The wind swept metallic dust across the plains of Thares, that bitter taste of rust Kael had known since childhood. He ran between abandoned extraction towers, his boots striking corroded steel. Every breath burned his lungs. He should've stayed at the hotel. He should've ignored the alarms.
But the sky had turned red.
Not the red of sunset — the sickly red of an expanding critical zone.
Kael hid behind a collapsed beam, heart pounding against his ribs. From there he could see the southern sector: fallen buildings, columns of smoke rising like twisted pillars. Sirens wailed in the distance. Certified Hunters must already be mobilizing.
What the hell am I doing here?
There was no answer. Only a stupid compulsion — an impulse that had dragged him from his room into the chaos. As if something inside him needed to be near it.
The ground shook.
Not an earthquake — something worse. A vibration that came not from below but from everywhere, as if reality itself were being shaken by invisible hands.
And then he saw it.
The Resonant Beast emerged from the central crater like a nightmare given form. Its body was an impossible amalgam: floating metal plates with no visible connection, red energy cables weaving through the air, fragments of machinery pulsing with their own light. It had no defined shape. It was as if someone had forced the remains of a factory to live.
A roar tore through the air. Kael felt the shockwave hit his chest like an invisible punch.
He fell back, gasping. The air had become dense, viscous. Every breath was a struggle. The beast's resonant energy saturated the environment, warping the laws of physics within hundreds of meters.
And then he felt it.
Something inside him responded.
Like a muscle he hadn't known existed contracting for the first time — a feeling of recognition. The beast's energy called out, and something within him answered.
No. It can't be. Not yet.
He was twenty-two. Most Awakenings happened between fifteen and twenty-five, but he'd assumed he'd be one of the unlucky ones — the ones who never connected to Resonance. He'd made peace with that.
Until now.
The beast took a step forward. The ground groaned beneath its impossible weight. Kael forced himself to stand, legs trembling. He needed to move. He needed—
The beast vanished.
It didn't move or leap — it simply ceased to exist.
Kael blinked, confused. Had he looked away? Had it teleported? Impossible. Resonant Beasts couldn't—
An explosion to his left. The creature had reappeared a hundred meters away, roaring at something Kael couldn't see.
And then he appeared.
One moment, the space was empty. The next, a man stood before the beast — as if he had always been there and the universe had just remembered him.
A long coat fluttered in a wind that didn't exist. A cigarette glowed orange between his lips. And around him, the air itself seemed… different — subtly bending to accommodate his presence.
But it was something else that made Kael's breath catch.
The crimson light of the critical zone cast long, distorted shadows across the wreckage. Even the beast, in all its impossible form, projected a dark smear across the ground.
But beneath his feet, there was nothing. No shadow. As if the light simply passed through him, refusing to acknowledge he was there.
Kael's heart skipped a beat.
Darling Voss.
Not just a veteran hunter — the Shadowless Swordsman. One of the few active Level 1 Resonants in the world. Spatial Field. A name that only appeared in the news when something truly catastrophic needed containment.
It was said he could appear anywhere on the planet within seconds. That his enemies fell before they even saw the strike — because he attacked from angles that didn't exist in normal space. That he cast no shadow because he existed slightly displaced from reality. That he had saved entire cities by teleporting resonant bombs into the vacuum of space. That he had once folded space around a critical zone, holding the collapse at bay for three days straight without sleep.
And now he was here. In Thares. For a disaster too small to deserve his attention.
The beast attacked. Its metallic limbs stretched like spears, crossing the hundred meters between them in a fraction of a second.
The hunter didn't move.
The spears passed straight through him — and kept going, without resistance, as if Darling were made of air.
Kael squinted. No — he was still there. But the space around him was warped. The spears missed because the distance between "where they were" and "where Darling was" had become infinite. Though visually, they looked like they should have hit.
So this is what absolute comprehension of space looks like, Kael thought, equal parts terrified and fascinated.
Darling took a slow drag from his cigarette, exhaling smoke that twisted into impossible spirals, defying physics.
"Severe class," he said — his voice reaching Kael despite the distance, as if sound itself had bent to deliver the message. "Unstable mechanical core. Uncontrolled proliferation."
He extended a hand. His fingers moved with surgical precision, as if manipulating something unseen.
And space obeyed.
The beast began to compress — no, not compression. The space between its parts was shrinking. Floating fragments snapped together. The creature roared, straining to expand again, but it was futile.
Darling was collapsing the space it occupied, forcing it smaller without even touching it.
In seconds, the fifty-meter titan had been reduced to a compact sphere the size of a car. It still roared, but the sound was muffled — distant, like a voice through water.
"Contained," Darling said, lowering his hand. "Extraction team can take over."
And then, without transition, he was beside Kael.
He didn't walk. He didn't flash or vanish dramatically. The space between where he was and where he wanted to be simply stopped existing — and he was there.
