He had fallen through lightning and code.
Burned through himself.
Resonated.
Now, he walked.
Kael's first steps into Ashveil didn't feel real. Not after what he had become.
The Core's death still echoed inside him. Something ancient had screamed when he broke it open. Something hungry had whispered his name.
And now the world noticed him.
Ashveil noticed.
It wasn't a city. It was a monster of stone and steel pretending to be civilization. Jagged towers scraped the sky like broken fingers reaching for a god that had abandoned them. Barrier fields sizzled along their flanks—constant, shifting, alive. Between them, bridges pulsed with heat and motion, webbing across the skyline like veins.
Ashveil breathed through pain. Laughed through scars.
Kael walked with Ayla and Echo through a gate made of cracked obsidian teeth. It looked like it had once bitten something divine and was still digesting it.
Two guards scanned them. One had a third eye stitched into her forehead, bleeding data. The other's arms were glass blades sheathed in skin.
"Fresh meat," the third-eyed guard said, licking her teeth.
Kael didn't blink.
[Zone Transition: Player-Nexus – Ashveil (Zone 3)]
[Population: 14,032 Alive | 207,804 Archived]
"What's 'archived' mean?" Kael asked, his voice low.
Echo responded without inflection. "Dead. But not removed. Their memories are stored—some may return. Others are… overwritten."
Kael's gut clenched. Echo's voice had changed—faintly distorted. As if she, too, was adapting to this place.
They passed through the marketplace, if it could be called that. Makeshift tents. Bone poles. Neon wires wrapped like vines. The smell of ash, grease, and decay.
Kael saw:
—A man auctioning childhood memories in glass vials.
—A half-melted woman laughing while stabbing herself for revive tokens.
—Soul fragments weighed like gold. "Two per token!" a vendor shouted.
Ayla whispered, "This isn't survival. It's ritualized madness."
Kael didn't answer.
Echo stopped at the center of a massive plaza. A crowd churned. All were watching it:
A towering slab of obsidian, alive with swirling code. A monolith of law and cruelty.
Kael stepped forward.
And the slab reacted.