Three years blurred into routine before I realized how much had changed.
The precinct was home now—at least in the way a cage is home. Same walls, same cracks in the ceiling, same clock that ticked two minutes slow and never got fixed. Case files stacked high on my desk like bricks, Avren across from me grinning that wolfish grin he never lost. The stale coffee smell bled through the walls. The radiator hissed like it had asthma.
Three years of bloodstains that never made it into reports. Three years of helping Avren hunt down killers Concord didn't want on their books. At first I told myself it was necessity. Survival. But somewhere along the way, I started to enjoy it. The hunt. The weight of resonance pressing in the air. The split second when a predator realized they'd been stalked all along.
I became a hunter by accident. Avren by design. Together we turned Delta's sloppy precinct into something that resembled order. Every locked box had our fingerprints on it. Every updated log carried our initials. The staff even started listening. A little.
---
The Guardian Workshop changed everything too. No more chasing demon cores across the Dead Zones, no more blood-priced trophies. Guardians could be formed through time and effort now, a craft instead of a wound. That shift put me in rare company.
I even made one for Avren. Not because I had to. Because it felt right.
His guardian wasn't flashy, not a towering nightmare like Velnix, not a shape-shifter like Flicker. It was smaller. A shadow-hound with an eye for trails, born to stalk in silence, ears pricked toward things others couldn't hear. Perfect for him. When I first saw it pad alongside him, half there, half not, I realized how incomplete he'd looked before. Now he was whole, like a missing piece of his soul had snapped into place.
Velnix didn't like it at first, jealous maybe. Flicker laughed in my head, called it "puppy." But the more I watched Avren work with it, the more I knew I'd done the right thing.
---
Three years also meant Nynxreach was almost over. Three months left in the curriculum before graduation. The days passed in a haze of lectures, drills, and late-night casework. Sometimes I caught myself counting the weeks, wondering what the world would look like after the ceremony. Would I still be in a uniform? Would I still sit across from Avren at a desk reeking of coffee and dust? Or would the Rift Seed drag me somewhere else entirely?
The Seed was still mine. Concord had tried to keep it, sealing it in their labs, running sterile tests like it was a piece of tech they could catalog. It hadn't lasted. Seeds bond to soulprints. They'd had to hand it back, humming faintly in my possession once more. No matter what paperwork they stacked against it, it belonged to me.
Sometimes I felt it in my chest, pulsing like a second heart. Sometimes it whispered when I slept. A reminder that in three months, the Old Realm mission would call, and doors only I could open would matter.
I wasn't ready.
---
Crest lingered on the edges of my life too, though I kept pretending it was casual. The White Room streamed live every week, a slick broadcast packaged like charity but smelling like a lab. Kids in neat rows, playing games, eating good food, smiling for the cameras. Orphans with no other options.
Crest was different.
She had a father once. He made me promise. And I meant to keep it.
So I watched every stream. Sent donations, always quiet, always under fake names. Sometimes I sent her things—boxes of books, clothes, once even a sketchpad with real pencils instead of the digital trash they gave them. She'd hold them up on stream, eyes wide, pretending it was all from "a sponsor." I never typed in chat. Never said it was me.
But I'd already decided. I was adopting her. Just hadn't said it aloud yet. Another apartment would be necessary. Ours was too crowded already—me, Neo, Matt, ghosts I carried home from work.
---
Neo.
He'd grown distant, brittle in ways I couldn't fix. Two years ago Sovereign gave him a boon: Rift Leaper. At first he didn't explain. Then little by little, I realized what it meant. He could open rifts at will, step through them like doors. No more Concord clearance, no more coordinates. Just… vanish.
Sovereign used him for work not on any ledger. Work nobody talked about. Neo called it freelancing. I called it selling his soul one jump at a time.
He'd disappear for days, sometimes weeks. Reappear hollow-eyed, skin pale like he hadn't slept in years. He'd brush off my questions with the same line: "I had a mission." That was it. That was all I got.
The scar under his left eye came from one of those missions. He never said how. Just one day he came back with a cut that wouldn't close right. Now it carved pale across his cheek, like someone had tried to erase him and failed.
And his guardian—if you could even call it that—was barely there. An underdeveloped shimmer, like smoke trying to remember how to take shape. Hard to see unless you squinted at the corner of your eye. Flicker mocked it, called it "half-born." Velnix ignored it. But I watched Neo with it sometimes, the way he clenched his fists, jaw tight, like he hated himself for not having more.
I never told him I understood.
---
One night, he stood before a rift that wasn't like the others. It shimmered thin, a sheet of glass stretched too far, edges pulsing like raw nerves. Only he could have opened it. His alone.
Time bent differently around him. Rift Leaper made it so. He could feel the hours slip in strange directions, see echoes of things not yet lived.
This time was worse.
He stepped through. Pressure folded around him, the world snapping sideways. And waiting on the other side was himself.
Not a reflection. Not a trick. Another Neo—older in the eyes, sharper in the stance, scar deeper, movements coiled with weight.
The younger Neo froze. "What is happening?"
The older one only smiled. Faint, tired, unshakably certain, like he had already lived this moment a thousand times.
A death quest. That was what Sovereign had given him. Fail, and death was the only option.
And the opponent was himself.
---
The three years changed us all.
Matt had his promotion swagger now, badge shining brighter than his eyes. He still burned dinner, still smirked when Avren teased him, but there was a weight in his voice when he spoke of Concord assignments. He was in deeper than ever.
Avren stayed the same on the surface—wolfish grin, cigarette smoke, precision like a blade. But I could tell the job had cut him too. The shadow-hound at his side never barked. It just stared at the dark like it knew something was coming.
Me? I still had one eye gone. Fingernails grew back, scars faded, but the pit was never far from my mind. Nights I'd wake with my hand curled like it was still gripping Flicker, waiting for another fight that never came.
The Rift Seed pulsed louder. Graduation drew closer. Crest laughed into her stream. Neo stared into rifts only he could open.
And me, sitting at a desk across from Avren, drinking stale coffee in a cage that called itself home—wondering what would break first.
The walls.
Or us.