverns, repair shops, arms dealers, even street performers juggling live voltage. Above, scaffolds spidered the ceiling like webs, connecting zones with bridges of rusted rail.
And at the center of it all:
A blackened iron building shaped like a decommissioned reactor core. The Foundry Headquarters.
Vash exhaled. "Smells like home."
They moved through the inner checkpoint with retinal and weapon scans. Inside, the main hall was thick with bounty hunters, mercs, and scavengers—all watching, waiting.
A tall figure stood at the end of the war table—half buried in flickering holoscreens.
The Quartermaster.
Old. Human, maybe. No one knew anymore.
His frame was a patchwork of armored robes and grafted tech—his left arm a prosthetic forge, constantly venting heat from its elbow, his face covered by a rust-red visor and rebreather that clicked with every breath. On his chest, the ancient sigil of an unknown Wing—long since dissolved.
When he spoke, his voice echoed like molten metal poured into an empty room.
"Crimson Static. Azure Silence. Sit. We've got a problem."
The war table hummed with low energy, a web of projection lines running across its iron surface—each one twitching toward a blinking node in Sector Null, deep below the Splinter Zones. The air inside The Foundry headquarters was thick—heat from recycled generators, oil smoke from a nearby forge, and the sharp scent of ozone leaking from damaged singularity dampeners.
Vash leaned back in his seat, arms crossed, his red eye twitching as it adjusted to the flickering light.
Lyra stood motionless, hands clasped behind her back, eyes absorbing every line of the display.
And around them sat the most unstable collection of sanctioned killers left in The City.
First came CATHEX.
A bounty seer—once human, now something else entirely. Her voice glitched between radio static and prophecy. Her mirrored mask reflected everything and nothing, and her long, twitching fingers scratched absentmindedly at the edge of the table as if trying to dig something out of time itself.
She suddenly tilted her head, the movement insect-like.
Then she shrieked—a sound like glass shattering inside a memory.
"These two will cause us great suffering and torment!" she intoned, a beat too loud. "The red burns fast, the blue forgets the blade!"
Vash gave her a sidelong glance. "Well that's rude."
Lyra didn't react.
The figure beside Cathex let out a mechanical chuckle that sounded like bolts rolling down steel.
GEARJUNK, the hulking mech-pilot, shifted his heavy exo-suit with a loud hiss of vented pressure. Bits of old tech clung to him like barnacles—fragments of weapon cores, reinforced plating, and half-melted wing logos soldered to his shoulders.
"Calm yourself, Cathex," he said. "Your memory bank seems to have lost its touch."
He grinned beneath his thick helmet. "Besides, I like these two. They've got flair."
KRRRCH.
The sharp grind of a voice cut through the table like a blade.
DOGEND, Slouched in the shadow of a broken pillar, masked and scarred, twin scatterblades strapped across his back like grave markers. His voice rasped through his melted rebreather, every word dragged through sandpaper lungs.
"Can you loud imbeciles quiet down before I burn you both to nothing…?"
Across from him, INK leaned against a cracked pillar.
Or… maybe not leaned. Ink's form constantly shifted—skin etched with glowing sigils that reshaped into different faces, different silhouettes. Male, female, beast, blur. Ink was whatever the job needed it to be.
The sigils across its chest shimmered, peeling away like heatwaves. They reformed into glowing words across its abdomen:
"IT ANNOYS ME TO NO END THAT I WORK IN THE SAME PLACE AS YOU IDIOTS."
Gearjunk let out a snort. "Come on, Ink. We're practically family."
Another sigil peeled off Ink's arm, fluttered like a burning tattoo across the table.
YOU'RE THE DRUNK UNCLE WHO NEVER DIES.
Gearjunk chuckled before responding.
"Fair enough."
At the end of the table, seated perfectly straight, was TESSERA.
Former Archive Manager. Her crystal earrings caught the flickering holo-light. The shredded-blueprint gown she wore didn't flow—it hung, like dead theory pinned to skin. Her long green hair was woven into a tight braid, coiled like a question mark.
She tapped a stylus against her tablet as she spoke.
"If we're done posturing around, I would like to speak in assistance of The Quartermaster...So let's begin."
She tapped a corner of the war table. A series of icons appeared—an arc of five glyphs used in Crimson Dossier threat indexing.
WORLD LOG: THREAT LEVEL INDEX
"For those of you too concussed to remember," she said dryly, "The Dossier uses a five-tier classification system for anomaly threats."
"First comes WHITE, which symbolizes a minimal threat and doesn't pose any notable threat to cause issues within its respective Splinter."
Tessera tapped her stylus on the tablet once more as the index changed.
Then comes YELLOW, Which showcases the active danger associated with said threat level, and requires attention. Low-chance of mass-chaos occurring.
Tessera tapped her stylus once again.
It is then followed up with...RED, which is indicative of a Severe threat, and can cause major harm and chaos in its respective situation if not dealt with accordingly. These situations are usually in accordance with notable threats in the City of course.
"Falling asleep with this pace we're going at..." Gearjunk muttered out.
"Shut up and pay attention or I'll burn you." Dogend said with raspy anger.
"Fine...jeez..." Gearjunk responded.
Tessera taps her stylus once more.
We then come to BLACK...Which is a threat that is catastrophic on the scale, and is generally noted for threats that are of major value and can cause entire collapses in the City's system if left unchecked.
These are all the general check's that are applied for active threat levels when it comes to the distinctive situations that can happen in this city, and if you weren't aware because of suddenly hitting your head to hard well you will surely remember now.
"Tessera...Tell them about the specific case that we are dealing with..." The Quartermaster's hollow voice rang out.
Tessera seemed to be briefly shook upon hearing these words before speaking again.
"What we're seeing here is a potential Null-tier breach. That doesn't happen. Not unless the Dossier wants to warn us without leaving proof."
The bounty-hunters all were confused and somewhat shocked at this.
"A Null-tier breach you say..?" Dogend repeated out.
"It's been decades since we've had something like this, You better not be fucking around Tessera." Vash said with seriousness.
"I only speak of what must be spoken of." Tessera reassured.
"And what must be spoken of is...You will all face the mission of dealing with this threat...now..." The Quartermaster spoke out.
Vash frowned. "So what the hell is it?"
Cathex whispered something incomprehensible. Then raised her head.
"The deep remembers. Buried tech. Forgotten code. The end itself..."
Dogend grunted. "They're sending us into a graveyard with no name."
Tessera nodded. "The Quartermaster called it the Godspine. Old Wing tech. Possibly pre-Spiral. Possibly not ours at all."
Ink's sigils flickered to life again.
"I'VE KILLED FOR LESS INFORMATION THAN THIS."
Gearjunk cracked his knuckles. "So what's the play? Recon or rupture?"
Lyra spoke, calm as ever. "We go down. We confirm. If it moves, we report. If it breathes, we stop it."
Vash grinned. "And if it talks?"
"Then I let you handle that part."
A low rumble shook the table as the Quartermaster returned—his molten forge-arm glowing brighter than before.
"Briefing's over," he said.
"Transit opens at zero hour. Load up. You're headed to a place the Wings buried and prayed no one would dig up."