The Mauler was dead. The cave fell silent.
Kaitri stood, his body a map of agony, and watched as his team… his team… rallied. They were a mess of blood, guts, and filth, but they were alive.
The pain from his ribs finally won. The adrenaline that had held him together, that had let him push through the agony, vanished like a snuffed flame. His vision, which had been razor-sharp, suddenly tunnelled.
The sounds of his friends' voices, Sibil's gasp, Varik's shaky "Holy... frack," all began to recede, as if he were falling down a well into the water.
He saw them turn. He saw Varik's eyes widen. He saw Paul flying towards him. What could make him that panicked? Is there something behind him?
His legs gave out. The last thing he saw was Sibil's hand reaching for him, her face a mask of terror, as his vision blurred, and the world dissolving into a soft, welcoming darkness.
He felt like he was floating. There was a muffled sound then the air felt kind of, wrong. It felt foreign.
Kaitri opened his eyes.
He was in a dream. But it wasn't a dream…
'Is it another sequence?' he wondered.
He looked around. The clouds were blue, but not the deep, reassuring sapphire of Halycon's sky. This was a pale, washed-out, sickly blue, choked with a brown-grey haze. The terrain was... shattered.
Skyscrapers, their glass eyes blind, lay on their sides like fallen titans. Chunks of the earth itself, massive islands of asphalt and concrete, floated lazily in the sky, held up by some unseen, broken force.
He saw and heard people. They weren't fighting. They were... surviving. Moving in huddled, desperate queues into massive, reinforced shelters built into the sides of exposed rock.
They looked hungry, beaten, and dying. He wanted to save them, he wanted to help.
He was moving before he could think, drifting forward silently. He couldn't hear the sound of his footsteps, but he didn't really think about it. He turned to a corner, tried to touch the rusted shell of a car, and his hand passed right through it.
He stumbled, almost falling over before getting balance and standing straight.
'This isn't Halycon,' he thought, his mind was analytical, even here in this strange land. 'Am I in another sequence?'
"Halycon? You're on Earth, buddy."
The voice was new. It was rich, male, and had an easy, almost musical confidence. Kaitri startled, his hands instinctively flying to his back, grasping for the tanto blades that weren't there. He spun around with his heart leaping.
A man was leaning against a broken wall, as if he belonged there. He was handsome, almost distractingly so, with sharp, intelligent features and a relaxed posture that seemed at odds with the devastated world around him.
He was wiping grease from some kind of mechanical component, humming a tune Kaitri had never heard.
"Oh, please," the man said, not looking up from his work. He smirked. "Even if you could fight me, you wouldn't last a second."
Kaitri's shock was replaced by a cold, guarded expression. "Who are you? Are you the voice in my head?"
The man finally looked up. His eyes were bright, filled with knowing amusement. "A voice? You mean the Scion System? Yup, that's me." He paused, his smirk widening. "Well. Not really."
Kaitri just stared, his mind struggling to process what he had just heard.
The man went back to his work, wiping the component with a rag. "I'm like a virtual assistant. An echo really…, created by the Main System to... help you a little. I have constraints. So don't ask too many questions, 'cause I probably don't have the answer."
"What? Wait, I don't get it." Kaitri felt his frustration rising. This was the voice, his curse, and it was talking to him like a bored mechanic. "A system? And it created... you?"
"Well, technically, the owner of this body is dead," the man said, gesturing to himself. "This is Earth, a year after The Pull. And my name... my name is Lin Ye. I was one of the very first Resonant humans, you see."
Kaitri's eyes widened. Lin Ye.
Lin ye left what he was doing and walked towards him with a smile. Kaitri felt uncomfortable but then he noticed that time had stopped but both of them could still move freely.
Then the world spun, the scenery blurring and changing. The broken city dissolved. Kaitri was standing in front of a massive, imposing fortress, built from black, volcanic rock. A crest was carved above its gate, bearing a slogan he'd seen before, in citadels all over Halycon.
"Memento mori, Memento Vivere." Remember death, Remember to live.
