SYSTEM WEAVE CONNECTION COMPLETE

  C.ross R.eality I.ntegration & T.ranslation S.ystem Active

  QUEST

  QUEST: SURVIVE UPDATED

  NEW QUEST: BREAK PURSUIT

  REWARD: Veil Orb shards based on performance

  Ethan lurched through the corridor on a bad ankle and worse footing, and the message hit his vision more vivid and refined than any before. “Really. CRITS.” Whatever was happening to him, whatever this system was, some part of him was steering it. He knew that now, because no outside force in any reality would name itself something that sounded like a cheesy computer system from a B-movie back when they still put ninjas in everything. That was the work of a very specific part of Ethan Cross — the part he'd spent thirty years trying to bury under professional composure and adult responsibilities. The part that still thought monster trucks were cool and had never once hit fast-forward through an explosion. CRITS. That kid was still in there, apparently, and he'd been given the keys.

  Then the pain hit. A tent peg through his eye socket, driven until it reached grey matter. He hissed through his teeth, one hand flaring toward his face on reflex, and the motion almost got him caught. Fingers grazed his shoulder from behind, close enough to snag cloth, and he twisted hard and stumbled through the turn.

  He kept moving. Stone walls narrowed and widened without warning, forcing him to choose between scraping his shoulder along cut blocks or stepping into open lanes where lantern light could catch him. The group behind him moved with disciplined patience. He heard it in the cadence: boots that didn't shuffle, brief pauses at intersections, the creak of leather straps under carried weight that stayed steady because nothing was loose. When a metal clink came, it came once. They were mapping as they hunted, and Ethan was the edge they hadn't reached yet.

  He cut left, then right, then doubled back through a low arch that forced him to hunch. His ribs punished him for the crouch, and his ankle caught on a raised edge that sent a jolt up his shin. He caught himself with his palm flat on the wall, and the stone was cold, gritty, with sharp edges where the blocks had chipped. Dust coated his throat when he breathed through his mouth, thick enough to taste.

  The lattices helped in small ways: his balance held a fraction longer on tilted stone, his feet found purchase more cleanly, his muscles didn't waste as much energy. Every time the System intruded again, flickers at the edge of his attention, pain lanced behind his eye and blurred his vision for a half-second. He learned to hate the timing and keep moving through it.

  A corner opened into a longer run, and the ruin sloped downward on the far side. Ethan didn't want down. The lantern glow behind him brightened at the last turn, and his choices collapsed to one. He stepped onto the slant and let gravity take him, dropping his weight low and sliding on grit and old dust. The angle steepened. His ankle screamed. He rode it because the alternative was hands and rope, and he had neither. He hit the bottom hard, tried to roll it out, and collided with a man crouching beside a crate.

  The man went down with a grunt and the crate thumped against stone, spilling wrapped bundles and dull clinks of tools. Ethan's shoulder clipped the man's jaw, and the man's head snapped sideways into the floor with a sound that made Ethan's stomach clench. The lantern light behind him wavered as someone shouted, and Ethan scrambled up on instinct, half crouched, palms torn from the grit of the slide, knees raw, ribs seizing when he tried to straighten. The man on the ground didn't move. A smear of blood at the corner of his mouth. Ethan forced his eyes away before the damage could become a person.

  Footsteps pounded down the slope above, controlled and fast, and lantern light poured into the lower lane in a hard sweep. Ethan backed into shadow beside a broken pillar base, trying to make himself smaller than his injuries would allow. Three shapes entered the lane, then a fourth. Boots planted in a practiced spread, spear tip low, bow unstrung but already in hand. They didn't charge. They assessed. One of them glanced at the man beside the crate and made a sound low in his throat, then looked away and adjusted his grip on the spear. Professional. The dead man could wait. The live one couldn't.

  They spoke, and for the first time Ethan was close enough that the sounds should have been words. They weren't. A twitch ran through the base of his skull, sharp and involuntary, and the System pushed into him again with the same lance behind his eye. The pain made him snarl, and when his vision cleared the sounds had changed. The nonsense syllables carried meaning now, and the meaning arrived wearing an accent that didn't belong in an ancient ruin.

