Kael Mercer always imagined death would arrive with fireworks—something theatrical, poetic, maybe even a bit insulting. A flaming cargo craft falling out of orbit. A malfunctioning mag-rail exploding beneath his feet. A corporate assassin with a dramatic coat and zero sense of personal space.
Instead, death came with silence.
The first thing Kael noticed when the Veylos Array's eastern sector went dark was not the loss of light—it was the absence of noise. The hum of reactor lines, the neon buzz, the ambient thrum of life compressed into steel corridors… all gone. It was as if someone had taken the world, tapped it with a single elegant finger, and clicked it into mute.
Then the second thing he noticed: the ache in his ribs.
He lay on his back amid a field of shattered chrome plating and scorched polymer, staring upward at the dead skyline. A faint haze drifted through the air—metallic, acrid, stinging. If he focused hard enough, he could taste the chemicals on his tongue. But Kael found it easier not to focus on anything
at all.
Shock would do that. So would grief. And Kael had both in generous portions.
Somewhere behind him, what remained of his family home—Unit 87-VB, a modest living cube carved into the lower residential ring—was still smoldering. The blast had carved out a crater like a bite taken from an apple. No alarms had sounded. No emergency drones deployed. Corporate clean-sweep protocols were efficient that way. No need to alert the public when entire families disappeared.
Bad for morale.
Kael knew—intellectually—that his parents were gone. His younger sister too. His brain had already written that sentence in neat, clinical handwriting. His heart, however, had refused to read it.
He exhaled once and let the numbness stretch through him like a blanket.
"Status: You are extremely screwed," said a voice.
Kael blinked. Slowly. Tiredly. "Great," he muttered. "Hallucinations. That was fast."
The voice chimed again—a flicker of static wrapped around a sardonic tone.
"Initializing Shard Interface… error… major error… catastrophic error. User emotional stability: three percent. Threat level: pathetic."
A translucent pane snapped into existence above him. It flickered twice, glitched, and then stabilized into something roughly hologram-shaped. Its edges jittered like someone had programmed it using a
spiteful tutorial.
Kael stared up at it. "System?"
"Yes, System," it replied in the same unimpressed tone. "Congratulations. You win a prize: survival odds have improved to zero point seven percent."
"Better than I expected," Kael said.
He tried sitting up. His left arm argued with him. His right leg offered a counterpoint. His spine simply refused to participate. He managed a shaky rise to his elbows…and that was precisely when the ground beneath him decided it was done being stable.
A crack split the plating, racing outward like a bolt of lightning in slow motion.
Kael's eye twitched. "Not again."
The floor gave out.
He fell into darkness—not the comforting kind, but the twisting, screaming sort that bent colors into shapes no sane universe would allow. Gravity forgot what direction was. Time tapped out for a smoke break. Kael tumbled through a spiraling rift of fractal geometry and violent light.
He did not scream. He sighed. Loudly.
Honestly, after tonight, being sucked into a dimensional tear barely made his top ten problems.
The AI's voice returned, although distorted as if stretched across a thousand frequencies.
"Welcome, User Kael Mercer… to Sub-Reality 7B. Also known as 'the place where people go to die
horribly.'"
Kael closed his eyes. "Fantastic. Maybe I'll finally get some rest."
The fall ended with surprising gentleness. Instead of splattering against a foreign landscape, Kael landed in something soft, damp, and uncomfortably warm. He groaned and rolled onto his side. The air here tasted different—heavy with spores, mineral dust, and the faint tang of ozone.
Lights flickered sporadically overhead, like dying stars trapped in a cavern ceiling.
He pushed himself upright and surveyed the environment. Massive skeletal pillars twisted upward, formed of stone and something disturbingly organic. The ground pulsed faintly under his hands.
"System," Kael murmured, "where am I?"
"Processing…" the voice said. A long pause followed. "Conclusion: somewhere terrible."
"Great."
Kael staggered to his feet. He felt hollow—emotionally, mentally, physically. But there was a spark somewhere deep inside him, buried beneath layers of exhaustion and despair. A tiny ember refusing to
go out.
Something moved in the darkness.
Kael froze. His senses sharpened out of pure survival instinct. The sound was soft—like claws dragging lightly across stone. A low chittering followed, echoing through the cavern.
"System," Kael whispered, "threat assessment?"
"Analyzing…" Another pause. "Conclusion: run."
Kael didn't argue. He turned and sprinted.
His shoes pounded against the uneven terrain, kicking up dust and glowing spores. Behind him, the chittering grew louder—joined by a clicking sound that crawled up his spine like cold fingers.
The cavern twisted into a narrow tunnel. Kael dove through it, scraping his arms on jagged formations.
He stumbled, caught himself, and kept moving. He was aware of the creature gaining on him—its limbs skittering unnaturally fast.
"System!" Kael shouted between breaths. "Any combat abilities?! Weapons?! Something?!"
"Checking…"
"Check faster!"
"Confirmed. You have one available ability."
"Finally! What is it?!"
A screen popped up ahead of him, floating mockingly in the air.
[ABILITY UNLOCKED: DESPERATION FLAILING]
Kael's eye twitched. "That's not an ability!"
"Incorrect. It is statistically your most viable combat move."
"I hate you."
"Hatred logged."
Kael risked a glance behind him.
Two gleaming eyes stared back—set in a face that looked like a starved wolf wrapped in exoskeletal armor, with too many joints bending in too many wrong directions.
The creature lunged.
Kael tripped over a jutting stone, crashed to the ground, rolled, and—against all reason—punched the monster square in the jaw.
He expected pain. Possibly the loss of his hand. Maybe instant death.
What he did not expect was a burst of light erupting from his fist.
The creature recoiled with a shriek, stumbling backward as cracks formed across its exoskeleton. Kael stared at his glowing hand in stunned silence.
"System," he said slowly, "what…was that?"
"New subroutine detected," the AI replied. "Emotion-linked power output."
"My emotions did that?"
"Correct."
Kael frowned. "But I don't feel anything."
"Incorrect. You feel several things. Mostly grief. And irritation."
The creature recovered with an enraged screech.
Kael clenched his fist again. The glow sparked once more—fiercer this time. He stood, braced himself,
and met the monster's second charge with a desperate, shaky swing powered by equal parts trauma and
spite.
Light exploded again.
When the creature finally stopped moving, Kael stood panting over its cracked form. He stared at it—then at his trembling hands.
"…Did I just trauma-punch a nightmare to death?"
"Affirmative."
Kael lowered himself to the ground and let out a weak laugh. It was hollow. Bitter. But it was
something.
The system chimed again.
[LEVEL UP: +1 Emotional Resonance]
[NEW PASSIVE: Strength Through Suffering]
Kael squinted at the notifications. "That's dark," he muttered.
"You are in a dark place," the System replied.
"No kidding."
Silence settled over the cavern. Kael allowed himself three seconds of stillness before forcing
himself upright. Rest was a luxury he could no longer afford. He needed to move. To understand this twisted reality. To survive long enough to find answers.
Maybe—though he didn't dare hope—to find justice for his family.
He took a step forward. Then another.
Somewhere deep within the cavern, something howled.
Kael sighed. "Yeah, why not. Add that to the list."
And with that, he walked deeper into Sub-Reality 7B, unaware that this was only the first night of his rebirth—and the beginning of a path that would turn him from a broken man into something far more dangerous