Lira wasn't pleased when I dragged a corpse into her sanctuary.
"Most people bring flowers," she said dryly, stepping over a pile of glyph-etched books.
"He had a crest-sigil," I replied, tossing the assassin's body to the floor with a wet thump.
Her eyes narrowed immediately. The old stone beneath us pulsed faintly as protective wards activated.
Crest-sigils were rare. Only high-order enforcers of the Arcanum used them—those who didn't answer to kings, guilds, or gods. They were the hand behind the curtain, enforcing law where even power bent knee.
"This shouldn't be here," she said, circling the corpse. "If they marked him with this, then he was no regular hunter."
"He wasn't. He almost killed me."
I watched her inspect the sigil—a glowing glyph embedded in a black steel plate fused to the assassin's chest. Even in death, it pulsed with a soft light, vibrating against the floor like it was alive.
She held a crystal lens over it. Her hands trembled.
Then she stiffened. "You couldn't Veilstep near him, could you?"
I nodded. "The moment I got close, my Veil channels locked. Felt like I was caught in static."
"Because this sigil," she said slowly, "is made of Unbound Etherium."
I frowned. "What the hell is that?"
She looked me dead in the eyes. "Code from the first system. The foundation layer. Before the gods, before the cycles."
---
The revelation shifted something in me. Deep.
If the Arcanum had Unbound tech—if they wielded relics of the original system code—they weren't just trying to kill me. They were trying to erase me. To wipe my thread from the weave entirely.
"You're a virus in their matrix," Lira murmured, running her fingers along the sigil. "And they've sent immune responses."
I crouched beside her, the room heavy with the weight of our silence.
"What happens if I break one?" I asked.
"You crash their node," she replied, a little too eagerly. "Sever their uplink. Send them blind. But the cost…"
I already knew.
The system inside me was evolving faster than it should. My Veilwalk had begun leaving echoes behind—whispers of other realities, flickers of timelines that shouldn't exist. Sometimes when I stepped through the shadows, I didn't come back exactly the same.
My eyes had started changing. No longer just black and silver—now they shimmered with fractal code.
I could feel it. The world wasn't just physics and magic anymore. It was lines of code. Glitches. Fragments.
---
That night, Ayla returned.
The old iron door creaked open and slammed shut as she staggered in. Her robe was shredded, soaked in blood, her braid half-undone. She dragged a satchel behind her and dropped it with a metallic clink.
"I'm fine," she muttered, waving off my concern.
She wasn't.
"You're bleeding," I said, already moving toward her.
"It was a trap. Set for you. In the slums. I thought I could slip through."
She collapsed into a chair, wincing as she pulled a shard of iron from her leg.
"I told you to stay hidden."
"You need me," she snapped back. "Even if I die, I won't run."
There was steel in her voice. Fire that had nothing to do with her class or abilities.
I didn't argue.
I knelt beside her and summoned a soft pulse of healing.
My hand hovered over her wound, light glowing between my fingers as her torn flesh began to knit.
"You're shaking," she whispered.
"It's the backlash," I lied.
In truth, I was afraid. Not of the hunters, not of the Arcanum—but of what I was becoming. Of the fact that every time I healed someone, it came easier. And colder.
Ayla watched me with those deep amber eyes. Eyes that had cried for friends long gone, for family never found. And still, she stood beside me. Loyal. Brave. Unafraid.
"We'll fight this," she said softly.
I finished the healing and let the magic dissipate.
"We're not just fighting," I said. "We're rewriting the script."
Her hand brushed mine, a soft moment in the chaos.
Then she smirked. "Maybe next time you drag a corpse in, give me a heads-up. I was mid-ritual."
"Noted."
But beneath the humor, the storm brewed. The sigil was still glowing. Still humming.
And in the dark corners of the room, I swore I saw it flicker.
As if... it was watching me back.