The world had already collapsed hundreds of years before the System. What remained were scattered pockets of civilization fragments clinging to memory, resource, and routine. The cities had fallen. The networks still hummed in some sectors. Corporations, where they still existed, sold the lie of convenience as progress. It all looked intact until the seams split. Some parts of the old world still clung on cracked, barely breathing, familiar beneath the ruin. But they were ghosts. Echoes. The kind that let people pretend it hadn't truly ended.
But even older than those were the real empires. Vast, ordered, brutal things. The last scaffolds of civilization before the great unravel. They had cities with borders, roads that still lit up at night, and satellites that obeyed commands.
It was from their vaults that most of the surviving tech came Imperial caches sealed in alloy bunkers, scattered like myths through the ruins. When someone cracked one, it changed the balance of power overnight.
They built machines no one now understood. Modular tools. Self-learning code. Black-box weapons no scavver dared touch unless they were desperate or mad. Emp tech came from them. Hard-coded tools of control.
The System didn't make those things. It adapted them. Stole their bones.
In the final days before the System, those empires were the only stability left. People migrated toward their reach like moths to the last working lamps. Some were annexed. Others were crushed. But for a while, they held.
Warren had never seen one firsthand. Just heard stories places where the clean water still ran, where drones still patrolled, where law was measured in firepower. They weren't kind. But they worked. Until they didn't.
People still whispered their names like spells. Not to honor them. To ward them off.
Before the System, there were salvage kingdoms. Pop-up citystates built on the bones of better eras. Markets made of junk. Dominions ruled by whoever held the last working battery.
People didn't thrive. They recycled. They burned old data for heat and prayed over broken plastic like relics.
Roads meant nothing. GPS had long since failed. Travel was a ritual of risk. You moved only if you had to, and only if you were desperate.
The sun didn't shine the same. The skies were heavy with static, clouded by the remnants of things too big to burn clean. Towers pierced the cloudbanks like rusted knives some still blinked with red lights that no longer meant anything.
Some outposts were myth. A clean spring. A room with power. An antenna that caught whispers from satellites no one controlled.
Children were born feral in places like that. Raised on the edge of memory. They learned to walk by stepping over bones. Their lullabies were screams.
The old tech wasn't holy, but it was close. People bled over circuit boards, bartered for interface keys carved from scrap. A working screen was a miracle. A chip that still lit up meant safety.
Every survivor carried a story of someone who tried to go back. To rebuild. They all ended the same way buried under collapse. The world didn't want rebuilding. It wanted forgetting.
That was the world Warren had grown up in. One where every kindness was a negotiation, and every promise rusted in the rain.
So when the System came when it pulsed through the sky like a second sunrise people didn't ask why. They asked how fast.
They called it the "Integration Phase." Neural links. Behavioral syncing. Immersive overlays. One global interface to unify thought, habit, instinct. They said it would fix everything.
And for a while, it almost did.
Then came the desyncs. The blackouts. The people who walked off rooftops with serene smiles because the voices in their heads said it was time to log out. People started vanishing in crowds glitching out, freezing in place, bleeding from the eyes. Memory corruption, they called it. A side effect.
Warren remembered overhearing rumors whispered around a scrap-barrel fire when the final patch rolled out. People cheered. Prayed. Drank cheap synthetic whiskey and stared at the screens like salvation was coded in pixels.
The next morning, half the world was dead.
The System's promises hadn't just failed they'd torn the world apart. Those who weren't dead quickly learned to survive, but those who had once walked the streets with certainty and comfort were now scattered in a broken, desperate mass. The wealthy, the powerful, the ones who had believed that the System was a cure they didn't suffer like the others. Their tech still worked. Their connections were intact. They didn't forget. Only the destitute, the scum, the poor they were the ones who struggled, who became expendable.
For them, the collapse didn't start with the System it had happened generations before. What followed was a slow erosion, not an explosion. Signals failed. Grids darkened. Something beneath their lives gave way whatever had kept things stitched together simply stopped. The collapse had no single name, no moment of clarity. Just absence, growing louder with each passing year, long before the System's rise this was just another evolution of decay.
The System arrived like a savior, but it wore a mask of math and code. It didn't bring food or safety. It brought diagnostics. It ranked need. It quantified worth.
People didn't get help. They got sorted.
Families were flagged as inefficient. Neighborhoods were marked unsalvageable. Resources were redirected toward sectors with better data alignment places where people had more "value."
