Warren weaved through the maze of the Red like he had lived in it his entire life.
Not hesitation. Not calculation. Just pure, immediate motion. The surge of instinct honed by hundreds of hours spent surviving places like this that tried to swallow him whole. The broken truncheon in his bleeding hand throbbed with every heartbeat, slick with blood that wept from the splinters embedded deep in his palm. The crack of its impact still echoed somewhere behind him, swallowed quickly by the rising static of the Red.
He was sprinting.
The escape route he had set earlier, carefully mapped and booby-trapped with deliberate precision to cripple any pursuers, lay ahead. But he had strayed farther from it than he should have. Too many turns. Too much damage. The gap mattered now. Every second.
He tore through the flooded metro, boots punching through shallow pools that swallowed his sound. His coat, shedding rain in fine beads, moved easily with him as he vaulted over fallen signs and skirted the skeletal remains of old kiosks.
The Broken screamed behind him.
Not all at once. In waves. Each cry a jagged, discordant note in the drowned symphony of the Red Zone. They had found the scent of fresh blood, the crackle of fresh violence, and they would not lose it easily.
He clutched the remains of the truncheon tighter, ignoring the tearing pain that raced up his arm. Splinters dug deeper with every step. A trail of blood dripped behind him, staining the cracked tile, marking his path like a gash torn in the world.
Move.
He ducked through a crumbling maintenance tunnel, narrowly dodging a low-hanging beam. He knew these ruins better than most, but not perfectly. No one did. Sections shifted over time. Decay rewrote the map.
The air grew colder the deeper he ran, thick with the metallic tang of rust and rot. His breath came in ragged bursts, frosting faintly against the damp chill. Every footfall reverberated louder in his ears than the cries behind him.
Still farther from the planned route than he liked.
Still bleeding.
Still alive.
He veered left, sliding across a slick patch he had soaked earlier, water and mud mixing into a treacherous film. His footing held; he had memorized the angle. The Broken behind him would not.
A crash echoed a heartbeat later, followed by a snarling cry that snapped off into a wet gurgle. One of them had slipped, sprawling into the soaked floor and straight into the jagged metal plates he had hidden beyond it. Flesh tore on rusted edges. The thing that had been a man once writhed, twitching in the filth.
Warren kept moving. No satisfaction. No pause. Just the sharp awareness of the Broken piling onto the downed one, pouncing like animals scenting fresh blood.
Ahead, the low arch of a broken support beam loomed. He ducked and shoved hard against the trigger line he had rigged into the debris. The slab of ceiling above shuddered, then fell with a roar, crushing the narrow passage behind him. The wet, crunching collapse was followed by high, broken whimpers from what remained.
The noise bought him a breath, a barrier between himself and the fastest of the Broken.
He skirted the edge of a flooded stairwell, using a fallen bench to vault across. The locker he had shoved earlier stood jammed in the hallway, a bottleneck he needed.
He slipped through sideways, the metal scraping his coat. The Broken would have to slow, squeezing through one at a time, snarling and shoving in their hunger. Warren had no time to feel anything about it, no weapon left to exploit the choke point. All he could do was keep running and pray the pack behind him devoured itself faster than it caught him.
He reached a cluster of shallow puddles, the ones he had seeded with broken glass. He moved light over them, but a thud behind him told him one had not been so careful. A wet screech followed. One had stepped wrong, the shards slicing deep enough to leave tendons flapping uselessly in the water.
Another heartbeat to gain ground.
He sprinted through the next passage, where wires invisible in the dim light stretched across the corridor. A blur of movement behind him, then a stumble, a crash, and a splintering snap that could only have been a femur breaking under its own weight.
Warren angled toward a side route. More debris, more tangled wire traps buried under junk. Another Broken lunged from the gloom and tripped, slamming into the wreckage. The sharp metal there punched into soft gut and exposed the gaping wound where rusted metal had torn through soft gut, leaving a mess of blood and shattered flesh.
He heard the thud and the wet crack of bone, but he did not look back.