Kael staggered back, startled. The yellow emergency lights cast his own long shadow across the ground. But where Darling stood, there was none — only bare pavement. As if the man before him wasn't entirely real, existing a millimeter out of phase with reality.
Shadowless Swordsman, Kael thought, a chill crawling down his spine. It's not just a title. It's literal.
Darling studied him with gray eyes that seemed to look through him — not just seeing, but perceiving every millimeter, every atom, every distance between molecules.
"You shouldn't be here, kid," he said, taking a drag from his cigarette. "Active critical zone. Survival probability without protection: twelve percent."
The words were casual. The tone, deadly serious.
"I… I thought I could help," Kael managed to say, his throat dry.
The silence that followed was heavy, suffocating. Darling studied him the same way he had studied the beast.
"Help," he repeated, the word half-question, half-mockery. "With what, exactly?"
"I… felt the resonance," Kael blurted out. "Something inside me responded. Like an echo."
That caught his attention. Darling's eyes narrowed slightly, and Kael felt something different — as if the space around him was being scanned, measured, understood.
"Latent," Darling said after a moment. "On the verge of Awakening. Exposure to concentrated resonant energy is accelerating the process."
He stepped forward — and Kael noticed something strange: the distance between them didn't change. Darling moved, yet the separation remained identical, as if space compensated automatically.
"Describe it precisely. What did you feel?"
Kael swallowed. "It was like… like I could feel the distances suddenly. Between things. Between me and the beast. Between the fragments of its body. Not with my eyes — with something else."
Something flickered in Darling's expression — the faintest raise of an eyebrow.
"Emergent spatial perception," he murmured. "Interesting."
"Is that… good?"
"It depends." Darling turned toward the collapsed beast — now a metallic sphere surrounded by containment teams. "An uncontrolled Awakening in the Spatial Field can kill you. Or worse."
"Worse than dying?"
"You could teleport yourself into a wall. Create an unstable spatial fold that collapses everything in a fifty-meter radius. Fragment your body across space and never reassemble it."
Each word landed like a stone. A chill ran through Kael's spine.
"The Spatial Field is the rarest," Darling continued, his tone now almost academic. "Only point-three percent of Resonants. And the most dangerous for beginners. Comprehending space isn't intuitive like mechanics or biology. It's abstract. Antinatural to the human mind."
He took another drag. The smoke curled in impossible shapes around his head.
"But if you survive initial training…" He left the sentence hanging — meaningful, ominous.
Kael gathered his courage. "Are you offering to train me?"
"Not exactly." Darling began walking away — this time allowing the distance to increase naturally. "I just want to see if you're a waste of time or if you actually have spatial affinity."
He stopped and looked over his shoulder.
"South valley. Dawn. If you don't show up, I'll assume you chose a boring but safe life."
And with that, space itself flickered. Darling didn't disappear dramatically — he simply… stopped being connected to the here and now. As if he had stepped sideways into a direction only he could see.
Kael stood trembling, staring at the empty space where the hunter had been a moment before.
Spatial Field. Level 1. A Pre-Pillar.
There weren't many in the world — seven, maybe eight. Beings whose understanding of their Field was so absolute that thought and action had merged, their will directly reshaping reality without the need for complex techniques.
And one of them had just shown interest in him.
Because Kael had felt distances.
He looked at his hands. They were shaking — not just from exhaustion. He closed his eyes, searching for that feeling again, that strange perception he'd had during the attack.
There it was. Weak. Unstable. But real.
He could feel the space between his hands and his body. Between himself and the ground. Between him and the distant extraction towers. Not visually — directly, like knowing where your limbs are without looking.
Spatial Field, he thought, equal parts fear and awe.
The rarest. The most dangerous. The one that could kill him in his sleep if he didn't learn control.
The containment team worked methodically, preparing the compressed sphere for transport. The sirens were fading. The sky still glowed red, but the critical zone was stabilizing.
Kael began walking back toward the hotel. His steps were steadier now, despite his exhaustion.
South valley. At dawn.
He didn't know what Darling expected of him. He didn't know if his body would truly Awaken into the Spatial Field or if it was a false alarm. Records of latent Spatial Resonants were almost nonexistent — they were too rare.
But if it was real… if he truly had affinity with the most mysterious Field of all…
The lights of the familiar, worn-down hotel appeared in the distance — old, neglected, but his. A reminder of what he had been.
Tomorrow at dawn, he might discover what he could become.
The wind carried ashes and metallic dust. Kael closed his eyes and focused on that new perception — the distances, the spaces between things, the invisible geometry of the world.
It was there. Real. Waiting to be understood.
Spatial Field, he thought again — and this time, the words carried not only fear.
But possibility.
A possibility terrifying, dangerous, nearly impossible.
But his.