The thing about dying is you'd think it gets easier.
It doesn't.
The rift beast had my leg somewhere around the knee—I could tell by the pressure more than the pain, the pain had already gone somewhere distant and polite—and I was lying on my back in the rubble of what used to be the 14th district market, staring up at a sky full of things that shouldn't exist. Void tendrils thick as skyscrapers. The Gate humming overhead like a living thing, which it was, sort of. The smell of ozone and burnt concrete and something sweet that I'd learned not to think too hard about.
Elias was gone.
Obviously.
I'd watched him take the Shard out of my hands—my hands, I'd bled for three months running solo night patrols to find that thing—and he'd looked at me with this expression I can only describe as apologetic, except not actually apologetic at all, more like the face you make when you step over a homeless guy so you don't have to feel bad about it. Sorry, not sorry. Classic Elias.
"You understand," he'd said. "The Shard responds to S-Rank resonance. It would've been wasted on you."
I'd said something back. Can't remember what. Something dumb probably. My tongue never worked right when I was furious.
Then the beast had come through the rift and he'd... left. Just turned and walked toward the evac point and left me there with a twelve-foot Void creature and no weapon and one functioning leg.
That was forty seconds ago. Or forty years. Hard to tell.
Not again, I thought, and the thought was so tired it barely felt like a thought. More like a reflex. Like how your knee jerks when someone hits it right. Not again not again not—
The beast dropped its jaw. Six rows of teeth that weren't actually teeth, just bone-colored shadows that had learned to bite.
I thought about Lira. Because of course I did. Six months from now, the south market. I'd run out of time again. I'd almost made it this time, I'd gotten further than the last loop, I'd gotten the Shard and then Elias had—
Not again.
The Gate above me pulsed once, deep and resonant, like a heartbeat.
Everything went black.
I woke up to the sound of rain.
Not dramatic rain. Not end-of-the-world rain. Just the regular kind, hitting the window of Dorm C in long streaks, the kind that means the weekend is ruined and your shoes are going to be wet all day. I lay there listening to it for a second, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the part where I figured out I was dead.
Didn't happen.
The ceiling was cracked plaster. My old one—the specific crack that looked like a river if you tilted your head. I'd stared at this crack so many times during Year One that I'd named it. The Seine, because I'd been in a weird French literature phase that semester, don't ask.
I sat up too fast. Dizzy. Hands out to catch myself on a mattress that was too thin and smelled like it had been cleaned once in 2019 and then just spiritually given up.
Academy dorm. Third-floor east wing. My room, or the room I'd shared with a guy named Tormund who snored like an elderly engine. Tormund's bunk was above me, empty and neatly made because Tormund had the annoying habit of waking up at five to do calisthenics.
The clock on my phone—my old phone, cracked screen, the crack in the bottom-left corner I'd gotten when I dropped it running from my first real Void creature—said 6:14 AM.
I picked it up. Opened the calendar.
October 3rd.
I made a sound. Not a word. Just a sound.
October 3rd. Three days before the first gate. Three days before everything starts.
"...okay," I said to the empty room. My voice came out rough and too high, the voice of an eighteen-year-old who hadn't finished settling into itself yet. God, I hated being eighteen. You'd think I'd be used to it by now.
I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to breathe and waited for the System interface to pop up. Blue panels, status screen, the whole thing. Standard regression protocol, every loop it had shown up within the first ten minutes—
Nothing.
Hm.
I checked my hands. No interface shimmer. No translucent text hovering in my peripheral vision. Just my hands, smaller than they should be, with the little scar on my right index finger from when I was seven and tried to open a can of beans with a kitchen knife because the opener had gone missing.
...Why do I remember that. That's not useful information.
Still no interface.
I was starting to feel less relieved and more nervous when I noticed my shadow.
I was sitting between the window and the desk lamp—Tormund's lamp, he left it on because he was a menace—so I had two shadows, kind of, overlapping and pointing in different directions. Normal. Except the one pointing toward the door was... doing something. Curling up at the edge. Not much. An inch, maybe. Like a dog ear flicking.
I stared at it.
