Kale Mercer stood at the edge of a gaping canyon where a highway used to be, the wind cutting across his cheeks like dry paper razors.
A crimson haze hung over the horizon, as if the sun had bled into the clouds and forgotten how to rise properly. Beneath the cliff, twisted structures slouched like the broken limbs of buried giants, half-devoured by glowing fungus and crawling mist. The air shimmered with mana — heavy and sour.
He didn't bother covering his mouth anymore. The first few months, he'd worn a respirator everywhere, terrified of breathing corrupted air. Then he got sick anyway, and then he didn't. His body adjusted. Just one more mutation courtesy of the system.
That had been the rule since the sky cracked open: adapt or die.
His boots crunched across glass and bone as he moved away from the ledge. The silence followed. Always the silence now.
The cities had once been loud — cars, trains, music leaking from coffee shops. Even the hum of electricity had once filled the cracks in the day. Now, there was nothing but wind and the distant shrieks of monsters too far to see.
Kale's thoughts had become just as quiet. The grief was still there, but it had settled — like sediment at the bottom of a still lake. Unmoved. Heavy.
He took shelter in a burned-out convenience store, its front torn open by some massive claw, its walls overgrown with blue-veined roots pulsing faintly in time with something he couldn't see. The mana flora didn't attack — but it wasn't harmless, either. Stay too long and you started to dream while you were awake. Stay longer than that, and you stopped dreaming altogether.
Kale tossed a flare into the far corner. The glow lit up the store's ruins. A single vending machine still stood against the wall, cracked and empty. Posters for soft drinks and old lottery tickets fluttered as he passed them. He stepped behind the counter and sat down, removing his pack with a groan.
His left shoulder ached again. A deep-set ache, not from injury — but from memory. He'd torn it trying to pull a screaming girl from a collapsed stairwell nine months ago. Her name was Riley. She didn't make it. He carried her pendant for a while until a trap room vaporized half his gear.
Kale leaned back against the counter and stared at the cracked ceiling. A small mana-bug — translucent and glowing orange — crawled along the wall. He watched it go, indifferent.
He pulled a dented flask from his coat, unscrewed it, and took a mouthful of foul-tasting water purified from dungeon runoff.
Everything tasted like copper these days. He'd bartered half a rare drop for a filter stone three weeks ago. Worth it.
His HUD blinked faintly:
[Mental Status: Isolated]
[Survival Modifier: Low morale -1 to all resistances]
[Trait: Endurance - Pain thresholds extended. Sleep penalty reduced.]
Kale stared at the words. He remembered when they used to mean something — back when he was trying to "optimize" his build. Trying to figure out what kind of class he had. What role he played.
Now he didn't care.
No one cared about builds anymore. Most of the people still alive didn't talk about "class trees" or "rare drops" or "guild rankings."
They talked about weather anomalies, safe zones, and how many more weeks until the water table went toxic.
And yet… every few weeks, someone would wander through a ruin wearing full dungeon gear, with a nameplate above their head and six-digit health bars. Kale never stopped them. They weren't like him. They were players.
He was just a man who didn't die fast enough.
The wind picked up outside. A low, keening sound echoed through the broken city, the kind that made your skin crawl. Not quite a monster cry. Not quite natural. Just… wrong.
Kale tightened the straps on his pack again and stood. He didn't plan on staying long.
He made his way back out through the crumbling door, stepping over a collapsed shelf of shattered snack bags and old cigarette cartons. Outside, the haze had thickened. A storm was coming — a mana surge, likely.
He needed to find higher ground. Mana storms pooled in the low places, warping everything. That included time. Kale had spent two days once in a submerged subway station and came out to find that a month had passed. His beard had grown. His watch had stopped. The scars on his arm had healed.
The system didn't explain everything.
Maybe it didn't need to.
Climbing onto a collapsed overpass, Kale picked his way over scorched cars fused into the pavement. He passed a skeleton buckled in the front seat of a police cruiser. The badge on the chest plate read "Stevenson." Kale nodded to it — a stupid, quiet ritual he did for every uniform he found.
He was almost over the ridge when he paused. Something caught his eye — movement, faint and fluttering. A piece of red cloth tangled on a rusted railing. A child's jacket, small, sun-bleached, and tattered. It flapped once in the wind.
He stared at it for a long time, fists clenched.
There had been children in his shelter group. Back when people still tried. Back when the dungeon changes were new and unpredictable. Some of them had mutated. Some had simply vanished — taken by the system. Teleported into instances they weren't meant to survive.
The system didn't care how old you were. Everyone had a role. Even the kids.
The thought made Kale's stomach twist.
He turned away, heart leaden, and climbed the last few feet to the overpass summit. From here, the city stretched outward like a broken skeleton. Giant chasms split through what used to be neighborhoods. Strange towers rose in places where nothing had stood before — dungeon spires, growing like tumors across the world.
Above it all, the sky swirled — not blue, not black, but a constantly shifting storm of red, violet, and sickly gold. The shape of the god-thing was still faintly visible there, like a moon you could see during the day. Sometimes it blinked.
Kale watched it for a moment.
"I hope you choke," he said quietly.
He didn't know if the thing heard prayers. Or curses. Or anything. But saying it still helped.
He set up camp under a fallen billboard, using a chunk of broken metal and debris to create a lean-to. It wouldn't stop a beast, but it might block the mana rain. He sat against the support beam, holding his knife loosely in one hand. He didn't sleep much anymore.
As the storm built in the distance, the air crackled with magic. Small lights drifted through the dark — not fireflies, but code motes, the floating remnants of failed instances. They passed through him harmlessly, whispering ghost data from long-deleted dungeons.
He closed his eyes, listening to the static. The silence between it. The aching, crushing weight of nothing.
In the morning, he'd move again.
In the morning, he'd keep going.
Because that's what you do when you've lost everything and there's nothing left worth hoping for.
You move.
One more day.
One more dungeon.
And maybe — just maybe — something will finally kill you right.
But not tonight.
Not yet.