The world exploded into gold and violet.
The Inquisitors didn't wait for a signal. They didn't offer a prayer. They simply unleashed the light.
A volley of sun-glass spears tore through the warehouse walls, turning the industrial steel into molten lace. Each spear was a concentrated beam of "Sanctity," a weaponized fragment of the Broken God's own radiance, polished and tamed by the Church's dogma.
I stood in the center of the storm.
The spears hit the darkness radiating from my skin and dissolved like salt in water.
*Weak...* the voice in my head spat.
*They bring us pebbles... when we crave the mountain.*
"Akira! Move!" Haneul's voice was barely audible over the roar of collapsing metal.
I felt a hand grab my collar and jerk me backward. Haneul swung her black blade, a crescent of shadow-matter cleaving through a beam that was falling toward my head.
"Don't just stand there and drown in it!" she hissed, her face inches from mine.
I looked at her. Really looked at her.
Her skin was pale, sweat beading on her forehead. She was terrified. Not of the army outside, but of me.
"I can... I can stop them," I said. My voice felt like it was vibrating in the air after I spoke.
"No, you can't. You're leaking, Akira. Look at the floor."
I looked down.
Wherever my feet touched the concrete, the floor was simply... vanishing. Not melting. Not breaking. Just ceasing to be. Small, jagged holes in reality were opening beneath me, hungry for anything they could touch.
"Lina! The breach!" Haneul shouted.
Lina was frantically slamming her fist against a hidden panel in the floorboards. "The dampeners are fried, Haneul! The only way out is through the sub-level tunnels, but they're flooded with industrial runoff!"
"Better to drown in oil than be burned by the light," Haneul said.
She looked at me, her grip tightening on my arm.
"Can you hold it in? Just for five minutes?"
I gritted my teeth. I tried to pull the violet energy back, to shove it into the hollow space where my heart should have been.
It was like trying to hold a hurricane in a paper bag.
The darkness fought me. It wanted to expand. It wanted to taste the golden soldiers outside. It wanted to eat their certainty, their faith, their very existence.
"I... I'll try."
"Lina, go! Now!"
Lina dived into the hatch, her heavy boots splashing into the dark, foul-smelling water below. Haneul shoved me after her.
As I fell into the dark, I saw the Inquisitors breach the main doors.
There were dozens of them.
Their white robes were blinding, their faces hidden behind golden masks shaped like weeping eyes. At their head stood a man holding a massive, burning censer.
The "Holy Smoke" hit the void I had left behind.
The scream that followed was not human. It was the sound of two incompatible realities grinding against each other.
Then, the hatch slammed shut.
***
The tunnels were narrow, suffocating, and reeked of ancient decay.
We waded through knee-deep sludge, the only light coming from a small chem-light Lina had cracked open. The green glow reflected off the wet walls, making the shadows dance like skeletal fingers.
I walked in the middle.
Every time I breathed, the violet light flickered in my eyes.
"What happened back there?" I asked. My voice was returning to normal, but it carried a metallic edge. "That Inquisitor... I took his arm. But I didn't feel it."
"You didn't just take his arm, Akira," Lina said, her voice echoing in the tunnel. She didn't look back. "You consumed the Shard-energy bonded to his nervous system. You ate a piece of his soul. That's why his eyes went dark."
She paused, her shoulders tense.
"That's why you're still standing. Your body needed the fuel to stabilize the Insight Shard."
A predator.
I was a predator that didn't even know it was hunting.
"How long until I lose everything?" I asked.
Haneul, walking behind me, was silent for a long time.
"It depends," she finally said. "On how much you use it. On how much you fight it. Some Vessels last years. Others... others turn into Abominations in a matter of hours."
She stepped closer, her blade still drawn.
"The fact that you're still talking to us is a miracle. Or a curse. I haven't decided yet."
Suddenly, the tunnel vibrated.
Dust fell from the ceiling.
"They're using seismic pulses," Lina whispered, looking at a small device on her wrist. "They're trying to collapse the tunnels to trap us."
"We're almost at the Forsaken Zone border," Haneul said. "If we can reach the Red Bridge, we can disappear into the slums. Even the Church doesn't like to go there. The corruption is too thick."
"Wait," I said, stopping in my tracks.
