On Vael'Tris, sunrise is a warning.
Not a beginning. Not hope.
Just light exposing the monsters you couldn't hear in the dark.
Damien learned that quick.
His first week on the planet nearly killed him—six times. Every time he blinked, something lunged. Every time he ate, something hunted. Every time he slept, the world changed shape.
There was no training camp.No dojo.No guidance.
Only fire.Flesh.Steel.And fury.
Day 4 – The Pitfall Pack
They came from below.
Three fusion-enhanced savages, masked, jointed like insects, emerging from ground vents as if the planet had spit them up. Their skin was armored in chitin plates, spliced into their muscles by crude cyber-spines.
One moved sideways when he ran.Another's voice was static bursts—half commands, half laughter.The third kept vanishing into his blind spots, even in open ground.
Damien beat them.
But not clean.
He dislocated his knee. Broke his own wrist just to land the final elbow strike through the mask of the largest one. When it shattered, he saw eyes like dead glass staring back.
"It's not a fight if you're comfortable," he reminded himself later, while setting his own bone with a scavenged torque clamp.
Day 6 – Dust Storms and Deathcalls
The horizon went red first.
The locals started covering their mouths and sealing their eyes before the first winds hit.
Storms here weren't just wind—they were biological.Dust clouds filled with floating fusion spores and razor-shard particles, eating exposed flesh down to bone.
Damien wrapped himself in woven cloth from a fallen tribal mutant whose skin was already half-metal.
He fought scavenger insects the size of wolves, their shells reflecting the storm light, their mouths emitting modulated human voices stolen from old victims.
When one screamed in his mother's voice, he hesitated—just for a second.It almost cost him his throat.
He killed it with a rock.Then vomited until he passed out in a crater.Woke up to something chewing on his calf.
Killed that, too.
Day 9 – The Arena Found Him
It wasn't a structure—it was a wound in the land.
A crater, 200 feet wide, rimmed with spikes made from shipwreck hulls.Hundreds gathered in the shadows—mutants, augmented gladiators, mercenaries, cannibals.
A warlord with a throat of metal and eyes like molten glass announced:
"Survive three rounds. Take the key. Learn the path to the Vault."
Damien didn't know what the Vault was. Didn't care.But the crowd's roar had a challenge in it—and that, he understood.
He faced:
A fusion-drunk berserker who spoke only in strings of military code.
A synchronized clone pack of five women, implants tuned to match each other's reflexes to the millisecond.
A blindfolded monk with an electrified whip that moved toward the sound of his heartbeat.
Damien bled. He limped. But he won.
The warlord placed the key in his palm—a jagged shard of black crystal.
The moment it touched his skin, it pulsed.
Day 13 – The War Beast
They released it in the forest zone.Thirty feet tall. Twelve legs. Three heads.
It stank of rusted blood and chemical burns.
He ran—not out of fear, but because he needed space to think.
The beast followed, trees snapping under its weight, the ground trembling.
He lured it to a ravine lined with strangler vines. When it leapt, the vines caught. He broke its jaw with a fallen tree trunk, then strangled it until it stopped moving.
And when it was over, Damien sat beside its corpse. A live. Barely.
Every day was a fight. Every second was a test. There was no rest.
But Damien's eyes—golden, steady, unbroken—reflected only one truth:
"If this planet thinks it can break me… it'll have to try harder."
And deep under Vael'Tris, something ancient stirred.
The Starborn Vault was real.And the key he'd taken from the crater?
It reacted to his blood.
The whispers began that night—mercenaries, scavengers, and cultists muttering about a blood key. About the unaugmented one.
And in a chamber older than the planet's cities, Null Sanctum's oldest secret opened one eye.