Sector 6-N2 - Entertainment District
Lanova - Mid Tiers, 19th Day of The Sun Year
4:30 PM
The soft trill of the old rotary-line ringer shattered the silence like a ripple across still water. At first, she didn't move. She lay tangled in linen sheets, one leg thrown carelessly across the corner of the bed, eyes half-lidded, staring at the undulating fan blades spinning against the ceiling's warm twilight hue. The call kept ringing, insistent, antique in tone, as though pulled from a different time entirely.
"Jasmine?" she murmured to herself, voice still hoarse from sleep. "What the hell is she calling for... it's been years."
She pushed herself up, muscles uncoiling in slow, practiced fluidity. Bare feet met the textured floor, cool matte stone, smoothed by time and intentional design. The entire apartment was one seamless open space, walls absent except where structural necessity required them. No doors, no clutter. Just deliberate choices. Japanese sci-fi minimalism threaded through every detail. Clean lines. Asymmetry in balance. Utility in aesthetics. Along the far walls, greenery climbed vertical garden panels, anchored by smartsoil matrices and slow-drip hydro feeds. They rustled softly as she passed, whispering under the draft that had already begun to move through the space.
The air held the soft tang of citrus from an auto-misting botanical canister in the ceiling, blending with the sharper trace of dried incense that had long since burned down to ash. Shelves of analog books floated beside shelves of data-crystals, all unindexed, as if memory—not algorithm—was the intended method of access. A low meditation platform sat near the back, flanked by a pair of cushion-stools and an inactive holo-oracle, its core light dimmed to a sleeping pulse. Her bed had no frame, just a suspended cloud of polymer-wrapped foam hovering inches from the floor, held in place by subtle gravitational anchors embedded in the slab beneath.
She crossed the wide stretch of living space in long, silent strides, not bothering to reach for clothing beyond the wrap already tied around her waist. The phone rested on a stand near the wall-length glass pane that defined the apartment's western boundary, a panoramic terrace window currently peeled open in a horizontal arc, letting the outside seep in. Warm wind brushed against her shoulders, catching in the ends of her loosely tied hair as she reached the comm device.
Beyond the glass, the Entertainment District burned in hues of layered neon and shifting saturation. Sector 6-N2 was alive at this hour—digital lanterns strung between skywalks, clubs thumping behind mirrored glass, ad-drones gliding overhead on whispering wings. The scent of fried starch and synthetic perfume wafted from the lower street levels. Somewhere nearby, a rooftop taiko set slammed a rhythm against steel and sky.
It was Lanova at its most decadent. And most deceptive.
The light filtered across her features as she reached for the blinking call relay, its ID already making her heart tighten: Navani, Jasmine
but she didn't press accept. Not yet.
Old habits were hard to kill, especially the petty ones.
Jasmine always hated waiting. That made it tradition. Five rings minimum, no matter the urgency. Even when they were young and on mission clocks, she'd make her wait. It was part ritual, part power move, part inside joke wrapped in passive-aggressive affection. A little dance of dominance. Five rings for every year Jasmine pretended not to care.
The third ring buzzed.
She stretched, slow and deliberate, arms raising high above her head as her spine cracked like dry bark. Her muscles shifted with feline precision, sculpted and smooth from years of war and the kind of training that left your soul two steps behind your breath. The sun-imitating strip lights from the terrace rim caught the curve of her shoulders, casting violet and silver over her bare back, highlighting each dip and hardline of her delts and triceps.
She was topless, not that she cared, she lived alone, high above Sector 6-N2, and modesty wasn't part of her aesthetic. Her only clothing was a pair of impossibly loose black elastic pants that hung from her hips like a whisper, moving with every tilt of her frame like water. Fabric pooled at her ankles and swept just above the floor, silent as shadow. Her long, violet-black hair flowed behind her, slightly damp and tangled from sleep, spilling in strands that shimmered blue under the terrace light. She pushed some of it over her shoulder and padded barefoot to the kitchen alcove.
Fourth ring.
"Drama queen," she muttered to no one, reaching for the coffee synth. It looked like a museum piece, an analog hybrid model with mechanical levers and actual grounds. The aroma of dark roast began to spread almost instantly, warm and bitter with hints of spice and floral smoke. She leaned her hip against the counter, waiting for the hiss of steam, letting the breeze from the open terrace cool the sweat still ghosting her skin.
