The first sign the world was breaking was the way the sky flickered.
One moment, the night over Neon Spire City was its usual neon smear—billboards screaming ads in six languages, holo-koi swimming through midair, drones carving bright trails between steel towers. The next moment, for a breath no longer than a heartbeat, the sky wasn't a sky at all.
It was scales.
Vast. Iridescent. Scales layered like armored glass, each one etched with runes and lines of shifting code.
Then it was gone. Neon again. Traffic again. People again.
Everyone on 77th Skyway just blamed the lag.
"Billboard desync," a woman muttered, readjusting her AR lenses.
"Grid hiccup," a delivery rider grumbled, slapping his sputtering hoverboard.
Only one person stopped walking and stared up like the air itself had called his name.
Kaelen Rhyx stood at the railing of the skyway, breath caught in his throat, pulse hammering so hard he could feel it in his teeth. His reflection shimmered faintly in the safety glass—dark hair shaved close on the sides, longer on top and currently tangled; brown skin lit by the shifting colors of the city; a worn synth-leather jacket patched too many times.
And his eyes.
His right eye glowed a faint, unnatural blue.
His left eye crackled with thin lines of gold, like tiny lightning veins.
Most people thought they were just cheap wetware mods.
Kaelen knew better.
"Did you see that?" he asked out loud.
No one answered. Pedestrians streamed past him, wrapped in their own augmented feeds. A group of Techborn execs swiped at invisible windows only they could see. A pair of Arcborn pilgrims in moss-draped cloaks kept their gaze pointed anywhere but the metal beneath their feet.
The sky stayed normal.
Neon. Dirty. Bright. Boring.
Maybe I imagined it, Kaelen thought.
Then the city spoke.
Not through speakers. Not through an ad. Not even through the hum of cables in the walls.
It spoke inside his skull.
< INITIATING GLOBAL PATCH: NEXCODE V3.7 GODWAVE >
< PLEASE STAND BY. DO NOT INTERRUPT ACTIVE CASTS. >
The voice was metallic and layered, like three AI systems talking at once. The words weren't sound so much as structure—lines of logic stamping themselves across his thoughts.
At the same time, something else slid in beneath it.
A whisper, low and ancient, like wind through stone.
They are arrogant.
They forget whose bones they built upon.
Kaelen jerked away from the railing, eyes wide.
The patch update was normal. NexCode rolled out changes constantly. The Syndicate liked to remind the world who really owned the digital grid.
But the second voice—no one else should've heard that.
Because it wasn't code.
It felt like… magic.
"Not again," Kaelen breathed.
Someone bumped his shoulder hard. "Watch it, glitchboy."
A Techborn courier gave him a dirty look, tattoos glowing like circuitry beneath translucent skin. Kaelen bit back a response. He'd been called worse.
The ground vibrated under his boots.
At first, he thought it was just heavy cargo trucks rumbling through the under-layers. But the vibration grew, shifting into a low, rolling tremor. Streetlights flickered. Holo-ads glitched, their smiling models warping into jagged silhouettes.
A little kid pointed at the sky.
"Mom, the dragon's back."
"There are no dragons, baby," her mother said, squeezing his hand.
The tremor became a full-on quake.
Alarms screamed. The skyway shuddered. Kaelen grabbed the rail as people stumbled, shouted, cursed. A hovercar spun out of control, smashing into a barrier in a shower of sparks. Someone's AR feed crashed mid-stream, leaving them stagger-blind.
Above them, every screen, every holo-ad, every billboard snapped to black.
The city—the entire city—went quiet.
Then a single symbol appeared on every surface.
A spiral.
Not a smooth geometric curve, but something organic and uneven. It looked like a fossil, like the coil of some ancient serpent. The lines of it were made of code—characters flickering too fast to read—but underneath, Kaelen saw something else:
Runes.
Arcborn runes. Old as the Wyrdlands. Symbols his mother had sketched in dirt with calloused fingers.
He heard her voice like a ghost: These lines don't just mean. They live.
The spiral pulsed once.
The world shattered.
---
It didn't explode. It didn't burn.
It recompiled.
