Kaelen followed the map south, leaving the copper-scented darkness of the textile factory behind.
The transition to the Southern Sector wasn't gradual. It was a cliff edge.
One moment, he was walking on cracked asphalt surrounded by rusting fences and debris. The next, he crossed an invisible line, and the world simply… stopped rendering.
The street ahead didn't end. It just became flat.
The buildings were gray blocks with no windows or doors—low-resolution shapes that the world hadn't bothered to finish. The trees were 2D cutouts, stiff and paper-thin, vibrating in the windless air like cardboard props on a stage.
A Dead Zone.
Kaelen stopped at the edge of the asphalt. The air rippled in front of him, smelling of ozone and burning plastic.
He checked the dead man's map. The blue line went straight through this sector. To go around the anomaly would take days, and he didn't have the water for days. He had the canteen he stole, and that was it.
He had to cross.
He stepped onto the flat gray surface.
There was no sound of boots on pavement. It was like walking on thick, mute rubber. The ground felt spongy, as if there were nothing solid beneath the gray texture.
[ WARNING: UNSTABLE REALITY ] [ REGION: Dead Zone (Sector 4) ] [ ENTROPY LEVEL: 85% ] [ AUTHORITY DRAIN ACCELERATED ]
The blue text hovered in his vision, pulsing with urgency. Kaelen swiped it away.
I know, he thought. I can feel it.
The pressure in his chest—the battery of his [Denial]—was ticking down. Being here was like standing in a radiation zone; the chaos was eating away at his existence.
He moved quickly, keeping his head low. In a Dead Zone, physics was a suggestion, not a law. Gravity could shift. Distance could loop.
He had walked for ten minutes when he saw the first glitch.
A bird—a crow—was frozen in mid-air above him. Its wings were spread, its beak open in a caw that made no sound. It wasn't hovering. It was paused.
Kaelen stepped around it carefully, giving it a wide berth.
Then, the bird stretched.
The black shape of the crow elongated, smearing across the sky like wet ink on a page, stretching into a thin, infinite black line that shot toward the horizon.
ZZZT.
The line of corrupted matter sliced through the air where Kaelen's head had been a second ago.
He ducked instinctively, his heart hammering.
It wasn't an attack. It was just an error. The world trying to connect two points of data and failing. But errors in this world were lethal.
He broke into a run.
He needed to get to the other side before the zone decided to refresh.
Ahead, the gray blocks gave way to something else. A dense, white fog rolled along the ground, swallowing the unfinished buildings. It didn't move like mist; it moved like pixels dissolving.
Kaelen checked the map again. The Sanctuary was past the fog.
He sprinted into the mist.
Immediately, his senses rebelled.
Up became down. The ground felt like it was tilting forty-five degrees to the left. Kaelen stumbled, slamming his hand against a wall to steady himself.
The wall rippled like water under his touch. His fingers sank into the concrete.
Don't trust your eyes, he told himself, pulling his hand back before the wall could solidify around it. Trust the Authority.
He closed his eyes. He focused on the hum in his chest.
[ Denial ]
He pushed a pulse of stability outward.
The world snapped back. Gravity realigned. The floor became solid concrete under his boots.
He opened his eyes.
He wasn't alone in the fog.
Ten meters away, something was standing in the mist.
It looked human, but the proportions were wrong. It was too tall—seven feet at least. Its limbs were elongated, thin as spider legs. It wore the tattered, glitching remains of a police uniform.
It didn't have a face. Where the features should be, there was just a smooth, white porcelain surface.
A Silencer.
Kaelen's blood ran cold.
Hollows were passive; they just wanted you to give up. They were the symptoms of the disease. Silencers were active. They were the white blood cells of the Void. Their job was to remove anomalies.
And Kaelen was a very loud anomaly.
The creature's head snapped toward him. It didn't have eyes, but it locked on.
It let out a sound—a high-pitched screech of dial-up static that pierced Kaelen's eardrums and made his teeth ache.
