**Chapter 1: The Scrap Boy**
The scent of rust, oil, and acid rain hung heavy in the air, thick and choking. The sky above Ironspire was a dull, unforgiving gray, rumbled with distant thunder that seemed to echo the unrest simmering beneath the city's industrial bones. Towering smokestacks belched soot into the heavens, and rows of tenements leaned like tired skeletons along the edge of the endless junk fields. In Ironspire, the sky was a lie. You worked, you bled, and you were forgotten.
Kael Veyne stood ankle-deep in waste sludge, the cold seeping through the holes in his boots. His torn gloves barely protected his fingers from the acid-rotted debris. Sparks flickered around some of the magi-tech piles, remnants of broken enchantments or malfunctioning circuits. The stink of ozone and decay didn't bother him anymore. Not really.
He smiled.
It was the kind of smile you wore when pain became routine. The kind that made people uncomfortable if they looked too long. But Kael didn't mind. They rarely looked at him at all.
"Keep your head down, keep your mouth shut," the foreman always said. "You're lucky to have a job, rat."
So Kael did. But he remembered. He remembered every insult, every blow, every bruise.
"Hey! That's my pile, freak!"
The voice cut through the clanging and hissing of the scrapyard. Kael turned. Garron again, shoulders like slabs of iron, stomping forward with two others in tow. Kael didn't move fast enough.
A punch to the gut folded him in half. The wind was gone from his lungs before he could gasp. He hit the ground, coughing.
"You deaf now too?" Garron growled. "You got sludge in your ears?"
A kick to the ribs. Laughter. Kael didn't scream. He didn't cry. He simply lay still, his face in the mud, his mouth pulling into a grin.
They didn't notice it. They never looked long enough.
Once they left, he sat up slowly, wiping blood from his mouth. His ribs throbbed. His arms trembled.
But his eyes burned with something darker than pain.
"Next time," he whispered. "I'll remember better."
He laughed softly. The kind of laugh that had no humor, only hunger.
Kael worked long after the others left. The garbage mountain became his cathedral. The broken things, his congregation. He spoke to them sometimes, told them secrets. Names of people he hated. People he'd outlive.
"Kael the rat," he muttered. "Kael the weak. But not forever."
Hours passed. The sky darkened, bruised purple and black. Lamps flickered around the edge of the yard. Security golems floated by, ignoring him as always. Just another scrap boy digging for parts.
Then he saw it.
At the base of a collapsed hauler cart, buried beneath shattered pipes and frayed wire, something pulsed. A dim, rhythmic glow. Blue and soft, like breath under skin.
He crawled toward it.
It was a bronze chip, no bigger than a coin, embedded with a fractured crystal core. Runes shimmered along its edge, too worn to read. But Kael didn't need to read them. He *felt* them. Whispering. Beckoning.
His hand hovered above it.
He hesitated.
Then he grabbed it.
Pain exploded behind his eyes. The world vanished.
> \[Initializing...]
> \[System Core Detected: M.E.R.C.Y. Protocol Rebooting...]
> \[Mental Sync Level: 24%... 57%... 89%... 97%...]
Kael screamed. He collapsed onto his side, twitching as visions stabbed through his mind. Fires. Screams. Steel ripping through flesh. Cities drowned in blood.
> "Welcome, User. You are undeserving. Yet... accepted."
> "Will you show them mercy?"
"No," Kael hissed through clenched teeth. "Let them choke on their mercy."
> \[User Classification: Aberrant]
> \[System Access Granted: Tier 0 Permissions]
> \[Directive 1: Survive.]
Blood dripped from his nose. His head throbbed. But his grin returned—sharp and unhinged.
"Now we're talking," he muttered. "Voices in my head, glowing rocks... This day's getting better."
He sat up, shaking, as a new window blinked to life in the corner of his vision.
> \[Welcome to the M.E.R.C.Y. System]
> \[Main Functions Locked]
> \[Opening Subroutine: Emotional Bias Amplification... Complete]
> \[First Trait Unlocked: "Cruel Clarity"]
> \[You gain increased perception and emotional control when under extreme stress or violence.]
Kael laughed. Loud. Mad.
"I've been broken for years," he whispered. "You're just catching up."
Something inside him clicked. The world shifted again. Colors sharpened. Sounds became clearer. The city groaned in its sleep, and Kael finally heard it breathe.
He looked down at the bronze chip, now embedded beneath his skin like a brand just below the wrist.
The voice in his head spoke again.
> "Will you grant them mercy?"
Kael's eyes glowed faintly in the dark.
"No," he said. "But I'll show them what mercy *really* means."
The storm above Ironspire began to roar.
And deep within the bones of the city, something ancient turned its gaze toward a broken boy who smiled too much.