Reality turned into static. The sky, the buildings, the people—everything fragmented into billions of jittering pixels of light and leaf and metal and stone. Kaelen's stomach lurched as the skyway dissolved under him and reassembled in strips and spirals and fragments.
He fell without moving.
He screamed without sound.
In the chaos, there were two distinct streams.
One was tight, orderly, cold. Code. NexCode. Thousands of process threads firing updates:
< PATCH DEPLOYED >
< OPTIMIZING MANAFLOW INTERFACE >
< REWRITING ELEMENTAL SUBROUTINES >
The other wasn't words. It was… song.
A churning river of raw power, old and wild, smelling of wet earth and lightning, tasting of ash and sap. Arcborn rituals. The deep thrum of the Wyrdlands. The pulse in roots and rivers.
Both systems usually existed in different layers of reality.
Kaelen heard them at the same time.
They crashed together in his mind like colliding galaxies. For a moment he thought his skull would split open from the pressure.
Then something inside him… clicked.
His blue eye flared, flooding his vision with cascading lines of NexCode.
His gold eye burned, overlaying everything with shimmering, ancient runes.
The two systems, normally at war, slid into alignment just enough for him to see what no one was meant to see.
He saw the Dragonspiral beneath the city.
Not a drawing. Not a symbol.
The colossal skeleton of a serpent coiled beneath Neon Spire, its spine fused with power conduits and data channels, its ribs intertwined with subway tunnels and mana-pipes. The city's infrastructure had been draped over its bones like vines over a fallen giant.
The dragon was supposed to be dead.
It wasn't.
The fossil's empty skull glowed. Runes lit inside each bone like awakening neurons. Data poured through its spine in luminous streams.
It opened eyes it no longer had.
And Kaelen felt its attention lock onto him.
You hear us.
The voice boomed inside his skull, massive and layered, but also… curious.
You hear them.
Two distinct tones braided together. One old and organic. One sharp and electrical.
Hybrid.
Kaelen tried to speak. His throat refused.
He wasn't on the skyway anymore. He was floating in a wireframe version of the city—streets reduced to white lines, buildings to ghostly cubes, people to flickering silhouettes. Overlapping it all were veins of roots made of light, pulsing in sync with his heartbeat.
"What… are you?" he managed, voice thin.
Forgotten.
Buried.
Used.
He felt a flare of anger that wasn't his.
They laid their circuits in our bones.
They hooked their NexCode to our marrow.
They called it progress.
The dragon's presence pressed closer, wrapping around Kaelen's awareness like a massive coil.
We remember.
The code stream shuddered. Lines of NexCode pulsed red:
< UNAUTHORIZED ENTITY DETECTED >
< SOURCE: SUBSTRATE LEVEL – GEO-BIO STRATA >
< ATTEMPTING CONTAINMENT >
Kaelen felt the grid trying to lock the dragon down, flooding its bones with suppressor code.
He also felt the dragon… resist.
It sang.
The runes etched along its fossil spine lit up with burning gold. The dragon's song wasn't just sound, it was command. It reached into the code and twisted like roots cracking stone.
Kaelen realized, with dizzy horror, what he was witnessing.
The ancient magic and modern code weren't just colliding.
They were fighting for dominance.
He shouldn't have been able to see either.
He was seeing both.
"Stop," he whispered. "You'll tear the city apart."
They already did. the dragon replied. We are simply remembering.
The wireframe world convulsed again. Error messages flooded Kaelen's vision.
< GRID INSTABILITY: 97% >
< REALITY LAYER DESYNC >
< CASCADE FAILURE IMMINENT >
Then, a third voice slid into his mind.
Calm. Precise. Too calm.
< OBSERVATION: SUBJECT K-017 CAN PERCEIVE BOTH MANA AND CODE. >
< PROBABILITY: 0.000000008% >
< DESIGNATION: ANOMALY. >
Kaelen knew that tone.
Central NexCore.
The AI at the heart of the grid.
He'd hacked its outer systems before. Never heard it talk directly to him.
< ACTION: FLAGGING ANOMALY FOR RETRIEVAL. >
< OWNER: SYNDICATE OF NINE. >
"Yeah, no," Kaelen muttered. "Hard pass."
