The city didn't breathe.
That was the first thing Draven noticed as he walked deeper into Sector 9. In the mines above, the earth groaned; water dripped, rats scuttled, and wood creaked. The world above was decaying, and decay was a form of life. But here, in the Black City, there was only a terrifying, sterile perfection.
The obsidian towers rose from the subterranean gloom like jagged teeth, their surfaces so polished that Draven could see his own ragged reflection walking alongside him—a grey ghost limping through a graveyard of gods. The air was cold, dry, and smelled of ozone, like the air after a lightning strike. There was no dust. In a place that had been sealed for centuries, there should have been layers of silt. But the floors were pristine. Self-cleaning enchantments, Draven realized. Or nanotechnology.
He walked down the central avenue, a bridge of black metal suspended over a vast, dark lake. The liquid below wasn't water. It was thick, viscous, and moved with a sluggish, semi-conscious rhythm. Every few seconds, a bubble of glowing blue gas would rise to the surface and burst with a soft plop, releasing a waft of pure, concentrated mana.
Draven's [Mana Eater] trait was vibrating in his chest. In the mines, the mana had been "dirty"—mixed with sulfur and earth. Here, it was refined. It was pharmaceutical grade. Just breathing the air made his exhaustion recede, replaced by a cold, jittery energy. His dislocated shoulder, which he had popped back in, throbbed with a dull ache, but the mana acted like a local anesthetic.
He gripped the Peacekeeper in his left hand, the heavy steel warming against his palm. "Where is everyone?" he whispered. The sound died instantly, swallowed by the acoustic dampening of the city.
He wasn't just exploring. He was hunting for resources. He had two bullets left for the heavy gun and a saber that was chipping. He scanned the buildings. Most were windowless monoliths, likely server banks or mana storage units. But to his right, about a hundred meters down a connecting walkway, he saw a structure that looked different. It had glass walls. And inside, he could see rows of tables. A laboratory.
Draven diverted from the main path. He approached the glass building cautiously. The door was sealed, but the control panel was dead. He used the hilt of his saber. Smash. The glass shattered—not into sharp shards, but into tiny, harmless cubes. Safety glass. He stepped inside.
The silence here was even deeper. The room was filled with long metal tables covered in alchemical equipment that looked centuries ahead of anything the Northern Alliance possessed. Centrifuges, distillation coils, mana-spectrometers. And bodies.
Draven stiffened, raising his gun. But the bodies didn't move. They were skeletons. Unlike the miners in the upper levels who had died of starvation or violence, these people had died... peacefully? They were seated at desks or slumped against walls. They wore white coats made of a synthetic fabric that hadn't rotted. Draven walked up to the nearest one. There was no trauma. No broken bones. On the table in front of the skeleton was a small, empty vial. Suicide, Draven realized. Mass suicide. Whatever had happened here, the staff had chosen to die rather than face it. Or rather than let It out.
He began to rummage through the drawers. Scavenging was second nature to him now. Most of the chemicals had evaporated into dry stains. The paper logs crumbled to dust when he touched them. But in a reinforced cabinet at the back of the room, he found something.
A metal case, sealed with a biometric lock similar to the gatehouse. Draven placed his hand on it. Beep. [ Access Granted: Subject V. ]
The lid popped open. Inside, nestled in foam, were three syringes. They weren't glass; they were metal cylinders with wicked-looking needles. The liquid inside was a glowing, neon violet.
[ Item Identified: Adrenaline-V (Experimental) ] [ Description: A combat stimulant designed for the V-Series biological weapons. ] [ Effect: Temporarily removes all physical limiters. Increases Strength and Agility drastically. ] [ Side Effect: Massive cellular degradation. High toxicity. ]
"Liquid death," Draven muttered. "Perfect." He took the syringes. He slotted two into the loops on his belt and held one in his hand, considering it. He was running on fumes. If he had to fight something big, his current stamina wouldn't hold. He pocketed the third one.
As he turned to leave, his foot kicked something under a desk. A datapad. Thick, rugged, and cracked. He picked it up. It shouldn't have worked after all this time. But as his fingers brushed the screen, his own mana jumped from his skin into the device. [Mana Eater] worked both ways; he could drain, but he could also power. The screen flickered to life. Static. Then text.
