"Alright... let's open this cage," Kael muttered, voice low, fragmented like static crackling through frayed comm wires.
His thumb slid onto the biometric scanner embedded beside the reinforced steel door. A chorus of soft blue pulses raced vertically in a hypnotic loop, electric veins chasing one another beneath the glass. With a guttural clang, the lock disengaged—vault-like—releasing its grip.
Inside, darkness settled like sediment. Not the blind kind you fear, but the kind you carry, buried beneath your skin.
A synthetic hum stirred as Kael stepped across the threshold. Above, fluorescents flickered with sterile indifference, bathing the chamber in an antiseptic haze. Matte black panels lined the walls, alive with embedded magnets thrumming in silent resonance. Weapons hung like dormant predators—sleek silhouettes forged from angles and chrome—each a relic forged in the crucible of mercenary nights, betrayals tasted bitter and deep.
These were not tools of mere destruction.
They were threads woven from the fabric of his past.
Rifles stolen from corpses of dead gangs, blades gifted by ghosts long faded, firearms born from outlaw hands and ex-military engineers who'd escaped death's grasp only to haunt the streets instead. Every scarred surface whispered stories — of survival, loss, and the fine line between predator and prey.
Above it all, flickering crimson glyphs burned into a dark metal backdrop, words etched like a curse, a creed:
THREADS ARE WRITTEN IN BLOOD.
Beneath the ominous inscription, Kael's HUD blinked steady:
KAEL RHYNE // CLASS BLACK THREAD // GHOST LVL.00 // TRACE 0.00
His boots pressed soft, deliberate on the cold floor. In the center, a table awaited — cluttered with battery cores, bio-mags thrumming with latent energy, high-density plasma cartridges coiled like sleeping serpents.
His hand moved, practiced, reaching upward.
Fingers closed around the grip of a pistol—sleek and lethal, like a femme fatale dressed in carbon and neon, dark elegance wrapped in cold steel.
VIRRX FANG // "THE LAST WHISPER"
The piece pulsed faintly, almost sentient in his grasp. Compact, lethal — carbon-fold alloy framed beneath a living bio-synthetic skin. Its semi-translucent surface revealed slow-pulsing red veins like circuitry coursing with blood. The grip contracted with subtle muscle-like filaments, synchronizing with Kael's touch. Voice-locked, keyed to his DNA and neural patterns — a weapon forged for a ghost.
His HUD streamed data — a cascade of stats, a digital heartbeat.
Carbon-bone chassis. Filament muscle trigger system. Redline activation protocol. Last cycle synced one heartbeat ago.
A deep gouge marred the left barrel — a clawmark of memory.
"Got that on that corpo job. Stubborn bitch," Kael muttered with a crooked smirk, holstering the Fang beneath his jacket with reverence.
Next came a hilt — deceptively simple but humming with latent menace.
MORPH-BLADE // VANTA SHARD
The blade unfurled with a whisper, slicing the stale air like a razor through shadow.
From the hilt extended a monomolecular katana. Cybernetic veins ran crimson along its edge, flickering softly under the cold light like a pulse struggling to stay alive. The metal shimmered with ghostly iridescence — part weapon, part artifact.
He spun the Shard, letting years of muscle memory settle like a second skin. Familiar. Deadly. An extension of himself.
"Viren Draven… you ancient bastard," Kael breathed into the empty room. "Your blade still sings."
His fingers traced the edge. Systems pulsed under lock—tied to neural codes of the blade's original master. Kael's access was incomplete; its deeper functions held hostage by legacy blood. But the blade answered still — to him, to blood, to death.
He twisted the hilt and the monomolecular edge retracted smoothly, collapsing into a sleek combat knife. The Shard slid magnetically into its sheath by his hip, silent as a predator's breath.
Turning to leave, his gaze snagged on a gleam against the floor — a flicker of cold silver.
A coin.
He crouched, fingers brushing the metal.
One face bore the faded emblem of a long-dead city mint — a relic of value and promise. He flipped it.
The other side stared back — a cracked skull, etched with thread-thin fractures, mocking, unforgiving.
