Light unstitched itself, then the woman spoke.
Her voice was half-words and half-broken recording: "You weren't…"
Static cut the syllable like a file corrupted mid save. The shards of sound hit the crater, ricocheting into nothing.
For a breath, the world inverted. Night looked like daylight. Ash gleamed like mica. Her outline wavered, not entirely there at all.
As if someone had attempted to render her, and the process timed out.
Her eyes were a storm glass grey deep as the weather itself.
She lifted trembling hands and traced a sigil in the air: jagged, extremely ugly, the kind of mark meant to anchor things that should not be anchored.
Arlen recognized the shape with the odd physicality of a memory you haven't yet lived.
It hammered his skin with a sensation like cold iron pressing against a new scar. Like the pillow after it's gotten warm.
"You weren't…" she tried again.
Then she splintered. Pixels clocked loose from her and fell down like gray confetti.
The sigil shredded as if cut, ribboning into the air and gone .
[SYSTEM NOTICE: EXTERNAL SIGNAL PURGED
SOURCE: UNREGISTERED
SYSTEM COMMENT: Dramatic interruption detected. Noted for artistic merit.]
Arlen lay flat on his back and tasted grit in his mouth and the after taste of leftover fear.
The salt and ozone scent hung like a thin flag half sea, half electrical burn.
He blinked and let the crater assemble itself around him again: the altar buckled in the middle, blue veins threaded under oblong obsidian, skeletal trees bowed like contrite sinners awaiting judgment.
He expected tutorial text.
He'd never expected that whatever had yanked him here would sound like a snarky clerk or like his landlord whenever he hadn't paid his rent.
His fingers bumped a stone and the Testament ribbon unfurled across his vision, bureaucratic and merciless.
[TESTAMENT // USER: ARLEN THANE]
[CLASSIFICATION: FRAGMENT]
[SOUL INTEGRITY: 04% — CRITICAL]
[LEVEL: 0]
[HEALTH: 04 / 10]
[STRENGTH: 02]
[DEXTERITY: 03]
[INTELLIGENCE: 06]
[WILLPOWER: 05]
[HUMANITY: 06]
[LUCK: Let's not talk about that]
[TITLES: MISTAKE; UNREGISTERED]
The digits read like a sentence he'd been reading his whole adult life:
You are, short, insufficient, unlucky and undeserving.
Under it a tooltip blinked, concise and terrible.
[SYSTEM TOOLTIP: Emotional resonance affects physical output
FOCUSED FEAR: TEMP + DEX x FOCUSED RAGE: TEMP + STR.
MEDITATION AND CONCENTRATION BOOSTS WILLPOWER
TEARS ARE THEREAPUTIC BUT LOW YIELD]
Arlen scowled, because absurdity could sting right next to terror.
"Fantastic," he muttered aloud. "So if I cry I get, what … emotional XP?"
[SYSTEM COMMENT: Crying may refresh humidity levels. So, it's absolutely fine.]
The Testament overlaid an arrow and a smeared map-pin.
[NEW DIRECTIVE: PROCEED TO HOLLOW REACH BEACON.
DISTANCE ~2.1 KM]
[ESTIMATED SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 23%]
[SYSTEM COMMENT: Scenic route, occasional hazard. Try not to become a cautionary tale for the ages.]
Arlen pushed himself up. Every movement announced itself: a ribbon of pain from shoulder to hip.
He set the half-ring he'd found in the crater into his mouth briefly, tasting metal and old memory, as if it might spark recognition of something he doesn't know.
The walk felt agonizingly unending.
The Hollow Reach widened up in front of him like the inside of an old wound.
Trees arched like ribs. Patches of ground glittered like crushed glass.
Mana Veins pulsed underfoot with the exhausted rhythm of a heart that had been doing overtime for centuries.
He walked because the Testament asked and because staying felt like consenting to erasure.
The Wisp, a defiant mote of light fluttered against his shoulder and refused to be extinguished.
