[POV: Silas]
The Void Citadel's notifications bloomed—invisible to everyone but Silas. Loot icons materialized above Varis's corpse: a purple glow that looked like a seed, a blue treasure chest, some translucent shards. Familiar timer rings circled each one, shaving away seconds.
The crowd's roar faded in his mind; replaced by the clean hum of feedback.
[Talent: Devourer — Activated]
[You have defeated: Varis Calder (Rank 2 - Level 5).]
[Fractional Free Attribute Points acquired: 1.0]
[Total Fractional Free Attribute Points: 3.0 (Mission Upper Limit Reached)]
[World Source Acquired: 5%]
[Loot Credited: 300 Void Coins.]
[Skill Seed Acquired: Mythic Heart (Anchor Heart) — Epic (Purple).]
[Catalyst Acquired: Memory Shard ×8.]
[Treasure Chest (Blue) Dropped.]
A treasure chest. That's new.
Three FAP. Maxed out. Finally getting somewhere.
Seven days. One tyrant. Five percent of whatever "World Source" is.
Time to collect them.
The crowd scattered seeing the tyrant fall, and turn into a corpse. The guards didn't know who to follow—half ran, half knelt to Caia.
People screaming. Footsteps hammering cobblestones. Armor clanking as soldiers collided with fleeing citizens. Bodies shoved past Silas as he moved against the current, toward the stage, toward the corpse. Someone's elbow caught him in the ribs. He ignored it.
Caia raised her bloody sword.
"Stand down. The tyrant is dead. The city is mine."
Her voice carried—not through magic, but through sheer force of will. The same voice that had commanded soldiers for years, that had led men into battle and brought them back home again. The Hawk-Crest guards hesitated. Looked at each other. Then, one by one, they knelt, swearing fealty to their new lord.
She's not running. She's not hiding.
She's claiming the throne. Right there. Blood still on her blade.
That takes a particular kind of nerve. Or desperation.
Silas reached the corpse. Varis's body was broken—arms severed, chest caved by stones, his own dagger in the heart. The blood had stopped spreading; the heart had stopped pumping. The timer rings above the loot were shrinking.
He crouched. Caia was watching. He could feel her eyes on his back, weighing, calculating. She knew he wasn't just checking for a pulse. She didn't stop him.
Fast. The timer is ticking. Touch everything.
He retrieved the Shank from Varis's chest. The blade came free with a wet sound, dark red from tip to hilt. He wiped it on the dead man's coat—the fabric already ruined, one more stain among many—and slid it back into his belt.
The treasure chest hovered beside the corpse—a translucent blue box with sharp angles, glowing faintly at the edges. Timer rings shaved away the last few seconds, countdown to nothing. He'd never seen one before. The Citadel kept surprising him.
Open.
[Treasure Chest (Blue) Opened.]
[Obtained: Wayfinder's Lament (Epic • Purple).]
The item description began to scroll, but he didn't have time to read it. He grabbed the physical pocket watch named 'Wayfinder's Lament' from the chest—tarnished brass, spiraling marks etched into the case, hands frozen at some hour that no longer mattered—and pocketed it. The regent's fancy-looking ring came next, slipped off a severed finger that was still warm.
[Item Detected: Wayfinder's Lament (Epic • Purple)]
[Extraction cost: 200 Void Coins. Confirm?]
Confirm.
[Item Detected: Regent's Signet Ring (Rare • Blue)]
[Extraction cost: 0 Void Coins. Auto-stored.]
The watch is strange. The Citadel seems... interested, actually charging me coins to extract it.
The ring screams power. Authority. A dead tyrant's seal.
The Skill Seed looks better than Toxin Mastery; another Memory Shard sink. But it's not a bad deal.
But I'm alive. And he's not. That's enough.
The world flickered.
The plaza, the crowd, Caia's bloody armor—all of it started to fade. Colors washing out, edges blurring. The hum grew louder, vibrating in his teeth.
[Main Objective: COMPLETE.]
[Preparing extraction. Returning to Void Hub in 30 seconds.]
Thirty seconds. He had thirty seconds left in this world.
Caia saw me searching the body. She didn't stop me.
She didn't thank me either. We were not allies. We were just... useful.
I gave her an excuse. She gave me a kill. Transaction complete.
People nearby didn't notice him fading. Their eyes slid past the space where he stood, as if he'd already stopped existing in their world. Seven days of cover, three kills, one dead regent—and now he was a ghost slipping out through the cracks.
One week. That's what it took to topple a tyrant.
Then weightlessness hit. Like falling, but up.
Something knocked the back of his head. His world went dark.
Darkness swallowed him whole. Not the darkness of closed eyes—true void, the kind that pressed against his skin like cold water and made his ears ring with silence. He couldn't see his hands or feel his feet. Couldn't tell if he was falling or floating or both at once.
A low mechanical hum vibrated through his chest. The Citadel's transit frequency thrummed in a manner that he felt rather than heard.
Silas tried to relax into it—tried to tell himself this was normal, that the knockout before teleportation had just scrambled his senses—but then came the crack, like reality tearing at the seams, and his gut dropped the way it did during airplane turbulence when the floor falls away and your brain screams wrong.
[Warning: Teleportation interference detected. Compensating...]