A ghost of a memory slid through his mind like a garbled radio frequency — distant but never gone.
"Kikan Coin," he whispered, voice low and cracked like static bleeding through a dead channel.
2069.
The past fell like a hammer.
×××
FLASHBACK :: 2069
The sound hit first.
Not a knock—never a knock.
A blunt concussion, like a riot fist slamming iron. Again. Louder. Fist against steel, steel that remembered every bruise.
The rust-choked door groaned like it was praying for death.
Kael Rhyne's eyes snapped open.
Same man. Different coffin.
No ink marked his left arm—just pale, unbranded flesh marred by old bruises and sleeping nerves. The skin looked untouched, unfinished. As if even his body hadn't decided what it was becoming yet.
His neck bore early graft lines—faint scars where tech met meat—but the real chrome hadn't come. Not yet. No active mesh. No uplink nodes. Just shallow, surgical traces where the future would burrow in.
No matte-black hexagon either. That cold implant—the one that would later anchor his spinal interface—wasn't there. The skin where it would live was still his own, pulsing quietly beneath the grime and sweat.
But the nasal mod was already in. A thin bridge of alloy ran along the center of his nose, seamless with flesh, laced with X-shaped biolights that shimmered soft orange when he exhaled. Standard-grade airflow regulator. Low-end corp tech. Designed to filter toxins, smog, and nerve gas—too many of which haunted Omnis' lower sectors.
And his eyes...
They already glowed.
Not bright, not loud. But deep.
Red.
Burning like two moons caught in orbit.
Not natural. Not cosmetic.
Factory mod, black market fit—spliced optic firmware built for combat reflex and low-light tracking. A blood-hued gaze that made people flinch before he ever spoke.
The room was a concrete crypt barely pretending to be shelter. Mold had colonized every seam of the drywall. An old fluorescent buzzed with death above, its light stuttering like a dying heartbeat. No windows. No screens. No net uplink. The air was thick with mildew, piss, and the stale ghost of fried noodles left to rot.
He lay on a mattress that had long since abandoned the idea of comfort. One spring jabbed into his shoulder. Another scraped his spine.
He blinked. Once. Twice.
Another slam at the door. Harder. It rattled the hinges like bones in a bag.
Kael groaned into the sour darkness.
"INCOMING, MOTHERFUCKERS!" his voice scraped, the sound frayed with acid and hangover static. "You break it, you're paying rent too!"
He rolled off the mattress like a corpse waking up late. Barefoot. Faded black tee clinging to his sweat. Jeans worn thin at the knees. No armor. No weapons. No time.
Cold air cut his soles. He coughed. Spat. Stumbled.
"I'm so fucking sick of this place," he muttered, the words gravel under his breath.
Then—he opened the door.
And the city sent its ghosts.
Three shadows waited under the hallway's flickering red light, blurred like glitches in Kael's retinas. Their outlines were wrong. Too still. Too sharp. Like they had been rendered with violence in mind.
They didn't step forward.
They arrived.
The Black Teeth.
Enforcers of blood contracts and unforgiven debts. Corporate assassins turned freelance nightmares. Their names weren't on the grid. Their footprints didn't register in surveillance. But in the criminal underworld of OMNIS, their silhouette was enough to freeze hearts mid-beat.
Kael's pulse flatlined.
Akari stood to the left.
Hair like onyx data strands, half her skull shaved raw to expose neural coils pulsing with ghostcode. Her body was wrapped in a chrome-thread bodysuit that shimmered like mercury in motion, form-fitting and flawless. Her eyes were white voids, feline slits that scanned Kael like a locked target. Her left arm—a bloom of syringe-tipped filaments and bone-knives folded into techflesh, waiting to unfold.
Sudo, to the right.
A monolith. Seven feet, muscles molded like riot armor. Eyes obsidian and pupil-less. His jawline looked carved from abandoned monorail steel. His right arm twitched, glitched—living wires looping through his shoulder to wrist, uncoiling and recoiling like a serpent ready to strike.
And at the center—against the doorframe—stood the one Kael dreaded most.