  RACIAL TRAIT

  Racial Trait: Translation

  Status: UNSTABLE

  Note: Comprehension will arrive in steps

  “Oi, watch yer feet,” one of them said, thick and casual despite the spear in his hands, and the accent his brain supplied for it was the closest thing to cockney he'd ever heard outside of London. “Crate's down, someone's been 'ere.”

  Something like cockney accents. He was being chased through a ruin older than anything he'd ever heard of, and the hunters sounded like they should be haggling over produce at a street market. The thought arrived before he could stop it, and then he buried it. Ethan edged along the wall. A second voice cut in from farther up the slope, cleaner, more controlled, the words delivered with care.

  “Hold your spacing,” the refined voice said. “Don't rush the lower lanes.”

  “Knox wants 'im breathin',” the rough-voiced one muttered. “Don't go stickin' 'im unless you 'ave to.”

  Their boss. He didn't know the face yet, but the name landed: Knox. The rough voice filled space without commanding it. The refined one didn't need volume.

  “Boss'll skin us if we lose 'im again,” a second man muttered. The same rough register, but this one talked faster, filling every pause.

  “Shut it, Mags,” the first one said. “You want 'im to 'ear us comin'?”

  Mags didn't shut it. “I'm just sayin', ain't natural, is it? Bloke runs like 'e's done this before, an' 'e's barefoot an' bleedin'. Don't sit right.”

  He shifted his weight and his foot nudged a spilled bundle. It clicked softly against stone. Heads turned. Lantern light moved. Ethan froze so hard his ribs protested, and the lantern sweep slowed, tightening to the corner where the sound had come from, holding on each shadow a beat too long. They knew they were close.

  REWARD

  GRANTED: Veil Orb (Exotic) — BOUNDLESS EYES OF SIMURGH

  GRANTED: Iron Shards x5 | Bronze Shard x1

  NEW QUEST: ESCAPE

  His hand flew to his eye, fingers pressing hard against the lid, and a raw sound tore out of him before he could stop it. The window had more to show, fragments flickering at the edges, half-formed and gone, but he lost everything past the first few lines to the pain. The sound wasn't loud, but in the tight stone lane it carried.

  The lantern snapped toward him and stopped, pinning the corner of his cover in warm light.

  “There!” someone barked, and even through Translation the urgency was unmistakable.

  His options collapsed. He could run, but the light was on him and the lane was too open. He could fight, but he had a branch and a body held together by stubbornness. The System windows had already shown shards in his inventory, and his mouth remembered the hunger impulse from earlier with sick clarity. The idea was immediate: consume. Power now. Solve later.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  He didn't stop to weigh it. He reached for what the System had given him and pulled. A shard dropped into his palm, sudden weight, cold and dense against his skin, and in the lantern light it had a dark gleam, almost metallic. His fingers burned where they touched it. Every part of him flinched from the density, the wrongness of holding it at all. His mouth was dry, coated in dust and the copper tang of his own blood from the collision. He was going to eat a rock. He was going to put a metallic shard in his dry bloody mouth and swallow it, and nothing about that plan was sane.

  He put it in his mouth. Teeth closed. He swallowed.

  The shard hit his stomach and sat there, cold and impossibly dense, a weight he could feel in one exact spot below his ribs. For a heartbeat that was all. Then the cold turned hot at that exact point, and the heat spread, and kept spreading. It tore through him from the inside out, a burning force that ran along every channel he'd built and slammed into every place that wasn't meant to carry it. His lungs seized. His muscles clenched hard enough to shake. He tasted iron and copper and a chemical bitterness that coated the back of his throat.

  WARNING

  SHARD CONSUMED: Iron Shard

  Effect: Tempering Surge

  Warning: Severe overload risk

  The burning filled every channel in his body and kept going.

  Every delver in the lane stopped moving at once. Not a tactical pause. Not a regrouping. They stopped the way people stop when someone pulls the pin on something and doesn't throw it. One of them took a full step backward before the decision had finished reaching his face.

  “He's eatin' it,” Mags said, and his voice had gone flat. “That's Iron. He just ate an Iron shard. He ain't got cores. He ain't got cores.”

