The cathedral split before it could pray.
Kaelen saw the crack open above the dome as a thin white seam, then widen with a sound like a giant glass table being struck from underneath.
People in the square looked up.
Some froze.
Some screamed.
One old man dropped to his knees as if his body still believed in mercy.
Kaelen did not.
He was already moving.
Not fast.
Fast was for the untrained and the desperate.
He moved with the ugly calm of a man who had watched cities die and learned that panic only wastes breath.
His eyes tracked the fall line of the first debris, the angle of the bells, the crowd's bad habits.
Left side was bottlenecking.
Right side would crush against the fountain.
The cathedral steps would become a funnel.
He filed it away and kept walking.
Above, the breach widened into a wound of pale light.
Something black moved behind it, not yet fully formed, only hinted at by a shape too large and too patient.
The bells began ringing on their own, one after another, as if the metal had been gripped by invisible hands.
"Run!" someone shouted.
That was always a stupid suggestion.
People did not run.
They collided, argued, tripped, remembered children too late, and then ran into each other harder.
Kaelen stepped around a woman who had fallen on her knees and was trying to gather scattered bread rolls with shaking hands.
She looked up at him with wild eyes.
"Help me," she said.
He looked at the rolls, then at the sky.
"No."
The answer came out flat.
Not cruel.
Just accurate.
Her face tightened as if he had slapped her.
The breach cracked again.
This time the sound punched through the square and sent birds exploding out of the eaves.
Dust slid from the cathedral facade.
A stained-glass saint lost its head and shattered across the steps in a rain of red and gold.
Someone began to pray.
Someone else laughed, which was worse.
Kaelen angled toward the north side of the square.
There was a guard shed beyond the chapel gardens, and if memory had not rotted him, a shipment of tools had come in that morning from the tannery district.
Enough iron to make a difference.
Not enough time to waste.
A voice cut across the noise.
"Hold the line! Get the civilians into the side streets!"
Kaelen turned his head a fraction.
Elara.
Young, sharp-shouldered, standing on the cathedral steps with a half-broken spear in one hand and blood on the other that was probably not hers.
She wore the city guard's blue, though the leather was too stiff and the fit too formal for a street fight.
Her hair had come loose from its knot.
One side of her face was pale with dust.
The other was already angry.
Right now she was eighteen or nineteen and trying to hold a city together with a voice that had not yet learned how hopeless the job was.
"Move!" she barked at a pair of guards near the fountain.
"You, left street. You, don't stand there like a sack. Go!"
One of the guards hesitated.
He looked too young to shave properly.
Elara grabbed his collar and shoved him toward the crowd.
"If you faint, do it after the door closes."
Kaelen kept walking.
She spotted him a moment later.
Her gaze snagged, sharpened, and followed him in a way that said she did not like being ignored.
"Hey," she called. "You there. Civilian. Get moving."
He did not slow.
Elara swore, a quick rough syllable she probably regretted the instant it left her mouth.
Then she vaulted off the step and cut through two panicking townsfolk to reach him.
Her movement had promise in it.
Not polished yet.
Still honest.
"Are you deaf?" she snapped.
"The cathedral is about to come down."
"Likely," Kaelen said.
She stared at him for half a beat, thrown off by the lack of fear in his face.
"Then why are you walking toward it?"
He looked past her, not at her.
"Because the people behind you will block the street in thirty seconds. The side passage by the chapel will stay open for twelve. Your west route is already dead."
Her mouth opened, then shut.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"Busy."
"That is not a name."
"Today it is."
Her eyes narrowed.
Behind them, the cathedral dome gave a deep groan.
Elara glanced up sharply, then back to the crowd.
"Fine. Busy. Then stop being useless and help me clear this lane."
"No."
For a second she just looked at him, offended in a way that was almost comical.
Then her expression changed.
Not softer.
Sharper.
"You're either brave or broken," she said.
Kaelen almost answered.
Instead he said, "You're losing time."
Then he walked past her.
He heard her bark an order a moment later, redirecting two guards to the eastern stair.
The square lurched sideways in his vision.
Not physically.
Internally.
A pressure tightened behind his eyes, and the world briefly flickered into something less honest.
He stopped in the shadow of a butcher's awning and braced a hand against the wood.
For one breath he thought the fragment in his chest had torn open completely.
Then the interface bloomed.
Not bright.
Not clean.
Corrupted at the edges, threaded with static and half-erased lines.
