In Kael's first life, the world had been measured in inches and ounces.
The Cage was not a metaphor. It was a twelve-by-twelve octagon of chain-link fence and blood-soaked plywood, hidden beneath an abandoned textile mill where the air tasted of rust and mold. Industrial halogen lamps flickered overhead, their relentless hum drilling straight into the skull. The light was harsh and unforgiving. There was nowhere to hide.
Kael was twenty-four years old and known as the Ghost. Not because he was fast. Not because he was flashy. He earned the name because he was silent. He didn't roar when he struck. He didn't celebrate when he won. He entered the Cage, dismantled another body with mechanical precision, and left without leaving behind anything that resembled emotion.
Outside the fights, his life was just as hollow. No family whatever faces he might once have known had faded before memory could form. No friends, friends were variables, and variables got you killed. He lived alone in a rented room containing a mattress, a hot plate, and a stack of anatomy textbooks. He studied the human body not to heal it, but to understand how it failed. Leverage points. Pressure thresholds. Angles of collapse. He knew where to press to shut down a windpipe and how much force it took to ruin a knee forever.
Then came the Butcher.
Three hundred pounds of mass and chemical enhancement, the man fought like a living battering ram. His technique was crude, but physics did not care about refinement. Force was mass multiplied by acceleration, and the Butcher had plenty of both.
The fight lasted fourteen minutes.
Kael shattered the man's nose in the first thirty seconds. He split both eyebrows open so blood poured into the Butcher's eyes. By the tenth minute, the big man's breathing had devolved into a wet, ragged whistle. Kael was winning. He always won.
Until he didn't.
It was sweat, nothing more than a thin smear of saltwater on the plywood. Kael stepped back to reset his stance, and his lead foot slid an inch too far. His balance shifted. His guard dropped not enough for a spectator to notice, but enough for the universe to collect its due.
The Butcher's fist didn't feel like a punch. It felt like the ground itself had stopped spinning and thrown him off.
There was a sharp, dry crack. His jaw. Another followed his orbital bone. Kael hit the canvas, and for a brief, detached moment, the halogen lights overhead looked beautiful. Like dying stars.
Warmth spread through his chest. His lungs filled with something heavy. His mind cataloged it automatically: blood, pressure, collapse. The body was failing.
What surprised him wasn't fear. It was irritation.
I forgot to clean the hot plate.
Then the lights went out.
Waking up was worse than dying.
Consciousness returned in fragments, dragging him upward through something dense and suffocating. Smells came first: antiseptic, lavender, and something faintly sweet. Bread. Yeast. Life.
Then sensation. His body felt wrong. Too small. Too light. His limbs were thin and weak, his skin soft in a way that made his instincts recoil.
When he opened his eyes, a woman was crying over him. She clutched his hand—his hand, pale and small, like it belonged to someone else entirely.
"Kael," she sobbed. "Thank God. My baby. You're awake."
His mind reacted before anything resembling emotion could surface. Female. Mid-thirties. No visible weapons. Emotional state unstable. Threat level negligible.
"Who… are you?" he tried to ask. The words came out thin and high, barely audible.
Understanding arrived slowly, pieced together over months.
He was six years old. The city was called N0-52. The woman was his mother, Elena. The man who hovered awkwardly nearby, eyes red with relief, was his father, Marcus. They were kind. Patient. Attentive.
And they were strangers.
As the weeks passed, a heavier realization settled in. He wasn't just reborn into a new life, he had been reborn into a world he recognized.
Posters on the streets showed armored figures standing against monstrous silhouettes. Newsfeeds spoke in careful tones about Awakened, about the Dream Realm, about people who vanished in their sleep and returned changed or didn't return at all. Curfews existed not to deter crime, but to keep people indoors when the world beyond the walls grew thin.
The Nightmare Spell.
In his first life, Kael had spent rare hours of rest reading webnovels on a cracked tablet to distract himself from hunger. He knew this story. He knew how fragile this peace was. He knew that the city's order was nothing more than a brittle shell over something vast and hungry.
Elena and Marcus loved him. But they did not love him. They loved the boy who had died of fever at six, the child whose place Kael now occupied.