Tetsu. Karakuri Jaw.
A myth that still made veteran mercs whisper at dive bars.
His face was half-machine, sealed from nose to chin behind a cyberplate that hummed faintly, etched with old Kanji glyphs Kael couldn't read. No lips. No emotion. Just a vented speaker embedded in the throat that growled like static over rusted blades.
Tetsu stepped forward.
There was no warning. Just violence.
His boot hit Kael's gut with military precision. Speed beyond human. Kael flew backward like trash off a magrail, slammed the wall, and folded to the floor.
Pain detonated in his chest. His lungs spasmed. A cough ejected blood across the ceramic tile.
They entered.
Not like men.
Like errors in the world.
Kael groaned, trying to rise.
But his vision fractured.
The red in his eyes flared—then glitched, spiking into a static bloom. HUD overlays stuttered to life uninvited, bleeding corrupted data across his retina like a virus at war with itself.
Names. Numbers. Dead code.
ERROR: REZ-32a.
[—UNRESOLVED TARGET—]
RYHNE, KAEL — DEBT OUTSTANDING
KIKAN COIN ISSUED :: T-30d
IDENT [BLACK TEETH] — STAND BY
WARNING: VITALS CRITICAL.
Text bled over text. A cascade of red-on-red, flickering across his vision like memories trying to reboot.
He blinked hard, once, twice—but the glitches danced behind his eyelids. A low whine rang in his skull. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he could hear his own name being whispered like a system echo.
His breath caught.
Akari's voice slid across the room like a whisper soaked in poison. "This dump smells like desperation and failed dreams."
Tetsu's mechanical voice grated through the air.
"Then he fits right in."
The room chilled.
Kael dragged himself upright, back against the wall. Every rib screamed. His face was already bruising.
Tetsu towered above him.
"Where's the money, Mr. Rhyne?" the jaw growled.
Kael gasped. His voice came out fractured. "I… just need a little more time."
Tetsu didn't respond.
Instead, he lifted Kael by the throat like he weighed nothing.
Kael's boots left the floor.
From beneath his sleeve, the cyberarm hissed and split open.
A blade emerged.
Seraph Fangs—curved, ceramic-white, lined with pulsewires that danced with static energy. The weapon was infamous. Designed for swift decapitations and neural laceration. Illegal on all levels.
It hummed beside Kael's neck.
Sudo tilted his head, finally speaking.
"The boss said… no money, bring the head."
Tetsu leaned in.
"Kuro-Hachibara doesn't wait."
Kael fought the air. His feet kicked. His hands clawed for the floor.
The blade licked his skin.
"I can get it!" he choked out. "A gig. One big score. Just one month. I'll bring back double."
Tetsu's eye slits narrowed.
"Double?"
His voice sounded amused. Or maybe disappointed.
"You gamble with time, Rhyne. You're not built to win."
A pause.
Akari scanned Kael again. Her eyes blinked into HUD mode.
"He's not bluffing. His vitals spike, but no pattern of deception."
Sudo's eyes flickered. A neural uplink pulsed behind them.
"Kuro accepts," he confirmed. "One cycle. Thirty days. No extensions."
Tetsu dropped Kael. Hard.
Kael hit the floor coughing blood and sucking oxygen like it was currency.
Tetsu turned toward the hallway.
A flick of metal.
Something slid across the floor.
A silver coin.
It clinked once. Then again. Then spun in a slow, beautiful pirouette before falling flat—dead silent.
Tetsu didn't turn back.
His voice echoed behind him.
"Kikan Coin."
"Your time starts now, ghost."
And just like that—they were gone.
Back into the red-lit hallway.
Back into the city veins.
Back into the shadowed web of OMNIS that never truly lets you go.
The door hissed and sealed itself behind them, a tired click of old servos and failing locks—like even the apartment was relieved they left.
Kael stayed there. Staring.
Chest heaving.
Blood between his teeth.
The coin shimmered on the ground like a countdown dressed in silver.
He reached out. Fingers trembling.
The metal felt warm in his palm. Heavy like fate.