Fifth ring.
Perfect. Timing. She gave a smug little smile, finally reached for the relay, and watched the light blink once more, steady, unchanging.
Only then, with one hand on her coffee cup and the other moving with practiced ease, did she press accept.
"Hello? Seyra? Can you hear me?" Jasmine's voice came in clean—older, calmer, a little more hollow than Seyra remembered.
There was a long pause. Seyra stood still near the terrace, the cup of coffee warm in her hand, the wind pulling at the loose ends of her hair. She looked out over Sector 6-N2, letting the neon skyline distract her for a moment before answering.
"…It's been five years, Jasmine." Her tone wasn't sharp, just tired. A simple truth laid bare.
On the other end of the line, only silence answered her at first. Jasmine never apologized quickly. It wasn't in her blood. Seyra didn't expect her to. But still—it hung there, unsaid, dense and pressing like unfiltered gravity.
"I know," Jasmine finally said. "But I wouldn't call unless it mattered."
"That's what you said the night before Kal Siro."
Another silence. This one heavier.
Seyra turned away from the window, exhaling slowly through her nose. The memory was like acid. She still remembered that last briefing room. How Jasmine's eyes had been distant even then, buried under mission directives, under the weight of the Empire's quiet desperation.
Kal Siro had been a nightmare. For Seyra, it was more than tactical failure. It was abandonment. Not just Adam and Spark disappearing when the delusions began to eat through the walls, but Jasmine, her supposed command partner, disappearing in the most crucial moment, leaving her alone. They had trained together. Served together. Seyra had joined the mission not just for duty, but for Jasmine. For the promise they'd once whispered on the rooftop of the Southern Range Barracks after their first joint op.
Jasmine had gone dark first. Retreating into the cold calculation that had made her famous in the Alata Peacekeeper ranks. Not heartless—but unreachable.
"I still don't know why you cut me off," Seyra said, voice low now. "You let them go, Jasmine. And then you let me go, too."
"That wasn't what happened."
"No?" Seyra stepped barefoot across the cool tile, past the paper-thin meditation mat, her tone warming, tightening. "Because from where I was, I remained the only one left standing in the ashes after you vanished into silence. The Fourteen Vows got scattered like dust. You never even tried to rebuild us."
"I couldn't." Jasmine's voice dipped, edges showing.
"Wouldn't is different from couldn't."
More silence. Then:
"Adam sent a signal."
That stopped Seyra cold.
"Adam?" She blinked once, twice, as if the name had disrupted a fault line behind her eyes. "You're kidding."
"No. He's alive. And he's moving."
"Toward what?"
"The Veil."
The words landed heavy. Heavier than they should've. Kal Siro had many ghosts, but few had survived long enough to haunt her properly. Adam was one of them.
Seyra set her coffee down. Her heart was doing that thing again, tight, suspended, a slow burn in the center of her ribs. She crossed the room again, this time toward the weapons case mounted beneath the eastern panel, but didn't open it yet.
"I thought he'd be smart enough to stay buried," she muttered.
Jasmine replied with something close to irony. "You know him. Buried doesn't last long."
"And you're calling me because…"
"Because I need you."
There it was. The Commander asking for help. A rare event, like seeing the artificial sun crack through Lanova's constant sky smog without warning. Seyra let the weight of it linger.
She stared at her reflection in the terrace window. The long, violet-black hair falling like ink down her back. The thick scar across her shoulderblade faintly pink from the last synthetic re-stitch. She was leaner than she used to be. Colder, too. But the EGO was still there—still alive inside her.
She had been one of the Fourteen Vows. An elite, experimental unit built around high-EGO sensitivity, all of them handpicked from childhood trauma registries and combat aptitude scores. Fourteen soldiers. Fourteen monsters. Most of them were dead now. Some didn't die clean. And Seyra… Seyra had survived longer than most because her EGO didn't burn out like theirs. It twisted. Focused. A manipulation-type Signature, built on emotional pressure and projection, Kal Siro had broken her faith. Not her function.
"I'm not getting involved in another one of your black ops," she said, not yet deciding whether it was a lie. "I'm not that soldier anymore."
"This isn't about soldiers," Jasmine said. "It's about a wound that never closed."
"…When?"
