Sector 6-N2 - Entertainment District
Lanova - Mid Tiers, 19th Day of The Sun Year
6:00 PM
The new clothes hung loosely over her frame, plain tactical gear tailored for mobility—not for ceremony. Seyra stood in front of the black-paneled mirror embedded into the wall beside her workspace, buckling the last of her thigh harnesses, fingers slow, methodical. There was no music, no broadcast feeds playing in the background. Just the subtle murmur of wind sifting through the terrace shutters and the rhythmic clicks of hardened buckles locking into place.
She didn't wear uniforms anymore. Not since Kal Siro. No insignia. No colors. Just blacks and greys and the slight edge of violet she allowed herself, stitched into the collar lining like a secret she'd never surrender.
Her weapons were waiting in their lacquered crate—simple, elegant things with deadly precision. A collapsible spear-knife, a three-shot plasma stave, and her EGO relic: Shiverglass, a prism-like pendant forged with the residue of her first full awakening. It pulsed now, faintly, like something breathing. She didn't touch it yet.
Instead, she moved to her low central table—a wide, clean surface of bleached composite wood—and drew the tablet from beneath a thin stack of archived memory sheets. It was old, heavier than modern models, slightly chipped at one edge where she'd once dropped it during a blackout in Sector 9. She didn't bother upgrading it. It remembered her hand. And that was all that mattered.
The screen lit up. No apps. Just canvas.
She sat cross-legged on the floor, hair falling like a curtain around her face, still damp from the shower. Her stylus hovered for a moment—then pressed gently to the screen. Thin lines appeared. Fast strokes. Almost surgical. Shapes began to form: a terrace, fractured by shadow. A blade held in reverse grip. A woman turning away. Seyra didn't stop to correct anything. She never did. These weren't meant to be exact. They were fragments. Memories as they surfaced—drawn the way they burned into her.
She kept sketching, but her mind drifted—inevitably—to the call. Jasmine's voice had been composed, like always, but frayed beneath the surface. A ripple she tried to hide. And the moment Seyra felt it, she'd been pulled backward, years into a chapter she thought she'd buried.
Kal Siro.
The name alone pressed a pressure point in her chest. It had been one of the Septagram Missions—the seven final operations launched by Alata Corp to end the Second Dawn Wars, missions designed not for victory, but conclusion. Brutal, unsustainable, but definitive. Each was a scalpel plunged into the war's heart. And Kal Siro… was the blade that broke.
The public knew only fragments. A hospital seized by an EGO Psycho. High-profile hostages. Internal sabotage. Aftermath: fire, collapse, a blacked-out report scrubbed from all civilian channels. But Seyra knew the full weight of it. She had been part of it. A Vow.
One of the Fourteen.
The Vows had been Alata Corp's deepest gamble: an elite experimental unit comprised solely of EGO manipulators whose resonance manifested not outwardly through destruction, but inwardly through manipulation—mental incursion, emotional redirection, cognitive reshaping. Every Vow was a mindbreaker. And every Vow was unstable.
EGO wasn't power. Not really. That was the first lie the Empire told when they outlawed it across the continent. EGO was will. It was identity turned outward. And the more forcefully you bent it to the world, the more the world bent back. Unawakened civilians carried it unknowingly, as instinct, as survival. But Awakened carried it like flame—and flame always asked for fuel.
Seyra's own awakening hadn't been quiet. No Vow's ever was.
At Kal Siro, she'd watched as reality itself twisted to reflect the EgoPsycho's will. The halls looped. Gravity collapsed in waves. Time fragmented. Most soldiers couldn't handle it. Couldn't process memory as weapon, voice as blade, trauma as battlefield. But the Vows were trained for this. Trained to walk the edge of delusion and pull it apart thread by thread.
Except they weren't alone.
That mission wasn't just sabotage. It was bait.
The Federation had seeded amplifiers throughout the site. External EGO triggers designed to resonate with the Vows' frequencies, overclocking their perception to the point of breakdown. Out of the Fourteen, only Seyra and Jasmine had made it out conscious. And even then—barely. The rest were either slaughtered or locked in permanent cognitive loops, minds liquified, personalities overwritten.
Seyra paused her drawing. Her hand trembled just slightly, stylus hovering over the digital paper. She stared at the last lines she had drawn.
A crack in a ceiling. A trail of blood leading up a wall. She hadn't realized what she was sketching until now.
She swallowed.
She still remembered what it sounded like when one of the Vows lost their anchor. Not a scream. A prayer. Repeated. Over and over, like a glitch in a language no one spoke anymore.
