The world was soundless when Yue opened her eyes.
No sky. No ground. Just the lingering echo of impact, folded into silence so heavy it felt like the universe was holding its breath.
She lay amid floating shards of light — fragments of the Bureau's shattered walls suspended in slow motion, each reflecting her own bewildered face from a different angle. Her ears rang. Her body felt weightless, detached, as if she were still falling through the aftermath of the explosion.
> Ne Job…
The name rose unbidden, cutting through the static in her mind. She tried to move, but her limbs trembled. The air around her was thick with residual divine energy, burned into static motes that crawled across her skin.
Her badge — the one every Bureau assistant carried — flickered weakly at her chest, displaying an error code she'd never seen before.
[⚠ SYSTEM BREACH: ROOT SOURCE UNDEFINED]
"Ugh… that's not in the manual," she muttered, forcing herself upright. Her voice cracked, half-laughing, half-panicked.
Then she saw him.
Ne Job lay a few meters away, unconscious, his robes scorched and faintly glowing. His spiritual signature flickered — unstable, like two frequencies clashing beneath the same waveform. The sight sent a chill through her.
Yue crawled to his side, shaking his shoulders. "Hey— hey, come on, intern, don't you dare go conveniently heroic on me right now!"
No response. Just that same unstable flicker — chaotic energy pulsing beneath his skin. She could feel it through the air, whispering, unbound.
"Okay… think, Yue," she breathed, tapping her forehead. "Containment first, panic later."
She began tracing stabilizing sigils in the air — standard divine triage seals — but the moment her glyphs neared Ne Job's body, the marks twisted, distorting into something alien. The sigils didn't dissolve; they reversed, rearranging themselves into shapes that made no sense.
Symbols she didn't recognize. Symbols that seemed to recognize her.
A pulse of energy erupted, sending her sprawling backward. The floating debris shuddered, orbiting faster, reacting to his heartbeat.
Ne Job groaned — faint but alive. Yue's heart jolted with relief.
Then she heard it — a whisper threading through the still air, like a memory trying to speak.
> "Containment incomplete… divergence detected…"
Yue froze. The voice wasn't his. It was inside him — mechanical, divine, yet strangely human.
She reached out again, more cautious this time. Her hands trembled as she hovered them over his chest, tracing the energy lines. What she saw made her blood run cold.
His spirit wasn't fractured — it was layered.
A mortal core. A divine signature. And beneath both… something far older. A spark that refused to obey structure, radiating patterns that bent the logic of Heaven itself.
> "This… isn't Bureau-grade energy," she whispered.
"This is… chaos."
The word lingered, heavy and forbidden.
And then — a low hum stirred the air.
Across the debris field, a single glyph ignited — the Bureau's insignia.
[RETRIEVAL IN PROGRESS: MEMORY AUDIT PROTOCOL 404]
Her breath caught. "No— no, no, not now—"
Dozens of spectral forms began materializing, draped in the Shard Court's insignia — faceless auditors made of glass and light. They moved silently, scanning the wreckage.
Yue pulled Ne Job close, eyes darting. She was still disoriented, but instinct screamed louder than reason.
They weren't there to rescue. They were there to erase.
> If they find him like this…
Without thinking, Yue pressed her palm to the floor — or whatever passed for ground — and invoked an emergency transfer glyph. It was crude, inefficient, and dangerously unstable in a fractured space like this, but hesitation wasn't an option.
"Hold on, intern," she hissed. "I'm not letting Heaven delete you twice in one day."
The world around them fractured again, reality bending like shattered glass drawn into a spiral. The Shard Auditors turned toward her — too late.
Light swallowed everything.