Kael's warning stayed with me long after he vanished into the fog.
Voids attract worse things.
I felt it before I saw it.
The air around the archway grew hollow not cold, not heavy, but empty. Sound dulled. The city's constant whispers faded into silence, as if the world itself was being swallowed.
Lumo dimmed, its glow flickering erratically.
"This isn't a spirit," I whispered.
The ground ahead warped, stone bending inward like it was being erased. From the distortion emerged something without form no eyes, no limbs, no shape I could properly describe.
It was an absence pretending to exist.
The fear circuit inside me trembled.
Then pain.
Fear drained from my body without my permission.
I staggered back, gasping. "It's pulling from me?"
Kael's words echoed in my mind.
Voids attract things far worse.
The entity didn't scream. Didn't threaten. It simply advanced, and wherever it moved, fear ceased to exist. Not consumed nullified.
My circuit reacted instinctively, trying to compensate, pulling fear from the surroundings.
There was nothing to pull.
Panic flared real, human panic.
I forced myself to think.
In my past life, enemies like this weren't beaten by power. They were beaten by mechanics.
"If it feeds on absence," I muttered, "then it can't process chaos."
I reversed the circuit.
Instead of stabilizing fear, I fragmented it released raw, unstructured emotional spikes into the air. Panic. Dread. Confusion. All at once.
The void shuddered.
For the first time, it reacted.
The entity warped violently, its form distorting as conflicting fear signals collided around it. It recoiled not damaged, but disrupted.
Lumo flared bright, amplifying the surge.
"Yes," I breathed. "You can't erase what you can't define."
The void withdrew, collapsing into itself before slipping back into nothingness.
Silence returned.
I dropped to one knee, chest heaving. My circuit burned, unstable but intact.
Kael stepped out of the fog moments later.
"So you survived," he said quietly.
Barely.
"That thing," I said hoarsely, "it exists because of me."
"Yes," Kael replied. "And now others will come."
He looked down at me, expression unreadable.
"You don't get to experiment freely anymore," he said. "You're part of the system now whether you like it or not."
I clenched my jaw.
In games, once the tutorial ends, the real enemies appear.
This was no different.