Dawn turned the eastern wall into a black blade against a gray sky. Han arrived with a paper token, a fresh brand that still burned under his sleeve, and the kind of silence that followed him like a curse. A line of salvage workers waited at the checkpoint—scarred laborers, wrapped hands, teenagers too thin to swing a pick. Nobody chatted. Even the guards spoke in clipped signals, as if too many words might attract attention.
The gate itself was wrong. Its iron bars were etched with System-script that shimmered faintly, and between them a fog crawled, luminous as bruised moonlight. It wasn't steam. It didn't drift like weather. It moved like it had intent.
Beyond the gate, the Scrap Yards breathed.
A bell rang once.
"Crew Twelve!" a dispatcher shouted. "Move!"
Han followed the group through. The air changed the instant he crossed the threshold—heavier, metallic, laced with something sweet and rotten. His tongue tasted copper. His ears rang softly, like distant glass vibrating.
The fog glowed low to the ground, pooling in depressions, clinging to heaps of shattered stone and twisted metal. Mountains of debris rose like dead waves: broken engines, collapsed towers, fragments of old buildings fused together as if melted and re-hardened. Every surface carried faint stains of magic, like burns that never fully cooled.
Han's skin prickled. The brand on his arm throbbed harder, and the static behind his eyes stirred.
A woman stepped in front of them, boots crunching on glassy gravel. She was in her thirties, with dark hair tied tight and a scar running from her left eyebrow down to her cheek. A metal badge hung from her neck: a stylized hook over a broken circle.
"Name's Ressa," she said. "I lead this crew. You listen, you live longer. You don't, you die fast, and I don't drag your parts back."
A few people chuckled without humor.
Ressa's gaze scanned the line and stopped on Han. "You're the new one."
"Han."
Someone spat. "Null."
Ressa lifted a hand and the spitter shut up. "Temple sent you to us, so you're ours until you're dead or reassigned. That brand means if you run, the wardens will track you. So don't."
She gestured to the group. "We pull usable relics, intact cores, anything the System didn't rot. We avoid fights when we can. We fight when we can't. And we never go into deep fog without a tether."
A stocky man with a thick beard stepped forward. A tree sigil glowed on his wrist—iron lines, defensive nodes. "Bram," he grunted, then nodded to two others: a slim archer named Sive, and a robed mage named Elan.
Sive glanced at Han and smirked. "So what do we do with the Null?"
Bram answered, blunt. "Send him in first."
Elan's mouth twisted. "Canary."
Ressa didn't correct them. She just turned and started walking. "Shallow route today. Null goes point. Sive watches. Bram anchors. Elan burns anything that looks hungry."
Han stepped to the front. The fog licked at his boots like cold fingers.
They moved in a staggered line, connected by a rope tether tied to Bram's belt and looped through each of their hands. The tether was thick, braided with silver thread, humming faintly in Han's grip.
"Silverline," Elan said when he noticed Han staring. "Keeps you from getting pulled. Sometimes the fog grabs."
They climbed over a ridge where the debris thinned and the ground turned strange—smooth, dark rock veined with pale light. The veins shifted under the surface, slow as worms. Sound changed too. Footsteps didn't echo properly. Voices felt muffled, as if the fog drank them.
Ressa lifted a hand, and the crew halted. Ahead, half-buried in slag, a stone arch rose from the ground. Its inner curve was lined with fractured runes, and a smear of violet haze clung to it like spilled ink.
"Old gate remnant," Ressa murmured. "Stay sharp."
Something moved near the arch.
It stepped into view: a knee-high thing shaped vaguely like a hairless fox, but its body stuttered. One moment it had four legs. The next, three. Its head flickered between too-long and too-wide, and its eyes were bright, jittering points like broken stars.
It tilted its head at Han, as if recognizing the weakest link.
Then it lunged.
Han jerked back, but the creature didn't move like an animal. It blinked forward in tiny jumps, skipping distance the way a bad drawing skips frames. Its claws scraped air that wasn't there.
Bram stepped in, wrist mark flaring. "Bulwark!"
A translucent barrier snapped into place—hard-edged, geometric. The creature hit it and for a split second looked solid—
Then it phased. Not through the barrier like smoke. Through it like the barrier had never existed. Bram's eyes widened as the thing appeared on the other side, already mid-swipe.
