The city of Virelith was dying slowly.
Not from war. Not from famine.
But from order.
Steel towers clawed the clouds, lit with a million artificial suns. Streets shimmered with holograms, and every citizen walked beneath silent drones watching every move. The System ran everything. From transportation to thoughts. From criminal records to dating matches.
And everyone had a number.
Everyone… except him.
Kael Veyron moved through the alleys like a shadow without a source. His hood pulled low, thread hidden under layers of old fabric, face partially covered with an outdated mask. Around him, civilians moved like clockwork—scanned, tagged, categorized. Each person bore glowing lines across their temples: their pathway code, their rank, their worth.
Kael had none.
The moment he stepped into a public grid, every scanner blinked red.
> [WARNING: Subject Unregistered] [Threat Level: UNREADABLE]
But no one noticed.
Because the thread bent the system around him.
Every camera that turned his way malfunctioned for exactly one frame.
Every drone that flew overhead received a false signal that he wasn't there.
He wasn't invisible.
He was… uncountable.
A Null.
He stopped at the edge of the Skyrail station—crowds swarming like ants, everyone moving as if destiny pulled them forward. That was the illusion the System sold: progress, order, perfection.
But beneath the surface?
Control.
Kael stared at a little girl in the crowd, maybe ten years old. Her code glowed a soft blue on her wrist: Class: Healer, Rank: D, Potential Rating: 43.7%.
Her entire life, summarized in numbers.
She looked up at him. Blinked. Frowned.
"Uncle," she said softly, tugging her mother's sleeve. "That man… he doesn't have a number."
Kael turned away before the mother could follow her daughter's gaze.
Because soon, someone else would.
He slid into an abandoned service tunnel, boots echoing softly across metal grates. The deeper he went, the colder the air became—less regulated, less artificial. The glow of the city dimmed until only the thread lit his path.
He wasn't alone down here.
A voice cracked through the darkness.
"Stop."
Kael didn't.
A stun blast flew past his head, slamming into the wall and lighting the tunnel with blue electricity.
He turned slowly.
A group of three stood at the far end of the tunnel. Black coats. Heavy boots. Faces hidden by visor masks.
Enforcers.
System cleaners.
The kind sent not to arrest—but to erase.
Their leader stepped forward. Her voice was filtered through tech.
"Kael Veyron. Null-class. Unauthorized existence. You are a breach of systemic protocol and reality integrity. Surrender."
Kael's expression didn't change.
"Surrender to what?" he said quietly. "An equation that thinks it's God?"
They raised weapons. No warning this time.
The first shot came fast.
Kael's thread shimmered.
And the bullet that would've struck his heart?
Never happened.
He didn't dodge.
Didn't deflect.
He simply rejected it.
The second enforcer hesitated. That was all Kael needed.
He moved forward—not fast, but impossibly correct. Like the world bent to make space for his step.
He reached out.
And touched the third enforcer's chest.
For a moment… nothing.
Then the armor disintegrated into dust, and the man beneath collapsed—alive, but memory-wiped, system tags erased, purpose deleted.
The others fell back.
"What are you?" the leader hissed, voice shaking now.
Kael's eyes met hers.
"I'm the thread your gods forgot to cut."
He walked past them. The thread flicked once.
Their comms died.
Their weapons shut down.
Their memories of him… corrupted.
By the time they reported in, they'd remember chasing a shadow. A glitch. Nothing real.
Because Kael wasn't real.
Not to them.
Not to the System.
But the world was starting to notice.
Deep beneath the city, far from the glow of surveillance, a chamber pulsed with light.
Multiple figures stood around a crystalline display—each one wearing robes embedded with data circuits. Faces obscured, their voices modulated.
One of them pointed at the red warning on the screen.
> [NULL THREAD DETECTED. PROBABILITY DISTORTION ACTIVE.]
"This shouldn't be possible," one of them said.
"It wasn't possible," another replied. "Until now."
"Do we know who?"
The screen zoomed in.
Kael's face.
Eyes unreadable. Thread barely visible, wrapped around his wrist like fate's mistake.
"We found him once," the eldest said. "We failed to erase him."
"He's evolving," a younger voice warned. "The more he uses it, the more unstable our system becomes. If he unravels the Codex—"
"He won't," the elder snapped.
Silence.
Then—
"Deploy Observer Units."
Another voice protested. "That will reveal we're watching."
"We are watching," the elder said coldly. "And now, we act."
Far above, Kael stood on the edge of the city's outer rim. The world below stretched endlessly—wastes, broken zones, fragments of the old world swallowed by the new System.
He closed his eyes.
The thread pulsed.
A soft whisper, not from outside… but from within.
> "You are not meant to exist. You are the wound in the code."
Kael opened his eyes.
"And wounds bleed."
Ending Chapter 2: The Man With No Number