"Soon. I'll send you a secure drop with the data trail. Coordinates. Everything."
Seyra stood there, quiet again, staring at the Entertainment District's sky, now shifting from plum to deep electric violet. Somewhere below, fireworks exploded in soft, decorative arcs over a corporate stage. She barely noticed.
"Five years," she said. "And you're calling me now."
"I had no one else I could call."
Seyra didn't answer that. Not directly. Not verbally.
But when the line finally clicked off, she was already pulling open the weapons case. Her fingers ran over the old gear—the tools of a past she told herself she no longer needed.
And for the first time in a long time, the name Kal Siro didn't just echo like a scar. It sounded like a warning.
She turned her head, letting the city wind ghost along her bare shoulders again.
"I guess we're doing this."
----
The Neon Mile
Lanova - Mid Tiers, 19th Day of The Sun Year
4:30 PM
The alley was narrow, curved like a broken spine, sealed at one end by a collapsed vent shaft and at the other by flickering signage from a defunct gear-repair vendor. It was the kind of corridor that held its breath, the kind that had seen death before and remembered it. Adam crouched behind the bent frame of a rusted maintenance panel, one knee pressed to the oil-slick concrete, his breath shallow. He could hear them now—footsteps that didn't belong to this place. Too measured. Too clean. Not boots, but something harder, mechanical softened only by synthetic musculature. Federation design. Automas. But not the street-level types used in smuggling busts or border skirmishes. These were Sicarii-class—black-blooded, ego-nullifying, elite soldier units. Rare. Expensive. Lethal. And worst of all: trained to counter EGO users.
Adam knew the type. Not from reports or intercepted comms, but from the old scars along his ribs, the ones that burned whenever null-fields got too close. Sicarii weren't just hunters. They were reapers dressed in chrome and command-line protocol. Bio-mimetic frames grown from selective gene-matter, infused with Federation-crafted bonewelds and outfitted with anti-ego resonance disruptors embedded in their palms and skulls. They didn't move like people. They moved like inevitability. Built for suppression, not mercy. And if four of them had crossed the sea, stepped onto Lanovan soil, breached the island's bureaucratic quarantines and AMA chokeholds, then the Federation wasn't just playing games anymore. They were making moves. They were declaring something. Quietly, with steel.
The panel hissed as he shifted slightly, heat signatures drawing closer from the western entrance. He'd counted the shapes in the ripple of his lens overlay—four units, two advancing in straight lines, two flanking through parallel corridors, their sensors sweeping in wide-radius arcs. They were working in formation, triangulating based on residual Ego-flux they'd likely tracked from Spark's den. Which meant they were good. Which meant they were here for him.
A drop of condensation fell from the pipe above him and burst against his shoulder. The air smelled of old wiring, discharged psi-batteries, and gunmetal sweat. Lanova's Neon Mile never slept, but here, beneath the glitter, in one of its broken mechanical underarms, the world slowed. Here, illusion peeled away. There was no shimmer of screens. No dancing holo-windows or drifting jazz or marketplaces wired to sell you dreams. Just rot. And war.
The lead Sicarii rounded the corner, a tall silhouette of black-paneled armor, shaped humanoid but wrong in the angles, like a mannequin made to mimic muscle but never breathe. Its eyes glowed faint red behind a clear faceplate etched with runes. Not Arcane—but technological imitations of Arcana. Federation brand. Adam could almost hear its interface parsing the environment, a soundless churn of data as it accessed micro-fields and electromagnetic residue patterns. These things read environments like monks read holy text. Every flicker of aether. Every twitch of heat.
Behind the enemy, the sky overhead flickered once—a soft, vertical ray of filtered artificial sun piercing through the half-formed canopy of artificial clouds above. It danced through broken glass mounted on the alley wall—a shard of an old advertising panel—and bounced, perfectly, onto Adam's face as he turned to assess. That sudden line of light—too warm, too precise—flared against his iris like the activation trigger of a divine mechanism. And just for a breath—no more than half a second—something deep inside him moved.
A flicker. A hunger.