Back then, Jasmine had led them. And Seyra had followed her, trusted her—until the end, when Jasmine broke contact. Left her to evacuate alone, thinking Seyra had been compromised. Maybe she had. Maybe she still was. They never spoke after that. Not once in five years. Until now.
Seyra set the stylus down, breath measured, and looked toward the glass wall of her home. The skyline of the Entertainment District glittered like an artificial constellation—Sector 6-N2, always humming with light and movement. Somewhere in this maze, Jasmine was moving again. And that meant he was too.
Adam.
The ghost. The deserter. The fracture point.
Seyra wasn't ready to hear his name. But the pulse beneath her skin already knew it. Her Ego shimmered faintly in response—warm, spectral, just at the base of her spine.
She stood, slowly, letting the past slide like water down her back. Then turned toward the weapon crate once more. The gear wasn't ceremonial. The call wasn't nostalgia.
Something had begun again.
And Seyra had no intention of sitting it out.
Seyra slid her tablet shut with a soft click, exhaling as the faint afterimage of her last sketch faded from the screen—just a half-finished silhouette this time, limbs reaching toward something they'd never grasp. She set it down beside the old brass incense tray on her dresser, rising to her feet. The room was already dimming—lights reacting to her motion, folding into softer hues of evening blues and greens as if the space itself knew she needed to change skins.
She stepped into her boots, the deep black synth-leather folding perfectly around her ankles like they had a memory of her.
She stretched her back slowly, the long lines of her spine curving with a quiet, fluid grace, the bare muscles of her shoulders flexing as she reached up to tie the last of her hair into place—a smooth, thick flow of black-violet now spiraling into a loose braid. She ran a quick scan across her own reflection, only half-present in the vertical screen panel near the terrace. No armor yet, no weapons showing, but the stance was there.
The apartment, spacious, quiet, minimalist, seemed to breathe behind her as she crossed to the main exit. Matte walls. Clean lines. Living plants pulsing soft bioluminescent green from recessed shelves. Her sanctuary had always been more temple than home. It was one of the only places in Lanova that hadn't demanded a version of her.
But even sanctuaries had their limits.
She keyed the door with a gesture and stepped out.
Lanova hit her like heat through a cracked seal.
She descended the tower in silence, boots tapping against the spiraling walkway, face neutral as the glass doors of her complex peeled open into the chaos of The Entertainment District.
The District pulsed in every direction—advertisements folding and unfolding in three-dimensional space like breathing origami, digital mascots leaping overhead across cable lines, entire storefronts changing appearance in real time based on who stood in front of them. Everything was branded, everything talking. Every wall, every light post, every discarded drink container was whispering something meant to make you feel seen, feel wanted, feel hooked.
And the people fed on it like starving animals.
Clusters of tourists buzzed between gambling dens, holo-theaters, and VR immersion tanks. Dancers swayed atop high-rise catwalks, backlit by flashing LEDs. Someone vomited glitter behind an arcade. A modified street preacher screamed gospel-coded prophecy while riding the shoulders of a mechanical lion. Half the shops here didn't even sell real product—just feeling simulations, projected emotion loops designed to trigger hormonal spikes. All of it licensed. All of it controlled. The AMA called it therapeutic commerce.
But Seyra wasn't here to indulge.
She turned left at a shop selling simulated nostalgia in scented vials—"Childhood: Vol. 3" and "First Rain, 4AM Edition"—and entered a narrower artery of light and shadow, a corridor between distractions. The signage dimmed here. The saturation dipped. The people thinned. But the surveillance didn't.
She was heading toward someone.
A girl who had once chosen a different war, and paid a different price.
They weren't close—not in the way most people understood it. There were no late calls, no old letters, no shared photos buried in memory drives. But there had been something deeper once. Something forged not through time, but through fire.
They had met years ago, back in the final, brutal surge of the First Dawn Wars. The automa hadn't even been a combatant then. She was a prototype—an artificial shell barely stabilized by nascent consciousness, locked away in a Federation deep-lab beneath the scorched ravines of Old Selien. It was one of the Federation's earliest war crimes, long before they'd perfected the clean language of diplomacy. A vault of weapons pretending to be children. The research logs called them "Constructed Innocents." Designed to carry magic but not intention. Living conduits of borrowed Ego—living spells wearing skin.
Seyra had been part of the extraction unit sent in during the dusk hours of that final siege. It wasn't supposed to be a rescue. The intel flagged the facility as a storage site for Ego amplifiers, not living prototypes. But once they breached the upper decks and peeled back the veil of static in the psychic shielding, they found more than parts.
They found her.
