Chapter 1 part 1
The atmosphere and urban decay of Noctis-V
Kael's mindset, cynicism, habits, and history
The negotiation with the contact and layered tension
His prep environment, gear, inner thoughts, old trauma
The journey to the Citadel perimeter
His first real sense of "something wrong beneath the job"
Chapter 1 – "The Red Vault"
Part 1 – "Job on the Table"(Expanded to ~2,500 words)
The city never truly slept. It didn't breathe, didn't rest, didn't pause—it simply recycled. Noctis-V was built on bones: concrete bones, blood bones, the bones of ideas that should have stayed buried. Above, artificial stars blinked out of sync, digital specks projected onto a ceiling of steel and atmospheric ash. Below, people survived in motion. You stopped moving, you got noticed. You got noticed, you got erased.
Kael Ardent moved.
His coat flared behind him as he turned off the main artery and stepped into a narrow service alley between two derelict blood clinics. The neon signage above flickered in aggressive contradiction: NOOD in blinking pink, BLOOD in red. One hadn't worked properly in years, the other never needed to. The rain hissed off his coat, bouncing off the polymer mesh with a low sizzle. Synthetic precipitation, loaded with trace silver and atmospheric bleach. Sanitizing the streets without actually cleaning them. A performance.
He flicked a damp synth-cig to life between two fingers. The ignition coil on his glove sparked dimly—older tech, homemade, held together with copper thread and memory tape. The flame was blue, the smoke cinnamon-acid, a flavor called Afterburn.
A shape emerged from the mist at the alley's mouth.
No sound, no footstep. Just motion—liquid, deliberate, masked.
The contact.
Even this far beneath the Citadel, they wore a distortion veil: a cascade of shadow that shimmered where a face should be. Their coat was long, collared, stitched with encoded thread that shimmered faintly under Kael's optical filter. He tagged three concealed weapon outlines at a glance. The posture screamed trained—but not corporate. Not law. Definitely not human-enforcement. Probably Clade-affiliated.
"Kael Ardent," the voice said. Neither male nor female. It had an artificial calm. The kind you heard in prayer halls and autopsy theaters. "You came."
Kael took a long drag and let the smoke curl out slowly. "You're lucky. I was one bad feeling away from binning the message."
"Then luck favors us both."
He hated that answer. Too easy. Like it had been waiting.
The contact extended a flat obsidian data case. Kael didn't reach for it.
"Details first."
"Sector V-0. Sub-Citadel access. Vault tier designation: 'Black Rose'. Entry route: Ember Ring catacombs. Open only with the embedded key."
Kael's gaze narrowed. "Sector V-0's locked down. Even the Clades pretend it doesn't exist."
"Precisely."
"You want me to go under Ember jurisdiction, into a sealed vault no one talks about, marked with a black designation... and just grab a file?"
"Not just a file. A code-string. Raw bloodcode. Sequence label: VRE-0."
Kael exhaled slowly. "Primeclade origin."
The veil didn't flicker.
"No one deals in Primeclade strands," Kael muttered. "They were purged. Even Synapse deleted their archives. Anything left from them is either corrupted or cursed."
"The client disagrees."
"Then the client's an idiot. Or desperate."
Silence.
Kael stared at the case. He didn't touch it. Not yet. "You offering hazard pay for a ghost hunt?"
"You'll be paid in memory currency." The contact opened their other hand. Resting in the palm was a small black coin—flat and glossy, with shifting script across its face.
A Vanta shard.
Kael blinked once.
Those weren't used for trade. They were used to erase things—identities, histories, entire memories. It was a kill token—worth more than anything you could carry.
"You don't even know what's in that vault," Kael said. "And you're offering a Vanta shard for it?"
"We don't need to know," the contact said. "We only need it opened."
Kael's fingers twitched.
"You open it, you copy the file, you exit. Leave everything else."
"Which means there's something else."
A pause.
Then, flatly: "There is always something else."
Kael reached out and took the shard. It felt cold through his glove. The data case followed. He slipped both into a lock compartment stitched inside his coat, next to his emergency injector and a sacramental blade he hadn't used in five years.
He looked up.
"I ever find out this is a setup, I'm coming back," he said. "You'll see my face before you stop breathing."
The veil didn't flinch. "Ghosts don't threaten. They haunt."
The figure turned and melted into the alley's mist, disappearing as silently as they'd arrived.
Kael walked.
Not far—two blocks through flooded gutters and a rusted-out station hub that used to be a chapel before someone turned it into a vape den. Noctis-V reconfigured like that. Holy one year, hellish the next. He passed three veinborn peddlers whispering branded blood offers to passersby, a preacher speaking in tongues to a wall of moss, and a dying streetlight clicking like it was trying to remember the concept of light.
He ducked through a defunct shuttle gate marked "PRIVATE – CLERIC PASS ONLY", pried open a panel behind the stairs, and crawled into the old maintenance shaft beneath. Forty seconds of crawling, another twelve hacking a magseal, and the wall opened into his den.
