The city was never meant to wake gently.It groaned. It hissed.Steam crawled through the cracks of concrete streets while the air vibrated with the sound of engines grinding against metal.
Red Vale District — the belly of the Undercity.Here, the sunlight never reached the ground. It was filtered through layers of broken glass, industrial fog, and dust from the world above.What passed for dawn was a dim orange haze, glowing faintly between towers of steel like an open wound that never healed.
People didn't walk here — they drifted.Workers with dull eyes and respirators, children chasing after sparks that fell from high scaffolds, and soldiers in government-gray armor, scanning alleys for contraband Field tech.
And through the noise, Elias Crowe walked quietly.
He didn't look like much — a slim young man in a patched academy jacket, face hidden under the shadow of a hood. But there was precision in his steps, a mechanical rhythm that didn't belong to someone born here.
His eyes — gray, analytical, unflinching — traced every movement around him. Not because he was afraid, but because he was measuring.
Every advertisement blaring on flickering holo-screens spoke of opportunity."Enter The Field. Become more.""Resonance is the new evolution."But everyone in Red Vale knew the truth:The Field didn't make you more. It made you useful — until you weren't.
Red Vale Academy stood at the far end of the district, past the collapsed tramway and the rusted barricades left from the riots of '19.The building used to be a military factory. Its windows were sealed, its floors smelled of oil and sweat, and its motto was still painted on every wall in faded letters:
"Progress is survival. Failure is deletion."
Inside, the sound of drills echoed through the corridors. Training never stopped — not because the students were passionate, but because the government demanded data.
Every move, every breath, every mistake was recorded.Elias knew this; he'd read the fine print in the academy's entry contract.You are property of the Rebirth Bureau until deemed functionally obsolete.
The students were divided into four classes.
Class A: Sponsored elites — children of upper guild families.Class B: Contracted mercenaries-in-training.Class C: Freelancers and semi-legals tied to local factions.Class D: Experiments — the Null Batch.
Elias was in Class D.
They weren't called students in the official reports. They were subjects.And The Field — that mystical dimension of infinite challenges and fiction-born worlds — was their testing ground.
It was Monday when Instructor Harlan summoned them to the assembly hall.A square room of concrete and rust, filled with flickering lights and the smell of burned circuitry.Harlan stood at the podium — tall, gaunt, his voice rasping like a broken amplifier.
"Batch 2025," he began, "you are not here because you are gifted. You are here because you are expendable."
The room went silent.
"You will enter The Field in one week as part of the synchronization trial. Your deaths will provide data for national safety calibration."A few students shifted nervously.Someone whispered, "Trial? He means execution."
Harlan continued, unfazed."Out of forty participants, survival expectancy is less than thirty percent. If you live, you'll earn a civilian license. If you die…" — his voice flattened — "your neural data will be recycled."
The screens behind him flickered to life, showing distorted images of previous batches.Silhouettes of young men and women caught mid-scream, bodies disintegrating into light.
"The Field," Harlan said, "is not a game. It is a mirror. It shows you what you truly are."
When the assembly ended, the Null Batch dispersed in uneasy silence.The air in the corridor felt heavier than before — as if the walls themselves had heard the announcement.
Elias walked beside three others:Raf Tannen — tall, dark-eyed, always chewing something to hide his nerves.Isha Vale — sharp, unflinching, a girl with the posture of someone who refused to bow even when she should.Tajri Kahn — restless, smiling too often, the kind of boy who mistook defiance for strength.And Sera Quin — quiet, clinical, her voice calm even in chaos.
They weren't friends. Red Vale didn't allow friendship — only proximity.But shared doom had its own kind of intimacy.
In the dormitory, the five of them sat in a circle around a single working bulb.The hum of the generators outside filled the silence.Nobody spoke for several minutes.
Finally, Tajri broke it. "You think this is some kind of bluff?"Raf snorted. "You saw the screens. Those weren't simulations.""Maybe faked," Tajri said.Sera looked up from her notebook. "Batch 2024 had similar footage. Biometric analysis confirmed authenticity. Deaths were real."Tajri's grin faltered.
Elias leaned back against the wall, eyes half-closed. "It doesn't matter whether it's real or not. We'll find out in a week."
Isha crossed her arms. "You sound calm for someone about to die.""I sound calm," Elias said, "because panic doesn't change statistics.""Statistics?" Raf repeated. "You talk like this is a math problem."Elias opened his notebook — a hand-bound collection of diagrams, handwritten notes, and a list of Field coordinates he wasn't supposed to have.
