Kein woke with the taste of metal in his mouth and ash in his lungs.
Six years had passed since the Awakening.
The world had shifted—no, fractured. Entire countries collapsed into anomalies, nations forgotten under tectonic upheaval and biomech overgrowth.
What was once Earth had been broken into three vast landmasses and dozens of floating archipelagos, each rewritten by disaster and shaped by System logic. Humanity had adapted—or perished.
The current global calamity was called the Ashen Sky Phenomenon. No one really understood it, but everyone lived under it. A veil of swirling ember-colored clouds blanketed the atmosphere.
Sunlight rarely pierced it. Instead, a perpetual twilight reigned, warm and lifeless, choking the skies like smog laced with memories of fire.
It wasn't just the sky that had changed—entire weather systems had vanished, replaced by systemic anomalies like ash storms, gravity pulses, and spatial folds.
Creatures from deep-system pockets emerged from dimensional folds without pattern or logic. Magnetic rivers flowed north. Time bends occurred in low-pressure valleys. Reality, once stable and inert, now flexed like muscle under stress.
Civilization, as it had once been known, now clung to survival in bastion cities—heavily shielded, partially sentient mega-structures that floated above the worst of the mutated earth.
Outside their walls, zones like W-13 rotted under entropy's thumb, claimed only by hunters, scavengers, and the mad.
Kein sat at the edge of a cliffside in what used to be South America, overlooking a valley of shattered machines and twisted metal growths.
They called it Zone W-13 now. Every region had a code. Every survivor had a story. He just had more blood in his than most.
His right hand rose, and the cube responded.
It hovered into his palm like a loyal dog, humming low. Perfectly black, its surface reflected no light. It had no buttons, no seams, and no weight—yet it pulsed with warmth and gravity like a miniature star.
It was more than a tool. It was his partner, his weapon, his tether to the System.
It was his Class core.
Techno Reclaimer—that was the name he'd chosen, back when choice still felt like a power.
He activated the cube with a flick of thought.
The air behind him shimmered with System energy as his Class mech, Cairn, materialized—seven tons of semi-Gundam metal and old-world wrath.
Four arms, repurposed from ancient mech frames and scavenged titan drones, moved with terrifying precision.
Cairn was all sharp edges, glowing cores, and silent judgment—a summoned extension of Kein's will, called forth through the cube's power.
Each time Cairn emerged, it felt like calling down a piece of lost divinity. The mech bore no face, only a glowing V-slit visor across its helm and rune-like glyphs that pulsed with orange System light. It didn't speak. It didn't need to.
Kein looked up. The sky shimmered like dying embers.
> [Environmental Sync: Complete. Ash Density: 74%. System Stability: Moderate.]
> [Target Signature Detected – Aberrant, Class III: Throatweaver. 1.3 kilometers southeast.]
He exhaled and rose.
"Come on, Cairn. Time to earn our keep."
They moved fast through the rusted landscape—through forests of steel-barked trees and rivers that hissed with caustic plasma.
Cairn's movements were heavy, but fluid. Kein's were swift and ghostlike, his limbs propelled by magnetized traction boots and the neural mesh of his cube's integration.
The bounty was big: 40,000 credits for the Throatweaver dead. 70,000 alive. Either would buy them fuel, repairs, and another week of breathing.
The terrain crunched beneath them. Everywhere, the land bore scars—fossilized machines jutting like broken bones from the earth, wild growths of metal-vine flora tangled around forgotten drones.
The Ashen Sky muted all sound into a constant hush, like the world was waiting.
Sometimes, Kein wondered if the planet itself was sentient now—its System merely a skin stretched over some dreaming intelligence.
There were reports of people speaking to mountains. Cities that moved. Stars that responded.
He no longer dismissed such stories.
The Throatweaver found them first.
It burst from a shattered reactor dome, all tendrils and wet steel, its body a spiraling mass of razor-wire muscle and half-melted cybernetics.
Its elongated head bristled with jointed mandibles. Pulses of static radiated from its core in waves. It had no eyes—only a dozen maw-like openings arranged around its chest, twitching and snapping open and shut.
Kein didn't hesitate.
The cube sank into his chest like ink dispersing in water.
In moments, his armor deployed. Plates folded over his skin, reinforced with smart-reactive alloy, linked by glowing filaments of scrap-coded nerve lines.
