CHAPTER 45: THE CAPITAL UNDER ATTACK

Ning Que’s body was a livewire, every muscle fiber thrumming with the aftershocks of his internal battle.

He braced himself against the warped metal frame of the shattered Submersion Chamber, the world outside a haze of smoke and flickering emergency lights.

His mind, however, was a shard of ice in the chaos, cold, clear, and utterly certain that something was terribly wrong.

The grand central corridor of the Yundao Guild was a tomb. No frantic footsteps of medics, no clatter of armored guards, not even the shrill, insistent wail of an alarm. Only a profound, unnatural silence was broken by the spit and crackle of static mana discharging from exposed conduits in the ceiling.

A series of frantic, glitching pings flashed across his vision, the System’s interface unstable and frayed. [LOCAL SERVER: OFFLINE] [RECLAIMER NETWORK: UNRESPONSIVE] [WARNING: INTERNAL BREACH DETECTED]

The last message pulsed, and a jagged red line etched itself into his augmented sight, pointing down the west corridor. A directional trail, leading toward a rapidly spreading bloom of corrupted energy. The Tech Hub. Linx’s old domain.

A bitter, humorless laugh escaped his lips, echoing in the dead quiet.

"Two hours. You let your guard down for two hours, and this is what happens?" He shoved himself off the frame, his voice a low growl of accusation directed at the Guild’s absent leadership, at Tao, at himself. "Pathetic."

He broke into a sprint, his boots skidding on slick patches of something he refused to identify. The walls were scarred with blood smears and long, cauterized gashes where they had half-melted into slag. Wires hung like dead vines from the ceiling panels. And then he saw them.

Creatures, if they could be called that, shambled through a broken server room ahead. They were twisted mockeries of life, their forms caught in a state of perpetual glitch. One had the lower body of a wolf and a torso that dissolved into a cloud of sputtering, corrupted data-pixels.

Another was a vaguely humanoid shape of writhing, black tentacles, its head a single, glowing red optic that flickered in and out of existence. They were Dungeonborn, but wrong. Unstable. Broken code made manifest.

One of them, a mass of twitching limbs and exposed, crystalline bone, lunged at him with a shriek that sounded like a dial-up modem screaming its last.

Ning Que didn’t think. He didn’t hesitate. His body moved on pure, lethal instinct. He ducked under the swipe, the air hissing where its claws tore through it. In a single, fluid motion, he pivoted, his blade an arc of silver light in the dim corridor.

The cut was clean, silent, automatic. The creature’s head disconnected from its body, and both halves dissolved into a shower of black-and-red pixels before they even hit the ground.

A crisp, clean notification appeared in his vision, a stark contrast to the earlier glitches. [SYSTEM ALERT: +1200 EXP] [ENTITY: CORRUPTED NULL-SPAWN] [NEW RECORD: FIRST REAL-WORLD KILL]

His stride faltered for a fraction of a second.

"Real-world kill...?" he repeated, his eyes narrowing. The implications were chilling. These weren’t projections. They weren’t contained within a gate. He gritted his teeth and pushed onward, the red trail pulling him deeper into the facility’s dying heart.

He rounded a corner and nearly collided with two figures huddled against a reinforced bulkhead. Viera and Aeris. Both were bloodied, bruised, and breathing hard.

Viera had her uninjured arm wrapped around Aeris, supporting her. The other arm was a horror from the elbow down; her skin had transformed into a jagged, semi-translucent grey crystal, veins of dark energy pulsing within it.

Viera’s head snapped up, her eyes blazing with a mixture of relief and fury.

"Where the hell have you been, Ning Que? Playing hero in a sensory deprivation tank while the world burns around us?"

"I was locked in," he said, his gaze fixed on her crystallizing arm. "What hit you?"

"One of those... things," she spat, nodding down the hall where more of the glitched abominations were crawling from a ruptured maintenance shaft. "They don’t stop. It’s like the dungeon broke open and spilled into us. They just keep coming."

Aeris, pale and drained, leaned heavily against Viera. Her usually vibrant aura was a faint, flickering ember.

"It’s the rift generator," she whispered, her voice hoarse. "In Linx’s old vault. They came from inside."

Ning Que’s blood ran cold.

"The vault? That project was supposed to be sealed. Tao gave the order months ago."

"He reactivated it," Aeris said, shaking her head slowly. "After the Behemoth... he thought we could find a way to stabilize the mana ruptures. Create a... a controlled gate we could study. But Linx was the only one who understood the core matrix. Without her..." Her voice trailed off, the conclusion hanging in the air between them. Without her, it was a bomb waiting to go off.

"He thought he could control it?" Viera scoffed, the sound sharp and brittle. "That arrogant fool. He couldn’t even control his own Reclaimers, and he thought he could tame a raw rift?"

Just then, a deep, resonant BOOM shook the entire facility. The floor plates groaned, and dust rained down from the ceiling. A tremor shot through the structure, not like an earthquake, but like the heavy footfall of something immense.