Another puddle loomed, shallow and rippling from the vibrations of his own flight. He vaulted it. Behind him, something heavier struck the glass hidden underneath. A guttural, glitching scream tore through the air, broken shards buried deep into knees and ankles.
The narrow hallway ahead offered no cover. Warren bolted across it, hearing the scramble and snarl of Broken behind him. He had planted upright shards of rebar here, hidden among the murk and ruin.
A heavy body thudded into them. Metal drove through flesh and caught bone. The scream that followed was high and sharp, the sound glitching into static as the thing sagged onto the impaling spike, limbs jerking once before falling still.
Warren twisted through the debris pile he had seeded, moving just wide enough of the traps to avoid them. Behind him, a Broken's leg snagged one of the trip hooks, the taut wire snapping back with a vicious recoil. It wrenched the creature's foot sideways, toppling it forward with brutal speed. Its face slammed into a rusted bracket jutting from the wreckage, the impact shattering teeth and cracking bone with a sharp, sickening crunch. A high-pitched screech followed, guttural and broken, but Warren did not slow to listen.
His lungs screamed for air. His blood hammering in his ears.
The hallway narrowed again. He dropped low, slipping under a half-collapsed beam, the last of the tripwires he had laid strung across the threshold.
A shriek ripped through the gloom as one of the Broken plowed into it, dragging others down in the chaos. Something snapped loudly under the tangle. Maybe an arm. Maybe a spine. The mass of them collapsed in a heap of twitching limbs.
For a heartbeat, the Red behind him was nothing but tangled bodies and broken cries.
He kept running.
He could feel the thinning of the air, the shift in weight that marked the boundary between the Red and the ruins beyond. His traps had not stopped them all, but they had slowed them enough.
Maybe just enough.
The Red pressed in around him, thick with static and wrongness.
He ran harder, lungs burning, blood hot and bright in his ears. The ruins clawed at his boots, the broken ground trying to drag him down with every frantic step. But he refused to slow. He would not give the Red the satisfaction.
The threshold loomed ahead. Not a clean line. A broken stairwell clawing up toward a thinner air, a battered reminder that once there had been ways out. A sense that he was crossing from a world that wanted him dead into one that simply wanted him broken.
Behind him, the sounds grew more desperate. Scrapes of bone against concrete. Glitching static that had once been human voices. The pack did not think. It reacted, gnashing and clawing and stumbling over itself in the chaos he left behind.
The faint bruising smear of grey light leaked down broken stairwells and through cracked concrete. Not sun. Just the washed-out face of another rain-soaked day. A boundary the Broken hesitated to cross, bound by some buried instinct.
His boots slammed against the fractured lip of an ancient platform. He vaulted a half-collapsed barricade without thought, coat flaring, rain hissing against old plastic and bone-dry cement.
The edge of the Red. The wounded place where the ruins spat out the few who survived it.
He did not look back.
There was no point. Either they would chase him into the Yellow, or they would fall back to the dark.
He crossed the last threshold with a jolt that rattled his bones. His boots found broken asphalt. His lungs sucked in wet air thick with mildew and rust instead of blood and static.
Only then did he stumble to a halt, dropping into a low crouch behind a fractured support column. His hand gripped the ruined truncheon until his knuckles went white, blood leaking in thin streams down his wrist.
The Broken did not follow. Not yet.
The Red held them.
For now.
Relief did not come as a flood. It came in slow, cautious increments, like breath returning to a drowning man. He sat there, crouched low against the broken stone, rain streaking down his coat, feeling every brutal inch of distance he had gained.
His heart still raced, but it was beginning to slow. Not safety. Never safety. But survival. For now.
A voice stirred at the edge of his mind. Not the System.
Mara.
"Even if you fucked up, Rabbit, you survived," her voice whispered, warm and sure.
He let her words settle over him, a shield against the gnawing void the Red had left behind. Her voice, steady and kind, just as it had been in every hard lesson she had ever taught him.
His hand ached from gripping the ruined truncheon. His legs trembled from spent adrenaline. His blood still dripped steadily onto the fractured ground.