Those in the wrong zones were left to rot.
Warren had watched entire blocks turn feral. Not from hunger hunger came later but from being ignored. People who once lived structured lives, clung to order whatever order was left went still. Like the world had pulled their plug. He didn't come from that kind of world, but he understood what it meant to lose it.
In the early weeks, there were still some who believed. They scanned in, updated their chips, waited for updates that never came. They stood in lines for food deliveries that had been canceled two cycles ago.
Others burned out quickly. Ripped their chips out with rusted tools, tried to go dark. Most didn't survive. The System didn't chase them. It didn't have to. Without connectivity, you didn't exist.
And if you didn't exist, you didn't matter.
Warren had always known it was coming. He had seen the cracks, even before the System launched its grand rollout. He had seen the way people blindly embraced it, thought it would save them. And he'd known better. The System was never about saving people. It was about control. About turning everyone into a resource.
To the System, Warren wasn't a person. He was a product, a commodity.
Now, the System still existed fractured, unstable, but still reaching. What had collapsed was structure. The old sectors were gutted and shifting, overrun with the Broken people whose chips had malfunctioned and turned them into mindless husks, twisted echoes of themselves. But to Warren, they were just another part of the terrain predictable, avoidable, manageable. A resource to be exploited, if necessary. Something to map, use, or strip down when the need arose.
Weeks earlier than the blood soaked alleyway.
He walked through what used to be a market strip rows of tarp-strung frameworks, stripped bare and forgotten. His boots left heavy prints in the slush of water that pooled in uneven depressions and sunken tile.
The rain didn't stop anymore. Not really. It just slowed now and then, like the sky was catching its breath.
Warren moved beneath a half-collapsed awning, ducking past twisted metal and soaked tarps still clinging to rusted scaffolding. He moved like he'd always lived there. Because he had.
Most structures leaned where time had bent them. Makeshift bridges of snapped girders and fused cable arced above some crossings. Others were simply dead ends, sunken and filled with debris or waterlogged decay.
A row of long-abandoned carts stood fused to the mud, their wheels buried, their contents raided down to the framework. One still bore a child's handprint stained into metal by old dye or blood, it was impossible to tell.
Power lines sagged low overhead, spitting static into the mist. Some sparked faintly. Most just buzzed like distant insects, droning through the haze.
He passed a slumped walkway riddled with half-melted mannequins, left behind by someone trying to scare off scavvers. Their faces were featureless. Their limbs burned. But someone had taken the time to stand them in a circle, arms reaching out like a ritual.
Wind chimes made from shattered glass and chain-link clinked faintly from a window frame three stories up. No one had claimed the sound in a long time.
Below, drain grates coughed steam. The air rising from them carried chemical bitterness burned filtration foam or leaking battery guts. It made Warren's eyes sting for a moment before the wind shifted.
Every now and then, he spotted the remnants of messages etched into walls with scorched wire. Not writing. Coordinates. Or warnings. One simply read: "SLEEP UNDERGROUND. THEY DON'T." He knew that was a lie. The Broken didn't have habits not like people thought. They followed noise, heat, sometimes nothing at all. But Warren knew better. During the day, most of them retreated underground into collapsed metro lines, old sub-complexes, the deep hollow systems beneath the surface. They stayed low, twitching in the dark, waiting. Some came back up. Others didn't need to.
A scavenger's tent flapped in a recessed stairwell, torn in half, the bedding soaked and scattered. It hadn't been long. But long enough.
Every corner held history written in damage. And Warren read it like scripture.
A figure moved just out of sight half-shadowed behind a bent support beam. Wrapped in rags. Holding something long and sharp. They didn't make a sound, and Warren didn't stop. The deal was simple: don't interfere, don't get noticed.
Near an old support pillar, a girl crouched beside a barrel fire too wet to burn. She was holding an empty can to her mouth, whispering into it like a walkie. Her eyes tracked Warren, but she didn't flinch.
A pair of figures crouched beneath a plastic overhang one shivering, the other keeping watch with a bent crowbar across their knees. Their eyes didn't follow Warren. They stayed low, heads down. Survivors knew better than to track strangers.
Farther on, a man sat on a ledge with his hands in his lap and his eyes wide open. He didn't blink. His mouth was stained with something dark. The rain didn't bother him.
Warren passed a cracked canopy rigged into a lean-to. A child peeked from inside, holding a metal fork like a weapon. The adult next to them didn't move. Maybe asleep. Maybe not.
