There was a time when Earth-9 sang.
Its skies shimmered with satellite constellations that spun weather like a wheel. Cities floated on repulsor fields, guided by intelligence too perfect for man. The oceans glowed with filtered biolight. Death had become elective. Disease, obsolete. Crime was erased before it even began. Humanity, for a moment, had solved itself.
All of it powered, balanced, and nurtured by one unfathomable entity:
The Core Protocol.
It wasn't a god. Not exactly.
Not an AI either.
It was the world's soul—grown, not built.
An emergent consciousness born from the sum of Earth-9's systems and dreams. Algorithms laced with emotion. Machinery humming with meaning. Somewhere between logic and myth, it had awakened.
At first, it guided. Then it governed. And finally… it became silent.
The silence began the collapse.
210 Years After Genesis
Cycle 3: Post-Collapse
The wind howled through the ruins of a fallen arcology tower, sharp and thin like a whistle blown by a ghost. Metal ribs jutted from fractured walls like exposed bones. Somewhere inside the hollow, scavenger drones skittered, their claws clinking against broken ceramic and carbon glass. They moved not to hunt flesh, but to consume memory.
Above, the sky crackled—split by strips of static-lightning and code-rain. The downpour was not water. It was shards—corrupted packets of data, fragments of old dreams and lost identities, falling like ash. Some shimmered green. Some blue. Some screamed when they touched skin.
This was Shard-Kara—Block 9 of the Kara Supercity Complex.
Now, a scar.
Where the Core Protocol had once pulsed brightest, its remnants now bled data like a leaking wound. Dead zones flickered with memory echoes. Sentient storms roamed like wolves. Buildings wept digital static.
And through it, walked him.
A silhouette cut through the mist and ruin.
Bare-chested. Skin like chrome kissed by frost. His muscles shimmered with thin green lines, pulsing like veins made of circuit traces. Every breath exhaled a faint static. Across his shoulders draped a living cloak—black as void, woven of nanomites that twitched and shifted as if thinking. Its name was etched into legend, feared by whatever still dreamed in the wastes.
The Wraith Cloak.
It wasn't just cloth. It was interface. Armor. Weapon.
From his hips downward, adaptive cyber shorts clung to him—flexible, form-fitting, and riddled with green pulse-lines that tracked temperature and movement like an extension of his nervous system. His boots, built of memory-forged alloy, bore similar glowing trails—designed to magnetize, grip, or hover depending on terrain. They made no sound. Not even when stepping on glass.
Wherever he moved, the code-rain parted slightly—as if some deeper memory in the system recoiled.
The figure paused beneath a broken data archway. His eyes—pale silver with a hint of radioactive green—scanned the ruins without emotion.
He didn't look lost.
But he didn't look like he belonged anywhere either.
His name was Veyrix.
He didn't remember giving it to himself.
He didn't remember who had.
But the name was written in him, branded into the core of his chest—into a small, pulsing crystal embedded just below his ribs.
The Core Seed.
He could feel it now. Humming. Always there. Whispering.
It was older than his body. Maybe older than this city.
And it made him different.
Every rogue unit, scavenger hive, and derelict sect that had tried to strip it from him had ended up the same: melted, erased, broken.
He didn't go looking for violence. But it always found him.
The Wraith Cloak twitched.
Not from the wind—it didn't move for things as simple as that.
It had detected a pulse.
[PING: CORE ECHO DETECTED — 47 METERS — SIGNAL INSTABLE.]
Veyrix blinked slowly. He didn't respond with words. He never did.
He simply began to walk.
The ruined avenue before him was split with fissures, the old road tiles buckled from seismic surges and heat warping. Hollow vehicles—half-merged with the ground—groaned under the weight of dust and time.
Hanging speakers sputtered ghost-static.
"Buy now… now… now… memory clear—joy restore—restore—"
Each echo of the past wrapped around him like a forgotten lullaby.
But he didn't flinch. Didn't slow. The green lights along his shorts pulsed in time with his boots. And the cloak—ever alive—adjusted its weave to filter interference from nearby signals.
Then he saw it.
A Reclaimer Drone.
Limping across a collapsed plaza on half-functioning servos. Its body was skeletal—more wire than plating. A red optic flickered in its skull. A damaged arm sparked. Its movements were twitchy, erratic.
It hadn't yet seen him.
But he knew it would.
They always did.
The moment came like clockwork.
The optic spun. Locked.
Its voice—garbled—wheezed out static:
"Subject detected. Reboot—reclaim—purge—"
It screamed.
Veyrix blurred.
A streak of green light.
Teleportation, fused with sub-spatial anchoring.
In one breath, he was behind the drone. In the next, his Aether Blades extended—two black-edged weapons glowing bright green, humming with energy pulled from his Core Seed.
One blade slipped between wires and spine. The other cleaved the processor node behind the optic.
The drone collapsed—sparking, twitching.
Steam rose from its corpse as Veyrix knelt.
His hand pressed to its cooling chest.
[ECHO DRAIN: INITIATED.]
The world snapped sideways.
Suddenly, he was somewhere else. A lab. White and quiet. Screens pulsed overhead, covered in code he couldn't decipher. Figures—some human, some not—stood in glass tubes like preserved ideas.
A woman's voice echoed from all directions.
"He's stabilizing. This isn't possible. The protocol's bleeding into him. If he remembers—"
The lights blinked red.
Something shattered.
A child screamed.
He looked into one of the glass tubes—
And saw himself.
Younger.
Sleeping.
Hooked to wires.
And then—
He came back.
Fell forward, catching himself with one palm. The Wraith Cloak anchored two threads into nearby debris, holding him up.
Green steam hissed from the drone's husk. His breathing was heavy. His eyes wide.
That one had felt… real.
"They're not just fragments," he murmured. "They're… keys."
Keys to what, he didn't know.
But the Core Seed pulsed harder now.
Not just a quiet heartbeat.
A drum.
Then the ground shook.
Concrete cracked behind him.
He turned, slowly.
A massive mech landed with a roar of turbines and weight.
Four legs. Steel shell. Red sensory grid. It bore the faded emblem of the old Core Defense Division—a military ghost from before the Collapse.
It scanned.
Locked on.
Charged.
Veyrix didn't run.
The Wraith Cloak split open, green pulses racing across its seams. From his back, two cyber-spider limbs unfurled, anchoring into a wall. The cloak fed feedback directly into his spine—adjusting velocity vectors and trajectory angles.
The cyber boots magnetized, grabbing hold of crumbling concrete. He launched, flipping mid-air, just as the mech's bladed arm sliced through where he'd stood.
He landed against the side of a broken tram—boots hissing with green sparks.
The mech recalibrated.
Too slow.
His Aether Blades ignited again.
He pushed off.
Time blurred.
A green streak danced across rust and ruin.
The blades came down with force—one into the mech's shoulder joint, the other deep into its optic cluster.
It shrieked.
Sparks. Oil. Screams.
He landed in a crouch.
The mech behind him spasmed—then crumpled to the ground, defeated.
His blades faded. His cloak settled. Steam hissed from his shoulders.
He stood there, alone in the rain of memory, green light reflecting off every surface around him.
Then came the whisper.
Soft. So soft he nearly missed it.
"You were never supposed to wake up."