Violet-white, threaded with electric orange, brushed with the cold edge of indigo. Not flame. Not energy. Something else entirely. His EGO. A flash of it, buried for months, now stirring like an animal testing the lock on its cage. The desire wasn't abstract. It wasn't righteous. It simply was. It wanted. Not blood. Not glory. Resolution. Adam blinked, the fire gone, but its echo still throbbed in his pulse. He flexed his fingers beneath the edge of his coat, fingertips brushing the grip of his embedded resonance blade. The kill-path ran in his head automatically, step, twist, cut, slide—but his thoughts weren't calm. They were clear. And clearing further.
The Automa stopped. Its voice issued in a calm, sterile dialect—modified Lanovan, Federation-accented. "Thermal ghost detected. Pattern inconsistency suggests biological anomaly. Releasing the seeker."
Its shoulder opened with a hiss of retracted plating. A drone unfolded from the slot, marble-sized but heavy with embedded sensors, glowing dimly red. It hovered upward, processing the air for flickers of heat, heart rhythm, even trace Ego-particles. Against most people, it would've worked. But Adam wasn't most people.
He moved, not fast; perfectly.
Slipped out from the panel like a shadow, angle precise, footfalls whisper-quiet from years of mod training and trauma reflex. His blade hissed out of its sheath with no light, no drama. Just function. It slipped beneath the Automa's arm and across its back, the edge phased to vibrate at micro-frequency. It didn't slice. It undid. Severed the spinal relay node beneath the composite muscle plating. The thing jerked once, head tilting unnaturally, its red eyes flaring wide.
Then it collapsed, systems folding into themselves, dead before it knew it had died.
The drone chirped in panic. Adam snatched it mid-air and crushed it with his palm. Shards fell.
The other three were already responding, rounds chambering. One charged straight, another darted up the wall and clung like a lizard to the vertical surface, the third vanished from sight—probably shifting to a stealth phase, using spatial warps to flank.
This was what the Federation brought to bear.
Where the Empire revered hierarchy and technological supremacy, massive war constructs, mechanized armies, consciousness drones and satellite fortresses—the Federation moved in shadows. Magic—not born from Ego, but from its periphery. They didn't touch their own souls. They touched the soul of the world. Federation casters didn't shape will. They channeled it—diverting rivers instead of throwing fire. Spells crafted with mathematical precision, arcane logic that didn't bend to emotion. Their whole society was built on that detachment. The anti-Ego. And their machines were the same, trained to reject EGO flux, to erase it. Not just resist. Nullify.
And now they were in Lanova. Which meant Jasmine wasn't the only target. Adam had just made it in the kill list too.
He ducked a sweep from the wall-runner, blade catching the heel of its descending boot. Sparks lit the alley. The third Automa appeared behind him, phase-walking through a false projection panel. A clean move. Tactical. But not clean enough.
Adam pivoted sharply, his micro-vibrating short blade folding back into its sheath with a clean magnetic click. It wasn't hesitation that made him pull back—it was realization. Precision wasn't going to cut it anymore. The Automas were coordinating now, learning, adapting with every failed strike. These weren't built to chase—they were built to corner. And right now, in this collapsing alley of neon wreckage and scorched sensor metal, Adam needed more than surgical tools.
He needed devastation.
His left hand slid beneath the heavy interior lining of his coat, fingers brushing the cool, matte grip of a hidden weapon, long, lean, dead quiet. The weight of it, even dormant, sent a shiver up his spine. He always carried it close. Never once left it behind, not even when he buried other weapons, other names, other pieces of himself. The hilt was deceptively simple, forged from matte-black hyperalloy and finished with silent obsidian ridges. No engravings. No insignia. Just the feel of something ancient forced into modern shape. Spark had once joked it looked like a relic. Adam never corrected him. It was a relic. Not of time—but of choice.
He drew it slow, reverently, rotating the hilt in his palm. The second his thumb pressed the recessed ignition ring at its base, the weapon responded. With a subtle whirr, a solid-length blade extended from the core, modular nanosteel locked in magnetic rigidity, dark as eclipsed stone, edge bathed in flickering hues of blue-violet and deep red-orange. No glint. No glow. Just hunger made visible.
The Fang of the Black River.
That was the name Spark had etched into the weapon's rootline code—deep inside the EGO-integrated matrix that allowed the blade to resonate with Adam's own energy signature. It wasn't just steel. It was bonded. Tainted by Adam's EGO years ago, after the Twelve-Limbed Siege near the borders of the Federation. The weapon had seen blood. Automa blood. Human blood. Federation tech and Veil enforcers alike. But more than anything, it had seen choice. It remembered the moment Adam stopped trying to survive and started trying to become something else entirely.