The humming in my head had changed.
It wasn't a growl anymore.
It was a warning.
"Something is coming."
"The Inquisitors?" Haneul asked, raising her sword.
"No. Something... older."
The water around our legs began to ripple.
But the ripples weren't coming from the direction of the Church soldiers. They were coming from the darkness ahead.
A low, wet sound echoed through the tunnel.
*Squelch. Slide. Squelch.*
Lina threw her chem-light forward.
The green light illuminated a mass of pale, translucent flesh that blocked the entire width of the tunnel. It looked like a collection of human limbs sewn together by a madman, but there were no stitches—only weeping violet sores.
Dozens of eyes peered out from the folds of skin.
They weren't golden. They weren't brown.
They were white. Blind.
"A Forsaken," Lina breathed, her voice trembling. "A failed Vessel. It must have been down here for decades."
The creature opened a mouth that was located where a shoulder should have been.
It didn't roar.
It spoke.
"Help... me..."
The voice was a distorted harmony of a hundred different people.
"Please... so... cold..."
It lunged.
The speed was impossible for something so bloated. It hit Haneul before she could swing, throwing her against the tunnel wall.
Lina screamed, falling back into the sludge.
I stood there, frozen.
The creature turned its many eyes toward me.
Its movements stopped.
The weeping sores on its body began to pulse in time with the violet light in my eye.
"The... King?" the creature whispered.
The word sent a jolt of pure ice through my spine.
*King?*
"No," I said, my voice shaking.
The creature began to crawl toward me, its many limbs dragging its heavy, rotting body through the water.
"Give... us... the light," it begged. "End... the hunger..."
I felt the Shard in my chest stir.
It didn't want to fight this thing.
It felt... pity?
No.
It felt recognition.
*A broken mirror...* the voice hummed.
*Looking at its own... shards.*
"Akira! Kill it!" Haneul shouted, struggling to get to her feet. Her coat was torn, blood trickling from a cut on her temple.
The creature lunged at me, its many hands reaching for my throat.
I didn't think. I didn't plan.
I just let the darkness out.
But this time, it wasn't a void.
It was a blade.
A jagged shard of violet energy manifested in my hand, humming with the sound of a thousand bees. I swung it in a wide arc.
The blade cut through the creature's flesh like it was smoke.
There was no blood.
There was only a blinding flash of violet light as the creature's essence was sucked into my palm.
I felt the "fullness" again.
But this time, it was followed by a wave of nausea so intense I fell to my knees.
I saw its life.
I saw a young boy in a village. I saw a mother kissing his forehead. I saw a priest telling him he was "chosen." I saw the day they forced a Shard into his chest and watched as his body rejected it, twisting him into this nightmare.
I saw his name.
*Kaito.*
And then, Kaito was gone.
Not just his body. His entire history. His memories. His pain.
I had eaten it all.
I doubled over, vomiting a thick, black bile into the tunnel water.
"Akira..." Lina approached me cautiously, her goggles pushed up. She looked at my hand.
The skin was no longer translucent.
It was grey. Dull.
Like a corpse that had been left in the sun.
"I remember him," I whispered, my voice breaking. "I remember his mother. She... she liked to bake bread with honey. He had a dog named Taro."
"What are you talking about?" Haneul asked, wiping blood from her face.
I looked at her, my vision blurring.
"The creature. I didn't just kill it. I... I took its life. Not just the heartbeat. The *life*."
Haneul and Lina exchanged a look. A look of profound, soul-deep dread.
"The Insight Shard," Lina whispered. "It's not just an observer. It's a Collector."
"We need to go," Haneul said, her voice hard. She grabbed my arm and forced me up. "The Church is still behind us, and that kill just lit up the resonance scanners for miles."
We ran.
We ran until the sludge turned into dry dirt, until the narrow tunnels opened up into the vast, crumbling ruins of the Forsaken Zone.
Above us, the "Sky" was a ceiling of rusted iron and hanging wires, leaking the eternal grey rain of the Divide.
We stopped under the shadow of a massive, collapsed bridge.
"We stay here for the night," Haneul said. "Lina, set up the scramblers. If they find us now, we don't have the strength to fight again."
Lina nodded, her hands shaking as she pulled devices from her pack.