Bram swung his baton. The blow should have cracked its skull.
The baton passed through empty air.
Sive loosed an arrow. The shaft struck—Han saw it strike—and then the creature glitched and the arrow was suddenly embedded in slag behind it, as if reality corrected the "wrong" hit.
Elan raised both palms. "Firebolt!"
A flame shot out, clean and bright. It washed over the creature, and for an instant, the fog lit orange.
The creature squealed—then its body jittered and the flame slid off it like it had become an idea instead of a thing.
Ressa drew a short blade, timed the next blink, slashed again.
Nothing.
The crew's fixed skills were precise, reliable, and useless against something that didn't obey the same rules.
The creature turned fully toward Han. Its broken-star eyes locked on his chest.
And Han's vision snapped.
The world peeled.
The fog became a lattice of floating particles, each carrying faint symbols that crawled and rearranged themselves. The slag field turned into layered grids, edges outlined in pale lines. Even the crew looked different—each person wrapped in faint branching patterns hovering behind them, their fixed trees visible as glowing diagrams anchored to their bodies.
The creature's outline was chaos, flickering and collapsing in on itself. But beneath it, Han saw something stable.
A point.
A tiny, steady knot of light at the creature's center, tucked behind its shifting ribs. A pin that held the whole broken shape to the world.
An anchor point.
Han didn't think. He moved.
The creature blinked forward to tear into him, claws raised. Han stepped into the attack at the last possible moment—not away, but in—because the anchor point didn't move even when the body did.
He drove his fist down, aiming for that knot of light.
His knuckles hit something that felt like hard glass.
The creature spasmed. Its body stuttered violently, flickering between forms so fast it became a smear. A shriek ripped out, layered like the sound was glitching too.
Han pressed harder, as if pinning it. The knot of light cracked.
And the creature came apart.
It dissolved into fragments—shards of pale code, strips of luminous fog, pieces of sound that snapped and vanished. The last thing to remain was the anchor point, collapsing into a single flickering shard that hovered above Han's knuckles.
The world snapped back. The shard still hovered, spinning slowly, stubbornly real.
Bram stared, mouth open. Sive's bow hung slack. Elan's firelight guttered in his palms. Even Ressa looked unsettled.
Han swallowed, then reached out.
The shard sank into his skin like warm water. Pain flared—sharp, then gone—replaced by a cold rush that spread through his veins.
Text appeared before his eyes, crisp and undeniable:
[Fragment Detected: Glitch-Step (Tier 1). No Root found. Create Root?]
Ressa recovered first. She sheathed her blade and grabbed Han's wrist, yanking his arm up as if expecting blood. "How?"
Han's mouth felt full of sand. "I… saw something. A point. I hit that."
Elan's eyes stayed on Han's knuckles. "That thing ignored steel and fire."
Bram's stare was blunt. "Nulls don't have skills."
Han stared into the fog. If he told them about grids and symbols, they'd either sell him or fear him. In the Scrap Yards, miracles were liabilities.
"I don't know what I am," Han said, keeping his voice small. "Maybe the System… slipped."
Ressa released his wrist, but she didn't soften. "You did something. That means you're useful. And useful people don't go first just to die." She looked at Bram. "Rotate point."
Bram grunted, annoyed, but he stepped ahead of Han. The tether shifted in their hands.
The prompt still hovered at the edge of Han's sight. Create Root? It felt like a door handle in a locked room. He didn't touch it. Not here. Not with eyes on him.
Ressa pointed at the fractured arch. "That's a spill point. If one crawled out, more can. We take what we came for and we leave."
They advanced, slower now, scanning every shadow. Han's heart still raced, but under it, something steadier formed. He had harvested something. A fragment. Proof that broken didn't mean empty.
As they passed the arch, Han glanced back once. For a heartbeat, his vision threatened to peel again, and he caught a faint seam in the air—like reality had been stitched in a hurry.
The Scrap Yards weren't just a dumping ground.
And somewhere beyond the fog, deeper ruins waited, full of discarded branches and shattered roots, begging to be stolen and rewritten today too.
They were a mine.