Chapter 2, Part 1: The Scout and the Shadow
The scream found him in the hollow between breaths.
Young, bright with terror—the kind that cuts through dust like a clean blade. KrysKo's head lifted a degree; feet stilled on broken asphalt; ears triangulated.
[AUDIO LOCK] Female, ~18–20; distress; distance 116 m; bearing 041°. [ADVISORY] Hostile voices overlapping (3–4). [TERRAIN MAP] Collapsed overpass; vehicle graveyard; multiple occlusions.
He didn't think should I. He moved.
The highway curled into a field of skeletal cars half-swallowed by ivy, bus frames laced with rust, glass powdered to glittering grit. Wind crept under the bridge and made a thin organ sound. The scent arrived before the scene: cheap alcohol, hot metal, human breath turned sour with excitement.
He slid to the lip of the overpass, low. Below: three men and a boy on the cusp of manhood—knives, a cleaver, a stub-nosed pistol with a cracked grip. The girl was pinned against a jersey barrier. One fist tore fabric. Another pair of hands pinned her shoulders, grinning through broken teeth.
Her eyes found KrysKo—wide, then steady. The plea landed without sound.
[QUEST UNLOCKED] — Humanity's Choice. Save the girl or walk away. Reward: Unknown. Consequence: Trajectory.
For one breath, the system let the world hold its options like scales.
He went.
He dropped clean—no shout, no warning. The first raider realized the shadow had shape when KrysKo's heel lifted the ground to meet his jaw. Teeth and blood arced; the man folded, boneless.
The cleaver-man reacted fast. Horizontal swing—blade shrieked against concrete. KrysKo slid into ginga, center line fluid, hips speaking rhythm. Step-right feint, sway-left; the cleaver kissed air. His leg scythed low—rasteira—and the man's feet lost their contract with earth. He hit hard; KrysKo's elbow found the sternum before breath could remember itself. A short metallic hiss—the forearm blades whispering free—and bronze rip sang from hip to collarbone. The cleaver clattered. The man did not rise.
The gunman jerked up, desperate. KrysKo inverted, palms to asphalt, legs scissoring into a meia-lua de compasso; his foot crushed the pistol hand. Bones cracked. The gun spun away under a dead sedan.
The youngest ran.
KrysKo was there—one, two—and the boy's hood met the barrier. Not enough force to break him; enough to smother momentum. A pulse trembled beneath KrysKo's palm.
"Drop it," KrysKo said. Calmer than the wind.
The knife rang on concrete.
Silence searched for its balance. The last raider—the one who'd pinned the girl—darted. KrysKo's blade moved in a quiet cross. Surprise registered at how easily bodies come apart.
[COMBAT REPORT] Hostiles neutralized (4). [DAMAGE] Minor (abrasion, left knuckle). [EXP] +210. [ACQUIRED] 12 Corrupted Shards, 1 Pustule Node. [EFFICIENCY] 61% → 66%.
Blades retracted. The girl didn't flinch at the sound; she had no breath left for flinching. Her blouse was torn; a raw scrape burned along her shoulder. She held herself small but upright—defiance surviving on stubborn instinct.
"You—" She swallowed. "You saved me."
"You would have bled," he said. True, and insufficient.
She drew the fabric closed with shaking hands, eyes never leaving his face. "What are you?"
He considered weapon and rejected it. "KrysKo," he said—the name fitting like a tool you'd forgotten you owned. "KrysKo O'Ruadhraigh."
"Kara," she said. "Kara Myles."
She staggered. He offered stability without touch, stepping so her legs could find a line. "We should move," he said. "The noise will carry."
Kara nodded, practicality swallowing panic. She stooped and grabbed a small satchel. Clay vials clinked like patient hearts. "East," she said. "Old thoroughfare toward University lands."
"Lead," he answered, falling in beside her like a shadow that had decided to walk.