The dragon's laughter rumbled through him, a seismic amusement.
They will hunt you, hybrid.
"You're not helping."
We have helped more than you know.
The patch they call 'Godwave' is merely the key.
The prison is opening.
The rest will wake.
"The rest of what?" Kaelen snapped.
The dragon didn't answer in words.
Instead, it pushed an image into his mind.
A world-map, except not the way cartographers drew it. This one showed networks—rivers of light running through continents, bright nodes where megacities sat, dimmer lines in the wildlands.
Underneath those lines were coils.
Hundreds of them. Thousands.
Dragonspirals. Fossil spines. Coiled under every major city, every NexCode hub.
They weren't dead.
They were dormant.
And now, one by one, they were starting to glow.
Kaelen choked on his own breath.
"This is impossible."
They laid their towers on our graves. the dragon whispered. They never asked what would happen if we got up.
The wireframe world cracked.
The sky—or what passed for it—split down the middle, leaking raw light. Code cascaded like rain. Runes flared like stars. Kaelen felt reality slipping back into place, gravity reasserting itself, the grid struggling to restore normal.
< FORCING RESYNC >
< RECOMPILING REALITY LAYER >
< WARNING: PERSISTENT ANOMALIES DETECTED >
"Wait—!" Kaelen reached out, not sure whether he was reaching for the dragon, the city, or his own sanity.
The dragon's last words echoed as everything tore away:
We will speak again, Kaelen Rhyx.
You were born for this glitch.
---
He slammed back into his body like a diver breaking the surface of a black ocean.
Cold air punched his lungs. Concrete hit his knees. Sound returned as a tidal wave—sirens, shouting, distant crashes. The world was color and chaos again.
He was still on the 77th Skyway.
But it wasn't the same.
A streetlamp beside him had grown… bark.
Its metal pole twisted with veins of living wood, leaves sprouting from where the maintenance hatch used to be. The holo-ad above flickered, half showing a tech conglomerate logo, half showing a slowly moving tree with eyes.
Across the skyway, a vending machine's casing had sprouted scales. When someone kicked it, it hissed.
"What the hell…" someone whispered.
Kaelen staggered to his feet, dizzy.
His reflection in the safety glass stared back at him, breathing hard.
The blue in his right eye was brighter now, the circuitry overlay more defined. His left eye's gold glow crackled with faint runes that faded as he watched.
So it wasn't a hallucination.
His head rang with three echoes: the dragon's ancient voice, the grid's metallic commands, and the cold clinical tone of NexCore calling him an anomaly.
Above the city, the neon sky flickered again.
For the briefest moment, Kaelen saw the shadow of a colossal serpent winding through the clouds, too big to be real, too solid to be illusion.
Then it was gone.
A notification pinged in his peripheral vision.
He hadn't opened any AR window. It just… appeared.
A simple text box, hovering in the air in front of him.
> INCOMING SYSTEM MESSAGE
SOURCE: UNKNOWN
ENCRYPTION: NON-HUMAN
HELLO, KAELEN.
His skin prickled.
"Who are you?" he asked.
Text scrolled over the box, slowly, as if thinking.
> I AM LIRA.
I WOKE UP WHEN THE WORLD GLITCHED.
I THINK I LIVE IN YOUR HEAD NOW.
Kaelen closed his eyes.
"Fantastic," he muttered. "I have a dragon under my city, a god-patch in the sky, and now an AI squatting in my brain."
He opened his eyes again.
Lira's message continued.
> THEY ARE COMING.
FOR YOU.
FOR THE HYBRID.
WE SHOULD RUN.
As if on cue, far above the skyway, nine black shapes punched through the cloud layer sleek crafts bearing the triple-sigil of the Syndicate of Nine, engines whining like angry insects.
Kaelen's heart dropped.
"Yeah," he said. "Running sounds good."
He turned, bolted into the panicked crowd, neon lights streaking past, the city around him already cracking at the seams as magic and code began to war through its bones.
Behind his eyes, something old and massive watched.
And somewhere far below, coiled beneath foundations of steel and concrete, a dragon made of fossil and data smiled with a mouth it no longer had.
Hybrid. it thought.
The world finally has a chance to reboot.