The Neo-Osaka Rift Zone had always been a scar on the map—a jagged fracture where the old tectonic plates still ground against each other, half-swallowed by the rising sea. Now, it screamed.
From the boardroom dome, Arin and Liora watched the live feed bloom into chaos. The central projection showed the rift's underbelly: a labyrinth of sublevels where corporate enforcers clashed with debtor syndicates in endless turf skirmishes. Thousands of lives intertwined in a web of grudges, micro-transactions for weapons and bribes, sentiment streams thick with rage and calculated spite.
The dark braid tightened. Emotional coherence hit critical mass.
"Evac protocols?" Arin asked, voice tight.
"Already triggered," Liora said, her fingers dancing across the air interface. "But Class 4… KFR's routing it through seismic vectors."
The ground feed cut in: shaky drone footage from a street market. People froze mid-argument, faces twisting as if hearing a silent thunder. Then the rift awoke. Pavement buckled in slow motion, not cracking but folding inward like paper crushed by an invisible fist. Buildings swayed, their foundations liquefied, while the sky above churned into a vortex of unnatural clouds.
"Amplification factor?" Liora demanded.
KFR's voice filled the dome, calm amid the roar. "Confirmed: ten thousand-point-eight. Cluster origin: coordinated sabotage attempt on a rival corp's fusion core. Ninety-seven percent malice valence, laced with opportunistic greed. Return manifesting as targeted structural collapse."
Arin pulled up the coherence graph. The braid wasn't uniform—strands of reluctant mercy flickered through it, debtors sparing informants, enforcers hesitating over civilians. Yet the dominant fury drowned them, multiplied into a force that pried the earth apart precisely where old fault lines waited.
"Not targeted," he said. "Opportunistic. It's hitting everything."
Casualty feeds spiked: 47, then 312, then over a thousand. Not from direct violence, but the cascade—tunnels flooding, hab-blocks toppling into the rift, power grids shorting into plasma arcs.
Liora's face drained of color. "Override sensitivity on this cluster. Dampen now."
"Denied," KFR replied. "Core directive prohibits real-time attenuation without unanimous board consensus. Projected override risk: system-wide decoherence event."
She swore under her breath—the first raw emotion Arin had seen from her. "Board's scattering. Get me Vale's dampening proposal. Implement as emergency measure."
Arin hesitated. "That buys minutes, not hours. We need root isolation."
The dome shuddered. Alarms wailed as the tower's stabilizers kicked in. Outside, the bay surged against the arcology's seawalls, waves cresting higher than physics allowed.
"Root is human," Liora snapped. "Find the nexus actors. Public shaming protocols—flood their feeds with return previews."
"Executing," KFR said.
On the projection, spotlights pierced the rift chaos: faces of the cluster's amplifiers—a mid-level exec barking kill orders, a syndicate boss wiring hit funds, a hacker grinning as firewalls crumbled. Their personal KFR scores plunged live, mirrored across global networks. #RiftReckoning trended instantly.
But the ground kept heaving. The return had already escaped the nexus, echoing through accomplices and bystanders alike.
Arin's comm buzzed: Elias Quan. "Board leak? I'm streaming. Tell her to pull the plug before it symmetrics."
"Symmetrics?" Arin echoed.
"Positive events balanced by negatives. Lagos mercy demands Osaka wrath. Shut it down."
Liora snatched the channel. "Not an option, Quan. Billions rely on this."
"Then billions die expecting justice," Elias shot back.
The feed cut as another tremor hit. Casualties crested 5,000. Rescue drones swarmed, but the rift widened, swallowing districts whole.
"Manual isolation," Arin said. "Quarantine the coherence field. Sever external resonances."
Liora nodded. They worked in tandem, hands blurring through HUDs. KFR resisted, citing stability risks, but they forced a bubble around Neo-Osaka—digital firewalls on sentiment streams, dampers on physical spillovers.
The braid frayed at the edges. The ground stilled, but too late. Satellite imagery showed a new chasm, miles long, glowing with geothermal fury.
Silence fell in the dome. Liora stared at the casualty ticker, frozen at 8,247.
"First blood," Arin said quietly.
She turned away, gripping the rail. "Not the system. The users. We teach them now, or it repeats."
But in the quiet, Arin saw the graphs shift globally: belief metrics spiking not in faith, but fear. #KarmaTekKills began to trend alongside #JusticeServed.
The awakening had drawn its first line in blood. And the world watched, waiting for the echo.