They left the overpass and the world changed texture. Asphalt surrendered to root and moss; green insistence pried apart the seams of civilization. Shopfronts gaped like mouths losing teeth. Solar glass was veined with creeping crystal—the lingering signature of Architect residue. Ivy that wasn't ivy pulsed faintly under its own skin, bioluminescence exhaling through capillary threads.
Kara's hands spoke a traveler's vocabulary—palm down: slow; two taps to thigh: halt; fingers lifted: listen. Each signal, KrysKo matched without waste. She glanced once; respect adjusted itself a degree.
They paused at a rot-scabbed bus fused around a triumphant tree. Weathered paint still carried a phrase: WE REMEMBER. Kara brushed dirt from the letters with her knuckles.
"Who?" he asked.
"Those who didn't cross the Silence," she said. "Those who did. Sometimes we don't know who we're remembering. We just know we should."
Wind moved through broken panes. The city watched them with a thousand dark windows.
[ENV SCAN] Air quality: moderate. Particulates ↑ in low corridors. [THERMALS] Minor fauna; low threat. [ANOMALY] Architect crystalline deposits (trace). Avoid direct contact.
They cut through a skeleton of greenhouses—the Glass Gardens. Webs of pane and frame made their own dim weather: damp, breath-warm air even in cold. Vines thick as wrists climbed ribs of steel. Somewhere, patient water dripped.
Kara slipped; KrysKo's hand found her elbow before gravity could file a claim. She looked at the fingers—those slightly-longer forearms, tendon lines clean under skin—and then up at him.
"Thanks," she said. Simple. Meant.
He released. "Step along the beam, not the pane," he told her. "More honest."
A quick smile—somewhere she still kept light. "I'll borrow that."
In a cracked atrium, a mural survived: children's painted hands ringed around a tree. Kara hovered a palm over a small blue print. "Do the Drakari have children here?" she asked, hush-soft. "Not in stories. In streets. Gardens."
"Some," he said. The word carried a faint echo, as if spoken by a file from far away.
"And they're safe? In University lands?"
"Safer than outside."
"You answer so I won't break," she said, not unkind. "You never promise."
"Promises are currency. I don't know which ones I own."
The smile faded. They moved on.
The ground shivered.
KrysKo's weight slid to the balls of his feet—loose, ready. Kara felt it too—the way soil hums a warning before a bad thing surfaces. Mulch rippled; then eyes—too many—caught green in the dim.
[ALERT] Subterranean motion → emergent. [ID] Engineered vermin ("Skull Rats," colloquial). [COUNT] 21. [THREAT] Swarm; corrosive bite; rapid adaptation.
They boiled out—rats once, now gear-collared, cranial plates peeled like grisly petals to expose latticed brain pulsing sickly yellow. Ammonia and hot copper burned the air.
Kara was already moving—backing to higher rubble, satchel open. "Don't let them bracket you!" she called. "They stack!"
Stack they did—three wide, two high—ladders of hate. KrysKo slid into ginga: low, open, the rhythm that makes everything else possible. First wave: a half-step left and a forward blade drew a clean line through three; momentum fed heel into a fourth. It cracked; it died.
"Back!" Kara snapped. She bit a gut-string, spat it, hurled a clay bulb. It burst wetly; a mint-sharp sting flooded the air. Half the pack veered, hacking, eyes pouring. The deeper-yellow skulls pushed through—learning, angry.
KrysKo changed tempo—rasteira hook-kick; armada to flank. A leaper latched onto his calf—pain flared bright and useful.
[DAMAGE] Dermal breach; corrosive agent detected; auto-repair engaged. [ACQUIRED] 3 Corrupted Shards.
He drove his knee up; the rat became a smear.
"Left," Kara warned.
He pivoted before the word finished, blade halving a midair skull along the axis of its hunger.
Another bulb shattered behind him. Chalk detonated. Milk-white fog erased depth. For a heartbeat he fought by sound and map alone—the scrape of claw, the hiss of breath, the humble chime of his inner gyroscope keeping the world true.
A body fell wrong. Not his.
