When light falls in Nocturne, it doesn't fade — it breaks everything in its path. And sometimes, the pieces don't fit back together.
The world was still white.
A blinding, searing void where sound died and time stretched thin. Asher floated in it — weightless, senseless. His fingers twitched like broken marionette strings, desperate to feel something solid.
A voice punctured the numbness, distant at first, then frantic:
"Boss! Boss—move! The tunnel's falling in!"
Rosa.
Her words snapped the silence in half. Pain crashed back in waves: throbbing skull, burning lungs, joints screaming from overexertion.
The chamber had become an apocalypse.
Where once the Bleeding Sun orb floated, now a chasm yawned, swallowing cultists and concrete alike. Stone and steel rained from above, molten cracks spiderwebbing across every surface. Gold dust — shimmering and wrong — danced like ash in a dying blaze.
Cultists shrieked as the serpent fissure at the chamber's heart devoured them, dragging robes and flesh into impossible blackness.
Asher blinked, disoriented. He caught fragments: the scavengers — gone without a trace, either buried alive or lost deeper underground. A sliver of impossible sky gaped overhead, sunlight fracturing and bleeding like liquid glass.
He stumbled to his feet. Vision blurry, but resolve hardening.
"Up!" he rasped, voice like sandpaper. "Rosa — we're climbing!"
--------------------------------
No time to think. No time to breathe.
Hand-in-hand, they ran — half-dragging each other, half-tripping over the buckling tiles beneath their feet. Every step echoed doom: ceiling tiles dropped like guillotine blades, subway cars twisted and writhed, metal groaning as if in agony.
One of the derailed trains slithered in their path, its doors snapping open and shut like a predator's maw. Asher yanked Rosa aside just as it lunged — a subway car with fangs.
Walls oozed molten gold, shimmering veins pumping something unholy. Every surface pulsed, alive, a grotesque parody of veins and arteries.
Sirens howled overhead — but warped, the usual mechanical wail twisted into something inhuman, rising and falling like the death cry of the city itself.
Rosa, teeth gritted, hurled her last blackfire charm. The explosion sucked all light inward, giving them just enough space to dive through a service hatch.
The ground buckled and collapsed behind them, swallowing everything.
They didn't stop moving until daylight — real or otherwise — seared their retinas.
--------------------------------
Surface Break: Nocturne's Skyline Flickers
They crawled out into Nocturne's Chinatown district, gasping for air, clothes torn, faces streaked with soot and blood.
But the world above wasn't safe either.
The skyline rippled like a mirage. Neon signs flickered erratically, caught between night and artificial day — entire billboards dissolved into waves of static before reforming with warped messages.
A stoplight blinked red, but instead of "STOP," its letters now screamed: DEAD END.
Around them, dazed pedestrians tilted their heads skyward. Confusion painted every face.
Above the skyscrapers, the sky fractured — a sun that should have been buried hours ago now glared through cracks in reality, flickering like a dying star.
And then, like a heartbeat too loud to ignore, a pulse.
A shockwave tore through the streets, rattling every window, shattering glass in an echo of their underground escape. Buildings groaned. The world shivered.
-----------------------------------
At the corner noodle shop, an elderly woman squinted at the chaos unfolding overhead. Calmly, she slurped her noodles, unfazed.
She muttered:
"Tch. Kids these days, always hacking reality. Back in my day, we just stole cable."
Her tabby cat, now glowing faintly with residual gold light, gave an unimpressed meow and resumed licking its paw.
Life, it seemed, found a way to stay weirdly normal.
-----------------------------------
A New Player Watches
Far above the chaos, perched on a cracked rooftop, a figure watched them — silent, calculating.
A woman, mid-30s, eyes sharp and mechanical, lenses flicking and zooming in with eerie precision. An old detective's badge, dulled with time, dangled from her belt — a relic of a time long past.
She pressed a finger to her earpiece.
"Target Asher Blackwood confirmed. The rupture event has escalated. HQ, we're proceeding with Phase Two."
Her eyes flicked skyward, narrowing as the fractured sun rippled again — a broken halo ready to fall.
"Phase Two," she whispered, eyes locked on Asher's ragged form, "is where it gets interesting."
Asher crumpled against a graffiti-tagged wall, breath ragged, chest heaving. He looked down — his palms… they glowed faintly, veins lit from within, poisoned with something that wasn't just sunlight.
Rosa grabbed his shoulders, shaking him. "Boss! Stay with me! We stopped the cult — but something's wrong. The city's—"
She stopped, eyes darting nervously upward.
"…shifting."
Asher's gaze, glassy but defiant, met hers.
"…we didn't stop it," he rasped, blood on his lips, "we just cracked the lock open wider…"
Another pulse surged through Nocturne — buildings blurred, and somewhere distant, a scream reverberated like a broken alarm bell.
The city was coming undone.
On the rooftop, the woman's lips curved into a grin.
Her cybernetic eyes locked onto Asher's glowing hands, sharpening with predatory focus.
"He's the ignition point," she whispered to herself, voice barely audible beneath the sirens and crackling light. "Just as predicted."
Without hesitation, she leaped from the rooftop, trench coat flaring, zeroing in on her prey.
Straight for Asher.
[End Of Chapter 62]
-------------------------------------
Preview of Next Chapter (63) — "City of Fractures"
As Nocturne reels from the rupture's aftershocks, rival factions emerge, hungry for pieces of the shattered power. Asher and Rosa navigate warping neighborhoods, stalked by the mysterious operative who calls him the "ignition point." Meanwhile, the succubus factions smell blood in the chaos — and they're ready to strike.