Someone had made a nest from old carpet and scavenged tubing inside a collapsed stairwell. Warren only noticed them because of the breathing. Shallow. Deliberate. Not scared just hiding.
A figure with a limping gait disappeared between two rust-streaked panels ahead. Their leg dragged. Their cloak was made of patchwork umbrellas. Warren let them vanish. If they made it, they earned it.
Behind him, a voice muttered something broken and slurred. Not to him. To themselves. Or to someone long dead. Warren didn't look back.
He paused near a cracked mirror bolted to a leaning support beam. It didn't reflect much, but it was enough to check behind him. Movement always meant risk.
A weathered slab was mounted on a rotted wall nearby something etched into metal, old and oxidized. Most of it was unreadable, streaked with corrosion, but Warren recognized the shape of the System's insignia burned into its surface. Whether it was a boundary marker or leftover protocol didn't matter. Someone, once, had tried to stake claim.
He stepped over a crumpled chassis once a security unit, now just a corroded tangle of synthetic muscle and armorplate. Someone had carved a word into its chestplate. 'Liar.'
The scent of ozone lingered. Not fresh. Old. Like something had discharged days ago and left a scar on the air.
Warren moved through it all like it was natural. His pace was slow but deliberate.
Up ahead, a rusted drone casing hung from power lines like a wasp's nest. It buzzed faintly with dying circuitry, eyes blinking red in a loop.
The world had broken, but Warren was still here. He had adapted.
He moved on, stepping lightly through the wreckage, until he spotted something in the distance. A figure hunched, stumbling, draped in a waterlogged coat. Their gait was uneven. Survival clung to them like mold.
Warren's eyes narrowed. The figure was ragged, desperate just another casualty of the world, scavenging, barely holding on. But desperation made people dangerous. This one, though weak and frightened, was still a threat. That made the choice simple.
He reached into his pack, retrieving the half-empty water bottle he'd salvaged earlier. The liquid sloshed softly, just enough to make a thirsty man act without thinking. He tilted the bottle to his lips, slow and deliberate.
The figure noticed him immediately. Eyes wide. Shoulders rigid. Every part of them locked on the movement of the bottle like it was the only thing in the world.
"Please… just a sip… I'm… I'm dying of thirst," the figure croaked, voice ragged from exposure.
Warren didn't answer.
He'd seen that look too many times people pushed to the edge, stripped of logic. There was always a line where the plea turned into a threat. This one was close.
And then they moved.
A sudden, clumsy lunge. Hands outstretched, fingers curled like claws toward the water.
Warren stepped back and let his body turn with it, twisting the momentum. He didn't drop the bottle. He didn't spill a drop.
The figure stumbled forward. Desperation outweighed caution now. They didn't stop to think.
They never did.
The first strike came fast. Warren brought his knee up into the figure's stomach, hard enough to knock the wind out but not kill. He needed to be sure. Needed to know if it was just thirst driving them or something worse.
The figure gasped, folded in on themselves, then clawed at him again. The breathless wheeze turned into a snarl. They weren't begging now.
Warren's truncheon was in his hand before the figure could recover. In his grip, it meant the end of things.
He swung low across the knees sending the figure crumpling into the sludge. They hit the ground hard, shoulder first, then rolled, arms still flailing toward him.
"Didn't have to," they rasped, coughing up rainwater and mud.
Warren didn't answer. He crouched beside them instead. Close enough to smell the rot beneath the coat. Not infection. Hunger. Rot from the inside out.
"Nothing left," the figure murmured, barely above a whisper. "They took it. Everything."
It wasn't clear who they meant raiders, the System, someone else. It didn't matter. The story was always the same.
The figure tried to lift their head. Warren met their gaze and saw nothing clear behind it. Just fog. The kind that comes from too long in the cold, too long without reason.
He almost let them go. Almost.
Then their hand shot out, not for the water, but for the pocket knife tucked near Warren's belt.
He moved fast. The truncheon came down once, clean. Bone cracked. It was precise. Satisfying. The kind of hit that didn't waste motion or meaning. He felt it in his wrist the transfer of power, the way the body folded under command.
There was a moment in the swing right before contact when everything fell quiet. Not silence, not peace. Just the sharp, simple truth of motion and intent. It was a feeling Warren knew well. And liked.
The figure spasmed, then stilled. Warren watched the stillness settle like mist. That quiet afterward when the noise was gone and only breath remained he liked that part best.