Home.
A gutted, unregistered railcar, bolted into the skeleton of an unused junction tunnel. Half the walls were lined with flexible screens, each covered in cluttered code, old maps, voltage readouts. There was no bed. Just a floor mattress and a hammock rigged between two suspension bars. The smell of ozone and solder clung to everything.
Kael stripped the coat, dropped it on the nearest pipe, and sat.
For a while, he said nothing.
His cyberdeck booted with a blink, mapping out the route the chip's coordinates described. He watched the lines crawl across the screen: through the Ember Ring's outer sanctum, past two defunct security rings, and down into an area marked "Obsolete Infrastructure: Not Maintained."
Yeah, he thought, that's the best kind of lie.
He pulled a toolkit from the wall, checked the blade on his short halberd, inspected the portable nullifier, loaded a patch-kit into his belt rig. Two syringes of marrow-restorative. One vial of refined sacrament blood. One injection of stop-spike for if things really went sideways.
Then he sat again.
And thought.
The shard sat next to his deck, pulsing faintly.
Primeclade.
He'd read the name maybe four times in his life. Once in a restricted Shroud archive. Once on a gravestone that had no body under it. Once in a dream.
No one mentioned them anymore. Not in polite society. Not in slums. Not in whispers.
"Simple data pull," he muttered.
The shard gave no answer.
Kael grabbed his coat, sheathed his gear, and headed toward the surface.
(to be continued in next message – continuing same scene to meet full 2,500-word goal)
Continuing directly from the midpoint of Part 1 – "Job on the Table", expanding to fulfill the full ~2,500 word scene:
The route to the Citadel's outer access point was a living anatomy of Noctis-V's worst organs. He passed between layers of crumbling city strata, from the corrosion-scabbed utility arteries to the fungus-wrapped heat veins beneath decommissioned bio-reactors. Trash floated in midair—poly-drone husks, expired med-patches, and shimmering orbs of commercial blood, half-evaporated from broken dispensers.
He moved fast, but not rushed. Kael wasn't new to suicidal jobs. He'd stolen organ ledgers from Synapse sanctums, bled information from Shroud temples, even walked out of a Vantros party with the heiress's tongue drive in his back pocket. But this… this had a different flavor. The wrong kind of silence. The kind that pressed in and made you sweat under armor.
The Citadel loomed as he approached.
Obsidian spires pierced the fog, capped with augur towers that rotated like mechanical eyes. Their surfaces shimmered with reactive runes—ancient ones, etched by hands long dust. Noctis-V's skyline bent around them like the rest of the city knew better than to encroach. The base of the Citadel, however, was more terrifying than its peak. Massive arched gates, reinforced sanctum walls, security drones in full crawl-mode along the perimeter. This was no longer architecture.
It was ritual made into fortress.
Kael circled south, to a maintenance ladder hidden behind a corpse-shed alcove. The gate had long since rusted. He pried it open with a shiv, ducked through, and dropped down a chute into total darkness.
His boots hit metal. Dust sprayed up like dry ash.
He clicked on his headlamp and found himself inside a tunnel of half-melted rune panels. Most were dead. Some still whispered to themselves in faint glyphs. He pulled out a shard-scanner, watching the signal pulse with every step.
Eventually, the passage narrowed.
He reached a sealed conduit box marked only by a three-line insignia—one he didn't recognize. It pulsed faintly under the scanner's beam.
"Vault Tier: Black Rose"
His breath fogged. Why is it so cold down here?
He crouched, jacked in the chip, and watched the walls breathe open. Panels rotated, sections of the tunnel folding back like a blooming flower made of bone and steel. Cold mist rushed outward, smelling faintly of iron and old breath.
No.
Not breath.
Stale blood.
As he stepped inside, his boots echoed off cathedral-tall walls. He looked up—and froze.
This wasn't just a vault. It was a sanctum.
High ribs curved overhead like the inside of a beast's spine. Shelves of crimson-core data bulbs lined the walls, humming with low, sub-bass resonance. Each one glowed with its own frequency. Each one watched him. At the center was a platform—elevated slightly, ringed with black glyphs that flickered faintly with the same language he'd seen etched into the Vanta shard.
He approached slowly.
The center glyph pulsed once as he stepped inside.
His HUD flared.
> ENTRY CONFIRMED – PRIMECLD PROTOCOL
> IDENT: UNAUTHORIZED
> WARNING: BOND INITIATION POSSIBLE
> DO NOT PROCEED
Kael paused.
Then stepped forward.
A whisper danced through the air—not sound. Language. Not one he understood. It bypassed his ears, cutting directly into the meat of his thoughts.
The air thickened. The glyph circle lit up.
Then something opened.
Not a hatch. Not a file.
A sarcophagus.
Its shell cracked down the middle like an eyelid parting. Cold mist gushed out in thick waves. A heart that had not beat in a hundred years began to murmur again.
Inside it… a girl.
No—not a girl.
Something worse.
Something sacred.
And something very awake.