The echo of the railgun shot didn't fade. It stained the air.
Three hours had passed since the eviction from Rust-Spire, and they were still running. Not traveling. Not escaping. Running.
The Rust-Spire was long gone behind them, swallowed by the endless gray dunes and broken silhouettes of the industrial waste, but the air still tasted wrong. Kaelen could feel it every time he sucked in a desperate, burning breath—a sharp, metallic tang that coated his tongue. It tasted like ozone and copper. It tasted like a storm that refused to break.
Renna stumbled, her boot catching on a jagged piece of rebar jutting from the ash. She went down hard on one knee, a hiss of pain escaping through her gritted teeth.
Her splinted leg should have failed her miles ago. The makeshift metal brace was digging into her skin, and the bandage was dark with fresh blood. It was only adrenaline—that primal, chemical panic—that kept her upright.
"Get up," Kaelen rasped, grabbing her arm and hauling her to her feet. "Don't stop. If we stop, we die."
"I know," she panted, her face gray with exhaustion. She gripped her rifle so hard her knuckles were white. "But something is... following us. I can feel it."
Kaelen didn't answer. He didn't trust his voice.
Something was wrong.
It wasn't behind them. It wasn't ahead of them.
It was around them.
He slowed despite himself, his chest heaving. He raised a hand. Renna skidded to a halt beside him, rifle half-lifted, eyes scanning the swirling dust.
"What?" she hissed. "Do you see them?"
Kaelen closed his eyes and reached inward. He wasn't reaching for power—his mana core was a hollow, aching void. He was reaching for information.
He tried to open the System.
Usually, the interface was instant—a crisp blue overlay on his vision. Now, it was static. It felt like trying to tune a radio in a thunderstorm. A sharp spike of pain drove itself into his temples.
[ SYST... ERR... ]
[ CONNEC... LOST... ]
[ INDEXING IN PROGRESS... 12% ]
The text flickered, distorted, and then vanished like a dying signal on an old screen.
Kaelen's stomach dropped. The dread that washed over him was colder than the wind.
"That railgun shot," he said quietly. "It wasn't just loud."
Renna frowned, wiping sweat and ash from her forehead. "It was a beacon. We know that."
"No," Kaelen replied, opening his eyes. "A beacon just tells them where you are. This... this is a signature."
They stood in silence for a moment, the wind tugging weakly at their torn coats.
Then Kaelen spoke again.
"Renna."
He saw his lips move. He felt the vibration in his throat.
But the sound didn't happen.
A full heartbeat passed.
Then the sound arrived.
"...Renna."
It hit his ears like a dubbed movie with bad sync.
Renna went still. She stared at him, her eyes widening.
"Say that again," she whispered.
"Don't panic."
The words came out of his mouth. He closed his mouth.
A second later, the words hung in the air. "Don't panic."
Renna stared at her hands. She lifted one slowly, experimentally, waving it in front of her face.
The air lagged.
Her hand moved, but a ghostly trail of afterimages followed her fingers, smearing across her vision like a cursor dragged across a frozen screen. The reality of her hand hadn't caught up to the intent of her movement.
"...That's not good," she whispered. The sound arrived late, overlapping with the movement of her lips.
The world shuddered.
Not visibly. Not dramatically.
But Kaelen felt it—a sickening lurch in his inner ear, like the ground beneath his feet was subtly re-aligning, nudging him half a step to the left without his consent.
"Optimization," Kaelen realized. "The System is buffering."
The Silence wasn't chasing them physically. It was rewriting the coordinates around them to trap them. It was treating them like a glitch that needed to be isolated before it could be deleted.
"We're not being chased," Renna said slowly, horror dawning in her voice as she watched the trails of her own movement. "We're being... boxed."
Kaelen scanned the horizon.
It didn't look wrong. That was the problem.
Every direction looked equally empty. Equally endless. The jagged ruins to the north seemed to flatten out. The dunes to the south looked like copies of the dunes to the east. It was as if choice itself had been smoothed down into a flat surface.
[ INDEXING... 18% ]
The percentage flashed in his mind, bright red and urgent.
"Run," Kaelen said.
They didn't argue. They sprinted.
But you cannot outrun a system that controls the ground you walk on.
The ambush came without warning.
The ground ahead of them didn't break open. It didn't explode.
It shifted.
Three shapes tore themselves out of the dust—low, fast, and fundamentally wrong. They looked like hounds made of broken glass and glitching pixels. Their bodies were insectile, with too many joints and bladed limbs that scraped against each other with a sound like a dial-up modem screaming in pain.
[ TARGET: VOID-STALKERS ]
[ CLASS: SCAVENGER / HUNTER ]
[ THREAT: MODERATE (GLITCHED) ]
"CONTACT!" Renna shouted, her training overriding the horror.
She raised her rifle. She didn't hesitate. She fired.
BANG.
The shot went wide.
Not because her aim was bad. Renna never missed.
The bullet passed straight through the Stalker's chest—or where its chest appeared to be.
The creature wasn't there.
The Stalker flickered, skipping sideways a full meter, its afterimage lingering for half a second like a ghost. The bullet hit the dirt harmlessly behind it.
"Lag!" Renna yelled, cycling the bolt frantically. "They're desynced! I can't hit them!"
The second Stalker leapt.
It moved with impossible speed, teleporting from ten feet away to directly in front of Kaelen.
Kaelen shoved Renna aside and rolled. He felt the wind of the claws passing through the space his chest had occupied a moment earlier.
He came up hard, his combat knife in hand, lungs burning.
He slashed.
He missed.
The blade cut through empty air, passing through the Stalker's flank as if it were smoke. The creature was already gone, its shadow arriving late, overlapping where it had once been.