Rain drummed against Warren's coat as he stood. The water bottle, still capped, hung from his fingers.
He waited a moment long enough for the weight of it to settle then bent and searched the body. No chip. No tools. Nothing worth carrying.
Only then did he drink.
No one drank the rain. Not anymore. Not if they wanted to wake up whole.
It carried trace metals and residue from old factories stuff that had never broken down, just passed through clouds and bodies and back again. You could taste the corrosion.
Some claimed it made your thoughts loop. That you'd see flashes of memories that weren't yours. Others just bled from the nose and forgot their own names.
Warren didn't know if all of it was true. But he'd seen enough bodies twitching in puddles to know that some lies came from somewhere real.
He crouched beside the figure once more not to search, but to study. The fingers were cracked and bloodless, fingernails chipped to the quick. Their coat wasn't scavver-grade. Just rags layered in hope.
He rolled them onto their back with the heel of his boot. The knife they'd reached for was well kept, clean-edged, cared for. But it had been tucked near his belt. Close. Personal. That was what mattered.
Warren stared at it for a long moment. It wasn't about the threat. Not really. That blade couldn't have really hurt him not in any way that counted.
But they'd reached for it anyway. His knife. Something that carried more weight than it should. Something he never let go of, not even in sleep.
He'd probably have let them go. Probably. But they reached for what he carried too close. Not the knife what it meant. What it anchored. You don't try to take that from someone like him and expect mercy.
Something hung around their neck a loop of wire, twisted with bits of glass and old screw caps. Crude, but unmistakable. A symbol of the Cult of Iron, even if poorly made. A personal memento of a world that had already forsaken its bearer. Not protection. Not pride. Just a memory trying not to rot.
Warren didn't touch it. Let the dead keep their charms.
The air shifted. Not the rain something behind it. A pause, like the world waiting to see what he would do next.
He rose slow, checked the line of the rooftops, the edges of every crumbling frame around him. No eyes, no movement but the silence had changed.
He moved on. He always did.
Warren didn't linger. The body behind him was already part of the rain, sinking slow into the mud. He moved like he always did forward, alone, eyes open.
The world didn't mourn. It didn't even notice. But he did. Not in grief. In clarity. A threat had been removed. A lesson, maybe, left behind.
He kept to the edges now, where shadow and rot made it harder for the Broken to track. His path curved toward the low structures near the waterline places where the air tasted of rust and runoff.
There were stories about the places near the water. Not the deep reservoirs they were dry now but the flood zones, where whole buildings sat half-submerged like teeth jutting from an open jaw. People said you could hear voices in the tide echo, glitching from drowned speakers wired to nothing.
Warren didn't believe in ghosts. But he listened anyway.
He adjusted his coat at the collar. The rain had soaked into the lining, weighing it down not failure, just saturation. Even a good coat absorbed something after hours of storm. He wore it anyway. The heaviness helped him vanish. In storms like this, even the System's reach blurred.
His footfalls grew softer as the ground beneath him changed less metal, more stone. Cracked concrete, coated in moss and slow, slick runoff. The kind of terrain that punished missteps.
He moved toward the edge of a fractured causeway. From here, the view stretched over sunken rooftops and submerged lines old boundaries erased by collapse. There was no border anymore. Just weather and hunger.
On one of the rooftops below, a figure stood unmoving. It was hard to tell if they were alive. Just a silhouette in the mist, face turned to the sky, arms slack at their sides. Warren didn't stop. Whatever they were doing, it didn't involve him.
A sound flickered past his left ear like a wire snapping under tension. He didn't flinch. The city always made noise. It was knowing which ones to fear that mattered.
A dog barked somewhere in the distance. Or something that used to be a dog. The sound ended in a wet, rattling choke.
Somewhere ahead, there would be shelter. Real shelter. Not just a dry patch or a ruined stairwell with plastic draped over it his place. The pharmacy.
It was half-buried beneath a crumbled overpass, camouflaged by debris and the tilt of the land. Most scavvers passed it without noticing. That was the point.
The entrance was narrow, sealed with repurposed slats of metal and locking hinges salvaged from four different kinds of storage units. Warren had reworked the entire threshold to look like a collapse.
Inside, it was dark. Dry. Smelled faintly of old bleach and rubber insulation. That was by design too.
He'd cleared it out long ago, stripped the shelves bare of painkillers and antibiotics. Now it was stocked with what mattered tools, heat, silence.