The automa hadn't spoken then. Not even when freed from the stasis chamber, not even when Seyra cut the neuro-tethers with her own blade and carried her to the evac point. But her eyes—strangely human, impossibly aware—had followed Seyra the entire time, not with fear, but with a kind of haunted recognition. Seyra never forgot that look. Not because it was alien, but because it wasn't. It mirrored something she saw in the glass every night. The soundless scream of something that had been taught not to exist.
She survived. More than that—she endured. And when the Empire branded her a dangerous anomaly, and the Federation demanded she be returned, it was the Kal Siro team that made the call to keep her. Hidden. Reclassified. Integrated.
By the time of Kal Siro, she was something else entirely. Not a victim. Not a prototype. A weapon with choice.
She wasn't officially part of the mission, not on the records, but she was there. Under another name, another function. Her presence was whispered through the team as a contingency. A failsafe wrapped in flesh. Spark had kept her tethered through side channels; Jasmine had given the quiet greenlight. And Adam—Adam had trusted her. Trusted all of them, once.
Kal Siro had been the last time Seyra saw her in uniform. The automa fought beside them in the broken lower floors, when the team was fracturing and the Psycho's Ego field made the corridors loop like Möbius strips. She held the line when Spark went dark and Jasmine bled through the walls. Seyra remembered glancing over her shoulder and seeing the girl's blade rise through fire, carving through magic like a thread through fabric. For a moment, Seyra thought they'd all make it out. But the building had other plans.
After the collapse, when the mission was branded a half-success and buried in strategic silence, the automa vanished. Burned her serial. Cut her affiliations. Became a ghost with pink hair and a name of her own making. She resurfaced years later in fragmented reports—scattered sightings, Cartel whispers, rumors of a self-willed automa operating on the edge of AMA surveillance zones. But no flags were ever raised. No charges filed.
No one could prove she still existed.
But Seyra knew better.
And if Jasmine's voice was calling again, if Adam was sharpening old weapons and Spark was tapping into ghost systems, then there was no question in Seyra's mind.
She'd feel the pulse too.
And she'd be here, waiting.
She didn't expect warmth in the meeting. Didn't want it. What she wanted was proof. Confirmation that what Jasmine had set in motion wasn't just a glitch in her own mind. She needed to see in someone else's eyes the same flicker that had returned to hers. The need to move. To do.
The feeling that the dead parts of the world were waking up again.
She ducked beneath an overhang lit with flickering kanji and passed through a scent barrier that smelled of burnt cedar and cooling glass. The street beyond was thinner, coiled like a hidden artery beneath the glow of a shifting skyline. Her destination sat just ahead—tucked behind an old panoramic VR parlor, shielded by a one-way membrane curtain that blurred anything that approached.
As she neared it, her pace slowed—not out of doubt, but familiarity. The same way a blade slows just before it enters the skin.
When the old blood rises, the old names follow.
And some names, no matter how much you run, come with a promise that must be kept.
----
Aphrodisiac Plaza - Entertainment District
Lanova - Mid Tiers, 19th Day of The Sun Year
7:00 PM
She sat beneath the shattered remains of the Aphrodisiac Fountain, where once love had been marketed like perfume and desire lit the skyline like scripture. The water hadn't run in years. Now only rusted pipes groaned behind the marble, and faint trails of synth-moss crept through the cracks like veins looking for a pulse. The plaza had once been the beating heart of the Entertainment District—before the second Dawn War turned architecture into collateral and dreams into debris. Now it was a hollow echo chamber, a place for the lost, the wired, the buried-alive. The light was different here, filtered through the broken data-lenses that once made the skies bloom with ambient auroras. Now, fractured and uncared for, they cast a sickly purple hue across the ground, smearing every surface in the color of old bruises.
She always came here.
Not for safety. Not even for nostalgia.
But because it was a reminder.
A memory held in bone and circuitry.
Long before the Fountain stopped flowing, before her name became encrypted shadow, before she made her pact with Adam beneath the silos of Block-93, she'd walked this plaza like anyone else. Laughed. Danced. Drank from the neon. She used to sneak out of Federation custody through the vent shafts of the Directorate's medical wing just to be here—smelling street food, tracing holograms across vending stalls, touching things that weren't assigned to her. It was in this plaza that she first felt like a person.
Now she barely remembered what that felt like.
She sat with one leg drawn to her chest, the synthetic leather of her sleeve catching faint raindrops from a drizzle that wasn't weather—just malfunctioning overhead misting grids. Her hair, once steel-gray when she was still catalogued property, was dyed to a soft pink now. A shade she had chosen. The one thing that was hers.