Kaelen felt it then—his body responding to a world that no longer respected cause and effect. The nausea was overwhelming.
This wasn't combat.
It was debugging.
"Lead your shots!" Renna shouted. "Aim where they'll be! Forget your eyes!"
A Stalker slammed into Kaelen from the side.
He didn't see it coming. He felt the impact—heavy, cold, and massive—before he saw the creature materialize. It hit him like a wrecking ball.
Kaelen flew backward, slamming into the dirt. The pain arrived a second late—a sudden, blinding white-hot flash across his chest where unseen claws had shredded his trench coat.
He gasped, rolling onto his back. Blood soaked his shirt.
Mana didn't answer him.
Authority stayed silent.
He was empty. He was just a man with a knife in a world of monsters.
Renna fired again.
She didn't aim at the flickering beast. She aimed at the empty space three feet in front of it.
The round punched through space.
A fraction of a second later, the creature arrived into the bullet.
SPLAT.
Black ichor exploded outward. The Stalker shrieked—a digital, tearing sound—and collapsed, dissolving into static ash.
"YES!" Renna barked. "Like that!"
The third Stalker reared back, mandibles clicking, recalculating. It looked at Kaelen, prone and bleeding.
It flickered.
It wasn't charging. It was waiting for the lag to align.
Kaelen forced himself upright, blood dripping from his nose. He gripped his knife.
"Renna," he said hoarsely. "I need an opening."
"You'll get one," she snapped, leveling the rifle. "Make it count."
She fired twice more. She didn't try to kill it; she fired low, at the ground, kicking up clouds of ash to force the creature's movement pattern to narrow.
The Stalker dodged left. Then right.
Kaelen ran.
He didn't run toward where the Stalker was.
He ran toward where its shadow lagged.
He jumped.
He tackled the empty air.
For a split second, he fell. Then, reality caught up.
THUD.
His weight slammed into solid resistance. The creature materialized beneath him, shrieking. Kaelen wrapped his legs around its torso, pinning the glitching limbs.
It bucked, snapping its jaws inches from his face. The smell of ozone and rot was overpowering.
Kaelen raised the knife.
"Delete this," he growled.
He drove the blade down. He didn't aim for the head. He aimed for the center of mass.
The knife punched through the chitin. Black blood sprayed over Kaelen's face. He stabbed again. And again.
The Stalker convulsed, its form flashing white, then black, then nothing. It collapsed into a pile of heavy, suffocating ash beneath him.
Silence returned to the canyon.
Kaelen rolled off the pile of ash, gasping for air.
The world tilted violently, then steadied. The lag was gone. The sounds of their breathing were synced again.
Renna staggered toward him, dragging her bad leg. She dropped to her knees beside him, her hands hovering over his chest.
"Tell me that was the last of them," she breathed.
Kaelen didn't answer. He was staring at his chest.
His coat had fallen open, shredded by the claws. The three distinct cuts were bleeding sluggishly.
But that wasn't what Renna was looking at.
She froze. Her eyes went wide.
"Kaelen..."
He followed her gaze down.
Over his heart, beneath the torn fabric and the blood, a glyph burned into his skin.
It wasn't a wound. It was light.
Blue. Geometric. Perfect.
It pulsed faintly, synchronized with something deeper than his heartbeat. It felt cold, like a piece of ice lodged under his ribs.
The System forced itself into existence again. This time, there was no static. It was crisp. Clear.
[ DESIGNATION CONFIRMED ]
[ PERSISTENT ANOMALY ]
[ INDEXING... 27% ]
[ STATUS: TAGGED ]
Renna swallowed hard. She looked from the mark to Kaelen's face.
"Oh no," she whispered. "No, no, no..."
Kaelen touched the mark. His fingers tingled as they brushed the light. It wasn't just a tracking spell. It was a claim.
"They didn't let us go," Renna said slowly, realization dawning. "Valerius didn't warn you to scare you. He warned you to register you. He tagged you."
Kaelen laughed weakly. It hurt his ribs. "I always wanted to be special."
Her expression didn't change. She looked terrified.
"We're not refugees," she said, her voice shaking. "We're sport. As long as that mark is active, they will always know where we are. The lag... the boxes... it's all part of the hunt."
The ground shifted again—subtly, deliberately. A dune to the east seemed to rise slightly, blocking the view.
Kaelen pushed himself to his feet, every muscle screaming in protest. He wiped the black blood from his eyes.
"Hiding won't work," Renna said urgently, grabbing her rifle. "We keep moving. We don't stop. We don't build anything that can be found. We have to keep running."
Kaelen looked out across the wasteland.
Endless.
Flat.
Predictable.
Perfect for a system that optimized erasure.
"No," he said.
Renna stared at him. "What?"
He turned East.
Toward the place the world kept bending him away from.
Toward the coordinates of the Anchor.
"If the ground itself is against us," Kaelen said, his voice steadying despite the tremor in his hands, "then we stop letting it decide where we stand."
Renna hesitated. She looked at his chest, at the glowing blue target. "That's suicide. If we stop, they swarm us."
"Running is worse. Running is what they want."
The glyph over his heart pulsed brighter.
[ INDEXING... 30% ]
Kaelen reached down and picked up the railgun. It was heavy, battered, and empty. But it felt right.
"If they want a target," he said, looking at Renna, "then we'll give them something that doesn't move."
Renna stared at him for a long moment. She looked at the wasteland that wanted to eat them. Then she looked at the man who had punched a glitch in the face.
She exhaled slowly. A grim smile touched her lips.
"...Alright," she said. "Let's build something loud."
They started walking.
Behind them, the world quietly adjusted its aim.