I sat against a concrete pillar, staring at my hands.
They were shaking.
"Haneul," I said.
She was cleaning her blade with a piece of cloth. She didn't look up.
"Why did it call me 'King'?"
The blade stopped.
Haneul finally looked at me. The grey in her eyes seemed even colder than before.
"There's a legend," she said. "In the old texts. The ones the Church burns."
She sat down opposite me, the black blade resting across her knees.
"They say the Whole God didn't just break. He chose to shatter himself because he saw that humanity would never serve a King. But he left one Shard behind. One piece that held the 'Will'. The piece that could call the others back."
She leaned in, her voice a ghost of a sound.
"The Insight Shard. The King's Shard."
I felt a cold sweat break out on my skin.
"You think... I'm going to bring him back? The God?"
"I think," Haneul said, "that every Shard in this world is going to feel you. And they are all going to come for you. Some will want to serve you. Most will want to eat you."
She stood up, her eyes flicking to the dark horizon of the slums.
"And I'm starting to think that the Archive didn't just want the Shard. They wanted the Vessel they could control. They wanted a God they could put on a leash."
"I'm not a God," I snapped.
"No," Haneul agreed. "You're a nineteen-year-old boy who's currently disappearing."
I looked down at my chest.
In the dim light of Lina's scramblers, I could see it.
A small, violet light was glowing beneath my skin.
It was shaped like a crown.
But it wasn't on my head.
It was wrapped around my heart.
*Thump.*
The pulse was stronger now.
*Thump.*
And for the first time, I realized the sound wasn't coming from inside me.
It was coming from the city.
The entire world was beating in time with my chest.
"Akira," Lina whispered, pointing at the sky.
I looked up.
The grey clouds were parting.
But it wasn't the sun that was shining through.
A single, massive eye was opening in the sky above the Forsaken Zone. It was golden. It was vast. It was weeping.
The High Priestess had found us.
And she wasn't sending an army this time.
She was coming herself.
"Haneul," I said, my voice cold and strangely calm.
"Yeah?"
"How do you kill someone who speaks for a God?"
Haneul looked at the golden eye in the sky and unsheathed her sword.
"You don't," she said. "You just make sure you're the one who speaks louder."
Suddenly, my head exploded with a new voice.
It wasn't the Shard.
It wasn't a memory.
It was a broadcast.
*"Citizens of the Divide,"* a woman's voice echoed from every speaker in the distance, from every radio, from the very air itself. *"A shadow has entered our sanctuary. A thief of souls. He hides among the broken. He carries the seed of the End."*
My face appeared on a massive holographic billboard a mile away, flickering in the rain.
*"A bounty of one million credits for the head of Akira Tsukishiro. Dead... or purified."*
I looked at Haneul.
She looked at me.
"One million?" she muttered, a dark smirk touching her lips.
"Haneul," I warned.
"Relax, Akira," she said, though her hand was trembling on her sword. "I'm an assassin. I know a bad deal when I see one."
She looked at the golden eye.
"But we're going to need a bigger gun."
"I don't need a gun," I said.
I stood up. The violet wings of the void flickered behind me, casting a shadow that swallowed the light of the holographic billboard.
"I need to find the man from my vision."
"Elias?" Lina asked.
"Elias," I confirmed. "He's the one who broke the God. I think... I think he's the only one who knows how to kill it for good."
But as we turned to leave, a shadow detached itself from the ruins behind us.
It wasn't an Inquisitor.
It was a man in a simple black suit, carrying a briefcase. He looked completely out of place in the filth of the Forsaken Zone.
He tipped his hat toward us.
"Master Tsukishiro," the man said, his voice smooth as silk. "Director Kwon would like a word. He says the 'King' should never have to walk in the mud."
The man opened the briefcase.
Inside was a beating, violet heart made of glass.
"And he's brought you a gift. A peace offering."
The Shard in my chest screamed in hunger.
I realized then that the war hadn't even started.
This was just the invitation.
"Who are you?" I demanded.
The man smiled, revealing teeth that were made of silver.
"I am the Courier. And I suggest you take the heart, Akira. Because the Church isn't the only thing that's hungry tonight."
The golden eye in the sky blinked.
The ground beneath us began to rise.
The hunt was on.