Behind her, just beyond the plaza's fractured boundary wall, her residence gleamed—almost offensively so. A Veil-issued smart complex fitted with mod-reactive glass, sound filtration, anti-surveillance nodes, and enough space for ten people, though she lived alone. A trophy house. Payment. The result of her lone incursion into one of The Veil's mid-tier supply nests three years ago—a solo operation that left eighteen bodies and a high-value blueprint in her hands. She could've sold it. Disappeared for good. But she didn't. Instead, she made a deal.
Protection for silence. Amnesia for survival.
They gave her the house. She let them forget what she was.
No name. No allegiance. A breathing artifact, tucked away in a curated corner of ruin.
And yet she kept returning here. To the place where her shadow still had a shape.
A low murmur of voices swam through the plaza—half-conscious addicts chewing on Ego fragments, a trio of aug'd-out prostitutes checking the motion sensors under their sleeves, an old woman preaching love to a rusted vending drone like it was the last god she remembered.
The plaza stirred—not with motion, but with presence. A shift in the hum, a recalibration in her senses. Like gravity subtly adjusting around a familiar mass.
She felt it before she saw it. That edge in the air, like a line pulled taut. Not tension. Not danger. Just inevitability. A tether long frayed finally being drawn back into alignment.
She turned toward the alley entrance without hurry. She always knew Seyra would come from there. She never took the promenade like everyone else—never indulged the empty performances of the district's main walk. Seyra moved like a shadow that didn't care about the light. And now, between a rust-scrawled noodle stand and the wire-stretched frame of an old light-dancer statue, that shadow finally stepped into view.
She felt her EGO rise without permission, the core energy that lived buried in her synthetic chest accelerating in short pulses—silent, invisible to most, but undeniable to her. A rhythm responding to something it couldn't name, only remember. The warmth of long-unspoken resentment. The sting of questions left to rot.
Seyra stopped at the edge of the broken plaza, just beneath a fractured arc of old skyline glass. Her silhouette was cleaner now—sleek coat, armored lines hidden beneath elegance—but her presence was unchanged. Unmistakable. The same walk, the same gravity. Her EGO was there, too—coiled, quiet, but awake. A storm in rest-state.
They didn't move toward each other.
They didn't have to.
The moment stretched, hung like an unanswered chord. Between them: silence. Above them: the violet-stained sky flickering through misfiring gridlight. The plaza breathed. The city held its breath.
Her eyes, pupil-less and crystalline pink, fixed on Seyra's without blinking. She didn't need irises to look through someone. Her gaze was pure pressure. Pure transmission. Not invasive. Just undeniable. Like being seen without permission—like something brushing against the interior of your mind.
Seyra didn't flinch. Didn't speak. Her posture stayed as still and precise as ever, boots planted just wide enough for readiness, hands relaxed but informed.
The Automa rose slowly to her feet.
Her clothing—compressed dark cyan turtleneck and matching palazzo pants, overlaid by a long, dark brown leather coat—moved with a breath of static wind from the overhead grids. Her appearance was deliberate, clean, almost professional. But the way she moved gave away her reality: too smooth for civilian, too soft for soldier. She was something else. Something rewritten.
The distance between them was no more than twenty paces. But neither stepped forward yet. The plaza could have been a cathedral in that moment—two figures standing across a long aisle, each with history burning in their chest, neither willing to reignite it carelessly.
And still, the current ran between them. Silent, electric. Old.
She let her head tilt slightly—not in question, not in surrender. Just… acknowledgment.
Seyra stood still for a moment longer than necessary. The plaza had gone quiet again, as if holding its breath. Then she stepped forward, the weight of years resting unevenly on her shoulders.
Her gaze lifted—those glowing pink eyes like polished glass, pupil-less and endless. She didn't smile, but something softened at the corners of her mouth.
"You always hated waiting." the girl spoke, almost like a boulder crashing down on a defenseless gate.
"And you always made me, Vela" Seyra's voice was quieter than expected. Not cold. Just tired. Tired in the way that only old friends could make each other feel.
Vela looked at her for a long moment. No scanner sweep, no head tilt. Just looked—the way people do when they don't need to verify who you are, because the memory is already carved into the bones.
"I didn't think you'd come."
"I almost didn't." Seyra exhaled through her nose, brushing windblown hair behind one ear. "But old wounds are reopening, I can feel it, my EGO can too."
Vela's throat twitched, barely a swallow. "It's happening again, isn't it?"
"Feels like it never stopped."
Vela looked toward the statue—those broken, open hands that once held light. The wind moved her hair gently, sweeping pink strands across her face like a slow whisper.
"Do you ever stop hearing it?" she asked. "Kal Siro. The hallway screaming. The air... folding in on itself."