"It is a math problem," he said. "The Field rewards consistency. Every report I've read says the same thing: the system observes your behavior, not your skill. It calculates your resonance stability. The more predictable you are, the longer you live."
Sera nodded slightly, intrigued. "You're saying survival is a behavioral algorithm."Elias smiled faintly. "Exactly. The Field isn't chaos. It's pattern."
"Where did you get all this?" Tajri asked."Leaked data from old batches," Elias said casually."You hacked the Bureau?""I read," Elias corrected him. "That's all it takes, apparently. Reading."
For a moment, they all laughed — not because it was funny, but because laughter was the only thing that didn't feel like surrender.
Outside, the Undercity roared.Trains screamed through the tunnels, drones whirred overhead, and propaganda echoed from speakers:
"Challengers bring prosperity! Join The Field — serve humanity!"
Elias watched from the window.He'd heard that voice since childhood — calm, persuasive, lying through its teeth.He knew what lay behind those words: decades of governments competing to exploit The Field, turning exploration into warfare.
The first discovery in 1991 — The Field Emergence — had ended the Cold War not with peace, but with a new kind of race:Who would conquer the fiction-born worlds first?Three decades later, humanity had divided into blocs again — guilds, corporations, and rogue governments, all fighting for control of "Dimensional Rights."
And now, 2025.Red Vale — a forgotten hole in Indonesia's Undercity — was the government's quiet answer to a question no one dared ask publicly:How far can we push the human body before it stops being human?
Elias stared at his reflection in the window.He didn't see fear. Just inevitability.This world had already ended once — in another life, another version of reality.This time, he wasn't going to be surprised by its collapse.
Behind him, Raf was muttering prayers to no one in particular.Tajri had started doing push-ups, pretending it made him braver.Sera was recording vitals on her pad.Isha sat by the wall, eyes on Elias.
"You really think we can survive this?" she asked.Elias didn't look at her. "I don't believe in survival. I believe in understanding.""Understanding what?""The system."
Isha smirked. "You sound like one of those Bureau scientists."He finally turned to her. "No. They study The Field to control it. I study it because I already lost to it."
The silence that followed was heavy. None of them asked what he meant.
The next few days passed like clockwork.Training intensified. Every hour was measured, every error punished with electric dissonance — a jolt from the collar everyone wore.The Rebirth Bureau agents came daily, collecting neural samples, checking resonance levels, pretending to care.
The night before deployment, Harlan gathered them again.He spoke briefly, without ceremony."Batch 2025. You are not pioneers. You are baselines. The Field doesn't need heroes. It needs patterns."
Then he dismissed them.
That night, Elias couldn't sleep.He lay awake on his narrow bunk, listening to the hum of the reactors beneath the academy.He thought about everything he had studied — the reports, the failures, the deaths.He thought about The Field, that vast dimension of living fiction where reality folded in on itself.
They said each layer of The Field was a reflection of human imagination — constructed from stories once told, worlds once believed in.If that was true, then The Field wasn't an alien force. It was humanity's subconscious, made real.And humanity's subconscious was cruel.
He turned his head toward the others, asleep in silence.For the first time, he envied them.Ignorance was lighter to carry.
Before dawn, the alarms rang.A synthetic voice filled the dorm:
"Batch 2025. Synchronization phase begins in six hours. Prepare for deployment."
Elias rose from bed, washed his face in cold water that smelled of rust, and dressed in the academy's gray uniform — the same one issued to every expendable trainee before him.
As he stepped into the corridor, the walls pulsed faintly with Field energy — a reminder that the real world and the other were already bleeding into each other.
He whispered under his breath,"Six hours until fiction becomes real again."
Outside, the smog lifted slightly, revealing a faint line of red light stretching across the sky — not a sunrise, but a distortion.The Field's boundary shimmered like a curtain of glass, waiting to be entered.
Elias stood at the threshold of Red Vale Academy and watched the horizon burn.He didn't feel fear, or hope. Only clarity.
"Progress is survival. Failure is deletion."
The words carved into the walls finally made sense.He wasn't here to win. He was here to witness.
And when the sirens called the Null Batch to gather,Elias Crowe walked toward the unknown —not because he believed in destiny,but because he already knew the ending,and wanted to see if it could change.