He should have been dead. Every misstep, every slip, every breath stolen too late. But he had followed what Mara taught him. Set the traps. Moved fast. Trusted the work he had laid down long before the sprint began. And somehow, against everything the Red had thrown at him, he survived.
Now he was here.
Breathing.
Alive.
"It is not about getting through clean," Mara murmured. "It is about getting through, Rabbit."
The weight of the last hour pressed down on him, slow and heavy, but he let it. He let it settle into his bones.
Mara had always been honest. Survival was messy. It was ugly. It was something you clawed out of the dirt when the world had already decided you should stay down.
He closed his eyes briefly, letting the rain slick his skin, washing away the worst of the Red's stink.
"You think you failed, Rabbit?" she said gently. "Maybe you did. Maybe you will again. That is not what matters."
Her voice shifted, softer, closer. "What matters is you got up. You kept going. You are still here."
He had lost pieces of himself in there. Blood. Resources. Ground he could not reclaim.
But he had made it.
And for now, that was enough.
He pressed his forehead lightly to the cold stone of the support column, breathing slow and deep. His fingers flexed once around the broken weapon.
Not finished.
Not beaten.
Still here.
Still surviving.
The Red would not have him today.
And that was a win.
Warren moved deeper into the Yellow, boots slipping in the muck that clung to the city's ruined edge. His breath tore from him in ragged bursts. His blood left a crooked trail across the cracked concrete, fading only where the rain caught it and washed it thin, but he did not slow. Forward was the only direction left.
He did not stop.
Not yet.
It was only after weaving through the first shattered alleys, only after the screams behind him faded into glitching static, that he stumbled into the partial cover of a recessed stairwell, half-collapsed but sheltered enough.
There, behind fractured concrete and rusted rails, he let his body sag into a crouch. He pressed his torn hand against the inside of his coat, feeling the heat of his blood through the sodden fabric.
The weight of the escape crushed down on him. He had made it. Barely.
The world tilted around him, muted and distant. For the first time in hours, he had space to think.
And thinking hurt.
The truncheon. His hand tightened weakly around what remained. A broken shaft, splintered and slick with blood. His lifeline.
Gone.
He should have checked it. He checked everything. That was the rule. Never trust anything until you put your own hands on it, checked it, tested it, knew it would not fail.
But he had trusted. Trusted that it was still whole. Trusted that it would hold up, just because it always had.
It was stupid. Worse than stupid. It was careless. And careless got you killed.
The memory burned him. The moment it had cracked. The way the jolt up his arm had felt wrong. The way the weapon had folded instead of striking true.
He was lucky to be alive. Luck, not skill, had gotten him out.
No. Not luck. Skill had bought him time. Luck had covered the last mistake.
He sat back against the cracked wall, blinking rain from his lashes, staring at nothing.
The truncheon was not just a weapon. It was not just a tool.
It had been a part of him.
It had been there when he learned how to fight. Before Mara, a gift from a man who no longer had a face in his memory, just a voice saying, "Don't let them take you, Warren," as he pressed the weapon into his hands. It had been slick with blood then, the blood of someone who must have mattered once. Warren could almost feel the warmth of that man's hand, holding him close, anchoring him to something real for the first time in his life. It had been there when he made his first real kill.
And now it was ruined. And part of him felt ruined too.
Not physically. Emotionally.
He had lost a friend. Lost something that had never once let him down until he had let it down first.
Warren bowed his head, resting it lightly against the damp concrete, letting the rain and blood and failure soak into the cracks between his thoughts.
At first, there was nothing. Just the ache, hollow and endless.
Then the first shudder wracked through him, small and sharp, barely more than a breath.
Tears slipped down his face, mixing with the rain, hidden from the broken world around him. He wept, softly and without sound, for the truncheon he had trusted and lost.
He wept for the man who had given it to him, a man whose voice was all that remained, a hand he could almost still feel if he reached back far enough.
And he wept for Mara, the only mother he had ever known, the woman who had taught him to survive, to fight, to endure, and who had left him too soon, leaving pieces of herself stitched into his blood and bones.
