Amnesia City sprawled beneath a fog that never fully lifted. In the distance, the Colossi split the sky like black bones clawing out of the earth — silent, immense, relics of an age no one could make sense of anymore.
In the lower slums of the South Belt, houses were nothing but shacks crushed against each other, jammed into the cracks of the world. Kobe and his mother lived in one of them: a hovel of rusted sheet metal and salvaged concrete, wedged between two crumbling pillars. One dark room. A mattress sprawled directly on the packed earth. A lopsided table. A narrow window that let in more cold than light.
Kobe was ten years old.
Small for his age. Thin. His shoulders already bent under a weight too old for him. He wore an oversized grey coverall, patched at the knees, and boots too heavy for his frame. His black hair was short, badly cut, caked with dust. His face was pale — hunger had carved it lean — but his dark eyes burned with something sharp. Too sharp for a child his age.
His mother sat on the mattress. Small, gaunt, her face etched with deep lines that had no business being there at forty-five. Her grey hair was knotted in a tight bun. Her hands trembled faintly around a bowl of watery soup.
"Kobe…" she rasped. "Don't go down today. The ruins are getting worse. You're too small."
Kobe tipped the last of the soup into his own chipped bowl. The liquid was nearly clear — a few bitter roots, a pinch of synthetic protein. No bread. Not for days.
"We have to pay the rent, Mama. And your medicine." He didn't look up. "If I don't go down, we have nothing."
She looked at him. That tired look — soaked in love and dread at the same time.
Kobe crossed the room and took her hands in his. They were cold. His weren't — already rough, already calloused.
"I'm careful," he said quietly. "I always come back. For you."
She held his fingers for a moment. Then let go.
Before stepping out, Kobe paused at the door. Same as every morning. He dropped his head, and whispered — barely a sound:
"I can do this. I will do this. I have to do this."
Three times. Like a vow he couldn't afford to break. Then he tightened the straps of his bag and walked out.
The alley was damp, cold, dead quiet. Yan and Luna were already waiting near the great rift — the gash in the earth that swallowed everything beneath the city.
Yan was taller, lean to the point of looking hollow. Close-cropped hair. A jaw like carved stone, always locked tight. Luna stood beside him, black hair cut blunt at her chin, thin cracked glasses on her nose, and that pale, sunken look — the kind you only got from learning fear young.
"Ready, little one?" Yan urged.
Kobe nodded.
They dropped into the rift.
The upper levels were dark and tight — a throat of stone and corroded metal. Their headlamps swept the walls: surfaces too smooth, too deliberate, throwing back a cold blue glow. Nothing down here looked like the ruins above. Up there, things had crumbled. Down here, they looked like they'd been abandoned mid-breath.
They went deeper.
The air thickened. Metal and ozone — the smell of something old and still alive. Lights blinked on ahead of them, unsummoned. Suspended bridges arched over black voids. The shadows moved. Not fast. Just slightly too slow.
"Look," Luna whispered, finger pressed toward the wall. A ring of symbols pulsed softly against the stone. "That wasn't there last week."
Yan's grip tightened around his crowbar.
"We grab what we can. We go back up."
But Kobe was already moving forward.
The ground was vibrating beneath his boots.
Not a tremor — something slower. Deeper.
Like a breath waking under the stone.
They entered a vast chamber.
The ceiling soared overhead, covered in patterns that looked like dead stars. At the center, a transparent pillar pulsed with threads of light still flowing through it. The silence was absolute.
Then it shattered.
A crack — sharp and clean.
Like a bone snapping.
The floor split. Black fractures shot outward in every direction. The pillar detonated in a burst of blue-white glass.
"Back!" Yan roared.
Too late.
The chamber came down.
The ceiling buckled. Slabs of metal and stone rained in cascades. Ancient dust exploded through the air — dense, choking, blinding.
Kobe was hurled backward. He hit a wall that folded around him like a metal flower closing. His lamp died. He choked, eyes screaming, heart slamming against his ribs.
Chaos. Nothing but chaos.
Yan — on his side, arm pinned under a beam, teeth grinding. Luna — on her knees, glasses gone, hands pressed over her skull, screaming words the roar swallowed whole.
Kobe dragged himself upright. Trembling.
The chamber was gone.
Where it had stood, a massive void had torn open — a wound in the earth with no visible bottom.
And in the dark below, blue lights pulsed. Slow. Rhythmic.
Like eyes.
Mechanical voices bled up from the depths, whispering in a dead language — warped, echoing, wrong.
The dust drifted down.
Kobe couldn't breathe.
They had gone too deep.
Something had woken up.
And whatever it was — it already knew they were there.