Argh, my head...
Pain throbbed through Ash's skull in steady waves. For a moment there was nothing else—no sound or sensation, just that deep ache pulsing behind his eyes.
Then the bell came.
It was a crystalline chime that didn't come from anywhere around him but resonated from deep inside his mind, like someone had reached into his thoughts and struck a tuning fork against his soul. A voice followed, speaking with his own inflection but stripped of all warmth.
[Ashley Burns. Welcome to The Still Kingdom.]
The what?
Before Ash could process the words, sound rushed back in a violent flood. Explosions thundered in the distance. Gunfire crackled in sharp bursts. People screamed: some in pain, others barking orders. All of it crashed into his ears at once, transforming silence into chaos.
Ash forced his eyes open.
The sky above was dull gray, choked with black smoke that crawled across it like something alive. A ship tore past overhead, its sleek hull catching firelight as it banked hard and vanished into the haze.
He pushed himself up. Every muscle protested, sending sharp complaints through his body. His ribs ached. His legs weren't much better. Yet nothing felt broken anymore, which meant his Tier Five regeneration had been working while he was out.
Then the memories came back.
The mission. The Catalogue. The airlock. The fall. Weeks of planning, all ruined by a point-zero-eight gravity variance Max had apparently withheld from the specs.
Ash looked down. He was sitting in a crater of his own making, the ground spider-webbed with cracks. Dust hung in the air, catching orange light from distant fires. He must have been unconscious for a few minutes at least.
His teeth ground together.
So I failed at this one too.
A shout erupted from his left.
Ash turned his head. A man sprinted toward him across the broken ground, pickaxe raised high. The attacker's clothes were tattered work gear, covered in gray dust. But what struck Ash most was the man's face: tears carved clean lines through the grime on his cheeks. The expression wasn't rage. It was grief.
"You damn Headquarters Ascended!"
The words came out half-sobbed.
"You ruined everything!"
Ash watched him come. He didn't move. Part of him — a tired, hollowed-out part — almost welcomed it. Death by an ordinary pickaxe wasn't elegant, but it would do.
Then the sky opened up.
A pillar of fire slammed into the charging miner before the man made it halfway. No scream. One moment he was there: tears and pickaxe and desperate rage. The next, ash scattering in the wind.
Ash's eyes widened as he stared at the empty space where a human being had been standing.
Of course. Someone's intervention was expected. Still, vaporization right in front of him for trying to finish what he had started? That was unexpected.
Ash turned his gaze upward.
A young man floated in the ruined sky, one hand wreathed in dying embers. Wavy crimson hair whipped in wind his own flames had created. His coat was pristine despite the chaos: tailored and red, without a speck of dust on it, though smoke curled from its edges. The look on his face when their eyes met was pure, arrogant irritation.
In that instant, everything made sense.
Damn it, Ty.
Their mission had been simple: stay in space while gathering intelligence on Apex operations, document what they were excavating, and leave. Not murder everyone and paint this gray landscape in fire.
But this... was also Ash's fault. If the jump from the ship hadn't happened, none of this would have followed. His brothers would still be safe in orbit instead of turning the surface into a war zone.
Tyrin's gaze shifted from Ash to something in the distance.
Ash followed it.
Five ships battled in the sky. Four Apex vessels against one Ash would recognize anywhere, that was the Catalogue. The very ship he'd fallen from. His brother's ship. The vessel moved with calculated grace, firing precision bursts that vaporized one attacker in a bloom of light.
However, this was still four against one. A lance of purple energy sheared off a wing. The Catalogue shuddered, vomiting smoke as it spiraled toward the horizon.
Ash watched it fall, waiting for the emergency eject sequence.
But It didn't come.
The ship hit the ground with a sound that echoed louder than all the chaos around him.
Ash's eyes widened.
"No... Max, you can't..."
Tyrin landed beside him, boots hitting the ground with barely a sound. His brother straightened, brushing dust from his coat.
"Ah. What's this? You finally realized your own mistake?"
Tyrin's voice was mocking.
"You idiot. Tell me... what exactly did you plan to achieve with that fall? Death?"
Ash's teeth ground together.
"Ty, now isn't the time. Max is in danger."
Tyrin glanced at the smoke rising in the distance. A slow smile spread across his face.
"What? You think Max would die from that?"
He laughed.
"Of course you would. You're the idiot who jumped from orbit thinking that would kill you."
Tyrin studied Ash's battered form and sighed. Then, more seriously:
"Get up, you fool. Lying in the dirt is no way for a son of flame to behave."
Something dark hit the ground in front of Ash.
His breath caught.