"No." Seyra's answer was too fast, too raw. "And neither did you. That's why you ran."
Vela flinched—but it wasn't visible in her body. It happened behind the eyes. A fracture in the rhythm.
"I didn't run," she said, quietly. "I... stepped out."
Seyra's laugh came dry, hollow. "Is that what we call it now?"
"I had to disappear."
"You didn't disappear from him."
That landed hard. A silence followed—not empty, but full. Charged.
Vela's voice, when it came, was barely audible.
"You think that didn't cost me?"
Seyra looked at her again—not as a soldier, not as a liability, but as the girl who once bled out in her arms with wires sparking from her spine and eyes too bright for her body.
"I know it did."
They stood like that for a while.
"He asked me to help," Vela said, after a beat. "Back then. I told him no. Not at first. But I owed him."
Another breath passed between them.
"So where do we go from here?"
Vela didn't answer right away. She stepped closer instead—just enough for the air between them to change.
"Tell me you still remember the old relay code," Seyra said, softer now, like asking for a secret.
Vela tilted her head, eyes glittering. "You really think I ever forgot it?"
Seyra almost smiled—but it didn't reach her mouth. Just her eyes, just for a flicker.
"Coordinates drop tonight," she said. "We're moving before the AMA sensors get wise."
"You still lead like you did back then."
"You still follow like you never wanted to."
Vela's voice came with a little breath behind it. Almost a laugh. Almost. "And yet here I am."
Their eyes met again—old heat barely dulled by time. Pain, maybe. Memory. But also something else.
Something unfinished.
"Then suit up," Seyra said, turning to go. "We've got something to burn."
And for the first time in too many years, Vela followed.
----
Sector Mile - Commercial District
Lanova - Mid Tiers, 19th Day of The Sun Year
7:00 PM
Adam took the long way back. Always did.
After the Automa, his pulse should've been slowing, but it wasn't. The air still tasted of ozone from the Fang's discharge. He could feel the vibration in his forearm where the hilt had rested—like the blade's hunger hadn't completely left him.
The streets between him and home were quiet on the surface, but the quiet here was never innocent.
A thin shimmer flickered in the corner of his eye—too precise to be light bleed from a holo ad. Above, a drone drifted between the leaning towers, its carapace lacquered in Federation gray. No logos. No running lights. Stealth grade. The kind they didn't waste on simple recon.
And then another—perched like a mechanical carrion bird on a rooftop antenna, lens tracking something Adam couldn't see. The air around it was thick with glyph-work, faint green lattice lines bending around the shell. Warding spell. Federation weave, no question. He'd seen those same lattice sigils burning into the walls of Kal Siro's outer bunkers, right before they collapsed under the weight of three hundred combined EGOs.
A deeper chill settled in.
Lanova was supposed to be sealed.
Not just by politics, but by geography and force. To breach the island perimeter without clearance meant threading through six overlapping defense grids, two of which were The Pyramid's own—each designed to erase anything bigger than a bird from the sky in under three seconds. And even if you got past that, entering the city's Pyramid Complex was a different kind of impossible.
The Pyramid wasn't just an administrative fortress—it was Lanova's heart. Every sensor, every node, every spell-thread ran through its veins. It was where the Treaty of the Second Dawn was signed. Where the old lines between Empire and neutral states were drawn in fire and ink.
The Federation had never signed that treaty.
They'd sent observers. Smiles. Promises. But never a signature. Which meant, by law and by blood, they weren't supposed to be here.
And yet here they were.
He caught more movement—a flicker of conjured matter taking the shape of a crow before dissolving into a swirl of script-light. Conjures. Not just machines, but magic-bound constructs. The Federation's preferred hybrid tools—capable of slipping between digital and physical space at will, untethered to a single plane. That wasn't street-level spy work. This was military. Deep infiltration.
Adam slowed, melting into a shadowed alcove between two shuttered vendors. His eyes tracked the patterns, the routes, the spacing. This wasn't a net meant to catch random prey—it was a funnel.
The question came, uninvited and heavy: How long had they been here?
And beneath that: Why?
Because this wasn't some rookie operation. This was seasoned, deliberate, and expensive. The kind of thing that took months—years—to set in motion. The kind of thing the Lanovian state swore could never happen.
He thought about the fight in the alley. The Automa's speed. Its magic shielding. The way it seemed to know exactly where he'd be.
No, this wasn't random.
They hadn't just come for him.
They were inside the walls, inside the very veins that fueled the city, searching for something perhaps?
Either way, whatever this attack was, if the Federation is involved something really big is going on, under the veil, the curtain of glory and redemption of the Game is about to be severed, this edition is bound to be marvelous.