And now, it remembered battle.
The nearest Automa lunged—a blur of metal limbs and cloaked distortion, pulse-rifle converting mid-run into a blade-arm. Adam caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and stepped forward into the assault. Not away. Into. The Fang swept up with fluid brutality, intercepting the blow mid-air. Steel met composite alloy in a high-frequency clash, the impact sending shockwaves down the wall and lighting up the alley in arcs of static discharge.
The Automa's weapon shattered, not cleanly, but along fracture points it didn't know it had. The Fang had that effect. It destabilized. It unstitched. Not through brute force, but through disruption. The edge was lined with a subtle EGO phase-distorter—Spark's addition—that vibrated in tune with Adam's soul signature, making the sword act less like a blade and more like a question: Do you belong in this world? Everything it touched had to answer. Not everything survived the conversation.
The Automa stumbled back, twitching, processing, as its core weapon systems blinked red. Adam didn't give it a second chance. He slid forward, shifting into a low stance, bringing the Fang upward in a brutal diagonal cut that ripped through its chestplate and up into the cranial rig. Sparks sprayed in a halo. The head slumped before the body did.
Two left.
One dropped down from above, its motion laced with sorcery. Federation magic—actual magic—braided into its descent like an inverted prayer. Runes shimmered in its wake, drawn from Ego not of self, but of surrounding. The Federation's strength: externalized will. They didn't bleed for their power. They borrowed it. From space. From time. From the raw weave of the city's ignored corners. This one landed with a spell already charged—Adam felt it like a cold wind slipping into his ribcage. A pressure. A warning. It was trying to silence his EGO, dull the resonance that fueled the Fang. Like all Sicarii elite, this one was trained in suppressive chants, rituals designed to kill identity before the body.
It stepped forward, and the alley dimmed. Shadows lengthened. Voices in the background, just city noise, faltered into silence.
Adam gritted his teeth.
The Fang flickered.
His breath came slow—measured. The key to EGO wasn't rage. It wasn't screaming or domination. It was existence. The clarity of will. The refusal to vanish.
He adjusted his stance, blade pointed low, the weight of the Fang channeling into his spine like gravity.
"I am still here," he whispered, as the runes tightened.
The second the spell finished forming, Adam moved, not toward the Automa, but through it.
He passed beneath the lowering runes like a breath between syllables, the Fang dragging across the null space of the caster's field with just enough resistance to draw a sound—not metal, not magic. Recognition. The Automa's head turned, too late. The blade arced, not in a killing line, but a cutting truth, severing the spell from its anchor, splitting both synthetic and sorcerous signatures in one fluid sweep.
The Automaton's systems shut down mid-motion. It fell like a marionette with cut strings, collapsing into itself. Runes flickered once and died.
The last one.
Adam pivoted, eyes narrowing as the final Automa twisted into motion—no longer advancing, no longer coordinating, but fleeing. Its retreat was not fear-driven, not desperation. It was strategic. A ghost vanishing back into its data hive, where Federation black channels would deconstruct the fight, calibrate for next time, adjust for Adam's weapon, his rhythm, his EGO signature. It would run the footage through quantum scrubbers, analyze his stance, model future intercepts. It would learn. And next time, it would not come alone.
Adam didn't speak. Didn't smirk. Just watched the automa glide toward the alley's broken threshold, its limbs adjusting into travel mode, pulse-lag dampeners hissing as it flickered past the corpses of its siblings. Its silhouette stretched in the artificial daylight bleeding through the edge of the Neon Mile, where synthlight and consumer glare waited like baited breath. Beyond that lay noise, safety, crowds. If it crossed that line, it was gone.
The Fang of the Black River still vibrated in his grip—low and warm, a pulse beneath the metal, as if the blade was waiting for permission.
Adam shifted his stance.
The movement was subtle, barefoot balance settling into his hips, right arm drawing back. Not a sword grip anymore. A throwing grip. The air warped faintly around him, a heat shimmer pulled from nothing. His fingers adjusted at the hilt's notched ridges, designed by Spark for this very act. He had never thrown the Fang unless it was necessary. And it was necessary.
