"Sixty seconds."
That was what the voice inside Cael's skull said.
Not aloud. Not a warning. Just a fact.
He didn't know if it was the System or his own nerves pretending to be useful.
The Severance would begin in sixty seconds.
He stood barefoot in the Initiation Hall, the floor beneath him warm and breathing. Smooth like bone, pulsing like it had blood. The platform beneath his feet was the Path of Entry, a spine-shaped slab built to remind everyone that they were walking on the remains of the world.
The air buzzed faintly with distant hymns. Not sung—hummed. By something buried too deep to excavate.
Above him, glass veins and black metal ribs twisted up into vaults that ended in darkness. The ceiling was lost, or maybe infinite. Just like the names written in the walls, thousands deep, scorched into the stone by old systems: initiates who had succeeded. Or failed. The difference was thin.
The chamber was shaped like a throat. A slow, spiraling descent that ended at one altar, and one door.
No banners. No saints. Just loss, structured into protocol.
And Elor.
Strapped to a turning wheel near the edge of the chamber, Elor had once been a promising initiate. His name had weight. His laugh made the cold barracks less brutal. He used to sneak extra rations to the smaller kids. He used to say things like, "You don't fail unless you forget why you started."
Now he just screamed.
Words poured from his mouth in patterns that didn't match any language. Snippets of childhood, scraps of memory from a thousand lives. Some weren't his. Maybe none were. The wheel turned slowly under him, creaking with age and sorrow.
He had tried to reverse his Severance. Chosen to remember what had been paid.
The System didn't like contradiction.
A worker stood beside him. A woman in a plain robe patched with gray vow-sheets, stitched with iron thread. Her eyes were shut, sealed behind thick black lines. Ritual scarring. Not blindness. Just refusal.
She turned the wheel again. Elor laughed. Or sobbed. Hard to tell.
"Don't look at him," she said, calm and final.
"I'm not."
He was.
Cael wasn't alone.
Four others stood behind him, each in their own prayer circle—barefoot, sleepless, sweating despite the cold. None spoke. One boy, barely fifteen, was biting his nails so hard he'd drawn blood. Another girl, taller than Cael, had her eyes locked on the altar, whispering a name under her breath. Over and over. It wasn't hers. Not anymore.
One of them had already gone through it. His arms twitched. His mouth moved. But no sound came. He looked at everyone like he didn't know who they were—or who he was.
They were his cohort. The last batch from Dormitory 9. A quarter of them were gone already.
One of them stood apart from the rest—Riven Hal. Tall, sharp-boned, and quiet even in the dorms. He hadn't cried when the wardens broke his hand for stealing bread. He hadn't spoken when his Severance came due the week before and the System demanded he forget his sister's name. Cael had watched him stare at a blank wall for six hours afterward.
Riven wore his silence like a shroud. His Severance Fragment had done something strange—made his eyes reflective like obsidian. They twitched at every movement now, like they were watching on delay. No one knew what power he'd received. Not even Riven, maybe.
He didn't flinch when Elor screamed.
But he did glance at Cael.
It wasn't envy or pity. It was recognition. The look of someone who knew what it meant to walk forward and not come back the same. They hadn't spoken in weeks, but they'd shared a wall long enough to know when someone else was already starting to disappear.
When the wheel turned and Elor screamed again, two of them flinched. The boy who bled stumbled forward and gagged. No one helped him.
They had all seen the price. But seeing and paying were different.
The altar in front of Cael came alive.
It stood taller than any person. A narrow slab of fused glass and something that looked like bone but moved like breath. It pulsed once. Runes formed across its surface, glowing in a slow red sequence. They crawled like insects.
:: CANDIDATE: CAEL ARDEN ::
:: INITIATION SEQUENCE CONFIRMED ::
:: SEVERANCE SLOT #4 UNLOCKED ::
:: OFFERING REQUIRED ::
:: SELECT FROM PERSONAL RESERVE ::
The command didn't speak. It just was. Written into thought, not words.
A list surfaced in his mind:
Mother's Voice
Taste of Rain
The Face of Your Brother
Touch of Silk
He looked at the third.
Nothing. No face. No name. Just a breath beside him on cold nights. A presence. Weight under shared blankets in orphan barracks. A memory that was more shape than detail.
Unprotected.
And so, worth power.
"This one," Cael said.
[SELECTED: THE FACE OF YOUR BROTHER]
The altar pulsed.
The floor vibrated with it. Low. Like something ancient shifting in its sleep.
From beyond the walls, the hum turned into a mechanical chant. Notes shaped like mourning. Like iron lungs trying to cry.
His knees buckled slightly.
Not from pain.
From change.
His chest tightened. Not like a wound, but like space inside his mind had been rearranged. A room closed off. A name unsaid. The cold feeling of walking past a door that used to matter.
:: SEVERANCE COMPLETE ::
:: FRAGMENT SLOT 4 ACTIVATED ::
:: AWARDING INSTINCT FRAGMENT: HOLLOW STEP ::
A line of light descended from above. A glowing white thread, smooth and perfect. It entered him through the chest like a whisper sliding between ribs.
No warmth. No resistance.
But something inside shifted.
His posture changed. The way his weight settled. The way the air around him bent, like space itself wanted to forget where he stood.
:: INSTINCT FRAGMENT GRANTED ::
:: [HOLLOW STEP] — "When seen, you are already gone." ::
He moved.
Just one step.
His heel lifted. His foot fell. But he never felt the floor. The distance was wrong. The sound was wrong. Like the System had trimmed a frame from reality and filled in the rest with silence.
The worker beside Elor twitched. Her stitched eyes turned to him.
"The first movement is light," she said. "The next will take more than memory."
Above, metal footsteps echoed.
A Corps officer stepped onto the upper walkway, wearing plain gray armor with twelve glowing symbols etched across his chest. Each mark represented a Severance passed. The man was unreadable. His face—not memorable. Perhaps deliberately so.
He studied Cael from the railing.
"The fourth Severance," the man said. "You know what that means?"
"I do."
"You've joined the war now. Nothing more to study. Nothing more to forget. Only function."
Cael didn't respond.
The officer turned away.
The altar dimmed.
A hiss sounded at the far end of the hall.
Chains groaned.
The vault door opened. Steam poured out—thick, bitter, metallic. A shadow moved behind the mist. Something waiting. Something hungry.
But it didn't step forward. Not yet.
Instead, something heavy dragged across the floor—metal on metal, like armor, or claws.
A shriek echoed once from the inside. Not human. Not Severed. Something between.
A second shadow appeared behind the first. Then a third. Shifting, unstable. Like a body remembering how to have form.
A warning sigil flashed red on the inner arch of the door.
:: CORRUPTION LEVEL – UNSTABLE :: :: ENTITY ID – UNREGISTERED :: :: DOOR LOCK: MANUAL OVERRIDE FAILED ::
Cael inhaled. The scent hit like blood mixed with ozone and bile.
He stepped forward.
Past the threshold, the mist wrapped around him. It curled against his bare arms like something alive, whispering back the last word he said—over and over.
"This one… this one… this one…"
A shape shifted at the edge of vision.
He didn't draw a blade. The System would give him what he needed. If he lived.
First kill.First Fragment in blood.
As he crossed the final step into the mist, the altar behind him flickered again—barely visible through the steam.
[REVERSE: Y/N]
The System was still watching.
And so was something else.
His name was still Cael.
But the voice whispering in the dark no longer used it.