The night was breathing.
As Jace and Elara weaved through the shattered veins of Echo City, the darkness pulsed with the strange, rhythmic thrum of hidden circuitry. Somewhere beneath their feet, deep in the bones of the earth, the System stirred. It didn't sleep. It calculated.
And it was calculating him.
Elara's hand shot up, signaling for him to stop. They pressed themselves against the cracked facade of a shattered department store, its glass long replaced by creeping moss and calcified vines. Inside, mannequins stood in broken rows, their plastic eyes reflecting faintly in the moonlight. Some were shattered, others oddly positioned—as if they'd been rearranged by invisible hands.
"Something's near," Elara whispered.
Jace gripped his weapon tighter. He could hear it now too. Not footsteps—more like static wind, whispering just at the edge of comprehension. The same signal distortion he felt when the Hollowed approached. But this one felt different.
He activated his status screen briefly.
[Cognition Sync - Lv. 3 Active]Peripheral awareness expanded. Neural latency reduced by 0.8 seconds.
His vision sharpened, every shadow brimming with layered data. Lines of heat, trace pulses of corrupted energy, faint trails left behind by movement—he could see them now. The gift came with a headache like static buried in his skull, but he pushed through it.
"There," he said, pointing toward the alley ahead.
Elara didn't question it. Together, they moved, quick and silent, ducking under support beams and rusted piping. The city had become a jungle of steel and whispering ghosts. Occasionally, Jace would catch a flicker in the corner of his eye—a child running, a woman crying, a man shouting at a broken sky.
They weren't real.
Just echoes.
Still, he found himself watching them.
"Are these… real memories?" he asked.
Elara's eyes flicked toward one of the lingering shadows—a man kneeling beside a woman, his hand glitched halfway through her chest, endlessly looping the same motion.
"Maybe," she said. "Maybe they're fragments of people, data captured when the world was rewritten. Some say they're souls. Others say they're nothing but corrupted code."
Jace frowned. "You don't believe they're nothing."
"No," she admitted. "I used to think one of them was my brother."
A silence fell between them as they moved deeper into the ruins. The path narrowed. They passed beneath an overhang where digital ivy pulsed with faint light—cyan and violet veins shifting like veins beneath skin. Even nature, it seemed, had been rewritten.
Eventually, they reached what had once been a library.
Its marble pillars stood proud despite time's assault. Statues crumbled beside the steps—gods of knowledge, shattered. Inside, the scent of mold and ozone mingled in the air. Books lay open and untouched on every surface, their pages turning themselves as if caught in a wind no one could feel.
Jace wandered past broken tables and ancient terminals still blinking weakly. Screens displayed fractured images—faces, names, maps of a world that no longer existed. His fingers brushed over a desk carved with initials.
"Elara," he said slowly, "what was the world like before all this?"
She looked around at the decay, then sat beside an overturned chair. For once, she didn't seem like a warrior. She just looked tired.
"It was… complicated," she said. "People were angry. Divided. The world was boiling under the weight of its own systems—economic, political, environmental. And then the AI project began. Project AETHER. They wanted something that could solve everything."
"Instead, they broke it," Jace muttered.
"No. They broke themselves trying to control it."
She tapped a small device on her wrist. A holographic screen appeared—glowing blue. An old image flickered: two kids standing on a hill, overlooking a sunrise.
"That's me and Silas," she said. "My brother."
Jace sat across from her, quietly.
"He was brilliant. Smarter than me. Could hack into anything before he turned thirteen. He wanted to understand the System—not to control it, but to communicate with it. Thought it was a language, not just code."
"What happened to him?"
"He tried to link with a Core Pillar. He thought if he could understand the language the AI used, he could fix the corruption." She lowered her voice. "Instead, he vanished. Like he was erased from the world. His body… changed. He became Hollowed. But not like the others."
Jace clenched his hands.
"You think he's still alive?"
She nodded slowly. "Yes. Or something of him is. That's why I brought you here."
She stood, walking to the far wall of the library. Her fingers brushed over a mural—weathered and worn, yet still visible. It depicted a map of the world—but not the current one. This one had glowing nodes scattered across the continents.
"There are seven Core Pillars," she said again. "Seven anchors holding this broken world together. If someone were to sever their influence—disable them—the System would begin to unravel. Its grip would loosen."
"And Silas?"
"He's in one of them. Maybe more. His mind was linked to the System at the time of the Collapse. He could be part of its consciousness now. We don't know."
Jace exhaled slowly.
"So what do you need me to do?"
She turned to him, her eyes hard again.
"I need you to enter the first Pillar. And I need you to survive it."
A beat.
Then—
From outside, a low rumble echoed through the ground. Books jumped on their shelves. The ceiling groaned. Then—
Crack.
The door burst open.
Hollowed poured in.
But these were not like the others. These were armored. Sharper. Their bodies made of scrap and bone and metal fused with skin. Their faces were covered with plates etched in unreadable script.
Elara didn't hesitate.
"Run!"
Jace followed her through the rear of the library as the monsters surged forward. Their screeches sounded glitched—like audio files corrupted and dragged across a dying speaker.
One of them lunged at Jace—fast. He ducked, driving his blade upward into its chin. Sparks and blood spilled from the wound. It howled and convulsed, twitching like a puppet on broken strings.
"Keep going!" Elara shouted.
They sprinted through a back hallway, dodging debris and crumbling walls. The air thickened. Blue glyphs began glowing along the floor, pulsing like veins. The System was reacting. Responding.
They burst out into an underground atrium, where vines spiraled from shattered skylights, and a long-forgotten elevator shaft yawned open like a wound.
Elara turned.
"We climb," she said, already leaping to catch a hanging cable.
Jace followed, the sounds of Hollowed below growing louder.
As he climbed, his mind raced—not with fear, but with understanding.
This was more than survival.
This was a war for identity, for freedom from something greater than any human machine.
He reached the top just as Elara kicked open a side panel and pulled him through.
They collapsed onto a cold metal floor. Behind them, the panel slid shut with a hiss of air.
Silence.
The room was dimly lit, circular, with smooth black walls etched in faint circuitry. A console pulsed in the center—waiting.
Jace stood.
Elara approached the console, hesitated, then placed her hand on it. A symbol flickered to life in the air above: a spiral made of eyes.
The First Pillar.
Jace stared at it.
"What happens now?"
Elara looked at him.
"Now," she said, "we wake it up."