My decision to Search for More Relics was pure hacker greed. The small, blue-white artifact I had just uncovered was a treasure trove of alien data, a fragment of the ancient, powerful network that was the God-King's Curse. But one fragment wasn't enough to build an operating system. I needed more hardware, more power, and more data.
In a corrupted system, the biggest vulnerabilities are often found immediately after a patch or exploit. The Veil Hack worked once; the door is open.
I carefully tucked the relic—still pulsing with that calm, ethereal glow—into the tattered rags of my tunic. It felt unnaturally cold against my skin, a cold that didn't belong to the humidity of the ruins but to the vacuum of space.
The Ebonscar air, thick with the acrid smell of ozone, pressed in on me. The green glow of the rifts seemed to pulse faster, hungrier. The Void had been alerted by my Veil Hack; it was time to move fast and ruthlessly.
I engaged the Shadow Cloak, the familiar hum a low thrumming behind my ears, and continued deeper, the twisted metal and obsidian rock of the ruins serving as my only cover. My eyes scanned the shadows not for movement, but for anomalies in the Veil's energy signature. Kael's logic was focused on system efficiency: Low risk, high reward. But Zayn's instincts screamed: Danger is everywhere. Trust nothing.
I didn't have to search long. The Void was proactively closing the gap.
As I slipped beneath the skeletal remains of a massive, rusted dome—a relic of pre-Fracture engineering—a tear appeared. Not the sluggish, distant rifts, but a localized, violent rip in the Veil directly in front of me. It looked like someone had taken a knife to reality.
[Threat Detected. E-Tier Void Entity. Proximity: 5 Meters. Engage.]
From the jagged edges of the tear, a creature dropped. It wasn't the hulking brute I'd fought before, but something smaller, faster, and far more insidious. An E-Tier Shadow Lurker.
It was a nightmare given form: a compact mass of oily, wet blackness, roughly the size of a large wolf, but with six razor-thin limbs ending in wickedly sharp claws. It had no discernible features, just two pinpricks of glowing red light where its eyes should be. It moved with unnatural, jittering speed, like corrupted animation frames—a glitch in the matrix come to life.
"E-Tier. Agile class. High damage, moderate defense. Equal footing, my ass. This is a hack-or-die scenario."
My sarcastic Earth-self kicked in."Worse than a poorly optimized boss fight. At least those had a save point."
The Lurker didn't hesitate. It lunged, the sound of its movement a dry hiss against the cold stone. Its speed was terrifying, a blur that ate distance.
My body moved before my mind consciously registered the threat. It was Zayn's instinct, pure, raw combat reflex, honed by generations of Veilmarked survival. I didn't dodge like a coder; I rolled sideways, a desperate, graceless tumble that saved my life. The tattered edge of my cloak barely cleared the air where the Lurker's claws had flashed, gouging deep furrows into the obsidian floor. The whoosh of displaced air felt like a punch.
I scrambled up, my breath burning in my throat, and sprinted toward a towering structure of fused metal girders. This was my plan: use the terrain as a weapon. This E-Tier monster wasn't a brute; it was a hunter.
The Lurker was faster than the Shadow Cloak could reliably hide. It followed the sound, the heat, the anomaly that was my presence with terrifying efficiency. It scrambled up a girder with impossible speed, its claws scraping against the rusted metal like fingernails on a chalkboard.
"Stay focused, Zayn!" I barked internally, using the name instinctively to cut through the fear, to rally both my cunning and the body's latent fighting ability. The slip was natural, urgent. Kael was the brain, mapping the battlefield; Zayn was the engine, moving the pieces.
I reached the rusted frame and vaulted over a broken console, not stopping to look back. Instead, I channeled my Shadow Cloak energy not into stealth, but into a momentary burst of velocity, a sudden, impossible surge that pushed my wiry frame faster than it should go, covering ground in a blink.
The Lurker, caught off guard by the surge, launched itself into the space where I should have been. It landed with a sickening thud on the old, fused console.
My exploit: The ancient console I had just vaulted was not just unstable; it was actively decaying, a critical flaw in the Ebonscar's ancient network of structures. I had noticed the structural integrity score drop when I landed. As the Lurker sailed past, I didn't stab the monster. Instead, with a desperate roar, I jammed the crude knife I'd taken from the thug in the slums directly and violently into a thin, hairline crack in the fused plating of the console, twisting it with all my might.
The ancient metal shrieked, a dying scream. The sudden, localized instability—the physical equivalent of a hard reset on a critical junction—triggered a cascading structural failure in the huge metal frame.
A two-ton section of rusted girder, already weakened by the Fracture and my previous movements, groaned, then snapped. It crashed down exactly where the Lurker, caught in its landing, was attempting to regain its balance.
A high-pitched, agonized squeal ripped through the air, vibrating through the bones of the ruins, followed by the deafening CLANG of metal striking metal. The Lurker was crushed, a smear of black essence dissolving rapidly beneath the wreckage, its glowing red eyes fading to nothing.
Exploit successful. Physical environment manipulation. Score: Efficient.
[E-Tier Entity Terminated. Risk: Extreme. Power Gained: 3 Points.] The Codex's dry text flashed in my mind, a reward pop-up for a desperate, life-or-death battle.
The brief high of victory was instantly overridden by a cold dread. The Void was angry.
"...Kael. Why resist?"
The voice was closer this time, heavy, mournful. It felt like my very essence was being tugged backward, towards the rift, towards oblivion. The familiar tang of old Earth coffee and the harsh acrid air of the ruins blended into a dizzying nausea, a direct assault on my sanity. I had to get out. My mind was holding, but the Void was learning my vulnerabilities faster than I was gaining power.
I scrambled up the wreckage, trying to put distance between myself and the dissipating Veil tear. I paused, checking the periphery, using my Shadow Cloak sense to scan for anything—
That's when I heard it.
It wasn't a roar, not a whisper, and not the grind of metal. It was a sound that had no business existing in this tomb: a faint, eerie, yet strangely beautiful melody. It was carried on the wind from a higher section of the ruins, a slow, high-pitched tune, almost like an ancient folk song played on a damaged music box. It was a clan tune, a signature only a privileged few would dare broadcast in the open.
And it was coming from the direction I needed to escape. Someone was up there, watching, waiting, or maybe even luring. Someone powerful, or someone insane.
Syl Night. The rogue who knew this place better than anyone.
The melody was captivating, but deadly. I had just traded the threat of the Black Swords for a potential encounter with a high-Tier rogue. The relic was cold in my tunic, the 3 Points burned into my mind, and the clan tune hung in the oppressive air, an invitation to deeper secrets.
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Poll: Kael (Zayn) has successfully gained 3 Points by defeating an E-Tier Void Lurker and is now holding a powerful relic. However, he has just heard an eerie clan tune—likely belonging to the rogue Syl Night—coming from his escape path.
Should Zayn pursue the source of the clan tune to uncover its secrets, or focus on escaping Ebonscar to avoid further void threats?
A) Pursue Clan Tune (Investigate the source of the melody, risking an immediate encounter with Syl Night to gain potentially crucial information on the Veilmarked origins.)
B) Escape Ebonscar (Focus on immediate survival, using the Shadow Cloak to find a hidden exit route from Ebonscar before the Void's attention and Varn's ongoing pursuit intensify.)