  “Back up,” the refined voice snapped from above, and for the first time it carried real urgency. “All of you. Now. If that surge doesn't settle he'll cook from the inside and take anyone within ten paces with him.”

  They didn't need to be told twice. The formation broke, not in panic but in the fast controlled scramble of professionals who understood exactly what they were looking at and wanted no part of it. Thirty seconds ago they'd been hunting him. Now they were giving him the lane, pressing themselves against the walls, putting stone between their bodies and his. One of them had his hands up as if that would help. Mags was still talking, because Mags was always talking. “Bleedin' mad. I've seen Stone-ranked lads pop from less than that. He's just standin' there cookin' and he ain't even screamin' proper...”

  On fire or not, Ethan didn't have time to die. He moved. Too fast. The surge didn't make him skilled. It made him fast. Ugly-fast, barely controlled. He was moving before he finished deciding to move. Lane width, foot placement, distance to the nearest shadow: everything registered in hard edges. His bad ankle hit the stone wrong on the first stride and he felt the joint give, but the surge ate the pain and he kept going.

  He lunged forward out of the lantern wash, and a spear jabbed toward his chest. He didn't block it. He slipped past it so close he felt the air move off the shaft, and his shoulder scraped the wall on the other side hard enough to take skin. He felt the scrape. The surge didn't block sensation. It just made the sensation irrelevant, and that should have scared him more than it did.

  One of the delvers hadn't moved fast enough. The man was on the ground where Ethan's charge had put him, pushing himself up on one elbow, face half-dazed, mouth opening to shout. Ethan's hand moved without thought. One strike, flat of palm to the side of the head, thrown with a speed and force his body should not have had. The man's head turned too far, too fast, and his body went slack before he could finish the first sound.

  Ethan's hand buzzed. He could feel the impact printed into his palm, a hot ache that ran through the small bones of his wrist. That was a man's skull. He had just hit a man's skull hard enough to hear it give.

  Warmth flooded into him. Sudden, sourceless, pouring into his limbs, his chest, his skull. For a half-second it felt good. Better than good. A clean bright heat that layered on top of the iron shard's fire and made everything sharper, faster, more. His hands were steadier than they'd been since he'd arrived in this world. His breathing evened out. His pulse slowed.

  His stomach heaved. Not clenched. Heaved. Because his body had just rewarded him for killing a man, and whatever wall he'd built between himself and the things happening to him buckled under that. He could feel it going, the careful distance that had kept him moving, kept him thinking, cracking at the joints. He had never killed anyone. He had never watched anyone die. And whatever had just poured into him didn't care about that at all. It just felt good, and his body had taken it the way a starving man takes bread, and he couldn't make it stop.

  There was no time. There was no time to understand what had just happened or what was still happening or why his hands were steady when the rest of him was coming apart. The surge dragged him forward. His legs were already running.

  The delvers staggered back. Ethan used that hesitation. He vaulted a low spill of rubble, hit the next corridor at an angle, and ran into deeper shadow.

  Behind him, someone shouted “Roy!” and another voice snapped, “Don't chase 'im close! If he bursts...”

  Their formation shifted into a wider spread that gave him space. He spent the space.

  He cleared one more corner and the man was already there. Knox's shoulders nearly filled the corridor. His weight was centered and low. There was no room to pass on either side. Lantern light from behind painted his outline, but there was nothing flashy to fix on. No oversized weapon, no armor that signaled rank. His hands were at his sides. He hadn't raised them. His breathing was even, unhurried, and Ethan could hear it clearly from ten paces because Knox had not moved fast enough to disturb it. His posture did the rest: loose, balanced, calm, and completely certain.

  Ethan tried to turn. Knox moved.

  Ethan didn't see the step. He only felt the impact as Knox's hand caught his shoulder and rotated him, redirecting him with a precision that required no effort. The grip was light. That was the wrong part. A grip that light should not have turned him completely around. Ethan's foot planted wrong on the bad ankle, and Knox's next motion took advantage of it. A crack, deep in his left leg. His leg folded under him, and the pain was immediate and total, dragging a sound out of him that he couldn't swallow.

