By morning, the city of Aethelgard pretended nothing had happened. That was how it survived; it had a thousand-year history of burying its scars under layers of polite denial and fresh whitewash.
Smoke still curled faintly from the broken crown of the Clocktower, but scaffolding had already been erected around the ruins, appearing almost overnight like a scab. White banners of the Inquisition were draped across the plaza, declaring: STRUCTURAL MALFUNCTION — CIVIC REPAIRS UNDERWAY.
There was no mention of the sky tearing open. No mention of porcelain towers descending from the clouds. No mention of the hundreds of glass pods or the citizens siphoned within them. The people believed what they were told, or perhaps they simply understood that believing the alternative was a death sentence.
Kael stood on a rooftop two streets away, tucked into the shadow of a stone gargoyle. He watched workers clear shattered crystal from the plaza below with rhythmic, mechanical sweeps. Beside him, Jonas sat in a silence that felt heavy and jagged. Neither of them had slept.
"You think they'll call it sabotage?" Jonas asked eventually, his voice sounding hollow in the crisp morning air.
"They'll call it a contained anomaly," Kael said, not looking away from the square.
Jonas huffed a dry, mirthless laugh. "That's worse. Anomaly means it's just part of the weather."
Below, a stretcher passed through the square, carrying a body covered in a clean white cloth. It was one of the pod victims. Kael's jaw tightened. Inside his mind, the Desperate Father stirred—not screaming with the raw grief of the night before, but watching with a cold, terrifying stillness.
You tried. It wasn't enough.
Kael closed his eyes. The fragment he had absorbed at the palace had changed overnight. It no longer felt like a foreign shard of glass pressing against the inside of his skull; it felt seated. Integrated. It wasn't dominant, but it was there—a quiet, analytical presence waiting for a command.
He exhaled and activated his Blueprint overlay. The city unfolded before him, but the lines had shifted. Before the Clocktower fell, the geometry had been rigid and fixed. Now, the ley-lines were recalibrating, rerouting energy through the city's remaining nodes. The primary conduit was offline, but the power had not vanished; it had redistributed.
Kael's gaze drifted toward the Palace Spire. The lines of force converged there more tightly now than ever before.
"They moved the focus," he murmured.
Jonas glanced up, brow furrowed. "What?"
"They're adapting. The network is self-correcting."
"Who? The Inquisition?"
Kael didn't answer immediately. The Architect. The Inquisition. The System. At this level of the game, it didn't matter which was which. They were all parts of the same machine, and the machine was hungry.
Footsteps sounded behind them—soft, bare feet against the cold stone.
"You are alive."
Kael didn't turn. He recognized the voice, a sound like dry leaves skittering over a grave.
"I assumed you would be," Nox continued, stepping out from behind a chimney stack.
Jonas spun around, his hand instinctively going to the hilt of his short sword. "Who—?" He froze.
Nox stood at the edge of the roof, her black dress unmoved by the wind. Her eyes were as empty as the night before a storm.
"He is drifting," she observed, her gaze lingering on Jonas for a brief, unsettling moment.
"Drifting where?" Jonas snapped.
Nox ignored him, stepping closer to Kael. "You interfered too early," she said.
"Was I supposed to wait while they drained those people?" Kael asked.
"Yes."
"For what?"
"For them to commit fully. I wanted the Architect to descend. I wanted it to expose itself."
"It did," Kael countered.
"No," she said softly. "It flinched."
Silence followed, thick and uncomfortable. Jonas looked between the two of them like someone watching a play in a language he didn't speak.
"You're saying we made it cautious," Kael said, his thoughts sharpening. A cautious enemy was harder to corner, harder to predict. The fragment inside him pulsed once in clinical agreement.
"You are integrating the node faster than projected," Nox added.
"Projected by whom?"
Nox tilted her head slightly. "By those who tried before you. To exist without inheritance."
Kael felt the air thin around him. "You mean I'm not the first?"
"You are the first to survive past midnight," she said.
The words settled with the weight of a tombstone. There had been others. Others who were "Hollow," others who had tried to fight the cycle.