He felt nothing when Elena hugged him, no comfort when Marcus smiled with tired pride. There was no hatred either. Only distance. When Marcus embraced him, Kael's body stiffened on instinct, his mind briefly mapping leverage before dismissing the impulse. When Elena kissed his forehead, he wondered clinically why she spent energy on something so inefficient.
He was not their son.
He was a weapon that had been set down in the wrong place.
So he prepared.
While other children played with holographic toys, Kael drilled in the confines of his room. His new body was inefficient, prone to error, soft in ways that offended his instincts. He corrected that through repetition. Thousands of movements. Perfected stances. Controlled breathing. He trained not for strength, but for economy.
His room remained bare. No posters. No keepsakes. A bed. An empty floor scrubbed clean for practice.
"Why don't you go out with the other boys?" Elena asked once, worry creasing her brow. "The parks are beautiful this time of year."
"I'm busy," Kael replied.
"Busy doing what?"
"Waiting."
The wait ended on his sixteenth birthday.
It began with a dull ache in his teeth, deep and persistent. Then came the exhaustion, predatory and unnatural, indifferent to rest. Kael tried to resist it. Shortened his sleep. Increased his drills. Forced his body to comply.
The Spell didn't care.
By the fifth day, his vision lagged. He would turn his head, and the world would follow a heartbeat later. The delay was subtle, nauseating.
He sat at the kitchen table, watching Marcus eat synthetic noodles. The man looked older than he should have, worn down by long shifts and the quiet dread that clung to City N0-52.
"You look pale," Marcus said. "You getting enough sun?"
"I'm fine."
Kael's gaze drifted to the man's neck, to the steady pulse beneath the skin. The calculation surfaced and was discarded. Violence here was inefficient.
What mattered was what came next.
He knew the signs. Once the pull grew strong enough, sleep would come whether he wanted it or not. And when it did, the Nightmare Spell would drag him into his First Nightmare.
If he slept here and failed, he would become a Nightmare Creature.
He would tear through these walls and kill the two people who had spent ten years feeding him.
He didn't owe them love.
But he owed them that.
On the seventh day, trembling with exhaustion, Kael stood.
"I'm going out," he said.
Elena looked up from her tablet. "Now? It's almost curfew."
"I need air."
He walked until the lights blurred, until he reached an abandoned service station on the edge of District Four. He sat against cold concrete and forced his eyes open.
Sleep took him anyway.
[Aspirant detected.][Entering the First Nightmare.]
The transition crushed him flat and then forced him through a needle's eye.
Heat hit first.
Kael opened his eyes to blistering air that scorched his lungs. He stood on a metal grate suspended above a river of white-hot iron. Gears the size of buildings churned overhead, blotting out the sky. The foundry pulsed with a relentless rhythm THUD. THUD. THUD. that vibrated through the soles of his feet and into his bones.
He wore a tattered, oil-stained tunic. A heavy iron shackle bound his wrist, its chain disappearing into darkness. Around him, dozens of other slaves pulled levers in perfect silence, faces empty, movements stripped of will.
A shape descended from the catwalk above.
The Warden was a towering fusion of iron plates and rotting flesh. Ten feet tall. Faceless save for a vertical slit glowing with sickly green fire. A barbed wire whip hissed as it dragged along the metal.
"Pull, #909," it rasped.
Kael gripped the lever but didn't pull. He listened. Not to anything supernatural, just sound, vibration, pressure. The grind of gears. The uneven shudder beneath his feet. Experience told him where strain accumulated. Where metal protested before it failed.
"No," he said.
The word rang too loud in the enforced silence.
The Warden roared and leapt down, the impact warping the grate. Kael moved not toward the creature, but toward the machinery. He swung his shackled wrist into the rotating teeth of a massive gear.
Metal screamed.
The chain held. The gear shattered.
The foundry convulsed as pressure surged with nowhere to go. Molten iron splashed upward. Gears tore themselves apart.
Something struck Kael from behind. Pain exploded across his back, white and blinding. He felt himself lifted and thrown.
The last thing he saw before darkness closed in was the Warden, still standing amid the collapse, its green slit burning brighter.
[Warning: Structural Integrity Compromised.][The Nightmare persists.]
Then the world went black.