Black.
The sound of distant artillery echoed like the final heartbeat of a dying world. Smoke. Ash. Metal twisted into unrecognizable shapes. The stench of burning flesh and scorched polymers clawed at his lungs. The sky itself had ruptured into a perpetual storm of blood-red clouds and falling debris.
"Vaelith-07, respond. Orders stand."
The voice was cold, synthetic. Not human.
He pressed his back against a jagged concrete wall as tracer rounds screamed past. His hands clenched a battered pulse rifle slick with grime and blood. Uniform torn. Armor cracked. A shallow gash bled freely across his brow.
He remembered now.
Not Vaelith Academy. Not Thrones. Not mana or cursed bloodlines.
This had come first.
The war. The System that controlled everything in his world. The cold numbers and protocols. The endless loop of missions. Expendable operatives in exchange for objectives.
He was one of them.
A disposable asset.
Designation: Vaelith-07.
"07, adapt or die."
The words crackled through the comm as if mocking him.
He shoved away from the wall and moved.
His squad had fallen hours ago. The perimeter was gone. The enemy hunted in packs now, unseen shadows with razored weapons and whispering voices. His boots slipped on rubble caked with blood and bone as he navigated the skeletal remains of what had once been a city.
A muffled groan stopped him.
He turned sharply, pulse rifle aimed.
A man—ragged, uniform shredded, blood soaking his side—lay half-buried under collapsed debris. Familiar. Squadmate. Friend.
Vaelith-12.
The man lifted shaking fingers toward him, eyes glassy with pain and fear. "Don't leave me… please…"
The comm in his ear flared harsh again.
"07, extraction window closing. Leave the casualty. Mission priority overrides all other protocols."
Vaelith-07 stared at the dying man. Static wind howled between broken buildings. Explosions lit the horizon like burning suns.
He could have walked away.
Most would have.
He knelt wordlessly and shoved his rifle across his back. One arm slid under the man's shoulders. He dragged him from the wreckage inch by agonizing inch, boots grinding against blood-slick stone.
The man coughed violently, staining Vaelith-07's armor red.
"You should have left me…"
"The System always lies."
It wasn't kindness. It wasn't heroism. It was defiance. A rejection of being nothing more than another programmed loss statistic.
The ground quaked violently.
Artillery. Close.
A deafening blast sent them both flying.
Darkness surged like a crashing wave. The sound of static roared into silence.
As he lay broken beneath fractured steel and flame, Vaelith-07's vision narrowed to a pinpoint.
Cold rain began to fall.
The comm whispered one last time into his fading mind.
"Adapt or die, Vaelith."
His final conscious thought burned bitter into the void.
"I will not end here."
The rain did not stop.
It fell cold and heavy over the ruins. It washed the blood from cracked armor, softened the edges of charred debris, turned ash into black rivers cutting paths through the rubble.
Vaelith-07 lay still.
He couldn't move. Couldn't feel the weight of the body he had dragged. Couldn't hear the distant screams or the mechanical buzz of the search drones sweeping overhead.
Only the comm remained. Hissing. Clicking.
"You are expendable."
The System always returned to that. Always reminding him.
Expendable.
Asset.
Tool.
His gaze drifted sideways. Dog tags lay scattered in the mud, torn from fallen comrades by the blast. Numbers. Names. Lives erased in a flash of heat and metal.
He stared at them.
For the first time in cycles, something inside him cracked.
Not a tear. Not a scream. A cold, hollow resignation. A deeper hatred for the machine that called itself perfect while treating life as numbers to erase.
The rain pooled around him.
[Mission failed.]
[Subject terminated.]
[Data retrieval in progress.]
[Reset sequence… error.]
[Subject anomaly detected.]
[Loop deviation: unauthorized.]
The voice distorted, breaking and reforming as darkness coiled tighter.
"I will not end here."
The words barely left his lips.
The world fractured.
The battlefield dissolved like paper consumed by flame. The rain became mana. The blackened sky stretched into the infinite twisting spires of Vaelith Academy.
Eryndor Vaelith gasped as air filled his lungs again.
The cold stone of the Labyrinth of the Lost greeted him. The same suffocating darkness. The same unseen eyes watching.
But he was already moving, already standing, already cold and calculating.
The System had failed to erase him.
He wasn't Vaelith-07 anymore.
Now he was Eryndor.
And he would break the next System, too.