Cain didn't stop until the city's lights thinned into scattered embers behind him.
City Z ended the way rot always did—not with a clean break, but with a long, choking collapse. Districts leaned against each other like drunks, held upright by cables and half-functional pylons. The sky above remained bruised, cloud layers grinding together as if the world itself hadn't decided whether to rain or tear open again.
Cain crossed into the industrial outskirts as dawn tried and failed to assert itself.
Here, the gods had never bothered pretending to care.
The factories were old—older than most Celestial footholds—built for output, not worship. Massive frames of steel jutted from the ground like exposed ribs, conveyor lines frozen mid-cycle, furnaces cold but stained with decades of heat. Cain slowed, not out of caution, but calculation. Places like this attracted survivors who understood one rule better than most: if the gods ignored you, you learned to live without them.