'Memento...' Kaitri's mind flashed to the Momento Sinew, the Momento Coin Dark-souled dropped sometimes after being killed. 'I always thought about this but is it actually connected?'
"Don't ask too many questions, I just want to show you a past… My past."
"Right after the Pull?" Kaitri asked and Lin Ye nodded.
"We were the first," Lin Ye's voice said, now standing beside him. "The first ones to fight back against the... 'demons,' as we called them."
"What happened?" Kaitri asked. He didn't know when the sequence will end so he calmed his mind and decided to get as much information as he could.
"The Pull... it broke everything," Lin Ye explained with a smile. "The Pure-souled OWs, the Elves, the Mernians... they had already made diplomatic contact with humans by then. They were ancient and we didn't know what was happening, so it was beneficial. They told us the Dark-souled were just the beginning. That the Rifts will return. They offered us a... partnership. An experiment."
The world shifted again. Kaitri was in a lab. He saw five people, four men and one woman, all in old-style military fatigues. He saw Elven sorcerers, their hands glowing with runes, and Mernian diplomats, their blue skin shimmering.
"There were ten of us in the project. Only five survived the Ritual," Lin Ye said, his voice now tinged with a distant sadness. "We were the first. ThefirstResonants."
Next, he saw the five in action. He saw their leader, a man with a fierce, burning aura, Xiang Li fighting off a Giant beast with crystalline skin and two heads. Kaitri trembled a little at the sight then he calmed himself once more, reminded that it wasn't real.
"Xiang Li was our officer," Lin Ye said, a fond smile on his face. "He was the first Resonant and the strongest. He... he also had a thing for the Eldrane princess, which made things... complicated for us. The human governments couldn't control him. He was too strong, too passionate. They wanted to get rid of him."
"The first Guardian…" Kaitri whispered. "Was he abandoned?"
"Not abandoned," Lin Ye corrected. "Exiled. The war on Earth was a stalemate. We needed more resources, more space. Earth was cramped, cities were dying. The government wanted to expand to Halycon. It was a death sentence. A way to get rid of the 'Xiang Li problem' and claim a new world at the same time."
He watched a vision of the five of them, standing before a high council who just declared war against a planet and sent him to lead the Resonants of the Concord to wipe out the Dark-souled on the planet.
It was Halycon.
Xiang Li was furious, and the four others, standing with him wore solemn expressions.
"He apologized. He told us he'd go alone. But we were a squad. We swore we'd be with him to the end. So, we went to Halycon."
"What were they like?" Kaitri asked, his eyes fixed on the five legendary figures.
"Demons," Lin Ye said. "The Dark-souled… Back then, we didn't have your fancy ranks. We just had... Levels. Level 1. Level 2. The stronger the demon, the higher the Level."
The vision changed once more and now they were on Halycon. A younger, wilder Halycon with red skies and thick air. Kaitri judged that he wouldn't be able to breathe here as a Terran.
He could see Lin Ye and a massive group, fighting a group of humanoid soldiers with armour that covered everywhere. He shuddered when he looked into their Visor. It felt like he was looking into eternal darkness.
"The Dark-souled here... they were different," Lin Ye said, his voice hardening. "They were... intelligent. They had a Kingdom. A hierarchy. They were too close to Earth and too terrible to be left alone so we had no choice but to answer the call."
Kaitri watched, mesmerized, as the five Resonants fought. He saw Hanako Sakura, a woman with a terrifying, cold grace, absorb a Momento Shard from a fallen beast, her crimson aura flaring. He saw them harvest a Momento Coin from the eye of a massive, wolf-like creature.
Then, he saw Xiang Li.
His soul energy was a brilliant, burning yellow. He wasn't just fighting. He was dancing.
"His Resonant spirit was… different," Lin Ye whispered, his voice full of awe, even now. "It communicated with him. It had a name. A heroic spirit from the old myths... Sun Wukong."
Kaitri watched as Xiang Li, cornered by a dozen Level-5 'demons,' roared. He didn't just summon a weapon. He summoned the spirit.
