Aria never trusted silence.
Guild headquarters at dawn was too quiet, the glass corridors stretching like the veins of a dead creature. Screens slept in their casings, glyphs dimmed, doors sealed with security locks that hummed faintly when she passed. Normally there would be the clamor of raiders returning from late-night breaches, laughter and shouting spilling from the mess hall. Now only her boots marked time against polished floors.
She didn't come here to rest. She came to hunt.
The archive room recognized her clearance with a hiss of air and the muted thrum of wards unlocking. The lights rose in a soft spiral, illuminating banks of projection tables. Aria strode to the center, fingers already working the interface.
She'd watched Kael Varin fight. Not once, not in rumor, not in distorted replays—she had been there. He'd soloed the biome wolf, forced a patch mid-raid, held entire fields together with nothing more than will and that cracked arm of his.
But according to official guild logs? He hadn't been there at all.
The screen flared alive. She input the query:
Ridge Forest Gate – Combatant Records.
NULL.
She pinched the display wider, calling up deployment feeds.
Team Leader: NULL.
Combatant Entry: RESTRICTED.
System Patch Event: NONE.
Her jaw tightened. The overlay told her nothing new—only confirmed the void. But Aria wasn't new to voids. Absences could be more damning than presences.
She toggled her personal raid cam, let it play.
There was Kael, walking into the Ridge Forest alone, light flickering through cracks in his forearm. She slowed the feed, caught the exact moment he triggered the patch—system shimmer stuttering across the field like glass breaking.
Evidence. Clear. Unshakable.
And yet the guild records called it nothing.
She froze the image, Kael mid-motion, cracks alive on his skin. His face drawn tight with focus, not the smugness of cheaters or the cold calculation of manipulators. Just stubborn determination.
Aria rubbed her temple. "What the hell are you, Varin?"
The door slid open behind her.
She didn't turn. "If you're going to tell me the logs are clean, don't bother."
The technician hesitated before stepping closer. Young. Nervous. "Ma'am… the logs have been validated."
Aria flicked him a glance sharp enough to cut. "By who?"
He swallowed. "Not internal ops. The overlays… they came from above."
"Above?"
He nodded, pulling up a file tree. Lines of text scrolled across the projection:
ARCHIVE_OVERLAY >> ROLLBACK_SYNC >> ADMIN.PATCH.NULL
Origin: UNKNOWN
Verification Key: REDACTED
Affected Entries: 3
Ridge Forest Gate.
Coral Hollow Gate.
West Breach Test.
All raids Kael had touched. All rewritten.
Aria's fingers curled against the table edge. "That's Dominion architecture."
The tech didn't confirm. He didn't have to.
Someone with administrator-level rollback permissions was rewriting Kael Varin out of history.
Later, in her office, Aria poured herself a glass of water she didn't drink. The city skyline cut sharp against the morning haze, towers rising like spears. Somewhere out there Kael was hiding with his family, patching cracks in reality the way other men patched armor.
If Dominion wanted him erased, it meant two things: he wasn't supposed to exist, and he was too dangerous to acknowledge.
Her commlink pulsed.
She swiped it open. A feed of guild chatter scrolled: raiders gossiping about Kael's "miraculous timing," Rex dropping sly insults in interviews, civilians debating whether mid-tiers deserved hero status.
Aria didn't bother with Rex. Sponsored prodigies always believed their crowns welded. What caught her attention was the new rumor flashing at the bottom of the feed:
"The Rollback Man. Lucky, cursed, or cheating fate?"
Her gut twisted. Rumors had teeth. Rumors could eat a man alive faster than any monster.
She leaned back, gaze drifting to the sword mounted on her wall. A relic from the first days of awakening—dull now, ceremonial. Everything dulled if you let it.
Not Kael. He burned hotter every raid. The cracks spreading on his arm weren't just marks of Debt. They were proof he was pushing against the system itself.
And if his daughter—Aria shook her head before the thought could finish. Dangerous path. No evidence yet. Just whispers.
But whispers had started wars.
Across the city, Kael sat on the edge of his bed, flexing his glowing arm in the dim.
Liora hovered near the door, silent, as though watching him in secret even though he knew she was there. He hadn't apologized for the morning. Couldn't.
The bandage cut into his skin, but the glow seeped through anyway.
Senna's laugh echoed faintly from the next room. It was the only sound that kept him from falling apart.
He thought of Aria—sharp-eyed, relentless. She wouldn't stop digging. If she found too much… if Dominion noticed…
The cracks flared once, pulsing in rhythm with Senna's laugh.
Kael closed his eyes.
Aria's decision came at dusk.
She stood at the archive table again, hands braced against the glow of the projection. Dominion had erased three raids. That wasn't a coincidence.
If they were burying Kael, then the only way to protect her guild was to know why.
She keyed in a private trace, bypassing guild firewalls. A dangerous move. A reckless one. But she had to see.
The system blinked. A warning flared.
ACCESS RESTRICTED – ROLLBACK VARIANT DETECTED.
Her throat went dry. She'd seen that tag only once before, in classified files about the first Patchrunner—a ghost of a man who had bent reality until it shattered.
Now Kael carried the same designation.
Aria's reflection stared back at her from the glass—hard eyes, tight jaw. She thought of her raiders, her city, the civilians who believed guilds kept them safe.
She whispered into the empty room: "If you're breaking the world, Varin… I need to know if it's to save us, or to bury us."