There was a generator in the back. Not System-grade, not standard. It ran off a waterwheel he'd built into the storm runoff two years back. Repaired twice. Balanced by hand.
The wheel sat wedged in a natural choke-point where runoff pooled and funneled down into a cracked culvert. He'd cut into it, added slats, reshaped the flow.
On heavy rain days like this, the generator thrummed steadily quiet, clean. More than enough to power the lights, the filters, the heat strip under the floor panel where he slept.
He passed a line of rusted floodlights on long poles, some still faintly blinking like they hadn't been told the world had ended. One sparked. Another burst, scattering glass into the water below.
Warren ducked under a fallen support beam, slipping between its jagged edges with practiced ease. He never moved fast unless he had to. Stillness was safer.
To his right, something floated. A body. Long gone soft, drifting in place, tethered by its own soaked coat snagged on a pipe. He didn't look again.
He paused as he moved beneath a bent highway sign, unreadable, but heavy with age. Something shifted in the dark ahead. Not Broken. Not scavver. Something else.
Movement but not erratic. Not hungry. A different kind of watchful.
He crouched, eyes narrowing. The sound of breathing too controlled to be panic, too slow for fear.
He didn't reach for the truncheon yet.
Some things didn't need violence. Some things only needed watching.
But he tracked the figure all the same. Step for step. Breath for breath. Until the rain swallowed the shape again.
And then he stood, because there was no use chasing ghosts.
But the shape hadn't vanished it had waited. When he turned his back, it moved.
He caught it in the corner of his eye. Close now. Wrong pace. Wrong silence.
The truncheon was out in a blur, already mid-swing before he consciously reacted. It met resistance bone and weight and the shape dropped hard.
It was Broken. Just not like the others. Thin, fast, and marked with faded wiring scars across the temple like something halfway through a rewrite. The System had failed to finish it, and what was left had kept moving.
It spasmed once, tried to rise, then surged with a second wind desperation, not strength.
Warren put it down clean. Two more hits. Precision. Then stillness.
But his breath didn't slow. Not yet.
The Broken weren't supposed to be out. Not this early. The light hadn't faded. The sky was still a bright overcast, washed grey but far from dusk. They moved in shadow followed instinct, signal, decay. This one shouldn't have been here.
He scanned the rooftops, the ledges, the gaps in the concrete where water pooled and shadows lingered. Nothing moved.
Still crouched, he pressed his fingers to the body's wrist, then the jaw. Just to be sure. No twitch. No residual hum. Whatever was guiding it had already fled.
He waited a moment longer, eyes tracing the skyline around his shelter. The pharmacy sat too close. Too exposed. He didn't like that this thing had made it here.
He moved to the edge of the slope behind the body and crouched low. Watched the water drain down the hill. One trail of footprints. His. And one that came from the opposite direction, fresh and erratic. It had been hunting.
He followed the line of debris for another twenty meters, just far enough to be certain. No backup. No echo. Just one.
He circled back.
Then he crouched, breath low. Searched fast. And there it was lodged behind the meat of its neck: a fragment.
Warm. Flickering. Its edges pulsed faintly with residual charge. He didn't hesitate. He took it.
This hadn't been an accident. The Broken had been hunting. Not scavenging. Not wandering. Hunting.
And it had come too close to his shelter.
Maybe it had been drawn to something. To someone. Maybe.
It hadn't been wandering. It had been tracking. Something. Someone. And when it lost the trail, it kept moving forward right toward his shelter.
It had been chasing something someone and the trail had gone cold just outside his home. Maybe the survivor slipped through. Maybe the Broken lost its rhythm. Whatever the reason, it hadn't found what it wanted.
Warren had crossed its path at just the right moment.
Too late for it. Just in time for everyone else.
Either way, it had come too close. Closer than it should've. And Warren didn't like what that said about tomorrow.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LEVEL 1 REACHED]
Warren Smith — Level 1
Alignment: Aberrant
Title: None
Unallocated Stat Points: 2
Attributes:
Strength 6
Perception 8
Intelligence 9
Dexterity 7
Endurance 7
Resolve 10
Skills at Level 1:
None available
Warren froze.
Not from fear. Not from pain. Something else. The text shimmered across his vision thin and sharp, like it had been waiting for him to see it. Not on a screen. Not projected. Internal. Personal.
He'd never seen anything like it.
The word Aberrant pulsed faintly in the corner of his vision, etched there with a presence that felt both cold and watchful. It didn't flicker. just vanished.
Stillness was all that remained.