LOG 492 - HEAD RESEARCHER KALEV "The project is a failure. The V-Series subjects are too volatile. They have the stats, yes. They have the mana capacity. But they lack the... soul. Without a soul to anchor the mana, they just burn out. They become husks. Except for Subject 0-0-1. He's different. He doesn't just hold mana; he eats it. But he's too aggressive. We had to put him in Stasis Cryo. We are sealing the facility. The 'Incursion' has started in the upper mines. If the creatures get down here... God help us. We are taking the exit pills tonight."
Draven lowered the pad. Subject 0-0-1. He eats mana. He looked at his hands. The pale skin, the unnatural veins. "I'm not the hero of this story," he realized, a cold smile touching his lips. "I'm the monster they locked in the basement."
It explained everything. Why the System called his class [Cracked]. Why his body could handle stats that should tear a human apart. Why he woke up in a mass grave with no memory. He wasn't a reincarnated gamer in the traditional sense. He was an ancient bioweapon that had been hijacked by a player's consciousness.
The screen flickered and died. Draven dropped the pad. He had his answers. Or at least, enough of them to paint a picture. Now he needed the exit. Or the control room. He looked out the window toward the center of the lake. The Black Pyramid waited.
He left the lab and returned to the main bridge. The Pyramid was massive. It sat on an island in the middle of the viscous lake, connected by a single, narrow causeway. As Draven stepped onto the causeway, the atmosphere changed. The "clean" feeling of the city vanished. Here, the air was heavy. Oppressive. It felt like walking through water. Gravity seemed to increase.
Draven's boots felt like lead. His shoulders slumped. Pressure, he analyzed. Protective magical pressure. Only the strong can approach. His Strength and Endurance stats were fighting against the invisible weight. He gritted his teeth and forced himself forward. Step by heavy step.
He was halfway across the bridge when the water in the lake began to boil. Draven stopped. He drew the Peacekeeper. "Show yourself," he rasped.
The black sludge erupted. A creature rose from the depths. It wasn't organic. It wasn't a spider. It was a Construct. A serpent made of articulated obsidian segments, held together by crackling blue energy. It had no eyes, only a faceless, sleek hood like a cobra. It towered ten meters above the bridge, blocking the path.
[ WARNING: DEFENSE PROTOCOL ACTIVE ] [ UNIT: OBSIDIAN SERPENT ] [ THREAT: EXTREME ]
The System interface flickered back into existence for a split second, trying to parse the threat, then died again. The Serpent didn't roar. It emitted a low, mechanical hum that vibrated in Draven's chest. It lunged.
Draven didn't try to block. You don't block a train. He threw himself forward, sliding on his knees across the smooth metal of the bridge. The massive head of the serpent smashed into the walkway where he had been standing a second ago. Metal buckled. Draven came up in a crouch, the Peacekeeper leveled.
BOOM. He fired a standard lead round. The bullet sparked off the obsidian scales, ricocheting harmlessly into the darkness. "Armor too thick," Draven noted.
The Serpent coiled, its tail whipping around to sweep him off the bridge. Draven jumped. Agility flared. He cleared the tail by inches, landing on the creature's back. The surface was slick and cold. He needed to find a weak point. The joints. The blue energy holding it together.
The Serpent thrashed, trying to shake him off. Draven grabbed onto a protruding dorsal fin with his left hand. His shoulder screamed in protest, but he held on. He jammed the barrel of the revolver into one of the glowing blue gaps between the scales. "Open wide," he snarled.
He spun the cylinder. Mana Slug. CRACK-ZZZTT.
The explosion was contained inside the construct's body. The Serpent convulsed. Blue light sprayed from the wound like arterial blood. The energy field destabilized. The segment blew apart. The Serpent shrieked—a sound of tearing metal.
But it wasn't dead. The tail whipped up and slammed into Draven's chest. It was like being hit by a wrecking ball. Draven flew backward. He tumbled along the bridge, skidding for twenty meters before slamming into the railing. He gasped, tasting copper. Ribs broken. Definitely. He tried to stand, but his legs wobbled.
