Chapter 2: The Glitch in the System
Kael didn't know how long he knelt at the edge of the crater.
The fire burned itself out eventually, leaving behind a landscape of ash and twisted debris that looked more like the surface of some dead moon than the place he'd called home. His knees had gone numb against the scorched earth. His eyes were dry from staring—no tears came, just a hollow ache that seemed to reach all the way down to where his soul should have been.
The coin still glowed faintly. The door handle still smoldered.
Mom. Dad.
The words meant nothing now. They were just sounds attached to memories that hurt too much to hold.
Around him, the crater hummed. Not audibly, but beneath that—a vibration he felt in his teeth, in the marrow of his bones. It was the same sensation he'd get standing too close to a Hunter with an active conduit, but magnified a hundred times. A thousand. Like standing inside a thunderstorm.
He reached into his pocket. His fingers found the river stone—his conduit, if you could call it that. Potential: Negligible. The Guild's assessment echoed in his mind. Weakest of the weak. Barely worth registering.
His hand closed around it.
And the world screamed.
Not in sound. In sensation. A torrent of fragmented voices, dying echoes, the last thoughts of a hundred people ripped from existence—all of them crashing into his skull at once. He saw flashes: Mrs. Henley reaching for her baking stone. Old Thom raising his walking stick. A child, no older than five, clutching a wooden toy soldier that glowed faintly before going dark.
They were all still there. Not alive—he knew that. But pieces of them. The energy their conduits had released when their owners died, still lingering in the ash, waiting to fade into nothing.
And his stone was hungry.
Kael gasped and tried to let go. His fingers wouldn't obey. The stone pulsed against his palm, cold where it should have been warm from his body heat, and he felt it—felt it—reaching out like a starving animal, drawing those fragmented energies toward itself. Toward him.
Tendrils of light rose from the crater. Faint, almost invisible in the dawn air. Silver from a broken cooking pot that had been someone's conduit. Amber from a shattered farming tool. A thread of deep violet from something he couldn't identify. They spiraled toward him like iron filings to a magnet, and his stone drank them in.
No. No, stop. This isn't—I don't—
But his body wasn't listening. His conduit wasn't listening. It was acting on instinct, an instinct Kael had never known he possessed, and it was feeding.
The feeding lasted perhaps ten seconds. To Kael, it felt like hours. When it finally stopped, he collapsed forward onto his hands, retching, though nothing came up. His vision swam. His entire body trembled uncontrollably.
Slowly, shakily, he opened his palm.
The river stone had changed.
It was still grey, still rough, still unmistakably a rock. But now a single crack ran through its center, and from that crack bled a faint, cold light. Not warm like the conduits he'd seen. Not golden or blue or any color he recognized. It was the color of starlight on frost. The color of something that shouldn't exist.
And within that crack, he could feel them. The fragments he'd absorbed. Not the people—he was grateful for that—but echoes of what their conduits had been. A flicker of Mrs. Henley's ability to keep bread from burning. A whisper of Old Thom's stubborn endurance. A child's innocent wish for protection, given form.
They were his now. Or the stone's. He couldn't tell the difference anymore.
"What… what are you?" he whispered.
The stone didn't answer. But the cold light pulsed once, like a heartbeat, and Kael had the distinct impression it was waiting. Watching. Hungry still, but patient now.
He shoved it back in his pocket and scrambled away from the crater's edge, his heart hammering. This wasn't right. None of this was right. Conduits didn't absorb other conduits. That wasn't how the Core worked. Everyone knew that. A conduit was a gift, fixed at birth, unchanging. You could grow stronger with training, unlock new applications, but you couldn't change what you were given. You certainly couldn't eat the dying remnants of others.
But his stone had.
And it was still cold in his pocket. Still glowing faintly through the fabric.
Hide it. Hide it now.
