The fog didn't feel like air.
It pressed in on Cael's skin, clinging like wet cloth, dragging at his breath. The light behind him dimmed to a pinprick, swallowed by the dense metallic vapor. The sound of the vault's chains faded. Then there was no sound at all.
Just his own heartbeat.
And even that began to slow.
The mist was thick—but it wasn't empty.
Shapes drifted just beyond sight. Not movement—reminders. Old memories of bodies. The echoes of people who'd passed this way and failed. Some were slumped. Others half-standing, posed like statues in mid-scream. Vapor coiled through their frames like they were hollow.
Cael didn't stop walking. He knew the rules. Hesitation bred failure. Failure meant death—or worse.
:: SYSTEM STABILITY: 97% ::
:: FIELD TEST COMMENCED ::
:: ENEMY DEPLOYED ::
:: [HOLLOW STEP – ACTIVE] ::
A tingle ran through his spine. His legs felt too light. His balance shifted, not forward, not backward—elsewhere.
The Fragment wasn't a skill. It wasn't a movement. It was an instinct that rewrote intent.
His brain would say: Step.
But his body would say: Disappear.
His center of gravity hollowed. His feet weren't where he left them. Something in his knees felt disconnected from the world's friction.
The air thickened.
At first, there was nothing.
Then it came.
From the far side of the chamber, something crawled into view.
It was shaped like a man, but broken at every joint—like its bones had grown in wrong after being shattered a hundred times. Its spine arched high, pulling its shoulders upward and backward. Arms bent too far. Its head dangled by strands of muscle from its collarbone, like it had forgotten where to put it.
But it wasn't the body that chilled Cael.
It was the uniform.
Tattered gray cloth, same as his own. The remains of a Severance Corps initiate's coat. A name-tag burned away. Its Fragment slot embedded in the chest still pulsed—black-red and unstable.
A failed candidate.
A transformed one.
The creature's mouth hung open, slack and leaking something that smelled like rotted metal. And then it spoke.
Not words. Static.
Low and sharp, like glass scraping inside his skull.
Cael's knees locked. He nearly stumbled.
The thing lunged.
Its movement was wrong—sudden, flickering. The legs didn't move, and yet it closed the space in a blink.
He didn't think.
His body did.
[HOLLOW STEP: AUTO-TRIGGERED]
Reality sheared.
Cael felt his bones detach—not from his flesh, but from the rules of distance. And then they tried to grow wrong.
His femur twitched. His spine pulled taut like it was resisting his own nerves. A single vertebra cracked audibly as something in the movement bent him out of sync with normal physics.
Pain flared.
The Fragment didn't move his body. It rewrote it—at cost.
His joints screamed as cartilage briefly unthreaded itself and regrew in misaligned orientation, only to reset with a flesh-pop that echoed in his ears.
He clenched his teeth so hard his gums bled.
The floor buckled, not beneath him, but around where he'd just been. It was like falling—but not down. Sideways through decision.
He didn't see the movement. He skipped it.
Time snapped.
The chamber twisted. Cael's vision jolted as if the air itself inverted—his position flipped sideways, then forward, then dropped him three paces to the left, like the world had miscalculated where he belonged.
He staggered.
The beast flew past, arms outstretched, claws scraping concrete with a high, laughing shriek.
Cael didn't understand what had just happened.
But he was alive.
The Fragment had moved him—automatically. Not with speed, but with absence. It had made him skip.
:: FRAGMENT SYNC INCOMPLETE ::
:: VOLUNTARY CONTROL REQUIRED FOR SUSTAINED USE ::
The system prompt vanished.
:: WARNING: SEVERE PHYSIOLOGICAL INSTABILITY DETECTED ::
:: SPINAL DAMAGE: MICROFRACTURES IN L4-L6 ::
:: SOFT TISSUE DISPLACEMENT: HIGH RISK OF NEURAL SLIP ::
:: FRAGMENT USAGE LIMIT: 2 REMAINING BEFORE SYSTEM INTERVENTION ::
The Severed turned, jerking like a marionette. Its shoulder popped, tearing its own arm halfway off in the twist. Didn't slow it down.
It came again.
Cael grit his teeth.
This time, he chose to move.
He focused on the moment before he would step. That threshold where a person commits—but hasn't yet acted.
And he rejected it.
He braced himself, too late.
[HOLLOW STEP – USER TRIGGERED]
His feet vanished. Not with speed. With recalibration. The world remapped his presence.
He slipped behind the creature—between seconds. But this time, the pain followed instantly.
His right ankle twisted in the air—no resistance. His hip dislocated mid-phase and realigned with a crack. The Hollow Step no longer bypassed his limits. It stretched them, carved them, wore them down.
He landed hard, teeth jarring, knees buckling. Blood wet his lip. He hadn't noticed he'd bitten through it.
His breath was ragged. His ribs felt like glass in a canvas bag. But his mind burned with new clarity.
His breath was ragged. But his mind burned with new clarity.
The Fragment worked best not when planned—but when unplanned. When he trusted it.
The beast screeched and wheeled around—but too slow.
Cael reached out—expecting nothing.
His hand closed around something sharp.
Not steel. Not bone. Just need.
A jagged weapon formed in his palm like a splinter pulled from the world—crooked, transparent, pulsing.
Fragment weapon manifestation: Instinct Shard [Temporary]
Cael drove it forward.
The blade sank into the beast's head—through the hanging jaw, straight up into its brain cavity. A gout of corrupted steam belched from its eyes, and its body locked.
Cael's forearm spasmed from the force of the impact. A nerve jolted loose in his elbow. His fingers went numb.
It didn't scream.
It just froze.
The eyes—once twitching—locked onto his.
Not in rage.
In recognition.
A moment passed.
Then the Severed's frame collapsed into vapor and ash. The system chimed, softly.
:: FIRST KILL CONFIRMED ::
:: INSTINCT ABSORPTION COMPLETE ::
:: PHANTOM MEMORY: "I almost made it…" RECOVERED ::
:: CORRUPTION LEVEL: CONTAINED ::
Cael stood alone.
His left knee trembled and gave out. He fell to one side, catching himself on a numb hand that barely functioned. Shaking—not just from cold, or fear—but from fracture.
The mist began to recede around him, drawn back toward the dark slits in the walls. Vacuum pressure. Reset protocol.
His temporary weapon dissolved in his grip.
But he could still feel the weight of it.
Still see the enemy's face.
That thing had been someone. One of the others. Not his batch—but not long before.
A voice—not the System—whispered from deep in the walls:
"You stepped. You saw. You passed.
Now… what did you lose?"
Cael didn't answer.
He couldn't remember the question.
But he could remember the pain.
He curled forward slightly, testing each breath like it might shatter something vital. His joints still throbbed—not just from the violence, but from the rewiring that followed it. The Fragment hadn't joined his body. It had colonized it.
His hip socket burned. His spine ached in pulses, radiating outward like fault lines. Every heartbeat felt like a hammer tapping against hairline fractures.
He lifted his right hand slowly. Watched how it trembled. Not from fear. Not from cold. From strain. From something inside him pulling at the fibers of his muscles, asking—no, commanding—that they change again.
The System had given him power.
But it had also started carving out space in him. Room for more.
He didn't know how many steps he had left.
Only that each one would cost more than the last.
And then he lost consciousness.