The world smelled of ammonia, wet straw, and the slow, rotting decay of the Sinks.
Elian leaned against the rough timber of the stall, his chest heaving. The shovel in his hands felt lead-heavy, the wood slick with sweat and grime. He was sixteen, but his ribs showed through the tattered burlap of his tunic like the rungs of a broken ladder. In the hierarchy of Iron-Hold, the horses ate better than he did. They were valuable assets of the Guild. He was just the biological machinery required to move their filth.
"Boy! The trough is empty!"
The shout came from the front of the stable. Varg. The stable-master sounded drunk already, his voice thick with the cheap swill brewed from fermented tubers.
"Moving," Elian rasped. His voice was dry, scraping against a throat that hadn't seen water in six hours.
He drove the shovel back into the pile of manure. It was a rhythmic, mindless misery that had defined his entire existence. Wake up, shovel, eat sludge, sleep, repeat. He was a ghost haunting a stable, invisible to the knights who rode these beasts, invisible to the world above the smog layer.
But as he lifted the heavy load, the world tilted.
It wasn't a dizzy spell. Hunger had made him lightheaded a thousand times, but this was different. This was wrong.
A high-pitched whine, like a tuning fork struck against bone, erupted inside his skull. The shovel slipped from his hands, clattering onto the cobblestones. Elian fell to his knees, clutching his head. The sound wasn't coming from his ears; it was coming from somewhere deep into his consciousness.
Crack.
Something inside him—something deep, calcified, and ancient—shattered.
The stable vanished. The smell of horse manure was replaced by the scent of ozone and burning stars. For a heartbeat, Elian wasn't on his knees in the mud. He was floating in a void of absolute, terrified silence. He saw a wall of white light, infinite and impenetrable, and he saw it crack. He saw eight streaks of colored fire scream out of the fissure, tearing through the cosmos like falling angels.
One was made of magma. One was made of glass. One was a shadow.
And one... the smallest, the weakest, a flicker of pale blue light... fell straight into him.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION]
The text flickered into existence right in front of him. It wasn't a hallucination inside his mind; it was a semi-transparent blue window floating in the dusty air, casting a faint, cold light onto the straw.
[Subject Identified: Variable 8]
[Status: Critical Malnutrition. Soul Integrity: 4%.]
[Synchronization: Complete.]
Elian scrambled back, swiping his hand through the air. His fingers passed right through the light. "What is this?"
He didn't get an answer. He got agony.
His veins felt like they were being filled with liquid nitrogen. The cold was absolute, a freezing fire that raced from his heart to his fingertips. He convulsed on the dirty straw, his back arching as his body tried to reject the foreign energy invading his very cells.
Then, the blue window shifted, turning a violent, flashing crimson.
[CRITICAL WARNING]
[Hostile Signature Detected: Fragment 1 (The Tyrant).]
[Estimated Time to Contact: 72 Hours.]
The vision of space snapped, but the red window remained, hovering persistently in the air before him.
Elian gasped, sucking in a lungful of damp, ammonia-rich air. He was back in the stable. He was on his hands and knees, shivering violently. Sweat poured off him, soaking his tunic, but it felt cold as ice.
"72 hours..." He whispered, reading the text that refused to vanish. A countdown had appeared beneath the warning, the seconds ticking away with terrifying precision.
71:59:58... 71:59:57...
"Did I die?" Elian whispered, touching his chest. His heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. "Is this... hell?"
A chittering sound from the shadows answered him.
It wasn't the usual squeak of the barn rats. This was a wet, clicking growl. Elian froze. He knew the rats of the Sinks. They were pests, annoyances that stole crumbs. But this sound was heavy.
From the darkness of the feed storage, a pair of yellow eyes emerged. They were glowing.
It was a Silt-Rat. A mutated scavenger usually found deep in the sewers, grown fat on alchemical runoff. It was the size of a dog, its fur patchy and mange-ridden, revealing grey, tumor-lumpy skin beneath. Its incisors were long, yellow, and dripping with saliva that sizzled faintly as it hit the stone floor.
It had smelled the energy. The Synchronization had released a pulse of pure mana, a dinner bell for every predator in a five-mile radius.
The rat hissed, its body tensing. It looked at Elian not as a boy, but as a sack of meat radiating a new, delicious heat.
Elian scrambled backward, his boots slipping on the slick straw. "Get back!"
He reached for the shovel. His hand trembled so badly that he fumbled the grip.
The rat lunged.