It overlaid the market in thin red text and pale blocks, as if someone had tried to turn reality into an account ledger and failed badly.
Kaelen's jaw tightened.
There it was again.
The wound.
The shapes on the interface shifted as he looked, and the first thing that made sense was not a health bar or a skill list.
It was a table.
He blinked.
The nearest man, a cooper clutching his wife's arm, had a line of text hanging over his head.
『Durability: 19%』
The wife beside him showed 『27%』.
A guard sprinting toward the chapel steps flashed 『61%』.
The child sobbing by the fountain, maybe 『12%』.
Kaelen's stomach did not drop.
It sank.
There was a difference.
"This is new," he muttered.
A second panel flickered beside the first, unstable, jagged at the corners.
『Resource: Breath Status: Degrading Estimated usability: 04:11』
He stared at it for one brutally long second.
A woman stumbled past him, pushing a basket against her chest like it could protect her from the sky.
Above her head, the number 『33%』 flickered red, then orange.
He understood the shape of the thing immediately.
Not mercy.
Not destiny.
Triage.
The fragment was not showing him souls.
It was showing him what could still be used, repaired, lost, or spent.
A terrible tool.
A necessary one.
Kaelen turned his head slowly, scanning faces.
A man with a cane. 『8%』.
A guard with a split lip. 『49%』.
Elara, partly obscured by moving bodies. 『72%』.
He looked at her for a fraction longer than necessary.
The cathedral made another sound, lower this time.
Something inside it was moving.
The breach widened.
And then the first creature fell out.
It hit the square on all fours and skidded across stone, claws shrieking sparks.
Thin body.
Too many joints.
A skull like a cracked mask.
Flesh layered in dark slick strips, as if it had been assembled from scraps and resentment.
Its head snapped up.
A second mouth opened under the first.
Scavenger.
The nearest guards shouted and raised spears.
The Scavenger moved before they finished the motion.
One guard went down screaming.
Another lost his grip and backed into the fountain.
Elara swore again and shoved civilians away from the steps, her face hardening.
Kaelen did not run toward the thing.
He ran sideways.
A butcher's stall.
Abandoned for half a breath.
A long slicing knife lay on the table beside a blood-slick block of wood and a pile of half-trimmed meat.
Kaelen seized the knife, tested the balance once, and found it workable.
Not ideal.
But ideal was a luxury for people with better timing.
The Scavenger ripped through a guard and turned, its head jerking toward the nearest warm body.
Kaelen watched its shoulders.
Watched the weight shift.
Watched the split-second hesitation before the second lunge.
The creature launched.
Kaelen stepped in instead of back.
The knife rose low, not for a dramatic kill, not for anything clean.
It went under the rib seam where the armor of flesh thinned.
He turned his wrist as the Scavenger came down, let its own force drive the blade deeper, then twisted hard enough to feel the structure inside it give way.
The thing screamed.
Not like an animal.
Like a machine finding out it could fail.
Its claw raked his shoulder.
Pain flared hot and immediate, a thin red line opening across the younger body.
Kaelen ignored it.
He drove the knife up under the jaw, all the way to the hilt.
The Scavenger convulsed, black fluid spilling over his hand.
It tried to bite him.
He leaned away, shoved the hilt, and kicked it in the chest.
The creature stumbled backward off the fountain step.
A guard took the chance and drove a spear through its spine.
The Scavenger collapsed in a twitching heap.
Everything stopped for one breath.
Not the breach.
Not the panic.
Just the people nearest the corpse, all of them suddenly aware that something had come into their city with a purpose.
The guard who had landed the spear stared at Kaelen as if he had just watched a man solve a math problem with a kitchen knife.
Elara arrived half a second later, breathing hard, eyes locked on the dead creature.
Then on Kaelen.
Then on the blood on his sleeve.
"Who the hell are you?" she said again, but this time the question had shifted.
Kaelen wiped the knife on the Scavenger's hide.
"Someone who showed up early."
She looked as if she might demand more, but the cathedral gave a shriek of stone.
The interface in Kaelen's vision spasmed.
Red text flooded the edge of his sight, jagged and urgent, each line tearing itself into place like a wound reopening.
『Attention: Rule overwrite detected.』
『Attention: Rule overwrite detected.』
『Attention: Fate recalculation in progress...』
His pulse jumped once.
Then the final line appeared, deeper red than the rest, as if the system itself had started to bleed.
『Do not let the girl touch the sealed crate.』