The streets of Lattice City writhed with restless energy as Kael descended into them.
He strode through the neon arteries without hurry, the trenchcoat flowing behind him like a shadow unmoored from its owner. Pedestrians scattered instinctively from his path, though none could say why. He wasn't famous enough for most to recognize his face beneath the dragon mask, not here in the lower tiers. But something about the way he moved — the coiled stillness of a predator conserving energy, the silence of footsteps that left no echo — triggered primal alarms in their subconscious.
The city itself was alive, a continent of steel and light layered skyward in infinite strata. Markets glowed with holographic stalls where merchants hawked synthetic meats and arcane trinkets. Hovercrafts screamed along magnetic rails overhead. Augmented billboards shifted with AI-curated temptations: beauty, sex, power, dreams. The entire megastructure existed to siphon attention, addiction, and ambition — and funnel it all into one crucible: the Aetherfang Games.
Kael's eyes drifted upward.
There, visible even from the lower sectors, was the Spire. A titanic obsidian tower crowned with arcs of floating crystal, tethered to the skyline by beams of light. It wasn't the Games' arena — those sprawled across entire biomes, conjured and demolished on demand — but the Spire was where it all began. Registration. Evaluation. The branding of every soul who stepped into the crucible.
Each step toward it pulled ghosts from the depths of Kael's mind.
---
Flashback I — The White Halls
He was eight.
The walls were white, sterile, humming with the buzz of machines that smelled of copper and antiseptic. Straps dug into his wrists and ankles, tighter each time he thrashed. Voices murmured just beyond sight. Sequence seventy-two. Subject response unstable. Increase exposure.
And then came the light.
Blinding, searing, gold. Injected straight into his optic nerves. His screams became silent shapes; the machines swallowed sound. Pain folded inward until it became something else — clarity, rage, perception sharpened to razors.
When he woke, his vision was no longer human. He could see the trembling heartbeat of the surgeon through three walls. He could trace the arc of dust motes as they spiraled in air currents. He could count every crack in his restraints.
The scientists called them "Dragon Eyes." A success. A weaponized miracle.
Kael had called them nothing at all. His voice was broken from screaming.
---
Back in the present, he paused at a crossing bridge where the streets split into layers of suspended glass. Advertisements pulsed across the transparent ground, shifting beneath his boots as though trying to sell him dreams he had no interest in. His golden irises flickered faintly as he scanned the crowd — not because he feared them, but because he saw too much.
Every heartbeat. Every hidden knife. Every hunger.
He continued forward, trenchcoat fluttering like wings.
---
Flashback II — The Forge
Fifteen.
The labs had burned behind him, smoldering ruins collapsing into ash after his escape. He carried nothing but scars and stolen schematics. For months he lived in dead zones, the underbelly of a city that pretended to forget its failures.
There he found the forge. Not a place, but a ruin of forgotten tech: a scrapyard of military drones, collapsed mechs, shattered reactor cores. He scavenged, learned, failed, built, and bled.
The sniper had been his masterpiece. Forged from alloys that resonated with dragon-coded circuits, reinforced with magic-sealed barrels etched in blood. The scope was alive, grafted to his Dragon Eyes, amplifying his perception until he could see the soul-flame of a man half a continent away.
Fang of Nox. The first and last thing most targets would ever see.
And the pistols — the twin eagles — had come later. Brutal, heavy, merciless. They mirrored him perfectly: a pair of fangs designed not for mercy, but for certainty.
Weapons did not betray. Weapons did not command. Weapons did not abandon.
---
Kael passed a plaza now, the shadow of the Spire looming closer. Crowds gathered in droves, would-be competitors spilling into lines that stretched for kilometers. Vendors had already set up stalls selling trinkets of false luck, charms of victory. Families wept as they sent sons and daughters into the crucible, knowing most would not return.
The Black Death walked past them, untouched by the swell of humanity. His eyes did not linger.
But a voice clawed at the back of his mind.
---
Flashback III — The Girl
Sixteen.
The first kill with Fang of Nox.
A mercenary had tracked him into the dead zones. Kael had seen him long before he arrived, traced his path through shattered streets, the rise and fall of his chest. The shot had been easy. Too easy.
But the girl…
She had been collateral. A street waif who had wandered into the mercenary's orbit at the wrong time. Kael had seen her heart rupture through his scope, the heat fade from her chest. His hand had not shaken. But his mind had frozen in silence.
For nights afterward, he had cooked meals for two, placing one plate across the fire from himself, untouched until it grew cold.
Then, one morning, he stopped.
Never again.
---
The crowd thickened as Kael neared the Spire. Security drones hovered overhead, their lenses scanning every soul. Holograms projected rules and warnings into the smog: No weapons discharged. No violence in registration. All acts punished by disqualification.
As though rules had ever held him.
He adjusted the dragon mask, golden ridges glinting under the pale dawn. The lines of competitors parted as he approached, not consciously, but instinctively, their bodies shifting aside as though compelled by gravity itself. They did not know his name yet. But they felt it — the inevitability of him.
Kael Draven, the Black Death, walked into the Spire.