The automa hit the alley's exit.
Adam exhaled.
And threw.
The weapon left his hand like a judgment, silent and clean, cutting the air in a flat arc, no spin, no wasted motion. Not a blade. A verdict. The sword lanced through the distance like a black arrow, its weight stabilized by the tuned balance Spark had engineered years ago—heavy at the base, impossibly light along the edge. It passed beneath a flickering light fixture and caught a sliver of sunlight, just enough for its EGO-forged edge to shimmer in shades of red, violet, orange, like a sunrise bleeding through oil.
And then it hit.
The Fang struck the retreating Automa dead center between the shoulder blades, piercing through chassis, into the core, and out the other side. A perfect line. No deviation. The automa jerked violently, limbs spasming as the blue-white glow in its spine fractured like glass and collapsed forward without a sound. Steam hissed from its vents. No explosion. Just a clean, abrupt end.
Adam stood at the alley's center, chest rising slow. His hand still hung in the air from the throw.
Around him, the city's noise returned, distant and unaware. A nearby speaker blared market ads for combat-grade synthskin. A drone vendor hovered overhead announcing a new line of stimulant teas. Life kept moving.
But something had changed.
His EGO dimmed behind his eyes, retreating to the coil of his spine—but not gone. Not cold. Just waiting. The Fang had drunk again. And it remembered.
They had come for him, Federation tools. Magic and steel, engineered to silence. But Adam had spoken. Not in words. In action. In choice.
And Lanova, vast and blind and hungry, had not noticed the shift. Not yet. Neither had Spark. Nor Jasmine.
But the river was stirring again. Its current deeper. Hungrier.
And now it had direction.
He walked forward, slow and silent, each step echoing faintly against the grimy alloy beneath his boots. The alley stretched like a wound behind him, smeared with blood, burnt ozone, and the static ghosts of Federation magic. The last Automa lay facedown at the threshold of the Neon Mile, the Fang of the Black River jutting from its back like a blade left in a collapsing temple. It hadn't twitched since the moment it fell. No reboot attempt. No emergency pulse. Whatever backups it might've carried, Adam's EGO had severed them at the source.
He came to a stop over the corpse, the blade still humming with faint life—its matte-black spine glistening under the shaft of false sunlight breaking through the filter clouds above. The wound around the entry was oddly precise, no excess rupture, just the surgical violence of intent made real. The Fang didn't maim. It ended.
For a moment, he stood still, breathing. Listening.
No further movement. No shadows at the alley mouth. No signal interference in his implant.
Satisfied, Adam reached down.
His gloved fingers curled around the sword's hilt, the familiar chill of its material meeting the warmth of his skin. It pulsed once—recognition—EGO syncing. He tightened his grip, braced his foot against the fallen automa's shoulder frame, and with a single motion, pulled.
The sound it made wasn't metal. Not entirely. It was wet, deep, a rupture that carried memory. The blade came free in a clean line, the sound followed by a faint hiss of decompressing fluid from the automa's breached core. Its eyes flickered once, then died.
The Fang gleamed only for a moment, wet with synthetic coolant and black-flecked energy residue, before that, too, seemed to evaporate, drawn into the sword's internal coil. Spark's modifications saw to that. The blade left no trace. Not on him. Not on it.
Adam flicked the excess from the edge, wiped the hilt across the inside hem of his coat, and sheathed the blade along the reinforced magnetic latch on his back. The weapon clicked into place like it had always belonged there.
And it had.
He took one last glance at the automa's body, then turned into the noise of the Mile.
Vanishing into the crowd, quiet, intact, still burning.
The wind shifted as he stepped out of the alley, carrying the low, static breath of Lanova's endless pulse, drones overhead, neon flicker in puddles, scent of coolant and street spice twisting together in the heat-haze of the Mid Tiers. No one looked at him as he passed. In the Neon Mile, blood was just another part of the market's rhythm.
Behind him, the corpse cooled.
Ahead, the streets bent toward something deeper.
Adam moved without sound, but with purpose—his coat drawn tight, the weight of the Fang firm across his waist, his eyes already scanning for the next shadow to cut through.
They had found him.
Which meant the countdown had started.
And from this point on, no one, Jasmine, Spark, not even the Cartel—would be able to pretend the Game hadn't changed.
Not with the river rising.