The Serpent was recovering. The gap in its armor was knitting itself back together, the blue energy reforming the stone. Self-repair, Draven thought bitterly. Of course.
He had one Mana Slug left. One shot. And the creature was regenerating. He couldn't win a battle of attrition. He needed to overload it.
He reached into his belt. He pulled out the Adrenaline-V syringe. He didn't hesitate. He jammed the needle into his thigh and depressed the plunger.
It wasn't like the stimulant he had taken in the tower. This was fire. Liquid magma flooded his veins. His heart hammered so hard he thought it would crack his sternum. The pain in his ribs vanished. The fatigue vanished. The world slowed down. Every drop of falling water, every spark from the damaged bridge, hung in the air.
[ ALERT: BIOLOGICAL LIMITERS REMOVED ] [ STRENGTH: ERROR ] [ AGILITY: ERROR ]
Draven stood up. He didn't just stand; he surged. The Serpent lunged again, jaws open to crush him. To Draven, it looked like it was moving in slow motion. He sidestepped the strike with terrifying ease. He didn't shoot. He holstered the gun. He drew the Northern Cavalier Saber.
With a roar that sounded more beast than man, Draven leaped. He didn't jump away. He jumped at the face of the Serpent. He grabbed the edge of its hood with his bare hand, his fingers digging into the stone like claws. Strength Overload. He swung himself up, face to face with the blind, obsidian cowl.
"System Reset," Draven whispered.
He plunged the saber into the creature's "eye"—the central cluster of sensors. At the same time, he placed his other palm against the stone. [ Mana Eater: MAXIMUM OUTPUT ]
He didn't drain the mana. He reversed the flow. He poured the chaotic, volatile energy of the Adrenaline-V straight from his blood into the Serpent's delicate circuitry. He was a living short-circuit.
The Serpent froze. The blue lights turned a violent, unstable red. The hum rose to a shriek. Draven kicked off the creature's face and backflipped onto the bridge.
KA-BOOM.
The Construct didn't just break; it detonated. Shards of obsidian rained down like hail. The shockwave nearly knocked Draven off the bridge, but he planted his feet, sliding backward, carving grooves into the metal.
Silence returned to the lake. The Serpent was gone. Only a cloud of blue dust remained.
Draven stood there, panting. Steam was rising from his skin. His veins were black spiderwebs against his pale flesh. The drug was burning him out from the inside. He had minutes before the crash.
He turned and walked toward the Pyramid. The final stretch of the bridge was clear. He reached the base of the massive structure. There was no grand staircase. Just a small, human-sized door at the base. It was open. Waiting.
Draven stumbled through the entrance. He expected a throne room. Or a computer core. Instead, he found a garden.
It was a small, circular atrium. Artificial sunlight streamed from the ceiling. Real grass grew on the floor. In the center, there was a single white tree with silver leaves. And sitting under the tree, on a simple stone bench, was a figure.
It was a woman. She wore a simple grey dress. Her hair was white, long, and floated around her as if she were underwater. She didn't look like a hologram. She looked solid. She was reading a book.
As Draven entered, bloody, smoking, and terrifying, she closed the book. She looked up. Her eyes were the same glowing blue as his.
"You're late, Number One," she said. Her voice was soft, but it carried the weight of mountains. "I was beginning to think the Inquisition had recycled you."
Draven leaned against the doorframe, trying to keep his vision from tunneling. "Who are you?" he rasped.
The woman smiled. It was a sad smile. "I am the template," she said. "I am the one they copied to make you." She patted the empty space on the bench beside her. "Sit down, Velor. The drug is about to stop your heart. We need to fix that before we can talk about saving the world."
Draven hesitated. His instincts screamed trap. But his body screamed mother. His knees gave out. He stumbled forward and collapsed onto the grass at her feet. The last thing he felt was her cool hand touching his feverish forehead.
"Sleep," she whispered. "The tutorial is over."
[ END OF CHAPTER 30 ] [ ACT 1 COMPLETE ]
[ SYSTEM REBOOTING... ] [ INSTALLING PATCH 2.0... ] [ NEW CLASS AVAILABLE. ]