The smell of ozone and rotting history always lingered in the Sump.
It was a thick, metallic stench that clung to the back of the throat, tasting like burnt copper and wet ash. Kaelen Thorne adjusted his cracked breathing mask, the worn rubber seal chafing against his jawline. It was a cheap, Grade-D filter—barely enough to keep the airborne Static from crystallizing in his lungs, but it was all a Scrubber's wage could afford.
Below him, the "Echo-Grime" glowed with a sickly, iridescent violet hue. It was viscous, pulsing slowly like a dying heart. This was the byproduct of a Class-B Resonance battle that had taken place three stories above in the Gilded District. Up there, the elite Tuners had clashed using the summoned souls of ancient kings and legendary warriors. Down here, Kael was the one left to mop up the supernatural filth their "heroism" left behind.
Left. Right. Twist. Purge.
Kael's movements were mechanical. He slid the heavy, lead-lined mop across the cracked pavement of the alleyway. Every time the mop head touched the violet slime, a hiss of white noise filled the air, and a plume of grey steam rose toward the smog-choked sky.
"Move it, Thorne! The shift ends in twenty, and if this sector isn't sterilized by then, the Foreman's taking the 'Hazard Bonus' out of your rations," a voice barked through his headset.
Kael didn't look up. He didn't have the energy to be angry. "Understood, Barker," he replied, his voice raspy.
"Don't 'Understood' me with that tone," Barker snapped back. Barker was a "Low-Hummer," a man whose Resonance was just high enough to manifest a glowing clipboard, which he used to lord over the Nulls. "You're lucky to even have a job. In any other city, a 0.0 like you would have been tossed into the Wastes for the Static-Born to chew on."
Kael ignored him, his eyes focused on a particularly dark patch of grime near a rusted drainage pipe.
Barker wasn't wrong, and that was the problem. In the Resonance Era, your value as a human being was determined by the frequency of your soul. Those with high Hertz counts became Tuners—the celebrities, the soldiers, the gods of the new world. Those with low counts were the labor.
And then there were the Nulls.
Kael had been born into a flatline. When he was six, he had stood before the Great Resonance Stone at the Academy gates, and the massive crystal hadn't even flickered. Not a single spark. He was a biological silence in a world that demanded a song.
Click.
The lead-lined mop hit something solid.
Kael paused. He nudged the pile of glowing sludge aside, revealing a jagged, crystalline object lodged in a crack in the concrete. It was the size of a fist, pulsing with an erratic, jagged light.
A Frequency Core.
Kael's heart skipped a beat. These cores were the concentrated essence of an Echo-Beast—the monsters that manifested when the Static grew too dense. Usually, the Tuner Corps were meticulous about collecting these; they were worth a fortune as power cells for the city's upper levels. To find one in the Sump was like finding a diamond in a sewer.
But this one was different. It was leaking.
Tiny arcs of white noise jumped from the core to the surrounding metal pipes, causing the iron to rust and flake away in seconds. The air around the core began to ripple, the light bending as if the world itself were losing its resolution.
"Thorne? Why'd your vitals just spike?" Barker's voice crackled, more curious than concerned. "You find something?"
Kael looked at the core, then at the camera mounted on the alley wall. If he reported this, Barker would steal it and take the credit. Kael would get a 'Good Job' and maybe an extra loaf of synthetic bread. But if he left it... the Static leak would eventually dissolve this entire block.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his father's pocket watch. It was a heavy, silver-cased relic with a shattered face. The hands had been frozen at 12:00:00 for over a decade—ever since the day his father had vanished into a Static Storm.
Thump.
Kael froze. The watch had vibrated.
Thump-thump.
The rhythm was accelerating. A high-pitched ringing began to build in Kael's ears, a frequency so sharp it felt like a needle being driven into his brain. He gasped, dropping his mop as he clutched his head.
"Thorne! Answer me! If you're having a seizure, stay away from the equipment!"
The world suddenly lost its color. The vibrant, sickly violet of the grime turned into a grainy, flickering grey. The sounds of the city—the distant sirens, the hum of the Great Wall's tuning forks—faded into a dull, muffled throb.