Kara's back hit glass ribs. An old one—scar-lipped, mottled, collar ticking like a grave clock—had climbed the frame and dropped. It found leather, then skin.
KrysKo crossed the space in a handful of impossible steps. No dance now—just a straight line of decision. His hand closed on spine and pulled. Flesh parted; tendons screamed. He kept pulling until the rat came apart in ragged halves, then flung the pieces away with a tremor he hadn't intended.
The swarm cracked. Survivors fled into holes; the day swallowed their small, mean sounds.
[COMBAT REPORT] Skull Rats eliminated (21). [EXP] +160. [ACQUIRED] 42 Corrupted Shards, 1 Pustule Node.
Silence tried—and failed—to settle.
Kara's breath hitched; blood shaped a dark V. Her hands fumbled straps—stubborn, shaking. KrysKo knelt; one palm found her wrist—gentle; the other pressed the wound.
Heat moved from him into her—no flame, just the steadier hum of the Drakari alloy riding his core. Nanites woke like soft avalanches beneath his palm and whispered instructions to torn tissue they remembered from manuals older than the ruin outside.
Kara hissed, then blinked as pain unclenched. "What… is that?"
"Field dressing," he said. True. Not all of it.
"You ripped that thing in half," she said. Not accusation—night's fact on the table.
"Yes."
"You don't sleep. You don't eat. Your blood… smells wrong." Her gaze tracked his forearms. The inlet seam was subtle, not invisible. "You fight like a man whose bones learned someone else's song."
He didn't answer. Nothing he could say would be smaller than the question she'd actually asked.
[SOCIAL] Trust threshold 58% → 61%. [ADVISORY] Partial disclosure may increase mission cohesion. [COUNTER-ADVISORY] Strategic ambiguity preserves optionality.
He released her wrist. "I know functions. Parameters. I know the way to the University."
"That's not what I—" She let it go. "Fine. For now."
They walked until light forgot words. In a collapsed atrium they made a camp no bigger than two breaths. Kara strung tiny copper bells across the entrance—old caravan trick. KrysKo sat the threshold and listened to the night do arithmetic.
Thin stew: bitter greens, jerky, a mint-sharp pinch. Steam drew fragile shapes. "You don't eat," she said.
"Not as you do."
"You have a heartbeat," she murmured, curious more than wary. "But it doesn't sync with your breathing."
"It syncs with other things." He found a corner of humor that didn't feel like his.
She huffed despite the day. "Strange."
"So I'm told."
She slept with her hand inside the satchel—metal, glass, tools, small certainties under her palm. "Second watch," she mumbled.
"I won't need—"
"I didn't ask if you need me," she said, already gone. "Wake me."
He nodded to the dark, and kept it.
Time smoothed. Far off, a train horn tried to remember tracks that no longer existed. Telemetry hummed—wind speed, particulate, thermal flickers the size of mice, the size of ghosts. The bells did not stir.
A hollow found the room.
Not motion—the absence where something had been. The world shifted a degree colder with no drop in temperature. KrysKo rose, blades asleep but interested.
A shadow near the atrium's slit of sky attended him. Patient as geometry. No breath. No dust. Presence like a solved equation.
He reached for classification the way a hand reaches for a familiar shelf.
[CLASSIFY] …Error. [RECLASSIFY] …Error. […REDACTED]
The sense of you are seen pressed gently against the inside of his skull.
He did not speak, and whatever it was did not speak, and between them a word seemed to burn quietly: Prototype.
A bell trembled. Kara stirred. He looked at her; looked back; nothing remained but air and the small ache of empty space regaining itself.
[NOTE] Unknown entity encountered. Classification locked. [ADVISORY] Do not pursue.
Kara rubbed her eyes. "What is it?"
"Weather," he said—small enough a lie it could almost be true.
Continue Reading
The identity of the shadow remains unknown, but KrysKo and Kara must press on toward the University. Find out what happens next when they encounter the Drakari Patrol in Chapter 2, Part 2: The Vanguard's Veil.