It went flat.
"...okay," I said again.
Pre-system manifestation. I'd read about that, once, in some salvaged text from a ruined archive in Loop 4 or 5, I couldn't remember which. Shadow class abilities sometimes surfaced before formal System awakening if the user had enough accumulated... something. Soul resonance, the text had called it, which felt a bit much, but the point was: sometimes the power shows up before the UI does. The UI was lagging. The power was already here.
That was new.
That was actually— that was interesting.
The breakfast hall smelled like powdered eggs and industrial coffee and the specific misery of eight hundred teenagers who weren't morning people.
I got there late enough that the worst of the rush had cleared, which was intentional. I had a system—had had a system, first loop around—for navigating the academy social ecosystem. Stay invisible. Don't sit near the window seats because that's where Elias' crew set up. Don't sit too far back either because that's where the actual delinquents were and they'd try to start something just to relieve the boredom.
Middle. Near the support pillar. Good sightlines, low visibility.
I sat down with my tray and started eating and tried to think.
The Shard. Vault sub-level 3, B-Rank lock enchantments, guard rotation every six hours with a forty-minute gap around midnight when the overnight crew was coming on and nobody was quite where they were supposed to be. I knew this. I'd used that gap in Loop 6. Loop 6 had ended because of an unrelated catastrophe but the vault run itself had worked fine.
Three days. I had three days before the first gate opened and the whole city started panicking and security tripled everywhere including the vault. I needed to be in and out before then.
I was working through the logistics when I heard him.
"Oi. Voss."
I didn't look up.
"Voss." A hand came down on my table. Heavy, deliberate, making my tray rattle. "You went invisible over here, I almost didn't see you. That intentional, or are you just naturally forgettable?"
Marcus. Elias' third wheel, tall guy, perpetually smug. In four years he'd try to poach a Gate contract from me and I'd let him because fighting him wasn't worth the political capital. Right now he was seventeen and hadn't figured out yet that being tall only gets you so far.
I looked up. "Morning."
"'Morning,'" he repeated, making it sound stupid somehow. "Did you check the Awakening brackets yet? They posted them this morning. You're seeded last. Last. Out of four hundred students." He paused for effect. "E-Rank projection. Man, that's—I almost feel bad."
He didn't feel bad.
"Good to know," I said.
Someone laughed from the window seats. I didn't have to look to know it was Elias' table—there was a specific quality to that laughter, bright and easy and performative, the laughter of people who knew they were being watched.
And then, from two tables over, quieter: "Marcus, just eat your food."
Lira.
She didn't look at me when she said it. She was reading something—a spell theory manual, I recognised the cover—and her silver hair was pulled back in this lopsided way she did when she hadn't had time to do it properly, which was most mornings because she was always running five minutes late. She said it like she was talking to herself almost, like she couldn't quite decide whether it was worth the energy.
Marcus looked over at her. Let it go, because even Marcus wasn't dumb enough to needle Lira Ashvane in public. She'd embarrassed him in the practical theory exam last month—or would have, I guess, from my perspective she already had—and he held grudges but he picked his battles.
He left.
I looked at Lira. She turned a page without looking up.
She would never know I'd watched her die. That I'd stood in a holding cell on the other side of the city and felt it happen, that specific horrible feeling when someone who is load-bearing in your brain just... stops. She'd be dead and she'd die thinking I was the Demon King, the monster who opened gates, who killed civilians, all the evidence carefully constructed by a guy who'd started planning his frame job in Year Two and had four years to make it airtight.
She'd die hating me.
Not this time.
I turned back to my eggs. They were cold. I ate them anyway.
The shadow thing happened again at breakfast.
I don't want to make it a bigger deal than it was. A fork was sitting at the edge of my tray, teetering a little, and I'd clocked it and thought that's going to fall and reached for it—
Except my hand was already on my coffee.
The fork didn't fall. It moved. Back toward the tray, an inch, like someone had nudged it. And under the table, my shadow had a tendril sticking up about three inches that retracted when I looked at it.
I sat very still.