From the far end of the hall, where the entrance to the Tech Hub lay in ruins, a new horror emerged. It was ten feet tall, its body forged from what looked like polished obsidian armor, etched with pulsing, data-like scars that glowed an angry crimson.

In one hand, it wielded a massive scythe whose blade seemed to cut through the very air, leaving faint, shimmering tears in reality. A Vault Reaper. A high-tier guardian entity that should only exist in the deepest, most secure dungeons.

Ning stepped forward, placing himself between it and the two women. His blade hummed softly, a low note of anticipation.

"I’ll hold it. You get the others, get everyone you can find, and get out of here."

"No," Viera growled, pushing herself off the wall. She winced as the crystallization in her arm pulsed with pain, but her stance was granite. She nocked a crystal-tipped arrow with her good hand, her bow appearing in a shimmer of light. "You’re not fighting that thing alone. We’re the only ones left here who can."

Aeris took a shaky breath, her hands glowing with a faint, swirling green light.

"She’s right. We fight together."

Ning didn’t waste another breath arguing. The Reaper was already moving, its stride impossibly fast for its size. The battle exploded.

It was a kinetic blur of desperate, synchronized violence. Ning blinked, his body dissolving into a wisp of shadow and reappearing behind the Reaper, his blade striking at the back of its knee. The obsidian armor flared, deflecting the blow with a deafening clang that sent shudders up his arm.

"Its armor is adaptive!" Aeris yelled, launching a bolt of compressed wind that slammed into the Reaper’s chest. The monster staggered back a single, crucial step, its data-scars flaring brighter.

Viera let her arrow fly. It wasn’t aimed to kill, but to distract. The crystal tip shattered against the Reaper’s shoulder, not piercing the armor but exploding in a blinding flash of light that momentarily overloaded its visual sensors. The creature roared, a sound of grinding metal and corrupted files, and swung its scythe in a wide, horizontal arc.

Ning blinked backward, the blade hissing through the space he’d occupied a nanosecond before. He saw the Reaper’s tactics shifting. It wasn’t just a brute. It was learning. Its arm morphed, the hand flattening into a shield of shimmering data-code that intercepted Aeris’s next wind-bolt, absorbing it completely.

It turned its attention to her, identifying the caster as the greatest immediate threat. It lunged, faster than anything that large should be able to move, its free hand lashing out.

Aeris threw up a wind barrier, but it was too weak. The Reaper’s claws tore through it like paper, and it slammed her against the wall, pinning her. Its obsidian fingers tightened around her throat.

"Aeris!" Viera screamed, firing another arrow that bounced harmlessly off its back.

Time seemed to slow. Ning saw the light draining from Aeris’s eyes, the panic giving way to resignation. A cold, silent rage filled him, washing away the last vestiges of the System’s forced programming. This wasn’t a simulation. This wasn’t a test. This was real.

His blade began to glow, not with its usual silver sheen, but with a brilliant, pure white light. His eyes flashed, the pupils contracting into pinpricks of burning white.

[SYSTEM SYNC OVERRIDE: ACTIVE] A new line of text burned itself into his mind, not a request, but a statement of fact. [SKILL UNLOCKED: VOIDTRACE]

He wasn’t there, and then he was.

He appeared ten feet in the air, directly above the Vault Reaper, hanging in space as if gravity were a suggestion he’d chosen to ignore. His blade, now wreathed in crackling white lightning, was held high. He looked down at the abomination that was choking the life out of his friend, and his voice cut through the chaos, cold and absolute.

"Fall."

He dropped. The descent was a streak of white light, a judgment from an empty heaven. The blade connected with the Reaper’s neck and sliced downward. There was no resistance, no clang of armor. The obsidian, the data-scars, the corrupted flesh, it all parted before the white-hot energy of his sword.

The Vault Reaper was cleaved cleanly in two. The two halves stood for a second before sliding apart and dissolving into a torrent of fading pixels and ash.

Silence.

Aeris slumped to the floor, gasping for air. Viera stared, her bow held slack, her expression one of pure disbelief. Ning landed softly, the white light in his eyes and on his blade receding, leaving him breathing heavily.

But the silence didn’t last.

From deeper within the breached vault, from the black heart of the failed experiment, a howl echoed. It was a sound of ancient hunger and cosmic despair, a sound that bypassed their ears and clawed directly at their souls.

And then the System, its voice no longer glitching but screaming with alarm, flooded their vision.

[WARNING: CLASS-A GATE HAS BEEN FORCIBLY OPENED IN YUNDAO] [WARNING: GATE STABILITY AT 0%. CONTAINMENT FAILURE IMMINENT] [RECLAIMER ZONE STATUS UPDATING...] [RECLAIMER ZONE HAS ENTERED DEAD STATUS]

A final, horrifying realization dawned on Ning Que as he looked at his friends’ terrified faces. Yundao was no longer a stronghold.

It had just become a Dungeon...