A sword. One he recognized all too well. The blade his mother had used. The black obsidian wakizashi. Seeing it here filled him with something between rage and grief.
"Ty... why the hell is this here..."
Tyrin didn't look at him.
"Stop asking stupid questions and pick it up. Then go after Max."
Ash stared at the weapon. He'd left it on the ship deliberately, buried under hamburger wrappers because he didn't trust himself with it. Because every time his fingers closed around it, the weight of everything she'd been pressed down on him. Everything he'd never be. The weapon was wasted on him. Still, no one came to mind who deserved it more. He regretted accepting it in the first place, but better that than seeing his mother's blade sold for scrap.
His hand closed around the rough stone hilt. It was cool and familiar. Impossibly heavy. Only his Tier Five strength made lifting it possible.
Ash drew it slightly and stared into the dark blade and saw his own face: pale, smeared with blood. Fractured.
The familiar whine of grav-engines cut through the air. Three Apex ships descended and settled ahead, ramps slamming down. Waves of troopers in void-black armor spilled out, rifles raised and aimed at them.
"You have got to be kidding me."
Ash muttered, forcing himself up through the pain. Despite the exhaustion, he fell into a fighting stance.
Tyrin just walked forward, rolling his shoulders.
"Leave this to the professional, little brother."
He cracked his knuckles. The air shimmered with heat.
"I'll clear you a path. Try not to trip on the corpses."
The lead troopers took aim. The moment their rifles began to glow, a wall of fire erupted in front of them. The heat was so intense Ash felt his eyebrows curl. Rifles melted in their hands.
Tyrin raised a glowing palm.
"I'm surprised. I thought you'd call for backup. Who knew Apex grunts were this stupid?"
He tapped his chest.
"I'm a 6.5 Ascended. You saw what I did to your friends. And yet here you are, lining up for an encore?"
Some troopers hesitated.
It was too late.
Fire surged forward. Not a blast but a living wave that rolled through their ranks, carving a scorched corridor across the field.
Ash didn't wait to be told. He ran hard forward, never looking back. Leaving Tyrin in a fight was like leaving a shark in a swimming pool. Worry for the water, not the shark. He didn't spare concern for his brother. The only focus: the ship that had crashed in the distance.
He ran until a massive wall rose ahead. The open-pit mine stretched out like a crater carved by a bored god. Jagged walls descended in terraces. Dust clung to everything. Massive machines lay scattered like discarded toys, some still smoking.
Miners were scattered across the pit in various states of panic. Some ran along terraces with nowhere to go. Others tried climbing the walls, fingers scrabbling on crumbling stone. But climbing out would bring them nowhere. This wasn't Varagos, where fleeing to safety was possible. This was a lifeless gray rock in space. The only way off was an Apex ship, and Apex wasn't running charity evacuations.
When Headquarters Ascended like him showed up, it meant someone had decided whatever was happening was worth sending people who could level city blocks. For miners, being present when Ascended fought was often enough to get killed as collateral or as a loose end. So they ran, even though running was pointless, because doing something felt better than waiting to die.
When Ash reached the wall, the scale hit him. The pit descended at least three hundred feet. For most people, climbing that on unstable rock would be impossible.
Ash was Tier Five.
He crouched low, feeling ghost-pain flare in his bones, and launched upward. The ground cracked beneath him. Miners on the wall flinched as displaced air threatened their grip. Some stared like they'd never seen a man jump. Others didn't even get the chance to look, clinging harder to the wall.
Cold air ripped past his ears as he ascended. For a moment it felt good, like maybe he could outrun everything if he just jumped high enough.
Then gravity remembered him.
Ash slammed down hard at the top. Pain carved through his left leg. He gritted his teeth and forced himself forward. The world narrowed to one thing: the black smoke rising ahead.
That was where the Catalogue had fallen. That was where Max would be.
His steps quickened. When he'd put enough distance from the open pit mine, shapes started appearing in the gray landscape.
First one. Then another. Then dozens. By the time Ash slowed, hundreds of silhouettes stood between him and the smoke.
The nearest figure had roughly the shape of a man, if a man were made of old weathered stone. Cracks covered its surface, and faint white light pulsed within them like glowing moss. The head was smooth and featureless—no eyes, no mouth, just blank polished stone.
Then it made a sound that made Ash flinch.
The statue breathed.
The sound was all wrong. Not human breath but stone groaning, air dragging through hollow tunnels. A statue pretending to be alive.
Ash's gaze swept the horizon. Not dozens. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. A silent army of breathing stone.
He sighed and adjusted his grip on the wakizashi. The straightest route to Max was a direct line through them. Going around would take time he didn't have.
Ash walked directly into the forest of breathing stone.