The air outside tasted dry and stale, like it hadn't been breathed in years, decades even. Dust clung to Cael's tongue with every breath, and the wind dragged grit across the cracked remnants of a road that stretched into the ruins ahead. The sky hung low in a pale wash of colorless light, more ash than blue. There were no birds, no hum of insects. Just silence and ruin.
The surface wasn't what he expected. Not that he knew what to expect in the first place.
He stood there a moment longer, watching the wind spiral through the empty plain. The ground was gray with soot, the horizon jagged with collapsed buildings, rusted towers, and crumbling roads eaten by time. Chunks of machinery jutted from the earth like broken bones, long abandoned by whatever civilization once used them.
Cael shifted his weight and winced. His side throbbed with a dull ache, a reminder of the Black Guard's powerful blow. He looked down at himself and frowned. The bruises he suffered had already darkened across his ribs and his hands were scraped raw. Yet something felt off. Not exactly wrong, just strange in a way. The pain was receding too quickly. The swelling should have been worse. His breathing should've been shallow from the hits. But instead, his body pulsed with a strange warmth under the soreness. With the way the sensations were changing, it felt a lot like he was seemingly adapting to the situation.
He looked down at the weapon he'd carried out from the fight: the Black Guard's spear. The handle was heavier than it looked, its segmented parts pulsing faintly with lines of dim blue energy. It was not warm, but it felt responsive to his touch, like it recognized him now.
"Are you going to explain any of this?" he muttered aloud.
[Specify.] Nyx's voice chimed in his head, calm and detached.
"This place. This world. The fact that everything around me looks like the aftermath of an apocalypse."
[Historical data not present. This HALO was designed solely for Subject-13's operational parameters.]
Cael stared across the cracked plain toward what looked like the rusted skeleton of an old city far in the distance. Towers slumped at awkward angles. A bridge had snapped in half midair, leaving its remains hanging like an unfinished sentence.
He started walking. The spear rested over his shoulder now, balanced easily despite its size. With every step, his legs loosened a little more, as if his body had begun reconfiguring its limits without him asking it to.
"Back in the facility, those files and reports I saw in the terminal... Subject-13," he said, his voice needlessly quiet. "That's me."
[Confirmed. Your name is Cael, also known as Subject-13. You are a Prime HALO project candidate.]
He stopped walking for a moment, his brow furrowing in thought. "Did you know my name beforehand?"
[It was embedded into your neural encoding. I recognized it upon system resync.]
"Right, it was in brain but I couldn't remember it. That's very convenient," he muttered. He knelt beside a cracked stretch of road where a faded sign had collapsed into the dust. The letters were in a language he recognized, but the name had been scorched off, melted by fire or heat or something worse.
He stood again and looked back at the path he'd taken. The bunker door had sealed itself shut far behind him. The Guard's arm, the one that had been severed, lay just beside it motionless now, a tiny dark spot on the stark sand. He made a mental note to keep moving, just in case it could signal to whatever may be out here.
"You said Prime HALO. What does that mean?"
[You are not a standard HALO user. Prime subjects are constructed using curated genetic and neural sequences. Your existence is a convergence of engineered design and synthetic intelligence. You were not born. You were made.]
Cael felt that sink into his stomach like a stone in water. "You mean I'm not human?"
[Your biology exceeds the standard definition of human, but not entirely separate. You were derived from humanity. An enhanced and refined breed designed to thrive over the current species of humans.]
He continued walking, his boots crunched over broken glass and powdered concrete. The remnants of a street curved around a crater filled with collapsed metal pylons. Not a single sign of life so far, and he was starting to find it a little unsettling.
"And what exactly is the Prime HALO Project?"
[That information is currently restricted.]
He stopped again with a frown. "Why?"
[Your system access tier has not yet reached clearance level for historical archives.]
Cael exhaled sharply through his nose. He turned in a slow circle, letting the spear hang from one hand now. There was no wind anymore which meant there wasn't much sand in the air. Just the distant whisper of shifting debris, and the sound of his own heartbeat.
"You expect me to just keep going with nothing? No answers, no memory, and after I just barely escaped a death machine that nearly broke me in half back there?"
[Your Directive is Survival. Continued exposure will facilitate adaptive calibration.]
He closed his eyes for a moment when he entered the remains of a small shop that was in the walls of a damaged building. The cold stung the skin beneath his bruises, fading slowly, but the pain grounded him. When he opened them again, the sun had shifted slightly, still hidden behind high gray clouds, but enough to cast longer shadows across the ruins.