The Ghost didn't move.
It simply hung in the air at the top of the ladder shaft, a silent, shimmering question mark in the darkness.
Michael didn't breathe.
He didn't dare.
His heart was a frantic, wild bird trapped in his ribs.
He took a slow, deliberate step backward, melting deeper into the shadows of Conduit Zero.
The Ghost didn't follow.
It just watched.
Its presence was a cold weight on his soul, a pressure that had nothing to do with the tons of rock and river above him.
He knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that it was scanning him.
Not with technology.
With something far older. Far more invasive.
It was tasting his energy, memorizing the unique flavor of his Void-tainted soul.
Then, as silently as it appeared, it was gone.
The shimmering distortion vanished.
Michael waited, every nerve screaming, for a full minute.
Nothing.
He finally let out the breath he was holding, his lungs burning.
It wasn't a chase. Not yet.
It was a tagging.
It had marked him. Now it would let the environment, the other monsters, do the work. It would wait for him to get weak, to get tired, and then it would collect him.
He had to move.
Fast.
He turned and plunged deeper into the dead conduit, his feet making soft, shuffling sounds on the debris-strewn floor.
The air in here was different.
It was stale, dead air.
The faint, electric hum of the city was gone, replaced by a profound, unnerving silence.
The only light came from his own faint aura, a product of his Void Reaper senses.
He checked his status.
[VE: 25/125]
He was running on fumes.
Opening the Arcana Gate had taken almost everything he had.
He couldn't afford to waste energy on flashy moves. He had to be efficient. Lethal.
He heard a sound up ahead.
SKITTER-SKITTER-CLICK.
It was the sound of too many legs on concrete.
From the shadows, a creature emerged.
It looked like a crab, but made of bone and rust. Its shell was a fused mass of ancient rebar and human skeletal remains. Its eyes were tiny, glowing red pinpricks of malevolent light.
[LV. 6 CORROSION CRAWLER IDENTIFIED]
It was a scavenger, a creature born from the Gate's lingering energy and the debris of the tunnel collapse.
It hissed, raising its chipped, bony claws.
Michael didn't hesitate.
He didn't have the energy for a flashy Shadow Step.
He ran forward, his movement low and fluid.
The Crawler lunged. CLANG!
Its claw struck the spot where his head had been a second before.
Michael slid under its body, the jagged edges of its shell scraping his back.
He twisted, the Reaper's Fang already in his hand.
He drove the black dagger upward, into the soft, unprotected joint where its leg met its body.
SLASH!
The blade, imbued with the last dregs of his Void Energy, slid through the creature's essence like it was water.
The Crawler let out a silent, pained shriek, its red eyes flickering.
It stumbled, its leg severed.
Michael was already moving, vaulting onto its back and driving the dagger deep into its central nerve cluster.
SQUELCH.
The creature collapsed, its red eyes going dark.
[CORROSION CRAWLER KILLED. 6 EXP GAINED.]
He was breathing hard.
Even that simple fight had drained him.
He looked at his energy bar.
[VE: 15/125]
Dangerously low.
He knelt by the dead monster. It didn't have a core, not a stable one. Just a messy clump of corrupted energy that was already dissipating.
He remembered the Alchemist's words. The Warden's.
Real mana. Real-world data.
Desperate times.
He placed his palm on the dissipating energy cluster.
He focused his will, not on the forbidden Soul Devour skill, but on a cruder, more basic absorption.
He pulled.
A jolt of raw, gritty energy shot up his arm. It felt like drinking sand and static.
It was dirty. Impure.
But it worked.
[RAW MANA ABSORBED. +5 VE]
It wasn't much, but it was something.
He pushed on, the tunnel stretching endlessly before him.
He thought of his father, in a DGC interrogation room.
He thought of Captain Valerius, her sharp, suspicious eyes.
He thought of Gideon, the shadowy director who had sent his mother to her death.
Rage was a better fuel than void energy.
It kept him warm in the cold, dead dark.
After what felt like an hour, he saw a light ahead.
A faint, flickering orange glow.
A campfire.
His hand went immediately to his dagger.
He crept forward, using the crumbling support pillars as cover.
In a small alcove, a fire crackled in a rusty oil drum.
A figure was hunched over it, poking at the flames with a metal rod.
She wore a patchwork of scavenged DGC armor plates over worn leather. A gas mask with one cracked lens was pushed up onto her forehead, revealing a face streaked with grime and a shock of bright pink hair.
She was roasting something on a spit over the fire.
It looked disturbingly like a Crawler's leg.
Suddenly, she froze.
Without turning, she spoke, her voice a low, raspy growl.
"I can hear your stomach growling from here, kid."
She sighed, and tossed her metal rod to the side.
"You can come out. If you were a Ghost, you'd have tried to phase through my spine by now. If you were a Crawler, you'd be dumber. So that just leaves 'lost and stupid'."
Michael stepped out of the shadows, his dagger held loosely at his side.
The woman turned, her eyes—a startling, electric blue—sizing him up in an instant.
She saw his tattered hoodie, the exhaustion on his face, the black dagger in his hand.
"Fresh meat," she grunted, more to herself than to him. "Freshly Awakened. You've got the stink of a new power all over you."
"Who are you?" Michael asked.
"They call me Jinx," she said, giving a crooked, cynical smile. "Because I have the worst luck in the five boroughs. Case in point, a stray puppy just wandered into my den. What are you running from, kid? DGC? A Guild you pissed off? A bad breakup?"
"Something worse," Michael said.
Jinx's smile faded.
She looked past him, back into the tunnel he'd come from.
Her eyes narrowed.
"Don't tell me," she whispered, a new tension in her voice. "You didn't bring a Ghost down here, did you?"
Before Michael could answer, the air behind him grew cold.
The fire in the oil drum flickered, its flames turning a sickly, pale blue.
Jinx swore, kicking the drum over and plunging the alcove into near-darkness.
"Get down!" she yelled, pulling a heavy, modified energy rifle from her back.
A shimmering distortion appeared at the edge of their camp.
The Ghost.
It had found him.
It raised a hand that was nothing but shimmering, transparent energy.
A ripple in space shot towards them, a wave of pure disruption.
"Phase-Ripper!" Jinx screamed, diving behind a concrete pillar. VWOOM!
The wave hit the wall where they had been standing. The concrete didn't break. It dissolved, turning into a cloud of gray dust that hung in the air.
Jinx peeked out from behind the pillar, her face pale.
"They're not trying to capture you, kid," she said, her voice grim. "That thing is set to erase. They want to wipe you from existence."
The Ghost drifted forward silently, its form flickering in and out of reality, making it an impossible target.
It raised its hand for another attack.
Michael knew what he had to do.
He was the target. He had to draw its fire.
"Hey!" he yelled, his voice cracking. "Ugly! Over here!"
He activated Shadow Step. ZIP!
He appeared directly behind the Ghost, his dagger glowing with a purple-black light.
He thrust the Reaper's Fang forward.
But his blade passed through nothing but air.
The Ghost had already phased, its form becoming completely transparent for a split second.
It reappeared a few feet away, turning its faceless head towards him.
A high-pitched, electronic screech echoed through the tunnel.
It wasn't a sound of aggression.
It was a signal.
A call.
From both ends of the long, dark tunnel, two new distortions shimmered into existence.
They were surrounded.
The Ghost hadn't been hunting him.
It had been herding him.
Right into the kill box.