Nobody around me had noticed. The girl at the next table was arguing with someone on her phone. The two guys near the exit were deep in a conversation about whether barrier mages were going to be relevant post-Awakening. Normal morning. Nothing weird except me and my shadow having a whole independent moment.
Then the headache hit.
Sharp, behind the left eye, pressure more than pain. A vision—not my vision, borrowed vision, looking at something I wasn't looking at—Elias in the vault. Tomorrow. The Shard in his hands, pulsing, and his expression wasn't smug for once, it was just hungry. The vault behind him empty of guards. A door ajar.
Gone. Back to the breakfast hall, fork in its place, coffee going cold.
Foresight. Before the UI, before formal System integration—the passive was running on its own.
Tomorrow. Elias had a way into the vault. Which meant the window I'd been counting on for midnight might not be the only window. Which was either good news or very bad news depending on whether he moved before I did.
I needed more information.
I found it by accident, mostly.
Was walking the east corridor back to the dorms when I passed the maintenance stairwell and heard voices below. Not trying to eavesdrop. Just—voices carry in these old buildings, all stone and hollow floors.
"...rotation's changing for pre-gate week. Command wants doubled security on sub-levels."
"That's not til Saturday though."
"Yeah, but Hendricks already moved the Shard to sub-3 today, so—"
"Today? Why?"
"Because Dawnhart apparently requested a viewing appointment and the Provost didn't want it in the main vault with foot traffic."
A pause. The sound of boots. I was very still against the wall.
"Kid's got connections."
"Kid's got more than connections." A laugh, not a nice one. "Whatever. It's their headache. We just do the rotation."
Footsteps retreating. Gone.
I stood there.
Hendricks moved the Shard to sub-3 today. Elias has a viewing appointment. Which means by tomorrow it's already in play, Elias has already seen it, maybe already started figuring out how to get it out—
Something in my peripheral vision flickered.
Just for a second, like a bad screen refresh. Text that appeared and disappeared too fast to read except for the last line—
[ Retrieve the Shard — 0% ]
Then nothing.
Then the hallway. Empty, rain hitting the windows, the distant sound of someone practicing elemental forms in one of the training rooms down the wing.
"...okay," I said, for what was probably the fourth time today. "Okay."
Dusk hit Neon City like a switch. One minute long grey afternoon, then the lights came on across the skyline and everything went purple-pink-orange, the neon signs and the gate warning beacons and the distant glow from the commercial district, and it was almost pretty if you could ignore what all those orange lights in the east were for.
Gate proximity indicators. They'd been installed six months ago. Nobody'd had to use them yet.
Four days.
I pulled my hood up and cut through the service alley behind the east wing. The rain had gone from steady to indifferent, just occasional drops, the kind of rain that can't commit. My shoes were already wet. Of course they were.
Sub-level 3 access was through a maintenance entrance near the groundskeeping storage—they'd never changed that, through every loop, some things stayed consistent, and one of them was that the academy's security was only as good as its guards, and its guards were mostly second-tier hunters who'd taken a stable academy job over the chaos of freelance, which meant competent enough but not inspired.
I found the rune-locked door.
It was old iron, set into the stone foundation, with a rune plate about chest height that was running a B-Rank enchantment—detection, alarm, lock, the standard package. I'd cracked this exact lock in Loop 6. Different body, same lock. Fingers remembered the sequence even if my stats were back to garbage.
I put my hand near the plate.
Not touching. Just near.
The shadows around my feet stirred. Reached. One thin tendril touched the edge of the rune plate and the lock made a sound—not the alarm sound, something quieter, more like recognition. Like the rune going oh.
I had not told my shadow to do that.
I was going to need to figure out the shadow situation. Soon. Before it did something like that in front of someone.
Inside, somewhere below, there was a sound.
A door. Then footsteps—light, coming up, someone heading for this exit.
I stepped back into the shadow of the doorway, hood down, tried to look like I belonged here which was hard when I was an E-Rank in a place that had zero reason for E-Ranks.
The door pushed open.
Silver hair. Lopsided ponytail. Manual still tucked under one arm.
Lira blinked at me.
I opened my mouth.