He had buried her with his own hands, cold earth soaking into his palms, but he had not wept then. He had been stone, because there had been no room for breaking.
Now, the dam had cracked wide open, and there was nothing to stop the flood.
The sky wept with him, a dark, endless mourning that lashed the ruins with rain and thunder, as if the world itself grieved what it had taken.
He wept because something in him knew the world would never give those pieces back.
The sky mirrored him, dark and unrelenting, the heavy clouds swirling low above the broken skyline.
The rain thickened, falling in heavier sheets, drumming against the fractured stone around him in a dull, relentless rhythm.
A gust of wind tore through the hollow buildings, howling like something wounded, scattering debris across the empty streets.
For a moment, everything in the world seemed to hold its breath with him, the ruin and rain folding inward.
Then lightning shattered the sky, white and violent.
The grief had barely settled when the notifications hit him, jagged and wrong, cutting through the silence like a blade across raw skin.
You have reached Level 2
Warren closed his eyes against the flickering text.
Two unassigned stat points. A system update. Recognition of survival.
The System still worked, even if the world did not.
And in that moment, that ragged, blood-soaked, rain-slicked crouch, he hated it for seeing him. For claiming his survival as data.
His chest rose and fell in uneven bursts. His fingers trembled where they pressed into the ruined truncheon stub tucked into his coat.
He wiped rain and blood from his face with the back of his hand, smearing both across his cheek.
Another breath. Bitter. Wet.
A flicker of static crawled across his chip.
He reached into his pocket with the wounded hand, blood slicking the fragments as he closed his fingers around them. Pain tore through his palm as the broken skin met the sharp edges, but he did not let go.
This was supposed to be different. He was supposed to control it. Use them when he was ready.
But the fragments pulsed against his torn flesh, hungry and impatient.
He tried to will them still, to keep them apart by sheer force of thought, but his body betrayed him.
Heat knifed through his fingers first, then raced up his arm. The nanites fused directly into the shredded skin, burrowing through blood and nerve to reach the chip embedded in his spine.
He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached, muscles locking as the merger completed, every fiber of his being resisting the invasion.
The pain was sharp. Not physical alone. It was something deeper, like identity itself being scratched, rewritten, redrawn without permission.
The fragments, those tiny pieces of stolen power, had forced their way in. Another violation. Another thing taken.
He knew what had happened before the next notification even hit.
[SKILL ACQUIRED: EXAMINE][Active}
|"Knowledge is Power. Perception is Control. The life rewards the observant. Examine, understand, and thrive."|
Rarity
How common or rare the item is
Durability
Current structural integrity
Weight
Mass of the object
Material
Primary substance(s) the object is made of
Balance Rating
How evenly the object's weight is distributed
Modification History
Record of any past alterations
System Integration
How well the item interfaces with the System
Origin
Known or inferred place of creation
Value
System-assigned worth in credits
This skill can be customized by user.
Metrics can be added or removed depending on user preference. Fields such as Rarity, Durability, Weight, and Origin may be hidden, reordered, or expanded. The System encourages optimization of metrics to maximize survival efficiency.
The words burned themselves across the inside of his mind, crisp and cold, as if they had always been there and had only been waiting for permission to surface.
He stared at them, unblinking.
Not anger, not yet. Not even resentment. Just a hollow resignation that clawed at the empty places the Red had carved out of him.
Warren flexed his hand once, the wounded palm clenching and releasing, feeling the weight of the new skill settle into his body like an unwanted guest.
The rain hammered down harder. The broken city sprawled silent around him, jagged and unkind.
He leaned his head back against the cracked stone behind him, eyes tracing the warped skyline through the sheets of falling water.
This was what survival meant.
Not victory.
Not triumph.
Just more weight to carry.
He dragged himself upright, muscles trembling from more than exhaustion.
He needed to move. Find shelter. Stop the bleeding. Reassess.
The fragments were gone now, buried inside him. The broken truncheon hung from the inside loop of his coat, dragging heavily against his ribs like a ghost that refused to leave.
