The world had always conspired to break Kael.
Not long after he left the ruins of the blood-soaked city the city that reeked of memories and regret his feet touched a land far darker than any realm he'd ever crossed.
The Seventh Fracture.
It wasn't on any map. Not in any history.
It was a wound in the fabric of reality, a place where logic collapsed and time forgot how to move.
The world pulsed like an open sore, and the air whispered with the fractured hymns of nameless entities things that did not belong to language, time, or meaning.
Kael had fallen into it chasing a sound.
A sound that, impossibly, echoed with the fragile laughter of Lira.
But what he found wasn't a memory.
It was chaos, incarnate.
---
The Seventh Fracture was a parallel dimension born from the overflow of Ilthea's power.
When force exceeded its limit, reality cracked. From those fractures, unstable rifts emerged places no sane thing should enter.
Only the broken survived here.
Kael was both physically ruined and spiritually shattered.
In this world, the laws of physics twisted at will.
But only those with deeply fractured souls could manipulate them.
Kael didn't just survive.
He evolved.
---
Every step on this nonsensical land tested the threshold of his existence.
Faces from his past rose from the fog hundreds of them.
Some whispered gently, asking him to come home.
Some wept.
But the most painful was the one who called out to him with a name long buried by the world:
"Elian."
His mother's voice.
But Kael had no home left.
---
Flashback: Age 8.
He lay bleeding in a field, a ragged tear across his chest.
Hunters from his birth clan had left him there an unwanted disgrace.
Near death, a creature emerged from the cracked earth.
Half-illusion. Half-reality.
It did not devour.
It whispered.
"If you survive, I will give you the world.
But the price of life is pain so deep, even demons will turn away."
Kael answered without speaking.
His eyes burned with fear and hate.
"Give it to me."
---
Back in the Fracture—
Here, voices of the past weren't mere illusions.
They could wound.
They could kill.
Only distorted souls could manipulate this broken realm.
Kael began to understand.
His body was no longer human. His shadow bent unnaturally.
His voice sometimes echoed across dimensions.
When he spoke, the earth trembled.
When he was silent, the sky bled different colors.
The power of this dimension was born of destruction and fear.
And Kael was becoming one with it.
---
At the peak of his descent, Kael stumbled upon the fragmented remains of an ancient artifact part of the original Attribute Panel, inscribed in a language older than time.
In a moment of madness and clarity, he absorbed the shards.
And the numbers surged.
Body: 5.0
Power: 5.0
Mind: 4.9
He could now run through air.
He could freeze momentum.
Copy enemy attacks.
Destroy the concept of "distance" itself.
But with great power came a cost.
The Fracture began to recognize him.
Not as an outsider.
But as its own.
---
In the distance, a new force stirred.
A clandestine organization called Skywatch detected the abnormal tremor in the world.
Their first target was now identified.
Name: Kael.