It moved.
It didn't run. It flickered.
One second it was ten meters away. The next, it was five.
Kaelen didn't hesitate. He drew his knife.
But his mind raced. A knife against something that teleports? Suicide.
The Silencer flickered again. Two meters.
It raised a long, needle-like arm to strike. The limb vibrated, blurring the air around it.
Kaelen didn't dodge. He couldn't out-speed a glitch.
He dropped to his knees and slammed his palm onto the ground.
He didn't target the monster. He targeted the Dead Zone.
The floor here was unstable. Fluid.
Freeze, Kaelen commanded.
[ DENIAL: MAX OUTPUT ]
He poured every ounce of his remaining Authority into the ground directly in front of him. He forced the fluid reality to obey the laws of physics. He forced it to be Solid.
The concrete instantly hardened, snapping from liquid chaos to absolute stone.
The Silencer flickered forward to strike—and its foot, which had been phasing through the floor, was suddenly encased in rock.
CRUNCH.
The creature shrieked as the solidified reality crushed its ankle. It was trapped. Anchored by the very laws of physics it tried to ignore.
It thrashed, its needle-arm slashing wildly. The tip of the limb grazed Kaelen's shoulder, tearing through his jacket and skin.
Pain flared—hot and sharp—but Kaelen ignored it.
He lunged.
He didn't stab the body. He knew from the archives that Silencers had a core. A dense knot of corrupted data in the chest.
He drove the chipped knife into the center of the uniform, putting his entire body weight behind the thrust.
The blade hit something hard. Like striking diamond.
The creature screamed, the static noise rising to a deafening pitch.
"Be silent," Kaelen snarled.
He twisted the knife. He poured his will into the blade. You are an error. I am the correction.
CRACK.
The core shattered.
The Silencer went rigid. The static scream cut off instantly.
The white body turned gray. Then black. Then dust.
It dissolved in seconds, collapsing into a pile of ash, leaving only the tattered police uniform lying on the newly solidified concrete.
Kaelen fell back, gasping for air. He clutched his bleeding shoulder. His reserves were empty. He felt lightheaded, drained.
But then, the warmth hit him.
It wasn't physical warmth. It was a rush of energy, filling the hollow space in his chest.
[ COMBAT RESOLVED ]
[ ENEMY ELIMINATED: Class 1 Silencer ] [ AUTHORITY EXP GAINED ]
[ LEVEL UP! ]
[ OBSERVER LEVEL 2 ] [ AUTHORITY CAPACITY INCREASED ] [ NEW TRAIT UNLOCKED: Echo Sense ] > You can now hear the faint resonance of nearby Authority sources. The past speaks to those who listen.
Kaelen stared at the text.
He had leveled up. The pain in his shoulder dulled slightly as the "System" patched his biological code. The cut stopped bleeding.
He stood up, shaky but alive.
He looked ahead.
The fog was thinning. The Dead Zone was ending.
He walked through the last wisps of mist, his boots crunching on real, solid gravel.
And there, rising above the ruin of the southern sector, he saw it.
A massive structure. It wasn't gray. It wasn't glitching.
It was a fortress of stone and stained glass, glowing with a soft, impossible amber light. Vines of green ivy climbed the walls. It looked like a castle from a fairy tale dropped into a nightmare.
The Sanctuary.
It was real.
But as Kaelen watched, the new trait—[Echo Sense]—kicked in.
He heard a hum coming from the Sanctuary. It wasn't the hum of a machine. It was a heartbeat. Slow, powerful, and terrified.
And surrounding that heartbeat, camped in the shadows of the ruins around the Sanctuary gates, Kaelen saw fires.
Dozens of them.
Orange flames flickering in the dark. Tents. Patrols.
An army.
Valerius's men were laying siege to the Sanctuary.
Kaelen gripped his knife.
He had found the light. But to get to it, he was going to have to wade through an army of the darkness.
He took a step forward.
Hesitation kills.