Interference? He tried to move, tried to speak, but his body wasn't responding. He could only watch as a shape emerged from the darkness ahead—humanoid, tall, with a blade where the arm should be. Or maybe the arm was a blade. And eyes, they were void-black with pinprick stars, like staring into deep space.
The figure tilted its head. Those star-flecked eyes did not blink.
It spoke in a language that was wrong—scratching, layered, two voices overlapping—and the Citadel's hum intensified as meaning arrived stripped of words.
"...Human? In the transit stream? Interesting."
The void seemed to bend around the figure.
"Your anchor is weak. A Citadel mark. Low-tier."
Something like amusement colored the translated meaning.
"Run along, little Contractor. Maybe next time, you'll be worth killing."
The figure raised a hand—not to attack, but to wave. It was casual, even dismissive. The star-flecked eyes held steady as the void rippled around Silas; a membrane formed like a bubble pushing him away, and then he was accelerating backward through the collapsing darkness until light flooded in and the transit stream spat him out.
It could have killed me. It didn't. Because I'm not worth it.
...Not yet.
[POV: Jessa]
Jessa pushed through the crowd.
Taren was behind her, pale, shaking. His hand kept finding her sleeve and letting go, finding it and letting go, like he couldn't decide if he wanted to hold on or run. The plaza was chaos—cheering, crying, guards shouting orders—but Varis's body was still. The bells had stopped.
Cobblestones under her boots. Blood on the stones. She could smell it now—copper and meat, the smell of the butcher's floor behind the eel stall. Death smelled the same everywhere.
Sparkweave is dead. Corin is dead. The old network is ash.
She'd known Corin since she was fifteen. He'd taught her the codes, the dead drops, the careful art of looking ordinary while doing extraordinary things. He'd believed in the resistance when no one else did, when the Regent was winning and hope was a luxury no one could afford.
Now he was gone. All of them were gone.
She reached the corpse.
The auditor was gone. Vanished like smoke. Nowhere to be seen. He'd thrown the dagger and disappeared.
I don't know where he is. But he did his part.
She looked down at Varis Calder. The man who'd killed forty-three people. The man who'd raised an orphan into a weapon. The man who'd thought he was untouchable.
He didn't look like a monster now. He looked like meat.
She spat on him. Just once.
Then she turned away.
Now I do mine. Find the other cells.
The guillotine plaza, under sunlight. Varis's body surrounded by stones. Caia on the stage, blood drying on her armor, sword still in her hand. Guards kneeling around her like supplicants before a new ruler.
Jessa's hand closed around Taren's sleeve, remembering the words she'd heard.
The spark doesn't die with me. It just... moves.
She walked away from the plaza. Taren followed.
The tyrant was dead. The Steel Warden stood in blood. And the woman who would be Sparkweave disappeared into the crowd, already planning the next step.
I don't know if this is justice. I don't know if this is hope.
But Varis Calder is dead. And I'm still alive.
That's a start.
That's enough.
[POV: Silas]
Silence.
It was the first thing he noticed. Not the ringing silence of an explosion, or the held-breath silence of sneaking into enemy territory, but the absolute, heavy silence of a vacuum. The kind of silence that pressed against the eardrums.
Then there was the light. White, sterile, and clinical.
Silas opened his eyes.
He was lying on a bed—no, a slab. Smooth, white material that felt like heated marble. The ceiling was a featureless expanse of soft luminescence. No cobwebs. No soot stains. No smell of rotting eel guts or tanning fluid.
Too clean.
He sat up painlessly. The headache from the knockout before he was extracted was gone—wiped away as efficiently as the blood on his hands. A groggy memory grabbed at him.
Something in the dark. Star-flecked eyes. A voice that wasn't words.
The memory slipped away before he could fully grasp it. His intuition warned him from recalling that experience that filled him with dread.
He looked down at himself. His Thalorian clothes were gone. He was wearing simple gray fatigues—clean, tailored, unmarked. His hands were spotless. His fingernails were clean. Yet his injured bandaged side still throbbed.
A wall of blue text slammed into his vision.
[Mission Complete.]
[Welcome to Void Hub.]
[Calculating World Source...]
[Settling Rewards...]
[New Items Detected...]
Lines scrambled over each other, demanding his attention. The System wanted him to look. It wanted him to see its assessment of his performance.
Silas swiped his hand through the air.
Dismiss for now.
The windows collapsed. The text vanished, ready to be recalled at a moment's notice.
He wasn't ready. Not yet.
He swung his legs over the side of the slab and put his feet on the floor. It was warm. Perfect temperature control. Seattle had never been this comfortable. Stoneveil had been a wet grave. This place... this place was like a sterile laboratory.
And he was the specimen that had just returned from the field.
As he sat there in the silence, staring at the blank white wall, his heart was beating slow and steady. Too steady. A minute ago, he had been standing in a plaza that smelled of copper and unwashed bodies, watching a tyrant get dismantled by a mob. He had felt the heat of the sun. The vibration of the crowd's roar in his teeth.
Now?
Nothing.
He took a breath. The air tasted of nothing familiar.
It's over.
He rested his elbows on his knees and rubbed his face. The tactile sensation was grounding. Silas felt the warmth on his skin. He was real. He was here.
I am alive.
A smile broke out. His mind drifted to last night—to the choices that had led him here.
Day 6. Night.
He closed his eyes, and the white room faded. The smell of Stoneveil returned.