  He hit the ground on one knee, then on his side, and his ribs flared on impact with the stone. The floor was cold against his cheek. He tasted grit and his own blood. The surge was still burning through him and his arms tried to push him back up, tried to make him stand, but there was nowhere to go. He swung the broken branch up, tried to make space with the only tool he had, and Knox took it out of his hand with a twist that made Ethan's fingers go numb. There was no fight. Knox had decided the game was over.

  “You had your fun,” Knox said, voice refined in Ethan's head, controlled enough to be almost bored. “But there is no getting around rank.”

  Ethan clawed at the stone and tried to push himself backward. His broken leg refused. His ribs flared. When he put weight on his ankle to compensate, the joint that had carried him through the entire chase buckled, and he stopped moving entirely. His vision tunneled. He felt the delvers arrive behind Knox in a loose half-circle, keeping their distance.

  One of them spoke, the rough accent thick through Translation, voice pitched between anger and awe. “Boss... he ate a shard. Iron. Just swallowed it. Thought he'd pop.”

  Knox's eyes flicked down to Ethan with a small, cold interest. “And he didn't.”

  “He didn't,” the man insisted. “An' he killed Roy. One hit to ve head and poor ole Roy's head turn't round wrong way.”

  Knox's expression didn't change for grief. It changed for calculation.

  “Bind him,” he said, and the delvers obeyed fast, keeping their hands clear of Ethan's mouth.

  They dragged him through corridors he couldn't mark. Two of them held his arms and his broken leg trailed behind him, and he felt every seam in the stone, every ridge where one block met the next, transmitted through bone. The bindings cut into his wrists when they pulled and his arms took the weight his legs couldn't. He tried once to get his good leg under him and take some of the drag off his broken one, and the delver on his left yanked him forward without breaking stride. Past the staging terrace with crates and packs and a crude cage hammered into place. Knox didn't hurry. Knox didn't need to.

  Ethan's world had slowed to pain, breath, and the sound of his captors' disciplined movement. His mouth tasted of copper, stone dust, the chemical residue of the shard. When they reached the cage, Knox leaned down just enough that Ethan could see his eyes clearly. They were calm. Nothing in them suggested that the last ten minutes had cost Knox anything at all.

  “I want to know how an Unmoored got here. You couldn't have landed here from where you are from. We have mana suppression sigils around this ruin,” Knox said. “Whoever suckered you into coming here is no friend. Tell me who. You answer me honestly, you might stay useful.”

  A sickly yellow light filled Knox's eyes, and Ethan's throat worked on its own, muscles clenching, jaw loosening. Words formed in his mouth before he'd chosen them. He managed one breath and a hoarse, honest answer.

  “No one sent me.”

  Knox watched him for a moment, then nodded once in acceptance. He gestured, and the delvers shoved Ethan into the cage. His broken leg hit the stone floor first and the sound that came out of him was not voluntary. The cage was narrow, too short to lie flat, the bars rough-hammered iron that caught on his torn clothes when he shifted. The floor was uneven stone that pressed cold against every part of him that was bleeding or bruised or burned. The bindings made it impossible to shift his leg to an angle that hurt less. He tried. There wasn't one. The door closed. The latch set.

  Outside, Knox turned away. “Clean up,” he said.

  “Iron-ranked an' all,” Mags muttered as they moved off, “an' 'e can't keep one bloke pinned without breakin' 'is leg first.”

  Two days ago he'd been arguing about a dishwasher gasket. Stephanie's voice had been patient and slightly annoyed, that specific tone she saved for when he was being stubborn about the wrong thing. The thought was there and then the iron shard took it, along with everything else.

  Ethan sat in the cage with his broken leg screaming, his ribs aching, and the iron shard burning through his body, growing in intensity. He could not reach for the comfort of his robot mode, no stepping out of himself this time. Tears filled his eyes as the burning found every Vitae and Meridian route he had built, mapped every junction, faster and faster. No respite. No unconsciousness. Every time he tried to find the distance that had saved him before, the pain was already there, waiting in whatever space he retreated into.

  His vision grew white as his world became agony.

  ? ? ? WEAVE IMPRINT ? ? ?

  ETHAN CROSS

  Status Timestamp: End of Chapter 6 (“Power Wears No Mask”)

  ??? ARCHIVE SEALED ???