The Frequency Core in front of him shattered.
Instead of an explosion, there was an implosion. The raw, unfiltered Static didn't fly outward; it rushed toward Kael's chest like a vacuum. Specifically, it rushed toward the watch in his hand.
The silver casing didn't melt. It drank.
A searing, ice-cold heat spread from Kael's palm, racing up his veins and slamming directly into his heart. He fell to his knees, his forehead hitting the wet stone. The "Null" within him—that empty, silent void where a soul-frequency should have been—was suddenly being flooded. It was as if someone were trying to play a symphony through a speaker that had been broken for twenty years.
In the darkness of his vision, a single line of text flickered. It wasn't the blue, clean interface used by the Academy Tuners. It was a jagged, ultra-violet hue that seemed to burn his retinas.
[Initialization Complete...]
[Detection: Perfect Vacuum Host Found.]
[Echo Unit: "ZERO" has synchronized with the Source.]
«...Finally...»
The voice wasn't human. It sounded like a thousand voices speaking in unison, played backward and layered with the crackle of a distant radio.
[Current Resonance: 0.0 Hz (Stable)]
[Status: The Future is a Recorded Error.]
"Thorne!"
The grey fog in Kael's vision cleared just enough for him to see Barker running into the alley, his glowing clipboard held like a shield. "What did you do? The sensors are going haywire! You—"
Barker stopped. His eyes widened as he looked past Kael.
Behind the foreman, the "Echo-Grime" was rising. The spilled Static from the shattered core hadn't vanished; it had coalesced. It formed a jagged, four-legged shape made of television static and teeth. A Static-Mite. It was a scavenger of the Echo-world, and it was hungry for the minor Resonance Barker was putting off.
The creature lunged. It moved with the jerky, unnatural speed of a glitched video.
"Move!" Kael tried to scream, but his voice was caught in his throat.
Suddenly, time slowed.
Kael saw the world through a new lens. Every object in the alley—the pipes, the bricks, Barker, the monster—was covered in thin, vibrating lines. Frequencies.
And then, he saw it. A tiny, flickering red dot on the monster's chest. It wasn't its heart. It was its Null-Point—the exact frequency where its existence was most unstable.
«...three... centimeters... left...» the voice in his head whispered.
Kael didn't have a weapon. He didn't have a Hero's soul. He simply reached out and grabbed his lead-lined mop. With a fluid, desperate strength he didn't know he possessed, he swung the heavy metal pole.
He didn't aim for the beast's head. He aimed for the red dot.
The moment the lead-lined tip touched that flickering point, the sound of a glass cathedral shattering echoed through the Sump.
The Static-Mite didn't bleed. It didn't even whimper. It simply unraveled. The creature turned into a shower of harmless grey sparks that dissolved into the air before they could touch the ground.
Kael fell back against the wall, gasping for air. The color returned to the world in a violent rush. The ringing in his ears faded, replaced by the heavy silence of the alley.
Barker stood frozen, his clipboard flickering and then dying out. He looked at the broken mop, then at Kael.
"You... you killed a Remnant," Barker whispered, his voice trembling. "Without an Echo? That's impossible. You're a Null. You're supposed to be nothing."
Kael looked down at his hand. The pocket watch was gone. In its place, a faint, glowing tattoo was etched into his palm—a circle with a single vertical slash through it.
Zero.
He felt a strange, cold clarity. The fear he had lived with his entire life—the fear of being useless, of being a "glitch"—was gone. It had been replaced by something much heavier.
A new line of text appeared in the corner of his vision.
[Chronos-Buffer Established.]
[T-Minus: 365 Days until the Second Static.]
[Current Objective: Survive the Silverspire Academy Entrance Exam.]
Kael closed his fist, hiding the mark. He looked up at the "Gilded District" shimmering in the clouds above, where the "Real" people lived.
"I'm not a Null," Kael whispered, his eyes hardening. "I'm the countdown."
He stood up, leaving the broken mop in the grime. He didn't need it anymore. He had a debt to collect from a world that had tried to silence him, and he had exactly one year to make sure they heard him.
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Arc I: The Zero-Entry Arc