Its glow seemed to say: try or maybe had he finally lost it.
The world around him kept leaking bits of other lives.
Once a shadow moved and left behind the whisper of a market hawker; another time, a child's giggle looped, then collapsed into static.
Memory here lay thin and exposed.
He had not taken twenty steps when the long grass pulsed wrong.
The Wisp pulled tight to his sleeve like a startled moth.
[THREAT DETECTED: Echo Husk (LV. 1)]
[RECOMMENDED ACTION: Evaison / Avoid if possible: otherwise breathe, then stab
[SYSTEM COMMENT: Rookie level enemy. Dramatic survival drama recommended.]
The Echo Husk stepped out half-formed, as if the world had dropped a frame while rendering a man.
One side of its face was skin; the other a smear of static and glass.
The thing smelled like old coin and stale laundry.
Its eyes were black wells that had gotten intoxicated on light.
Arlen wasn't built to fight, he was built to run from problems.
In another life, he'd been fluent in excuses and late bills.
Here and now his hand tightened around a rusted dagger more from habit than hope.
The husk lunged.
The motion was a wrong jitter, like a skipping recording.
He swung to meet it, and his boot slipped on a sheet of glassy ash.
The dagger missed.
Pain exploded in his forearm as its claw nicked him.
It was hot and immediate, the kind of honest pain that forbids philosophy.
[SYSTEM UPDATE: Health -2]
[BLEEDING: Active]
[SYSTEM : Congratulations. You are now an object of mild concern.]
Arlen tasted metallic fear and felt a flash of the office fluorescent light he'd once frozen under.
The meeting where everyone had waited politely for him to speak and he had nothing to give as always.
The flash burned into his bones and sparked useless panic.
Anger, sharp and pragmatic, flared.
It was not the noble kind of rage; it was a hot, focused little thing that wanted only to stop being humiliated again.
[EMOTIONAL FOCUS: Anger detected]
[Temp + Str boost (0:00:15)]
His swing landed truer.
The husk staggered with the surprise of being hurt by someone it thought of as a clumsy nobody.
For half a beat, he felt victory, small, squeaking, and guilty.
The ground quivered.
A surge of blue light ran up from the Mana Vein, a cold current that knifed through his leg and spiked up to his hip.
Numbness crawled up his calf and into his fingers; the dagger vibrated with the sensation of being held by electricity.
[ENVIRONMENTAL ALERT: Mana Vein Surge]
Temp Nerve Block (Arm/Leg Numbness ).
CAUTION: MOTION CONTROL IMPAIRED.]
Warm memory burst forward mangled with the surge,the old buzzing streetlight outside his rented flat on a night he'd missed rent, a vague promise to be different.
The sensation of that old resolve felt small and brittle in the light.
An Ironbloom tendril whipped from the underbrush rushing to coil around his ankle with the speed of a closing trap.
It tightened like an appetite.
He kicked, and the vine coiled harder.
The smell of sap filled his nose.
[SYSTEM ALERT: Environmental hazard // ironbloom, contrition.
[SYSTEM RECOMMENDATION: Sever Tendrils Swiftly
He pulled out his broken. The blade slid, and the tendril split with a wet, dismissive sound.
The thing recoiled disappearing into the ground.
He rolled with everything left in his body and shoved ash into the face of the husk charging to him purely on instinct.
The Wisp flared, and he felt, absurdly, like there was someone refusing to let his light go out.
The husk unexpectedly fell apart with a sound between fog and paper.
He coughed, lungs burning with the acrid tang of disturbed Mana.
[ACHIEVEMENT: Didn't Become Dinner].
[BONUS: +1 Dexterity]
[SYSTEM COMMENT: Not dead. Also, slightly less incompetent.]
But the fight wasn't clean.
A second husk smaller and faster chewed at his calf, and he tasted hot blood.
