The knowledge wasn't a comfort. It was a weight.
Kael felt it in the quiet moments, in the sterile silence of their government-issue domicile in the Outer Ring. The name—Kinetic Core—was a clinical diagnosis for a miracle, a cold label for the ghost in his machine. It explained the vibrating spear, the impossible resonance that had shattered a Phase Stalker's hold on reality. It explained everything. And it changed nothing.
Lord Valerius was still out there, a patient predator in a city of gilded cages. House Thorne was a shadow in the periphery. And they, Kael and Maya, were just two kids from a backwater fort with a stolen blueprint for a new kind of soul. The knowledge was a shield, but it was also a target.
"It's not enough," he said, the words a disturbance in the room's humming stasis. He was looking at the data slate, its ghostly blue light painting his face with the sins of the Ancients. "My armor… it's a reaction. A good one, but it's still just a wall. Valerius isn't a Chimera. He won't throw himself against a wall."
Maya looked up from the kinetic spear she was meticulously stripping and cleaning on her cot. The ritual was her anchor, a piece of familiar, brutal logic in a world that had become impossibly complex. "He's a man who collects weapons," she said, her voice low and even. "He won't see you as a wall. He'll see you as a lock he wants the key to."
He nodded, the truth of it a cold knot in his stomach. He was a problem to be solved, and Valerius was a master of solutions. Defense wasn't enough. He had to evolve. He had to become a more complex problem.
His fingers, no longer just a technician's, but something more, danced across the surface of the slate. He wasn't just reading Thorne's logs anymore. He was interrogating them. His Kinetic Core wasn't just a power source; it was a lens, a new way of seeing the world. He filtered the bestiary, looking not for threats, but for echoes of his own nature. He was searching for sympathetic frequencies.
He found one.
"Tremor-Lizard," he breathed. "Tier-2. Reptilian. Native to the Ashen Badlands. It doesn't have exceptional armor or speed." He traced the schematic, a creature that looked more like a living piece of geology than an animal. "Its primary trait is… resonance. It generates localized, high-frequency vibrations through the ground to stun its prey."
Maya stopped her work. Her eyes, dark and sharp, met his. She didn't need the diagram. She understood the principle. "Kinetic," she said.
"More than that," Kael corrected, a feverish excitement cutting through his weariness. "It's not just brute force. It's tuned. It's a focused application of kinetic energy. It's… elegant." He looked from the slate to Maya, the path forward snapping into terrifying focus. "It's the next ingredient."
Getting the permit was an exercise in calculated lies. They couldn't use the same story of a traumatized burnout; that currency had been spent. This time, Kael played the part of the ambitious prodigy. He filed the request not as a hunt, but as a field test. A User with a uniquely resonant Frame wished to test his new, experimental armor synthesis against a creature known for its disruptive kinetic pulses. It was a perfect piece of bureaucratic fiction—plausible, technical, and just arrogant enough to be believed in a city that valued power over sense.
They were granted the permit, not with a bribe, but with the cold logic of an acceptable risk. If they succeeded, the Enclave gained valuable data. If they failed, it was just two more scrappers from the outer territories who flew too close to the sun.
The Ashen Badlands were a world scraped clean. The wind, a constant, mournful razor, had stripped the land of all but the hardiest, most stubborn rock. Grey dust, fine as powdered bone, coated everything, deadening sound and stealing color. It was a place of profound emptiness, a canvas waiting for a monster.
Kael used the Hound's senses to track, a low, constant thrum of information painting a map of the desolation in his mind. He smelled the ozone in the thin air, tasted the mineral tang of the dust. He felt the vast, geological silence of the plateau. The Tremor-Lizard was a creature of stone and vibration; it left no scent, no trail a normal predator could follow. But Kael was no longer normal. He let his Kinetic Core be his guide, feeling for a dissonance in the earth's natural hum. A wrong note.
He found it near a cluster of jagged, wind-carved hoodoos. A low, rhythmic pulse in the bedrock. A heartbeat made of stone.