"What happened to them?" Jonas muttered.
"They were corrected," Nox replied.
A cold breeze passed across the rooftop, making the white Inquisition banners below snap in the wind. Kael held Nox's gaze. "What happens now?"
Nox looked toward the Palace Spire. "Now, they adjust. The Inquisition. And your sister."
Kael's jaw tightened at the mention of Lira. "What about her?"
"She is accelerating. She absorbed the feedback from the failed descent. She is at thirty-two percent."
Jonas sucked in a sharp breath. "That's impossible. She didn't even fight at the tower."
"She didn't have to," Nox said. "The incomplete arrival dispersed. She is a Sovereign; she is the natural sink for that energy. She is currently stabilizing the error you created."
"So I made her stronger," Kael realized, a cold stone of guilt settling in his stomach.
"Yes."
Kael activated Blueprint again, but this time he focused inward. The fragment glowed faintly within his mental space—an incomplete node seeking its missing pieces. If Lira absorbed the rest of the Architect's descent, the cycle would complete itself through her.
"Is she still herself?" he asked quietly.
Nox studied him carefully. "For now. But Blooming is not a partnership; it is an overwrite. Whether she remains Lira depends on whether she chooses to remain."
"Choice?" Jonas shifted uneasily. "That's not how synchronization works. The higher the percentage, the less 'you' there is."
"Normally, yes," Nox agreed. "But she is the Crimson Empress. She has... options."
Nox turned her gaze toward Jonas fully. "You are accumulating weight, Kael Arden. You must choose how to use the space." She tapped his chest lightly, the contact brief but chilling. "You are not empty anymore."
[Mental Stability: 71% → 66%]
The number blinked at the edge of his awareness. The fragment was aligning with his thoughts, but it was taxing his mind. It wasn't inheritance, but it was still a burden.
"What do they do next?" Kael asked.
"They investigate you," Nox said, looking toward the distant academy spires. "And they will not be subtle. They will not target you directly—they'll use the ones you've anchored yourself to."
She looked at Jonas.
"Excuse me?" Jonas bristled.
"You're visible, Jonas," Kael said quietly. "You have a Lineage. You have a record. I'm a ghost, but you're a target."
Jonas's interface flickered. [Ironclad Vanguard – 14%]. The stress was pushing his synchronization higher.
"They are coming," Nox said softly.
Kael heard it then—the rhythmic, measured thud of boots. Multiple sets, approaching from three different directions below the rooftop. Inquisitors.
Jonas's grip tightened on his shield. "You were serious."
Kael's mind sharpened into a flurry of data. Blueprint flared, mapping escape routes across the uneven city skyline. But as he prepared to move, he saw them.
At the center of the street below walked Professor Veyne. He looked uninjured, unburned, and perfectly composed—as if the explosion at the Clocktower had been nothing more than a minor academic disagreement. He stopped in the plaza and looked directly up at Kael. He didn't search; he knew.
"You are adapting quickly," Veyne called out, his voice carrying easily in the morning air.
Kael didn't answer.
"Come down, Mr. Arden," Veyne continued. "We have much to discuss regarding your... unique contribution to last night's events."
"We're not going down there," Jonas whispered.
"No," Kael agreed.
Veyne's smile didn't falter. "Very well." He raised one gloved hand.
The Inquisitors stepped forward in unison, their porcelain masks reflecting the morning sun. But it was what emerged from the shadows behind them that stopped Kael's breath.
It was tall, with skin like polished marble and crimson cracks running along its surface like glowing veins. Its eyes burned with a familiar, predatory red light. It was shaped like a Sovereign, but it was glitching—incomplete. The feedback from the failed descent had condensed into a physical form.
It was a Construct of the Architect. And it was looking directly at Kael.
"You interrupted a descent," Veyne said, his voice almost gentle. "Allow me to demonstrate the consequence of an incomplete equation."
The Construct stepped forward, and as it did, the very air around it seemed to thicken and grow heavy. Kael felt the pressure on his lungs. It was an aura of authority so absolute that the workers in the plaza began to drop to their knees without knowing why.
The hunt for the Hollow had truly begun.