He remembered being the kid who stepped out of class with the excuse that he'd lost the assignment and never blamed anyone; that memory lodged like a burr.
Why was he thinking about this right now? "Focus" he muttered under his breath.
He moved like someone whose muscles remembered better than his head.
The dagger found purchase in the smaller husk's neck; the thing disintegrated into static and a faint smell of soap and coin.
He fell to his knees before sitting down.
The Wisp hovered above his shoulder, furious and tiny.
He laughed where he sat because absurdity and survival had become the same thing.
"Dramatic," he said aloud, tasting blood and the sudden electricity of not dying.
He spat and felt as ridiculous as ever.
He crawled to the ridge where the Hollow Reach Beacon jabbed up from the ground: a shard of glass and circuit, a relic whose light pulsed like a heart that hadn't given up yet.
Someone many someones had scratched sigils into its sides.
The jagged mark of Veyrn was carved over and over like a prayer and a warning.
He pressed his palm to the Beacon because the Testament told him to and because clinging to acts felt saner than giving in.
[OBJECTIVE UPDATE: Sync with Beacon Node… Attempt minimal patch]
[REWARD: Temp Auto heal // Bleeding reduction // Minor stat calibration .
The Beacon was cold, then warm as a breath.
The Testament streamed a dozen clinic-like status lines into his vision.
[SYNCING…]
[SECURITY CHECK: FRAGMENT AUTHORIZATION…UNKNOWN]
[PATCH ATTEMPT: Minimal ]
[RESULT: +2 Health (temp)]
[BLEEDING: Stabilized ]
[NOTE: SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION FOR DEEP INJURIES]
[SYSTEM COMMENT: Emotional focus increases patch efficacy. Suggested methods: cursing, mantra, cinematic inner monologue.]
He tried.
He thought of stupid things , his dying apartment plant, an embarrassing joke, the woman's storm-eyes.
The Beacon hummed, and the Wisp's light threaded through his ragged ribs into something steadier.
[INTEGRITY: +1%]
[EMOTIONAL FOCUS: Resolve.]
A noise to the east changed the air.
Not the skitter of Duskrats.
Not the small, hungry rustle of husks.
This was deliberate long-footed, not hurried.
The smell of metal came in with it.
[EXTERNAL ENTITY APPROACHING: SIGNATURE: UNKNOWN // ETA: < 00:01:30 ]
[SYSTEM COMMENT: This would be a wonderful moment for a dramatic inhalation. Consider doing so.]
He pushed up.
The silhouette at the ridge uncoiled from the blue haze slowly, like an image downloading over a bad connection.
For one disorienting moment, it looked human: tall, cloaked.
Then things that should have been symmetric tilted wrong.
The head cocked at an angle that didn't match bones; a hand seemed to fold with extra joints.
It wore a cloak that ate light at the edges.
A voice drifted down, layered like two recordings played at once: one smooth and measured in plain English, the other thin with static like cold air sliced through a radio.
"Who walks at the edge of code?" it asked.
The words harmonized and doubled; there was the indifferent cadence of translation and the chill of something older.
[SYSTEM ALERT: Unregistered vocal pattern detected]
[SEMANTIC ANOMALY]
[SYSTEM COMMENT: That voice is not on the approved list. Also unnerving.]
Arlen's mouth gave him an answer without consulting his brain.
"I… I woke up here," he said.
His voice sounded strange in his ears — small and naked.
The figure stepped forward.
For a second the face, if you could call it that seemed to rearrange itself into something close to sympathy.
"Still carrying her mark," the stranger observed.
The words were plain. Not accusation. Not pity. Fact.
The sigil, that same jagged Veyrn line she had drawn hovered above the stranger's palm, as if displayed there to make a point.
A cold trickle ran down Arlen's spine.
[END OF CHAPTER 2 — THE HOLLOW REACH]
[NEXT OBJECTIVE: Survive contact // investigate origins
[DIFFICULTY: SEVERE]