It was sunning itself on a wide, flat rock, and it was a masterpiece of natural camouflage. Its hide wasn't crystal, but a mosaic of slate-grey, obsidian-veined plates that perfectly matched the surrounding terrain. It was low-slung and powerful, its thick limbs ending in claws designed for gripping rock, not rending flesh. It wasn't a monster built for a charge. It was an ambush predator made of the very ground it stood on.
"There," Kael whispered into his comm, his voice a ghost on the wind.
Maya, a hundred yards to his left, was already in position, a motionless shadow in the lee of a rock outcropping. Her reply was a simple click of her comm. Ready.
This was the test. All of it. The lies, the planning, the hunt. It was a final exam for the technician who had become a weapon.
The lizard sensed them. Its head, a featureless wedge of dark stone, lifted. It didn't roar. The air around it simply began to shimmer. The ground beneath Kael's feet trembled, a low, gut-wrenching vibration that was not a sound but a physical force.
Kael braced himself, opening the door to his inner-world. The [Shard Armor] bloomed across his skin, a shimmering, liquid-like mosaic of impossible geometry. The tremor hit him, a wave of pure, disruptive force. It wasn't like the Geodes' sonic attack that caused lag. This was a physical assault on his Frame's stability. The barbs of his armor vibrated violently, a high-pitched whine of protest. The Hound snarled, wanting to charge the source of the attack. The Tortoise groaned, its placid nature straining under the kinetic assault. Kael felt like a machine being shaken apart. But the armor held. The harmony, fragile as it was, held.
He needed to get closer. The lizard was a fortress, and its only weakness was proximity. He switched his senses. Click. The Hound's world of scent and sound vanished, replaced by the Stalker's cold, conceptual blueprint. He saw the lizard not as a beast, but as a system. He saw the flow of energy into its core as it charged another pulse. And he saw the path.
He moved. His body felt thin, unreal. A ghost flowing through a world of concepts. He didn't run. He flowed, a grey shape against grey rock, his footfalls silent on the vibrating ground. The lizard, its senses attuned to tectonic shifts and the heavy tread of prey, was blind to the whisper of his passage.
He was twenty feet away when it unleashed its second pulse. The world buckled. Kael stumbled, reality reasserting itself with a brutal, physical lurch. The Stalker's ghost-walk faltered. He was solid again. He was seen.
The Tremor-Lizard turned, its movements a slow, grinding inevitability. It opened a mouth that wasn't a mouth, a cavern of dark crystal in its stony face, and let out a roar that was the sound of a mountain breaking. It charged, not with speed, but with the crushing weight of a landslide.
Kael didn't retreat. He stood his ground, the technician facing a catastrophic system failure. He had the schematics. He knew the flaw. He let the Hound's pounce surge through him, not to meet the charge, but to evade it. He sidestepped, a fluid, desperate motion, and as the behemoth thundered past, he thrust his spear. Not at its armored hide. He aimed for the patch of softer, fibrous tissue on its flank, the spot where its leg joined its body. A weak point. A design flaw.
The spear struck true. The vibrating tip, a trick born of desperation and a deep understanding of his own nature, didn't punch through. It resonated. It found the creature's own frequency and turned it back on itself. A feedback loop.
The Tremor-Lizard shrieked, a high, thin sound of grinding stone and violated physics. The plates of its armor cracked, not from the force of the blow, but from the internal, harmonic assault. It stumbled, its unstoppable charge dissolving into a clumsy, broken heap.
It was over.
Kael stood panting, his body a screaming chorus of aches and strained energy. He looked at the fallen Chimera. The hunt was done. The test was passed. He walked toward the dying beast, where a new light was beginning to pulse. A quiet, steady thrum of pure, kinetic potential. The second ingredient. He had it. And as he reached for it, he knew with chilling certainty that the next stage of his work, the second synthesis, would be a crucible far hotter than this one. He wasn't just collecting parts. He was building a new god, and he was using his own soul for a forge.