His left arm unfolded into a multi-purpose blade module, its edge resonating with pulsed vibrations. His right transformed into a grappler reinforced by kinetic coils.
The forge-hub on his back deployed with a hiss of pressure, ready to fabricate constructs at his command.
"Cairn—pattern delta!" Kein shouted.
The mech responded instantly.
Cairn roared—an audio quake that shattered loose panels in a fifty-meter radius. Two of its arms deployed seismic hammers. The other two readied chain-pulse cannons.
It surged forward, slamming into the Aberrant with full force.
The ground trembled.
The Throatweaver shrieked—not in sound, but in anti-frequency pulses that vibrated against the bone. The wave hit Kein like a sledgehammer of nausea. He gritted his teeth and activated internal dampeners.
Cairn struck again.
One seismic hammer collided with the Aberrant's midsection, sending it skidding through a pile of ruined transport vehicles.
Before it could recover, Cairn's pulse cannons fired in unison—streams of condensed kinetic force that punched through steel like paper.
But the Throatweaver adapted quickly.
It sprang sideways, launching a web of tendrils tipped with anchor-jaws. Several latched onto Cairn's limbs, sparking against his armor.
Others embedded in the ground and structures, reeling the creature across the field like a spider pulling taut its web.
Kein dashed right, weaving between obstacles. He aimed his grappler at a collapsed tower and fired, launching himself skyward.
> [Blueprint Unlocked: Magnetic Net – Tier II]
> [Crafting: 5 seconds... Complete.]
He flipped mid-air and landed hard. His gauntlet struck the ground with a burst of forging light.
From his forge-hub, the Net launched—an expanding sphere of crackling magnetic filaments.
It blossomed like a collapsing star and clamped down on the Throatweaver, binding it in a three-dimensional lattice of kinetic force.
The creature thrashed, writhing violently. One of its tendrils snapped a rusted streetlamp in half. Another launched into the sky before falling limp, overloaded with system feedback.
Kein saw a chance to end it. He scanned the surrounding scrap—his HUD identifying flammable coolant residue leaking from nearby ruptured tanks.
> [Optional Tactic: Overload Pulse + Elemental Ignite – Success Probability: 67%]
He grabbed a broken power conduit and rammed it into the liquid-soaked metal, then charged it with a short blast from his cube. Blue-white arcs of current danced across the surface.
With a sharp command, he directed Cairn to pivot its remaining arm-mounted cannon and fire.
The bolt struck.
The explosion was sudden and thunderous—fire, smoke, and molten debris rained down. The magnetic net held just long enough.
The cube pulsed in Kein's palm.
> [Reclamation Protocol: Engaged. Capture Viable. Proceed.]
He sprinted.
The Matter Spike extended from his forearm, its tip glowing with piercing energy. The world blurred around him as he locked onto the target's core signature.
He ducked a flailing tendril.
Slid under another.
Then drove the Spike deep into the Throatweaver's central junction.
There was a moment of stillness.
A silence so complete, it stole breath.
Then the creature convulsed, released one last screech of broken code, and collapsed. Its body spasmed, then locked in place—trapped in the magnetic weave.
> [Target: Neutralized. Status: Alive.] [Payload Enclosure: Deploying. Credit Transfer Pending.]
Kein knelt beside the still-twitching form, his chest heaving. His armor retracted in layers, vanishing into the cube, which hovered silently nearby. His skin steamed from the heat. Static crackled in the air.
Cairn lowered its arms into standby mode. The mech's core dimmed slightly, emitting a low whir as it cooled.
Kein reached up and tapped a burnt plate on its chest.
"Not bad," he muttered.
The air shifted.
He looked up.
The ash in the sky was turning darker, swirling into slow vortices that spiraled with a nauseating rhythm. A storm was forming. Another mutation wave was coming—probably within hours.
His HUD pinged quietly.
> [System Notice: Mutation Event - Probability 82% within 3 Hours. Category: Atmospheric-Class.]
Kein exhaled.
In the distance, shapes moved through the haze. Silhouettes—tall, thin, jagged. Not human. Not friendly.
He gripped the cube tighter.
There was no time to rest.
He turned to Cairn.
"Let's move."
And the two vanished into the burning fog, just another ghost and his machine, wandering through the world that once was, hunting pieces of survival in a place that had long since stopped making sense.
...