He would have to rebuild. Start again.
But first, he would have to endure this moment.
The moment where everything he had trusted, his weapon, his planning, even the sanctuary of his own body, had been stripped away. All that remained was a boy, bloodied and bowed by the world, refusing to fall.
He pushed off the wall, one step at a time, moving forward because there was nothing else left to do.
Survival was not clean. Survival was not beautiful.
It was what you did because you had no other choice.
And he would survive.
He would crawl if he had to.
He would bleed if he had to.
But he would not stop.
Not here.
Not ever.
Warren ground his teeth until his jaw hurt.
He stared out at the fractured city beyond, chest still rising and falling with the aftershock of the run. His blood dripped in steady beats from the torn hand.
He had fought so hard for those fragments. He had earned them, piece by piece, paid for in blood. Now they were gone. Folded into his body by force. No choice. No control. Just another thing taken before he could make it his own.
And the truncheon, the weapon he had carried through so much, was little more than a shattered memory in his grip.
Too much lost for too little gained.
He pulled the broken truncheon out from where it hung inside his coat, gripping it tight despite the sting in his injured hand. He pressed it to his shoulder like a ritual, feeling the rain soak into the cracked leather and battered wood, and moved forward into the ruined streets without looking back.
He had gained three things from the Red: a hard-won respect for the ruins that nearly claimed him, a level earned by surviving what should have broken him, and a promising skill woven into his blood whether he wanted it or not.
But he lingered here for far too long.
Warren moved carefully, searching for the right place. Not just any wall or step would do. There were places marked long ago by those who survived the Red and lived to tell it.
He found it tucked away under the lip of a collapsed overpass, an old drainage pillar, still half-standing, scarred with rain and time. It was not obvious unless you knew where to look. That was the point.
Near the base, almost hidden by grime and moss, were faint marks.
Old scavs had left their proof here.
Warren knelt. He could just make out Mara's mark among the others, a clean, deliberate symbol scratched deep into the stone. A crescent shape bisected by a straight line. Simple. Sharp.
There were only a handful of other marks. Some older than Warren had ever been. Some nearly washed away.
None were fresh.
Until now.
Warren pulled a small scrap of battered cloth from his coat pocket, something kept dry against the inner lining, and wiped his bleeding hand just enough to focus.
He used his pocket knife to carve his mark. The rain would have washed blood away. The stone would hold truth.
His symbol was not random. It was a merging of his initials, hidden inside the twists of an older script long forgotten by most scavvers, woven together with the date of his crossing.
A real scavenger would know to ask for the phrase hidden inside the pattern.
Warren etched it carefully beneath Mara's, making sure the angle, the lines, the weight of it matched what the old rites demanded.
Etched above all the marks, faint but still visible even under grime, the phrase was carved into the stone, a piece of the old rites preserved where only scavengers would find it.
"The blood of the stone is cold. The heart of the world is too deep to see. The air in my lungs is borrowed, and I will pass it to you, my brothers and sisters, and to all those who come after."
The phrase was more than a prayer. It was a cipher. A scavenger who had truly crossed the Red would weave the essence of their initials and the date of their passage into the mark, hidden in the curves and slashes, matching the cadence of the words carved above. The placement was precise. If someone faked it, any real scavenger could tell. The pattern would break, the rhythm would falter, and the lie would unravel.
The placement of the initials and the folded numbers of the date would tell a trained eye if he had truly passed through the Red.
The stone would catch liars. The phrase would catch pretenders.
Warren finished, running his thumb once across the carved lines, feeling the edges bite against his skin. A silent oath written into rain and ruin.
He stood back and looked one last time at the pillar, Mara's mark faded but defiant, his fresh and stark. A new scar for a wounded world.
If others came, if they carried offerings and knew how to speak the phrase, he would answer them.
If they did not, if they came blind and greedy, the Red would have them.
Warren looped the broken truncheon back into its place inside his coat, securing it against his side, and moved on.
No words. No second thoughts.
The stone would speak for him.