Chapter One: The Weight of Birth
Kael Veyr figured out the world was a rigged game long before he was old enough to shave.
In the Southern Quarter of Helion, the air didn't just smell like rust; it felt heavy, a metallic silt that settled in your lungs and refused to leave. The sky wasn't some poetic "bruised ceiling"—it was a dirty gray weight that made you feel like a bug under a boot. You learned two things early: how to ignore the hollow ache in your stomach, and how to look invisible when the Enforcers walked by.
Kael was poor, even for Helion. But it was the genetic evaluation that really buried him.
He still remembered the clinic. It smelled of cheap ozone and the attendant's stale, coffee-stained breath. She didn't even look at him as she tapped the datapad, her movements robotic with boredom. The red text on the screen felt like a physical heat against his face:
GENETIC VIABILITY: 0.03%CULTIVATION COMPATIBILITY: FAILED
"Defective," she muttered. She was more interested in her lukewarm caffeine-stim than his ruined future. "No resonance. No pathways. You're just static, kid. Move along."
Static. That was the word that stuck.
In a city where the elite could snap their fingers and spark lightning, Kael was the silence in between. He spent his years in the recycling furnaces, hauling scrap that glowed with a heat that made his skin peel. He wasn't "patient"—he was just too tired to be anything else.
The day everything broke started out like any other Tuesday.
Kael had been assigned to Survey Sector Twelve. Officially, the district was "stable." Unofficially, the concrete groaned every time the wind blew, and the shadows felt too thick. The ruin breathed—a low, rhythmic pressure behind Kael's eyes that made his teeth ache.
He didn't see the creature until the metal screamed.
Concrete folded like wet paper as something tore free from the ruin's gut. It was a mess of limbs and joints that bent the wrong way, skin patterned with glowing sigils that smelled like an electrical fire.
Kael didn't think about "terrible clarity." He thought: Not today. Not in this shithole.
He ran. His lungs felt like they were filled with broken glass. Gravity seemed to thicken, dragging at his boots like he was sprinting through waist-high mud. He knew he was too slow. He knew the math.
He hit a collapsed wall and turned, cornered. The creature lunged, its shadow swallowing him whole.
Pain didn't "obliterate thought." It was a cold, white-hot spike that drove into his chest, fracturing ribs and forcing the air out of him in a ragged wheeze. He hit the dirt hard, the sharp taste of copper flooding his mouth.
Then, the ceiling cracked. Not the one above him, but the one inside him.
It wasn't an explosion. It was a cold, precise snap—like a bone setting back into place. His thoughts didn't "expand"; they sharpened into a single, painful needle. Information screamed behind his eyes. He didn't see "flows of force"—he saw the sigils on the monster's skin and suddenly knew they were nothing more than a bad line of code.
His right eye throbbed with a glacial, biting cold.
PRIMARY SHACKLE: BREACHED.
Kael didn't move. He just reached out with a mind that suddenly felt too big for his skull and tore at the sigils.
The creature didn't just fall. It buckled. Its momentum collapsed as if the world had decided it no longer had permission to exist. It slammed into the gravel, pinned by a weight Kael couldn't explain but could feel in the very marrow of his bones.
He stared at his shaking hands. He hadn't fought it. He had rewritten it.
The effort tore through him, a second wave of pain that finally pulled the lights out. As his head hit the grit, a final line etched itself into his vision—patient and cold.
SHACKLES REMAINING: UNKNOWN.
Kael closed his eyes. The sky was still gray, but for the first time in his life, it didn't feel quite so heavy.