He pulled his shirt over the pocket, pressing the stone against his thigh. The fabric wasn't thick enough to completely mask the glow, but maybe—maybe if he kept his hand over it, if he didn't let anyone see—
Distant shouts. Footsteps. Multiple people, moving fast.
Kael's head snapped up. From the direction of Millbrook, a squad of figures approached at a speed no normal human could match. Hunters. A full response team, their conduits active and blazing with light. At their head was a woman in dark blue robes, a staff in her hand topped with a core shard that pulsed with steady authority.
He had seconds to compose himself. To become, again, the worthless G-Rank nobody the receptionist had dismissed without a second glance.
He slumped to the ground, pulled his knees to his chest, and stared blankly at the destruction. It wasn't hard. The numbness was still there, beneath the terror and confusion. He let it rise to the surface, let his face go slack and empty.
The Hunters arrived in a swirl of displaced air and glowing magic. The woman in blue—an official of some kind, by the look of her robes—took one look at the crater and went pale.
"By the Core," she breathed. "Get me readings. Now."
Two Hunters stepped forward, their conduits—a compass and a spyglass—glowing as they activated. The compass spun wildly, then stopped, pointing directly at the crater's center. The spyglass's owner gasped.
"Ma'am, the residual energy signature—it's not consistent with a dungeon breach. Or a failed opening. Or any known explosion pattern."
The woman's jaw tightened. "Then what is it?"
The Hunter with the spyglass swallowed hard. "It's a Core Instability Event."
The words landed like stones in still water. Every Hunter in the squad went rigid. Even Kael, playing the broken survivor, felt his stomach clench.
A Core Instability Event. He'd heard whispers of them, the kind of rumors that circulated in the darkest corners of taverns when Hunters had drunk too much. The Core, the source of all power, the divine heart of their world—it wasn't supposed to be unstable. It wasn't supposed to glitch. But sometimes, rarely, impossibly, it did. And when it happened, conduits in the area went haywire. People died. Whole villages vanished.
The official explanation was always the same: dungeon accident, failed opening, monster breach. The truth, if the rumors were true, was buried so deep even most Hunters never found it.
"Secure the perimeter," the woman ordered, her voice steady despite her pallor. "No one approaches. No one touches anything. I want every conduit fragment catalogued and contained. And find out if anyone survived."
Her eyes swept the area and landed on Kael.
For a frozen moment, he was certain she could see through him. See the cold light in his pocket, the fragments of dead villagers his stone had consumed. His hand tightened over the rock, pressing it harder against his leg.
The woman approached. Up close, he could see the exhaustion in her face, the lines carved by years of witnessing horrors like this. But her eyes were sharp, assessing.
"Boy. Are you injured?"
He shook his head, not trusting his voice.
"Your name?"
"Kael. Kael Vale." His throat felt like sandpaper. "I… I was in Millbrook. Registering. When I came back…" He gestured weakly at the crater. It wasn't hard to let his voice crack. The horror was real, even if the performance was deliberate.
The woman's expression softened a fraction. "You're lucky, boy. Wrong place, wrong time, but you walked away." She glanced at his pocket, where his hand still pressed. "What's that? Your conduit?"
His heart stopped.
Then restarted, pounding against his ribs. He forced his fingers to unclench, to pull the stone out slowly. In the daylight, with Hunters all around, the cold light was barely visible—just a faint shimmer along the crack that could easily be mistaken for a trick of the light. He held it up, letting them see.
The woman's gaze flicked to it, then away. A common river stone. G-Rank trash. Not worth a second look.
"Keep it safe," she said, already turning away. "You'll need it if you're serious about being a Hunter."
If only you knew.
He shoved the stone back in his pocket, his hand shaking. The cold light pulsed against his thigh, and he could swear he felt it… pleased. Satisfied that its secret was safe.
For now.
The investigation lasted three days.
Kael was questioned multiple times, first by the squad, then by officials who arrived from the Capital. He told them the same story each time: he'd been registering, he'd come home, he'd found the crater. They asked about his family. He told them they were dead. They offered hollow condolences. He accepted them with a blank face.
