CHAPTER 1: STATIC AND SILENCEThe alley reeked of rust and blood—old scents that clung to The City like mold. Neon flickered above in the shape of a cracked Wing sigil, now repurposed as gang graffiti. The rain came down hard, slicing through steam rising from manholes like thin knives. It painted everything in the pale, sickly palette of decay, the colors of a city that refused to die but had long since stopped living.

  Vash Ramiel stood at the edge of the alley, coat dripping, one cybernetic gauntlet humming a dull red beneath the sleeve. His breath fogged in the cold. Behind him, smoke still curled from a colpsed Syndicate checkpoint—half its guards dead, the rest limping toward nowhere, leaving blood like breadcrumbs behind them. The metal was still hot from the bst he’d triggered, firelight flickering behind broken walls.

  He didn’t look back. He never looked back.

  "Three minutes te," said a voice. Calm. Measured. Clipped.

  Lyra Viren dropped from a rooftop without a sound, nding beside him like a shadow that had decided to wear a human shape. She barely disturbed the puddles underfoot. Her cloak shimmered in the dim blue light, absorbing the city’s noise like it owed her silence. She didn’t even gnce at the wreckage.

  "I was early," Vash muttered. "The explosion was te."

  Lyra’s expression didn’t change, but the pulse sensor embedded in her optic HUD flickered once. She didn’t argue. She just stepped forward, scanning the alley’s edge with a flick of her wrist. The tech in her glove pinged and hissed, mapping out data invisible to anyone without her augmentations.

  The bounty data lit up in her retinal overy: TARGET: Kossin Lieve.CLASS: YELLOW THREAT Rogue Fixer.LOCATION: Last pinged in Splinter Zone 3-C, near a decommissioned Hana Association field station.CONDITIONS: Capture optional. Dismemberment permitted. High votility.

  "He’s nesting in the old Hana yer," Lyra said, fingers ghosting across floating blue glyphs. "Encrypted signal suggests a failing Singurity device. Likely unstable."

  Vash cracked his neck. The red in his left eye pulsed brighter.

  "That means one thing."

  "No backup," Lyra replied.

  "No rules."

  A train screeched somewhere overhead, cutting across the skyline like a burning fuse. The City never stopped moving. But down here, in the Splinter Zones, time felt like it paused before things got worse. This part of the City had colpsed in on itself during the Spiral, and no one bothered to recim it. The ws of physics bent here. People disappeared without trace.

  They moved.

  Vash led, boots thudding against metal and concrete, cloak whipping behind him like the tail of a wild beast. He took corners fast, his instincts guiding him more than any map. Lyra followed without sound, light on her feet, calcuting every angle, scanning for traps, ambush points, heat signatures. She said nothing. She didn’t need to. Their rhythm was set years ago.

  They reached the outer walls of the Hana complex—a jagged ruin of reinforced alloy and bst-formed gss. Turrets hung like vultures from broken scaffold arms, long since dead. Graffiti covered the front entrance in five different gang dialects. The security systems here were long offline, but something else pulsed in the air—a low-frequency vibration that made the back of Vash’s teeth buzz.

  "That’s a Singurity tremor," Vash said.

  "Confirmed," Lyra nodded. "Originating from sublevel three."

  They bypassed the front doors and slipped through a rusted service hatch, barely wide enough for Vash’s frame. The hallway inside was scorched, walls bckened by old suppressive grenades and breach charges. Hana emblems peeled off in tatters.

  "Looks like he’s been here for a while," Vash said.

  "He’s been setting roots. Not good."

  As they pushed deeper, movement flickered across Lyra’s sensors. A blur at the far end of the corridor—a figure trailing static like smoke.

  "There," she said. "Heat signature: 88%. That’s him."

  "Time to turn up the heat."

  Vash surged forward, gauntlet igniting with an angry red glow. The humming grew into a low roar as he sprinted. Lyra followed at a distance, eyes locked on data feeds as she watched the space around them shift. Something felt wrong.

  The trap triggered.

  The hallway erupted. Mines on the walls fred to life, spitting magnetic arcs across the air. Energy cables snapped out like steel vipers, coiling toward Vash.

  Lyra acted first. She raised her glove and unleashed a sonic burst—a low-frequency distortion that pulsed through the air like a pressure wave. The cables faltered. The magnets de-synced.

  Vash crashed through the chaos.

  Ahead, Kossin Lieve stood like a malfunctioning machine given flesh. Bolts protruded from his spine, his body twitching with erratic energy. His eyes flickered, one human, one synthetic and sparking.

  "You’re not taking me back!" he screeched, voice warping through digital yers.

  "We’re not here for redemption," Vash growled. "We’re here for the check."

  Kossin raised a phase rifle and fired.

  The bolt hit Vash in the chest. The impact staggered him, seared through his coat, left a trail of burnt synthmesh.

  "That all you got?" Vash spat blood and surged forward.

  Lyra was already in motion. She leapt, twisting in the air, her bow assembling itself in a fsh of blue light. The string formed from magnetic tension, glowing softly as she notched an arrow of pure energy.

  "Ten seconds," she said.

  Vash grinned.

  "I only need five."

  He hit Kossin like a meteor. The impact dented the floor, sparks shooting out in every direction. Gauntlet met armor, and armor lost. Kossin tried to retaliate, but Vash overwhelmed him with raw fury. Every hit pulsed with red light, every punch threatening to ignite the room.

  Kossin stumbled back—blood leaking from cracked impnts. He screamed and activated a failsafe.

  The room shuddered.

  Walls distorted. Space bent.

  Lyra felt the shift in her bones. A temporal instability. The room had become a Singurity shell—a st-ditch suicide trap. Kossin was trying to colpse the zone with all three of them inside.

  She unched the arrow.

  It hit Kossin in the neck. The blue energy spread through him like frostbite. He froze, eyes wide, just before the device detonated.

  Lyra reached Vash and yanked him back. She activated her phase field. Time slowed.

  The explosion consumed Kossin in a bloom of white fire—but didn’t touch them. Not yet.

  The world shifted again. Then snapped.

  They nded hard, ten meters back, in a pile of ash and scorched floor tiles. Vash coughed. His coat was on fire. Lyra calmly extinguished it with a sonic burst.

  "He had a Singurity shard," she said.

  "You don’t say."

  They stood over what was left of Kossin. He twitched once, then went still. His impnts still glowed faintly, sparking with residual energy.

  "You want to bring the head or the spine?" Vash asked.

  "Spine."

  Lyra drew out a thin scalpel from her sleeve. It gleamed in cold blue light. She went to work, precise and surgical.

  Vash stared at the wall, his gauntlet hissing as it cooled. The red in his eye flickered.

  "You ever wonder how many times we’ve done this?" he asked.

  "Seventy-six," Lyra replied. "Assuming standard memory retention."

  "Right."

  He didn’t tell her he barely remembered the first fifty. Every time he used the gauntlet at full charge, more of him disappeared. Fshes of faces he couldn’t name. Voices he couldn’t pce.

  They left the compound in silence. The rain hadn’t let up.

  The City didn’t care.

  But somewhere out there, another bounty had just gone live.

  And two names blinked on the Crimson Dossier, marked red and blue:

  CRIMSON STATIC & AZURE SILENCE: ACTIVE