Yin sat on the edge of Tower Helion's uppermost ledge, legs dangling above the clouds. Wind whispered across the steel, tugging gently at the edge of his coat. From this height, the city below looked almost serene—an illusion carefully crafted by the System.
The skyline stretched like a jagged crown—glass spires woven with veins of light, neon ribbons pulsing up their frames like blood through circuitry.
Drones darted in synchronized formations, scanning the streets in grids with blinking eyes and low mechanical chirrs. Silver centurions—humanoid AI units with emotionless masks—patrolled the ground level, their cores glowing faintly blue as they scanned the passing crowds.
It wasn't the city he remembered.
Not the one where he and Mira once shared ice cream in the South Park Arcade. Not the place where she chased after pigeons with a laugh so bright it made the air feel lighter.
That city was long gone.
Replaced.
Now, every corner of New Eidon was under constant surveillance. Surveillance towers stretched like black monoliths between the zones, each embedded with sky-level motion sensors and astral barrier tech designed to detect mana surges and emotional spikes—telltale signs of demonic camouflage.
The System had learned.
Demons no longer came roaring through in hordes. They evolved. They infiltrated. Disguising themselves in human skin—hijacking bodies, imitating speech patterns, mimicking empathy. It was an insidious kind of invasion.
But the city had adapted too.
Every registered citizen was implanted with a biometric ID. Unregistered entities—those who blinked wrong, moved wrong, breathed wrong—were immediately flagged. The drones, sensitive to anomalies in heat signatures and psionic frequency, would descend like a flock of metal vultures. Suspects were surrounded in seconds, scanned, and if confirmed… neutralized.
Yin had once seen it happen. A little girl in the market, holding her mother's hand. Something in her aura was off—just enough to trip the alarm.
The silver masks didn't hesitate. They tore her from her mother's arms before she could scream. The thing that wore her skin burst into black tendrils the moment it was exposed. But the mother never stopped crying.
The barriers hummed overhead—a nearly invisible dome of refractive light that split the sky into geometric panels. It shimmered only when tested by outside forces, like the flicker of invisible wings or the pressure of clawed fingers against its surface.
The darkness beyond the city pressed against that dome like a great, waiting ocean. Beyond the shield, there was nothing but ruin. Cities burned and swallowed by the Rift. Forests turned to bone. Oceans evaporated into salted wastelands. And demons roamed like gods unchained.
Humanity's last hope had curled inward, creating cities like New Eidon: technologically immaculate prisons built atop the graves of the old world.
Yin's fingers curled around the ledge.
Even with all this—this polished, gleaming shell of civilization—he had never felt more alone.
They called him a candidate. A prodigy. The most promising of the Adapted.
But no one knew what the Covenant had taken from him.
And no one knew what it continued to whisper in the hollow places of his soul.
"You remember what it felt like, don't you? When she died in your arms? That was power. That was awakening. That was truth."
The voice whispered again. It had been whispering since he accepted the system in attempt to save his little sister—and yet he was too late. And now, Mira is dead and he's stuck with a system he refuses to understand.
His jaw clenched.
The city didn't care. The System didn't grieve. It only recalibrated, reinforced, evolved.
But Yin remembered.
He stared at the flickering horizon, where the barrier met the void. Somewhere out there—beyond the light, beyond the reach of surveillance—were the ones who had taken Mira. The ones who still wore her blood like a crown.
Yin had never seen Ling since that day either. Ling Huang—his best friend, his tether to the past. The boy with untamable green hair who always got picked on in the academy for being "weird," for standing out. But Ling never minded. He'd just laugh it off, always flashing that crooked grin and pretending the bruises didn't hurt.
He was the one who'd shared lunch with Yin when the cafeteria bots served him something he couldn't even pronounce. The one who made a thousand jokes during curfew lockdowns. The one who taught him how to swear in four different languages and asked nothing in return but loyalty.
And now—just like Mira—he was gone.
Disappeared.
Ripped from the streets during the first Purge and never seen again.
Yin Zhao, despite being born Chinese, had grown up in the States, navigating two cultures, two tongues, and neither ever truly felt like home. Not until Mira started humming to him in the mornings. Not until Ling dragged him into trouble and laughed them out of it. Eidon had been a strange, beautiful chaos. An awkward patchwork of tech and tradition, where the future still bowed to memory.
But that Eidon was gone.
Now, it was all calculation. Monitored joy. Quantified suffering. "Home" had been sterilized, rebuilt into cold symmetry and rules, and every warm thing in it was dust.
"Cero."
A woman's voice, clear and low, rose behind him like a gentle knife.
Yin's silver hair rippled with the wind, brushing against the side of his cheek—but he didn't turn. Didn't flinch.
"Cero, you've already been summoned twice. Why are you still here?"
Her voice didn't accuse. It never did. That was Uno—Contestant #0001. Real name: Yukine Sato.
She stepped closer, her boots barely making a sound against the steel platform. About his age, maybe younger, with scarlet hair braided tightly down one side and eyes the color of a glacier before it breaks.
Uno was everything the other contestants weren't—quiet, almost maternal, but lethal. Under her calm demeanor was a force that had wiped out entire demon packs just outside the city's barrier. She had climbed the System faster than anyone else.
Except Yin.
For now.
Yin finally turned his head to her, his expression is blank. His silver eyes carried the kind of pressure that didn't come from battle, but from loss. Deep, personal, and unrelenting.
"I was remembering," he said quietly.
Uno didn't ask what.
She already knew.
Everyone had heard the story—the tragedy of Cero. The prodigy with perfect sync rates. The one whose sister died during the first purge. The one who had once smiled like it meant something.
Uno moved beside him and sat, folding her legs beneath her. She didn't speak. Just looked out at the horizon with him.
"I miss the smell of bread," she said after a long pause. "Real bread. The kind that took time. Not the synthetic stuff from the Replicators."
Yin exhaled through his nose. "I miss rain," he murmured. "The soft kind. Before the storms were weaponized."
Uno tilted her head. "You can't keep skipping summons. You know the Council is watching you."
"Let them watch," Yin muttered. "They watch everything else."
"They want to test your resonance core again."
He laughed bitterly. "Of course they do."
Uno reached out, brushing a hand against the back of his coat. Not in comfort—just a reminder that she was still there. Still real.
"You're not the only one who lost someone, Cero," she said gently. "But if you keep holding onto ghosts, you'll become one."
Her words weren't cruel. They were truth—delivered with the precision of someone who'd learned to weaponize kindness.
Yin looked at her, finally, and for a moment, he didn't see the soldier the System had made her. He saw the girl beneath the code. The one who once knelt beside a dying contestant and sang to them until their pulse stopped.
Uno stood up, brushing imaginary dust from her coat. "Sector Twelve reported a breach just outside Grid Delta. A blood-class demon."
Yin's eyes sharpened.
"I'm heading there," she added. "But they asked for you first."
Of course they did.
He was Cero.
The Zero.
The System's first prototype—its weapon in human form and maybe its most dangerous mistake.
Yin rose slowly, wind slicing through his hair. His eyes lingered one last moment on the shimmering dome that caged the city—on the darkness waiting just beyond.
"I'm coming," he said.