All the while, the stone sat in his pocket, cold and patient, and Kael listened.
He learned that the official cause would be a dungeon breach—a rogue monster spawning in the village center and detonating. Standard cover story. But he also heard fragments of the real conversation, overheard when the officials thought he was asleep in the temporary shelter they'd set up.
"The energy signature doesn't match any known monster type."
"The instability readings are off the scale. This wasn't a breach. This was a cascade failure."
"If the Core is destabilizing this close to a population center…"
"Don't say it. Not until we have more data."
Cascade failure. Core instability. Words that weren't supposed to exist, spoken by people who weren't supposed to know them.
And through it all, Kael's stone kept feeding.
Not actively—he learned to control that, or at least to suppress the hunger. But whenever the officials brought out their detection equipment, whenever they scanned the crater for residual energy, he felt his stone reach. Reaching for the fragments they were collecting, the pieces of dead conduits they were sealing in containment boxes. Reaching for the power that should have faded but hadn't.
Once, a box passed within three feet of him. The stone pulsed so violently he had to bite his tongue to keep from crying out. The cold light flared beneath his shirt, visible for just an instant—but everyone was looking at the box, not at him.
He was invisible. Worthless G-Rank trash. No one paid attention to trash.
He hated how grateful he was for that.
On the third night, Kael slipped away from the shelter.
He didn't know where he was going, only that he couldn't stay. Every minute in that camp was a minute the stone might betray him. Every scan, every passing official, every innocent question was a potential disaster. He had to get away. Had to think. Had to understand what he'd become.
The crater was off-limits—guarded day and night—so he circled wide around it, picking his way through the scorched outskirts of what had been Thornhaven. The ground here was still warm in places, still reeking of smoke and death. He walked for what felt like hours, his shadow stretching and shrinking under the light of two moons, until he reached a part of the forest he barely recognized.
There, half-hidden behind a collapsed section of the village wall, was something new.
Or rather, something that shouldn't have existed at all.
It was a dungeon entrance. A shimmer in the air, like heat rising from summer stone, but cold instead of hot. It was small—barely large enough for a person to squeeze through—and it flickered unevenly, its edges blurring and reforming in ways Kael had never seen.
A dungeon breach, he thought. A monster must have spawned here during the explosion.
But no. The officials had swept this entire area. They'd found nothing.
So why was this here?
He approached slowly, his stone forgotten in his pocket. The barrier flickered again, and this close, he could feel its instability. The same wrongness that had permeated the crater, the same sense of a system glitching. This dungeon wasn't stable. It was barely holding together. One wrong move and it would detonate, just like—
Just like Thornhaven.
He should run. Should go back to the camp, report it, let the professionals handle it. That was the smart thing. The safe thing.
His hand closed around his stone.
The cold light flared. And the hunger returned.
Not for fragments this time. For the barrier itself. For the unstable, flickering energy that was barely containing whatever lurked inside. His stone wanted it. Craved it. And for the first time, Kael didn't fight the feeling.
He reached out. Pressed his palm—stone and all—against the dungeon's barrier.
He expected death. Explosion. The 80% his father had faced every single day.
Instead, the barrier glitched.
It flickered once, twice—then opened. Not with intent, not with the careful application of a specialized conduit. It simply… gave way. Parted like water around his hand, creating an opening just large enough for him to step through.
Kael stared at his hand. At the stone, now blazing with cold light. At the open dungeon, waiting for him like a hungry mouth.
The Core had rules. Everyone knew them. Dungeons required openers. Barriers required intent. Power required blessing.
But Kael Vale wasn't blessed.
He was something else entirely.
He took a step forward. Then another. The dungeon swallowed him whole, and behind him, the barrier sealed itself shut—not with a bang, but with a whisper.
As if it had never been there at all.