It moved with a terrifying, unnatural speed. One second, it was in the shadows, the next it was a blur of grey fur and teeth. Elian instinctively threw his arm up.
Crunch.
Pain exploded in his forearm. The rat's teeth sank through the burlap and into his flesh, locking onto the bone. The weight of the beast knocked Elian onto his back. He screamed, a raw, animal sound of terror. The creature's smell was overpowering—rotting meat and chemical waste.
"Get off!" Elian thrashed, punching the rat's head with his free hand. It was like punching a bag of wet sand. The creature didn't let go; it thrashed its head, tearing at his arm, trying to drag him down to expose his throat.
He had no training. He had no technique. There was only pain, and the sudden, cold realization that he was about to be eaten alive in a pile of shit.
No.
The refusal wasn't divine. It was human. It was the stubborn, spiteful refusal of a boy who had survived sixteen years of starvation and wasn't going to die to a rat.
He kicked upward, driving his knee into the rat's soft underbelly. The creature squealed, loosening its grip for a fraction of a second.
Elian didn't think. He didn't use a technique. He just grabbed the shovel handle lying next to him with his blood-slicked hand.
He roared, swinging the heavy wooden handle with everything he had left.
The wood cracked against the rat's skull. The creature fell back, dazed, shaking its head.
Elian scrambled up, adrenaline flooding his system. The pain in his arm was a white-hot fire, but he ignored it. He gripped the shovel with both hands, raising it like an axe. The rat recovered, snarling, crouching for another spring.
"Die!"
Elian brought the metal spade down.
He missed the head, striking the creature's shoulder. The blade sliced through the mange and skin, hitting bone. The rat screeched, snapping at the metal. Elian yanked it back and struck again. And again. And again.
He hacked at it with messy, desperate swings. He didn't stop when the rat stopped moving. He didn't stop when the screeching ended. He kept swinging until his breath was gone, until the spade was buried deep in the ruined mess of grey fur and blood.
He stood over the carcass, chest heaving, blood dripping from his left arm onto the straw.
A new window popped into existence, floating just above the corpse.
[Target Neutralized: Mutated Silt-Rat (Level 1)]
The text flashed red.
[Initiating Integration...]
Elian dropped the shovel. "Integration?"
He didn't get an answer. He got agony.
It started in his eyes. A sudden, piercing pressure, as if someone were pushing needles behind his eyelids. He fell back against the stall wall, clutching his face, clawing at his skin.
"Ah! Stop! Stop it!"
His optic nerves were burning. He could feel them rewriting themselves. The biology of his eyes was shifting, twisting, forcing itself into a new shape to accommodate the data he had just stolen from the beast.
He squeezed his eyes shut, tears streaming down his face, mixing with the grime. The pain was blinding, a migraine that pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
[Integration Complete.]
[Acquired Trait: Low-Light Vision (Beast Tier).]
[Burden: Optical Hypersensitivity.]
The pain receded to a dull, throbbing ache behind his temples. Elian lay there for a long moment, afraid to open his eyes. The stable was quiet again, save for the dripping of his own blood.
Slowly, hesitantly, he opened his eyelids.
He gasped.
The stable wasn't dark anymore. The shadows had retreated. He could see... everything. The grain of the wood on the stall door. The individual motes of dust floating in the air. The heat radiating from the dead rat's body, a faint, fading red aura against the cool blue of the stone floor.
He looked at his arm. The bite was deep, bleeding sluggishly. He needed a bandage. He needed to hide the body. If Varg found out he'd been fighting monsters instead of working...
But then his eyes drifted back to the red window still floating in the air, persistent and ominous.
[Estimated Time to Contact: 71:58:12]
"The Tyrant," Elian whispered, the name tasting like ash in his mouth.
He looked at the dead rat. He had barely survived a scavenger. He had flailed and panicked. And now, a floating box told him a God was coming in three days.
Elian laughed. It was a dry, broken sound that hurt his chest.
He wasn't a hero. He was a stable boy with eyes that burned and an arm that was bleeding out. But as he looked at the red numbers ticking down, a strange, cold resolve settled in his gut.
He wrapped a strip of burlap around his arm, pulling it tight with his teeth until the bleeding slowed. He winced, the pain grounding him.
"Seventy-two hours," Elian muttered, picking up the bloodied shovel. His grip was weak, but it held.
He turned away from the corpse, stepping out of the stall and into the blinding, painful light of his new world. The Eclipse had begun.