A spectral, monkey-like warrior, draped in golden armor, appeared behind him, its eyes like twin suns. Xiang Li's staff, a simple Diaphanous weapon, extended, sweeping the entire enemy squad away in one, glorious, devastating blow.
"He was the first Fated-rank," Lin Ye said. "This was thirty years after we got the power. We were all Fated-rank, by then."
"The First Five," Kaitri said, his mind putting the pieces together. "Xiang Li. You. Hanako Sakura. And... Timo Harsk. Stone Voss."
Lin Ye looked at him, surprised. "You know?"
"I read a lot… Plus, the names," Kaitri said. "Harsk. Voss. Those are House names now."
Lin Ye just shrugged, a sad smile on his face. "Am I? I'm dead, kid. I died in that war. No idea what came after."
Kaitri smiled and wanted to shake his head but then paused and said, "I don't know actually. The top ten houses are well known but there are others, and I don't know them all. Maybe you had one."
Lin ye smiled at that information, it kind of made Kaitri feel good even if he knew the real Lin ye was dead and this was just a construct.
"You said... the Kingdom. You said they had ranks. The ranks we use now."
"Ah," Lin Ye said, nodding. "Stone Voss. He was our strategist. He was the one who named them. He said if we were going to beat them, we had to understand them. He used their own hierarchy against them."
The vision shifted. Kaitri saw a massive, black-fleshed city, teeming with Dark-souled.
"The low-ranked beasts, the ones wandering Halycon, the Kingdom called them Fragments," Lin Ye explained, as if teaching a class. "The ones who were stronger, who served the palace... they were the Wardens."
He saw the beasts they had just fought. The Mauler. The Brute.
"The Strikers were their foot soldiers. The Sentinels were their horrors, their elite warriors. And then... then there were the Ascendants."
The vision turned dark. A new creature appeared. It was a giant. A humanoid, thirty meters tall, its skin like cracked obsidian, its eyes burning with a dark, intelligent magic. It was a general.
"The Ascendants were mages. Top warriors who used Dark-souled magic. They were the real war. The Elven rune-sorcery and our Fated-ranks were the only things that could hold them off. And above them all... was the Paragon. The leader. I never lived long enough to meet him."
"How... how did you...?" Kaitri started.
The vision zoomed in. He saw Lin Ye, his face bloody, his old-style armor shattered. He was running, limping, from that same, colossal Ascendant. He'd been hit with a fatal blow, a curse of dark magic he couldn't heal.
He saw Lin Ye, in his final moments, stumble and fall into a familiar cave. The same cave. He watched, as if through a ghost's eyes, as the dying hero pulled out his journal and, with a shaking hand, began to write.
Kaitri was fascinated. He had so many questions. "What happened? How do I get stronger? What about Archedes? What about my spirit?"
"I was created for one purpose," Lin Ye said, his voice fading. "One goal."
"A goal? What goal?"
"The cave isn't just a home to Dark-souled," Lin Ye said, his form beginning to dissolve. "It is also the grave of the real Lin Ye. Find my body. Take my journal. It will help you understand the true way to become a Resonant."
"Wait!" Kaitri yelled, his frustration boiling over. "The System! Why me? What is it? What does it want?"
Lin Ye just smiled, a sad, final smile. "I told you, kid. I'm just an assistant. I don't have the answer."
He dissolved. The world started to come apart, the vision of the cave fading to black.
"Goodbye, Kaitri Anam. Don't... frack it up."
The world snapped back to the cold, mechanical voice he knew.
[Sequence 'The First Resonant' Complete.]
[Data Integration: 12%]
[New Objective Acquired: The Hero's Grave.]
[Warning: Physical trauma detected. Waking subject.]
'It... it was a sequence,' Kaitri thought, his mind reeling. 'I fainted. That's why I didn't hear the start of it. That's why no one saw my eyes change.' He felt a sudden, cold anger. The System. It used him. It showed him all of that, just to give him a... a quest.
He cursed the System.
He opened his eyes.